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This chapter discusses collective induction, the cooperative search for descriptive, predictive, and explanatory generalizations, rules, and principles. As a psychological process induction begins with the perception of some pattern, regularity, or relationship. The two basic processes in induction are hypothesis formation and hypothesis evaluation. This inductive process occurs for both single individuals and cooperative groups such as scientific research teams, auditing teams, securities and intelligence analysts, art experts, or air crash investigators. Theoretically, collective induction is a divisible and complementary group task in which groups may perform better than individuals by dividing the task into subtasks and combining the different insights, understandings, strategies, and other cognitive processes of the group members.

This chapter examines group-to-individual problem-solving transfer, the effect of experience in cooperative group problem solving on subsequent individual problem solving by the group members. Both specific and general group-to-individual transfer may be assessed in a three-stage IGI versus III design. In the IGI experimental condition participants solve problems as individuals (I), then as groups (G), and then as individuals (I). In the III control condition the participants solve the same problems three times as individuals. Group-to-individual transfer is demonstrated by better third-stage performance for individuals in the IGI condition than in the III condition. This IGI versus III design also allows assessment of group versus individual problem solving on the second administration, and also model-fitting analyses of the social combination processes by which the groups map known distributions of correct and incorrect members on the first administration to a correct or incorrect group response.

This chapter examines data centers, statisticians, data managers, and collaborators within cooperative oncology groups who took over the management of clinical trials and their results. It also discusses the applications of statistics in clinical cancer trials, the design of multicenter trials, the stratification of treatment randomization by institutions, the advent of computerized techniques, and the introduction of organizational innovations by statisticians.

This chapter focuses on the debates concerning the relations between the US cooperative oncology groups and the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP) of the Division of Cancer Treatment (DCT). It also describes the emergence of an autonomous form of research when the cooperative group program was implicitly recognized as an independent research enterprise.

This chapter discusses the major turning points in the clinical trial process and examines the consequences of the oncogene revolution for the conduct of clinical cancer trials. It begins with the introduction of molecular biology into the US cooperative groups. The reorganization of the drug discovery process and the transformation of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) screen are then discussed. This is followed by a discussion on the redesigning of clinical trials and how target therapy is changing clinical cancer trials as a system. Finally, the chapter discusses the establishment of the Office of Oncology Drug Products (OODP).

This chapter's goal is to discover the connections—both positive and inverse—between interdisciplinarity and research in the future context, anchored from both pragmatic and philosophical perspectives. Collated studies in this section are derived from the experiences of research activities conducted at ICMFDS. Although there have been attempts to utilize the interdisciplinary approach in academic and industrial settings, several problems in cooperative groups and futures inquiries are identified. Among these are problems which pertain to reception challenges, communication disruptions, distribution challenges, inadequate training and education, and indefinite recognition status. Despite the occurrence of these predicaments, innovations in the fields of interdisciplinarity and futures research contribute to the discovery of new frameworks that allow collaboration of scientific facts, organizational information, academic findings, and widely accepted notions.

This chapter argues that consumer co-operatives offer great potential for health care reform that integrates care around the needs of consumers and contains health costs. Two case studies – of the Group Health Cooperative in Seattle and the Yallourn Hospital and Medical Society near Melbourne – provide examples of co-operative provision in the USA and Australia. The author draws on his own experience in co-operative provision of health care, and provides an outline strategy for transitioning to co-operative health care models.

This chapter lays out several alternative understandings of moral progress found in the contemporary literature of analytical moral and political philosophy. None of these amounts to a theory of moral progress, but each is suggestive of some of the building blocks for constructing such a theory. Among the accounts considered are those offered by Peter Singer, Ruth Macklin, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Railton. A taxonomy of types of views is provided, utilizing the following distinctions: monistic (reductionist) versus pluralistic, static versus dynamic, and better norm compliance versus functionalist, where the latter are grounded in the idea that managing problems of cooperation is constitutive of morality. Each of these understandings is shown to be inadequate because it is unable to accommodate the full range of types of moral progress or, in the case of functionalist views, because it betrays an impoverished conception of what morality has come to encompass.