Airline deregulation and the airline labor market

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 has had a significant impact on the airline industry and its labor market. The structure of the airline labor market before the Act is examined in light of certain significant historical events including legislative intervention and regulatory practice. The Act and other coincident extraneous events are considered to show how deregulation and other unrelated economic and technological factors operated as a catalyst, sparking substantial short-term upheaval in the airline labor market. It is argued that in the longer term airline employees have little to fear from deregulation and that deregulation may eventually enhance labor’s position in view of the increased employment opportunities that an expanded market may bring and the abolition of the industry strike insurance scheme. I thank Bo Carlsson, Paul Gerhart, and Paul Salipante for their comments and suggestions.     

Using telehealth for buprenorphine induction and engagement

CODAC Behavioral Healthcare, a Rhode Island–based opioid treatment program (OTP), has just won a $372,597 contract to implement a telehealth project that will create a rapid crisis response system linking high‐risk populations with buprenorphine. We spoke with Linda E. Hurley, president and CEO of CODAC, on how the program will work.     

Methadone and buprenorphine superior to all other treatments

A very important insurance‐based retrospective study shows clearly what the clinical trials have already shown: Agonist treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) is better than abstinence‐based or antagonist‐based treatment in terms of reducing overdose and opioid‐related morbidity. (Buprenorphine and methadone are opioid agonists, naltrexone/Vivitrol is an antagonist.)     

Methadone and buprenorphine in prison: Success in RI

The omnipresence of substance use disorder in prisons and jails cries out for treatment — and so do the inmates — but until recently, it has been scarce. Leading the way is the small state of Rhode Island, where Cranston‐based CODAC, an opioid treatment program (OTP), is providing methadone inside the state's jail/prison facility, with staff working alongside corrections (see ADAW, May 7, 2018).     

Race Differences in Opioid Misuse and Adolescent Suicidality

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal - The rise of the opioid epidemic coincided with the increased risk of suicide as the leading causes of death among adolescents in the United States. Past...     

Mismatched response predicts behavioral speech discrimination outcomes in infants with hearing loss and normal hearing

Children with hearing loss (HL) remain at risk for poorer language abilities than normal hearing (NH) children despite targeted interventions; reasons for these differences remain unclear. In NH children, research suggests speech discrimination is related to language outcomes, yet we know little about it in children with HL under the age of 2 years. We utilized a vowel contrast, /a-i/, and a consonant-vowel contrast, /ba-da/, to examine speech discrimination in 47 NH infants and 40 infants with HL. At Mean age =3 months, EEG recorded from 11 scalp electrodes was used to compute the time-frequency mismatched response (TF-MMR_SE) to the contrasts; at Mean age =9 months, behavioral discrimination was assessed using a head turn task. A machine learning (ML) classifier was used to predict behavioral discrimination when given an arbitrary TF-MMR_SE as input, achieving accuracies of 73% for exact classification and 92% for classification within a distance of one class. Linear fits revealed a robust relationship regardless of hearing status or speech contrast. TF-MMR_SE responses in the delta (1–3.5 Hz), theta (3.5–8 Hz), and alpha (8–12 Hz) bands explained the most variance in behavioral task performance. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using TF-MMR_SE to predict later behavioral speech discrimination.