Separation Failure in Linear Programming Discriminant Models

Linear programming discriminant analysis (LPDA) models are designed around a variety of objective functions, each representing a different measure of separation of the training samples by the resulting discriminant function. A separation failure is defined to be the selection of an “optimal” discriminant function which incompletely separates a pair of completely separable training samples. Occurrence of a separation failure suggests that the chosen discriminant function may have an unnecessarily low classification accuracy on the actual populations involved. In this paper, a number of the LPDA models proposed for the two-group case are examined to learn which are subject to separation failure. It appears that separation failure in any model can be avoided by applying the model twice, reversing group designations.     

Social work and interprofessional education: integration,intersectionality, and institutional leadership

Over the last decade healthcare policies and practices in the US have placed significant emphasis on healthcare integration, mental health parity, and implementation of team-based practice models to improve quality, safety, and affordability of service. With these incentives in mind, schools of social work have joined with national and international health education organizations to reduce disciplinary silos and increase shared learning opportunities across professions and programs. The social work profession has long supported collaborative practice however, students are rarely paired with others in the classroom or intentionally taught about counterparts’ roles and expertise. Social work leaders are also responsible for addressing the intersectionality between collaborative competencies and sociocultural factors. The 2015 EPAS and 2016 Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice create multi-level opportunities for social work educators to provide Interprofessional Education (IPE) innovation and leadership across common curricula and educational settings. The authors examine historic challenges to integrating IPE in social work curricula, provide three examples of IPE/social work initiatives in higher education, describe the intersectionality of the EPAS and the IPEC competencies, and identify institutional benefits associated with the integration of IPE in schools of social work culture and curriculum.     

Integrated care workforce development: university-community collaboration

ABSTRACT

Behavioral health workforce shortages to provide quality care services for children, adolescents, and transitional age youth are well established. This paper highlights the workforce shortage and the need to infuse interprofessional education to engage in integrated care for children, adolescents and transitional age youth with behavioral health needs. A specialized training curriculum to build behavioral health workforce in Nevada was conceptualized and delivered through 10 workshops under the auspices of the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) funded Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training (BHWET) grant funded in 2014. To train existing workforce and in alignment with the spirit of the grant to build behavioral health workforce and existing workforce, workshops were extended to social service providers in the community. In an effort to enhance university-community collaboration, workshop presenters were invited from various units in the University and from social service agencies in the community. Implications of such training are addressed from a policy, practice, research, and university-community collaboration perspective.     

Measuring Temporal Dimensions of the Intensity of Violent Political Conflict

Violent political conflict shows patterns of varied intensity and persistence. These patterns may induce changes in human behavior in various temporal dimensions. In order to study these effects, empirical research needs a suitable way to measure conflict intensity. This paper suggests and illustrates a method of aggregating raw data on violence incidence into complementary temporal categories, in order to enrich empirical insights. We construct short-, medium-, and long-term measures based on daily fatality counts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 1997 and 2011. We show that these dimensions, although constructed from the same set of raw data, contain complementary information since they are only weakly correlated. As an example, we illustrate how several such categories can be useful in modeling the dynamics of food prices. This demonstrates that such aggregations provide complementary temporal perspectives. They therefore can potentially enrich the analysis of the effects of conflict on human behavior beyond commonly employed measurements of daily or yearly frequency.     

Did the Military Interventions in the Mexican Drug War Increase Violence?

We analyze publicly available data to estimate the causal effects of military interventions on the homicide rates in certain problematic regions in Mexico. We use the Rubin causal model to compare the post-intervention homicide rate in each intervened region to the hypothetical homicide rate for that same year had the military intervention not taken place. Because the effect of a military intervention is not confined to the municipality subject to the intervention, a nonstandard definition of units is necessary to estimate the causal effect of the intervention under the standard no-interference assumption of stable-unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA). Donor pools are created for each missing potential outcome under no intervention, thereby allowing for the estimation of unit-level causal effects. A multiple imputation approach accounts for uncertainty about the missing potential outcomes.     

Postethnic Experience in Contemporary Jewish American Fiction

Multiculturalism has meant something of a crisis for many Jews in the United States in that it has placed them in the paradoxical position of being part of the dominant white majority while they continue to maintain their particularity as an ethnic minority. Some scholars who subscribe to the ideal of a postethnic society as a means of resolving the divisiveness and fragmentation in multicultural America have, however, argued that this very dualism experienced by American Jews today may well point toward what they hope will come about in American society as a whole when it moves beyond multiculturalism. This essay explores some of the ways in which the contradictions experienced by Jewish Americans as members of an ethnic minority with majority status figure in recent Jewish American fiction. It concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications of the anomalous position of American Jews for the place of contemporary Jewish writing within the rapidly changing canon of American literature.     

RISK SOCIETY,MEDIA, AND POWER: THE CASE OF NANOTECHNOLOGY

Risk society theory posits that the transformation of industrial to postindustrial society corresponded with a transformation of societal power structured by capital, to one structured by the ability to define risk. Perceptions of risk are, in part, socially constructed and created through the framing efforts of various institutional actors. The resulting struggle over meaning is particularly acute when the issues contain many unknown elements—as is the case with emerging technologies. Applying insights from media studies, frame analysis, and organizational theory, we analyze coverage of nanotechnology (NT) in popular press, trade, and general science publications. The findings document the extent to which the risks of this emerging technology are presented or ignored across, between, and within organizational subfields. The analysis empirically assesses a key proposition of risk society theory and reveals how institutional processes reflect and reproduce power differentials. We discuss the implications of the empirical findings for sociological theories of risk and society, power, and collective action.     

Activism and the Limits of Symmetry: The Public Relations Battle Between Colorado GASP and Philip Morris

Litigation has forced tobacco companies like Philip Morris to disclose more than 7 million internal documents, including previously confidential public relations plans. We draw from this archive, as well as from activist materials, to demonstrate that, despite vigorous industry efforts to thwart them, activists in this case employed strategies of values advocacy and inoculation and capitalized on economic benefits to persuade publics. This watershed case poses continued challenges for the 2-way symmetrical or mixed-motive theoretical model of public relations. Accounting for public relations activism and understanding its voice in influencing contemporary public debate requires that scholars move beyond this widely accepted model that stresses compromise between activists and organizations. An alternative rhetorical theory of activist public relations is posited to account for groups that refuse to accommodate opponents.