Effect of the doctor on college students' attitudes toward physician-assisted suicide

Ninety-six students were presented with eighteen different vignettes describing different types of active and passive observed suicide, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Attitudes regarding the morality and desired legality of each situation were measured. Results indicated that the interaction between the doctor and the patient, and, to a lesser extent, the active or passive nature of the agent of death, were more important than the actual actions of the doctor in allowing or causing death to occur.     

Residential Building Codes,Affordability, and Health Protection: A Risk-Tradeoff Approach

Residential building codes intended to promote health and safety may produce unintended countervailing risks by adding to the cost of construction. Higher construction costs increase the price of new homes and may increase health and safety risks through income and stock effects. The income effect arises because households that purchase a new home have less income remaining for spending on other goods that contribute to health and safety. The stock effect arises because suppression of new-home construction leads to slower replacement of less safe housing units. These countervailing risks are not presently considered in code debates. We demonstrate the feasibility of estimating the approximate magnitude of countervailing risks by combining the income effect with three relatively well understood and significant home-health risks. We estimate that a code change that increases the nationwide cost of constructing and maintaining homes by $150 (0.1% of the average cost to build a single-family home) would induce offsetting risks yielding between 2 and 60 premature fatalities or, including morbidity effects, between 20 and 800 lost quality-adjusted life years (both discounted at 3%) each year the code provision remains in effect. To provide a net health benefit, the code change would need to reduce risk by at least this amount. Future research should refine these estimates, incorporate quantitative uncertainty analysis, and apply a full risk-tradeoff approach to real-world case studies of proposed code changes.     

Do male dropouts benefit from obtaining a GED, postsecondary education, and training?

The authors use longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to investigate whether the wage trajectories of male high school dropouts are affected by the acquisition of the General Educational Development (GED) credential, by postsecondary education, and by training. The authors show that acquisition of the GED results in wage increases for dropouts who left school with weak skills, but not for dropouts who left high school with stronger skills. College and training provided by employers are associated with higher wages for male dropouts.     

Death at the border

"Debates about United States border control policies have generally ignored the human costs of undocumented migration. We focus attention on these costs by estimating the number, causes and location of migrant deaths at the southwest border of the United States between 1993 and 1997.... Deaths from hyperthermia, hypothermia and dehydration increased sharply from 1993 to 1997 as intensified border enforcement redirected undocumented migration flows from urban crossing points to more remote crossing areas where the migrants are exposed to a greater risk of death."     

Bayesian robustness for multiparameter problems

Bayesian robustness is studied for ε-contamination classes of prior distributions. Nonparametric classes of contsminations such as the class of all unimodal spherically symmetric densities are considered here. Posterior φ-divergence and its curvature are used to measure the sensitivity of priors on the resulting posterior densities. Examples are provided to illustrate our results.     

THE USE OF INTERACTIVE VIDEO TO DEMONSTRATE DIFFERENTIAL APPROACHES TO MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPY

This article outlines the development of an interactive video system designed to demonstrate differential approaches to family therapy using identical therapy situations. The primary purpose of the project is to resolve some of the confusion many novice family therapists experience while being exposed to the numerous family therapy approaches. Technical aspects of the interactive video system are also outlined.     

LBI tests for the detection of compound normal distribution in control and treatment populations

Independent samples are drawn from control and treatment populations with normal and compound normal distributions respectively. We derive the locally best invariant (LBI) tests through Wijsman’s representation for the detection of mixture departures from the normal distribution. These tests may be viewed as tests for the equality of control and treatment populations. Further, they are optimally robust for the model considered by Durairajan and Raman (1994).