Smartphones and Face‐to‐Face Interaction: Digital Cross‐Talk During Encounters in Everyday Life

Using data collected from focus groups and nonparticipant observations, this article explores how and why cross‐talk by way of smartphone affects face‐to‐face encounters. The findings show there are three types of digital cross‐talk: exclusive, semi‐exclusive, and collaborative. Furthermore, it was found that digital cross‐talk can either facilitate or disrupt the expressive order of an encounter. Semi‐exclusive and collaborative digital cross‐talk were found to facilitate encounters. Exclusive digital cross‐talk was found to disrupt or have little influence on encounters, depending on whether or not interlocutors successfully engaged in a corrective process, an avoidance process, or aggressive face‐work.     

Managing the Dynamic Science and Engineering Labor Market in the United States

The five million workers employed in science and engineering (S&E) occupations, and the 20 million with S&E degrees, are considered keys to U.S. competitiveness in the 21st century. Most of those earning PhDs in engineering at U.S. universities are foreigners, as are many of those earning PhDs in science. Many U.S. employers assert that the U.S. Government impairs economic competitiveness with policies that force some foreigners who earn advanced degrees from U.S. Universities to leave and restrict admissions of H‐1B temporary foreign workers and that employers want to hire.     

Declining Numbers of Foreign Students and America's Science and Engineering Enterprise

The enterprise of science and engineering (S&E) is powerfully affected by the role of immigrants in institutions of higher education and in US labour markets (Freeman et al., 2004). Especially since the 1970s and increasingly in the 1990s, educational institutions and labour markets have experienced steady increases of foreign students and workers and have come to expect more of the same. Yet, since 2001 there have been notable downturns in the number of foreign students applying and attending US institutions of higher education.     

Pilot testing the detection of elder abuse through emergency care technicians (DETECT) screening tool: results from the DETECT pilot project

Objective: To pilot test the feasibility of implementing an elder abuse (EA) screening tool (DETECT) designed for medics.

Methods: Testing occurred between September 17th, 2015 and October 26th, 2015. MedStar Mobile Healthcare medics completed the DETECT tool when responding to calls for community-dwelling patients 65 years of age or older.

Results: The DETECT tool was used 1,248 times by 97% of medics responding to an eligible 911 call. Medics responded affirmatively to at least one screening item on 209 of the completed screenings (16.8%). Immediately following the introduction of the DETECT tool, there was an increase of 5.4 (226% above baseline) reports per month (p = 0.0056).

Conclusions: The DETECT tool was easily incorporated into medic’s field-based practice and resulted in an increase in medic generated reports of EA to APS. Future research designed to evaluate the tool’s validity and reliability are warranted.     

Unemployment: an international perspective

Using standard OECD unemployment and national income account data, the rela-tionship between unemployment rates and the productivity-adjusted real wage rate is examined for six major countries, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, using bivariate regression analysis. In addition, pooled cross-section estimates of the same relationship are provided for the 24 traditional OECD countries covering the period 1971-1995. The object is to determine whether the observed statistically significant positive relationship between these variables found for the United States exists in other economies. The basic conclusion is that the inter-national experience in this regard is similar to that for the United States. The research underlying the analysis reported in this article has been supported by the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress of the United States and is reflected in Vedder and Gallaway (1998).