Mirror, mirror on the wall: reflections from failure to establish a truly uniform national health care policy

When the author gazed into the proverbial mirror and asked if the U.S. health care system was the fairest of them all, it shattered. In this article, Thompson tells why the system is broken and what failure to fix it means to physician executives. He suggests that we, as Americans, must reinvent ourselves by realigning our value systems and and stifling our obsession with profit before trying to reinvent health care.     

Nondictatorially independent pairs

Suppose that social welfare function f satisfies the Pareto condition and has complete and transitive values. On a domain satisfying the free quadruple property, if the outcome set X has m< outcomes, then the set of pairs of distinct alternatives on which f satisfies both independence and nondictatorship contains at most the fraction 2/m of all pairs. On a domain satisfying the free six-tuple property, if X is a subset of Euclidean space then the set of pairs on which f satisfies both independence and nondictatorship has Lebesgue measure zero.Campbell's research was financed by the National Science Foundation, grant SES 9209039.     

Power, Politics, and the Framing of Environmental Illness

The medical community, along with other government agencies, has created its own frame of environmental illness. This frame has been generally accepted by the American public. In this paper we discuss framing in general and the factors related to how the environmental illness frame has been constructed and maintained. We offer a brief history of the medical institution and illustrate the frame with its definitions of environmental illness. Qualitative data from a study of Oak Ridge, a contaminated community located in Tennessee, are examined to analyze the consequences of challenging the environmental illness frame. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Genotypic performance over environmental arrays: A non-linear grouping protocol

A non-linear model for examining genotypic responses across an array of environments is contrasted with the 'joint regression' formulation, and a rigorous approach to hypothesis testing using the conditional error principle is demonstrated. The model is extended to cater for situations where single straight-line response patterns fail to characterize genotypic behaviors over an environmental array: a combination of two straight lines, with slope in below-average and in above-average environments, is offered as the 1 2 simplest representation of convex and concave patterns. A protocol for classifying genotypes according to the results of hypothesis tests, i.e. H( = ) and H( = = = 1), is 1 2 1 2 presented . A doubly desirable response pattern is convex ( < 1< ), while a doubly 1 2 undesirable pattern is concave ( > 1> ). 1 2