Physician opportunities in management: signs and portents

There are many trends today that spell great opportunity for physicians who seek to shift their careers into management. Some of those trends are outlined here, with commentary on each opportunity presented. Like much in life, most opportunities contain uncertainties and unanticipated consequences. Thus, no opportunity comes without some possible negative side effects and blind alleys for the unaware. Some of these pitfalls are also presented, along with some suggested strategies for physicians who seek major roles in the management of the health enterprises of the future.     

Revisiting sociology's first classic:The division of labor in society and its actuality

Durkheim's doctoral dissertation can justifiably be called sociology's first classic. Rereading it 100 years later enables us to see major domains of the contemporary world where its analysis remains, of actuality, heuristic or yet to be fully appreciated: for example, its themes of anomieas economic deregulation and corporatism as an institutional arrangement to deal with anomie.At the same time, Durkheim's discourse reflects its historical embeddedness, such as his discussion of the sexual division of labor, which needs to be reworked. A second feature of emergent contemporary social solidarity unforeseen by Durkheim (and the great majority of theorists of change) is what may be termed the return of mechanical solidarity.     

Efficient Computation of Reduced Regression Models

We consider settings where it is of interest to fit and assess regression submodels that arise as various explanatory variables are excluded from a larger regression model. The larger model is referred to as the full model; the submodels are the reduced models. We show that a computationally efficient approximation to the regression estimates under any reduced model can be obtained from a simple weighted least squares (WLS) approach based on the estimated regression parameters and covariance matrix from the full model. This WLS approach can be considered an extension to unbiased estimating equations of a first-order Taylor series approach proposed by Lawless and Singhal. Using data from the 2010 Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), a 20% weighted, stratified, cluster sample of approximately 8 million hospital stays from approximately 1000 hospitals, we illustrate the WLS approach when fitting interval censored regression models to estimate the effect of type of surgery (robotic versus nonrobotic surgery) on hospital length-of-stay while adjusting for three sets of covariates: patient-level characteristics, hospital characteristics, and zip-code level characteristics. Ordinarily, standard fitting of the reduced models to the NIS data takes approximately 10 hours; using the proposed WLS approach, the reduced models take seconds to fit.     

Divorced Yet Still Together: Ongoing Personal Relationship and Coparenting Among Divorced Parents

This study examined the ongoing personal and emotional involvement between former spouses and its association with perceptions of the quality of the coparenting relationship. Dyadic analysis of 54 formerly married couples revealed that both men and women rate their coparenting relationship as better when they also report ongoing personal and emotional involvement with their former spouse. Furthermore, when men reported ongoing involvement, their former wives reported better coparenting. The opposite effect was not found. This pattern held for both Black Americans and White Americans. Clinical implications of the findings of this study are also discussed.     

Inheritances and Bequest Planning: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances

Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, this paper documented the positive correlation between the receipt of an inheritance and the expectation of leaving a bequest. Inheritance recipients were found to have a higher probability of planning to leave a bequest relative to households that had not received an inheritance. Conditional on having already received an inheritance, the likelihood of expecting to leave a bequest was even larger for households that anticipated to receive an inheritance in the future. The findings in this paper suggest that inheritances already received or expected to be received may be an important transmission mechanism underlying the bequest motive.     

Using satellite remote sensing and household survey data to assess human health and nutrition response to environmental change

Climate change and degradation of ecosystem services functioning may threaten the ability of current agricultural systems to keep up with demand for adequate and inexpensive food and for clean water, waste disposal and other broader ecosystem services. Human health is likely to be affected by changes occurring across multiple geographic and time scales. Impacts range from increasing transmissibility and the range of vectorborne diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, to undermining nutrition through deleterious impacts on food production and concomitant increases in food prices. This paper uses case studies to describe methods that make use of satellite remote sensing and Demographic and Health Survey data to better understand individual-level human health and nutrition outcomes. By bringing these diverse datasets together, the connection between environmental change and human health outcomes can be described through new research and analysis.     

Derrida and messianic subjectivity: a hauntology of revealability

In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida argues that the category of hauntology should replace the canonical understanding of ontology. By invoking the trope of the ghost, hauntology helps to demonstrate how there still lingers in the absence of a thing, a spectral element that is more real than its corporeal counterpart. Thus, the ontological category of time is replaced by deconstruction with an anticipatory temporality abstracted from the transcultural messianisms of planet Earth, which is called messianicity. By framing this analysis through the epochal deployment of what Derrida coins as globalatinisation, I will argue that the concept of messianicity can be applied to a specific mode of subjective production, subjectivation, to help demonstrate the failings of not only the event of revelation (Offenbarung), but also, by pushing towards its paroxysm in an hauntological spirit, the so-called originarity of revealability (Offenbarkeit) – its still entanglement in the politics of light. Going beyond Derrida here, what this amounts to is a certain ‘hauntology of revealability’ whereby the arrivant, the First, is accepted under the umbrella of the messianic pledge of faith just to have itself doubled by a darker power that has never had to haunt itself into its eschatological or teleological throne.