Review of shaken baby syndrome

1. Shaken baby syndrome can lead to substantial neuropsychological deficits that can alter children's normal developmental course. 2. Clinical acumen can be critical in identifying shaken baby syndrome and preventing further difficulties. 3. Education and treatment for caregivers can be important in reducing the likelihood of shaken baby syndrome.     

The role of litigation in human research accountability

This essay examines and analyzes the recent and dramatic series of personal injury lawsuits instituted against those individuals and institutions that conduct and monitor human research. It discusses the social engineering functions of tort litigation, outlines the legal elements and viability of lawsuits against those who conduct and monitor human research, and evaluates and predicts what role tort litigation will play in fulfilling the goals of accountability in the context of human research and human research regulation. In general, tort law engenders two forms of accountability: retrospective and prospective. Retrospective accountability is backward looking, focusing on harms that have already occurred, their culprits, and the reimbursement of individuals for their injuries. Prospective accountability is forward looking in that it encourages actors and institutions to fulfill responsibilities toward individuals in order that harm does not occur, or at least that the risk of harm is decreased. This article argues that research litigation is not, and will probably never become, an effective means of ensuring retrospective accountability in regard to research injuries and ethical violations. Paradoxically though, the current wave of research litigation may serve an important and even key role in encouraging and ensuring prospective accountability.     

Quality of Life Indexes for National Policy: Review and Agenda for Research

A number of governments and public policy institutes have developed Quality of Life Indexes – statistics that attempt to measure the quality of life for entire states or regions. We develop 14 criteria for determining the validity and usefulness of such QOL indexes to public policy. We then review 22 of the most-used QOL indexes from around the world. We conclude that many of the indexes are successful in that they are reliable, have established time series measures, and can be disaggregated to study subpopulations. However, many fall short in four areas: (1) indexes vary greatly in their coverage and definitions of domains of QOL, (2) none of the indexes distinguish among the concepts of input, throughput, and output that are used by public policy analysts, (3) they fail to show how QOL outputs are sensitive to public policy inputs, and (4) none have examined convergent validity against each other. We conclude that many of these indexes are potentially very useful for public policy and recommend research to further improve them.     

GNR, MGR, and exact misspeclfication testing

The Gauss-Newton regression (GNR) is widely used to compute Lagrange multiplier statistics. A regression described by Milliken and Graybill yields an exact F test in a certain class of nonlinear models which are linear under the null. This paper shows that the Milliken-Graybill regression is a GNR. Hence one interpretation of Milliken-Graybill is that they identified a class of nonlinear models for which the GNR yields an exact test.     

Exploring the Traits of Happy People

This paper explores self-reported happiness across afourfold personality framework that synthesizespsychoanalytic and psychometric approaches topersonality structure. Using survey data from arepresentative sample of the U.S. adult population, weidentified four personality types rooted in two basicdimensions – Extraversion/Introversion andTendermindedness/Toughmindedness. On a general level,we found that Extraverts were happier than Introverts,and Tendermindeds were happier than Toughmindeds. More specifically, we identified patterns ofsimilarities and differences across personality typesin the meaning of happiness with respect to goodeating habits, financial insecurity, anxiety andtension, financial optimism, and health concerns.     

INFORMATION INTERDEPENDENCE: Keohane and Nye's complex interdependence in the information age

A well-known and respected attempt to theorize interdependence in the field of international relations is complex interdependence. In Power and Interdependence , Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr define interdependence as reciprocal effects among actors resulting from 'international transactions - flows of money, goods, people and messages across international boundaries'. Though much research has been done on the effects of interdependence on the first three, the flows of messages have been studied less often. Keohane and Nye addressed the issue in a 1998 article in Foreign Affairs , discussing changes in the global environment resulting from the information age which have had an impact on their ideas. This article proposes to go deeper into complex interdependence. The world is becoming increasingly 'information interdependent' and this essay is an attempt to apply the assumptions and concepts presented in complex interdependence to the information age. In the final analysis, complex interdependence complements research from the field of communications, that information flows should be understood as underlying mechanisms and processes that facilitate contextual understanding of issues. It maintains the integrity of the assumptions of complex interdependence, while adding an understanding of the nature of information and information flows.     

Comparing several independent correlations with a standard correlation

The Dunnett procedure for comparing several treatments with a control is applied to the problem of comparing several independent correlations with a standard correlation. Appropriate critical values are specified and an example is provided.     

Ideology and Social Movements: The Contributions of Habermas*

Theorists of social movements have not developed a sufficiently complex perspective of the role that ideology has in the dynamics of social movements. This essay demonstrates that Habermas’theory of the autonomy of normative structures is useful to explain the independent role of ideology in determining the direction taken by social movements. Habermas’emphasis on the interrelationship between cultural traditions, consensus formation, epistemologies, and differentiated rationalization processes furnishes an alternative to the instrumentalist and ahistorical assumptions that often characterize theorists’treatment of ideology in social movements. Empirical examples from studies of social movements are utilized to demonstrate the usefulness of Habermas’approach.