Medical practice in large-scale organizations.

The traditional role of the physician as the principle resource allocator in the health care system is rapidly giving way to a shared decision-making. As more and more physicians practice in large organizational settings, an adversarial relationship is developing that affects both the quality of care and the efficiency of medical practice.     

RELATIVISM AS A CULTURAL INFLUENCE ON TWENTIETH CENTURY DECISION MAKING

Culturally determined norms are seen as guides to the subjective components in the decision process. An understanding of normative elements in choicemaking must therefore begin with an analysis of the culture relevant to the decision. Ways in which the Western twentieth-century intellectual and cultural climate have influenced the ability of modern managers to make value-laden decisions are examined. Implications of relativism for management decision making along with the influences of relativistic decision making on organizational health also are discussed.     

Attribution of Human VTEC O157 Infection from Meat Products: A Quantitative Risk Assessment Approach

To address the risk posed to human health by the consumption of VTEC O157 within contaminated pork, lamb, and beef products within Great Britain, a quantitative risk assessment model has been developed. This model aims to simulate the prevalence and amount of VTEC O157 in different meat products at consumption within a single model framework by adapting previously developed models. The model is stochastic in nature, enabling both variability (natural variation between animals, carcasses, products) and uncertainty (lack of knowledge) about the input parameters to be modeled. Based on the model assumptions and data, it is concluded that the prevalence of VTEC O157 in meat products (joints and mince) at consumption is low (i.e., <0.04%). Beef products, particularly beef burgers, present the highest estimated risk with an estimated eight out of 100,000 servings on average resulting in human infection with VTEC O157.     

Insurrectional Arts: Restoring a Politics and Ethics of Attention

Abstract

This chapter is inspired by contrasting passages in two stories. The first is in Jamaica Kincaid's story, ‘The Embassy of Cambodia'. Her narrator, who is following a transversality between two forms of atrocity: those practiced by states, as in the case of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge exterminism and that inflicted on abused migrant domestic workers from third world countries. The narrator notes that people in her village are too distracted to heed peoples’ afflictions: ‘The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world?…?we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to necessary tasks?…?’. In contrast, in Daniel Alarcon's story, ‘Collectors', a seasoned convict is explaining to his new cell mate how to survive by reading signs as you watch the men in the prison yard:

Did they have their arms at their sides, or crossed in front of them? How widely did they open their mouths when they talked? Could you see their teeth were their eyes moving quickly, side to side? Or slowly, as if taking in every detail?     

Politics,institutional structures,and the rise of economics: A comparative study

Theory and Society -     

Disconnected Geography: A Spatial Analysis of Disconnected Youth in the United States

Since the Great Recession, US policy and advocacy groups have sought to better understand its effect on a group of especially vulnerable young adults who are not enrolled in school or training programs and not participating in the labor market, so called ‘disconnected youth.’ This article distinguishes between disconnected youth and unemployed youth and examines the spatial clustering of these two groups across counties in the US. The focus is to ascertain whether there are differences in underlying contextual factors among groups of counties that are mutually exclusive and spatially disparate (non-adjacent), comprising two types of spatial clusters – high rates of disconnected youth and high rates of unemployed youth. Using restricted, household-level census data inside the Census Research Data Center (RDC) under special permission by the US Census Bureau, we were able to define these two groups using detailed household questionnaires that are not available to researchers outside the RDC. The geospatial patterns in the two types of clusters suggest that places with high concentrations of disconnected youth are distinctly different in terms of underlying characteristics from places with high concentrations of unemployed youth. These differences include, among other things, arrests for synthetic drug production, enclaves of poor in rural areas, persistent poverty in areas, educational attainment in the populace, children in poverty, persons without health insurance, the social capital index, and elders who receive disability benefits. This article provides some preliminary evidence regarding the social forces underlying the two types of observed geospatial clusters and discusses how they differ.