Professionalism, educated labour and the state: hospital medicine and the new managerialism

This article examines the degree to which doctors, as members of an autonomous profession, function as organic intellectuals within capitalist society (Abercrombie and Urry, 1983) and, more generally, the complex and ambivalent relations that sustain their role within a ‘service class'. It is in this context that the organization of medical care and its delivery in Britain will be addressed. In particular, the current and intended changes in the organization and control of hospital medicine within the NHS, notably the issues of medical audit, clinical budgeting and the role of the ‘internal market’.     

On the block structure of proper block designs

In this paper we consider proper block designs and derive an upper bound for the number of blocks which can have a fixed number of symbols common with a given block of the design. To arrive at the desired bound, a generalization of an integer programming theorem due to Bush (1976) is first obtained. The integer programming theorem is then used to derive the main result of this paper. The bound given here is then compared with a similar bound obtained by Kageyama and Tsuji (1977).     

The interaction of aging and 10 years of racing on ultraendurance running performance

The aim of this study was to examine the interaction between aging and 10 years of racing in endurance runners. Race-time data from 194 runners who had completed 10 consecutive 56-km ultramarathons were obtained. The runners were either 20.5 +/- 0.7, 30.0 +/- 1.0, 39.9 +/- 0.9, or 49.4 +/- 1.0 years old at their first race. Each runner's race speed was determined for each race over the 10 years. Data were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA, one-way ANOVA, and independent t tests and showed that performance improved and declined at greater rates for younger runners; younger runners had a greater capacity for improvement than older runners; approximately 4 years were required to reach peak racing speed, regardless of age; it was not possible to compete at peak speed for more than a few years; and the combined effects of 10 years of aging and racing neither improve nor worsen net performance. In conclusion, these data suggest that although these runners showed similar patterns of change in race speed over a 10-year period, the extent of change in performance was greater in younger than in older runners.     

Peep show establishments, police activity, public place, and time: a study of secondary effects in San Diego, California

An empirical study was undertaken in San Diego, California, to test assumptions made by the government and by conservative religious policy advocates that there is a greater incidence of crime in the vicinity of peep show establishments. We asked two questions: (a) Is criminal activity in San Diego particularly acute at peep show establishments compared to surrounding control locations? and (b) Is criminal activity in San Diego disproportionately greater at or near peep show establishments between the hours of 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. compared to other times of the day? The levels of crime activity and the expenditure of police resources were examined by measuring the number of calls-for-service (CFSs) to the police within a 1,000-ft. area on either side of the peep show establishments and comparably-sized control areas beyond the immediate 1,000-foot area. A more focused late-night (2 a.m. to 6 a.m.) analysis was also undertaken. The results showed no reliable evidence of differences in crime levels between the control and test areas, nor was there any evidence of disproportionately greater amounts of crime within the 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. time period in the areas surrounding the peep show establishments. We concluded that San Diego does not have a problem with crime at the peep show establishments generally, nor is there a heightened problem with crime during the 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. period. We discuss the implications of assuming that peep show establishments are associated with negative effects in the community and the possibility of viewpoint discrimination against sex communication.     

Bayesian Forecasting With Stable Seasonal Patterns

A multiplicative seasonal forecasting model for cumulative events in which, conditional on end- of-season totals being given and seasonal shape being known, it is shown that events occurring within the season are multinomially distributed is presented. The model uses the information contained in the arrival of new events to obtain a posterior distribution for end-of-season totals. Bayesian forecasts are obtained recursively in two stages: first, by predicting the expected number and variance of event counts in future intervals within the remaining season, and then by predicting revised means and variances for end-of-season totals based on the most recent forecast error.     

Is Adolescent Employment Still a Risk Factor for High School Dropout?

Past cohorts of teenagers who spent long hours in jobs were more likely to drop out of high school than those who worked moderate hours or did not work at all. This article examines the association between employment intensity and dropout among adolescents in the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 who traversed high school during a time of decreased prevalence of both employment and dropout relative to earlier cohorts. Analyses reveal that a relatively small percentage of teenagers nowadays are characterized as either intensive workers or dropouts (around 11% each). Yet, despite declines in intensive employment and dropout, disadvantaged youth remain overrepresented in both groups, and intensive work is still a risk factor for poor grades and dropout.     

Planning personnel retraining: column generation heuristics

Retraining of staff is a compulsory managerial function in many organisations and often requires planning for a large number of employees. The large scale of this problem and various restrictions on the resultant assignment to classes make this planning challenging. The paper presents a complexity analysis of this problem together with linear and nonlinear mathematical programming formulations. Three different column generation based optimisation procedures and a large neighbourhood search procedure, incorporating column generation, are compared by means of computational experiments. The experiments used data typical to large electricity distributors.