Racial Disparities in Hospital Length of Stay for Asthma: Implications for Economic Policies

Asthma is one of the most common health burdens on American families. An understanding of how the costs of asthma are distributed across communities is essential to realizing cost savings from preventative care. We model the household’s utilization of hospital services using Grossman’s health production framework. We then test for differences in asthma-related hospitalizations by race using inpatient records from the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance. On average black and nonwhite-Hispanic patients stayed between one-third and one-fourth of a day less than similar white patients which translates into a difference in expenditures of $8 million over 1994–2002. The difference in expenditures raises questions for market-based methodologies to value health and for policies directed at reducing inequalities in health outcomes.     

Understanding the Role of Outsiders in Community-Based Development Interventions: A Framework with Findings from Iran

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This article analyzes various roles of development practitioners (called outsiders) in five different cases of...     

Using Object Knowledge in Visual Tracking and Reaching

Nine‐month‐old infants were presented with an engaging and challenging task of visually tracking and reaching for a rolling ball that disappeared and reappeared from behind an occluder. On some trials, the infant observed the experimenter place a barrier on the ball's track; the barrier remained partially visible above the occluder throughout the remainder of the trial. When the task involved only predictive tracking, infants' anticipatory gaze shifts were faster when no barrier was present. When the task involved both tracking and reaching, there were more reaches when no barrier was present. If the infant reached, the timing and extension of the reach and the accompanying gaze shift did not differ with regard to the barrier. Because catching the ball was quite difficult for these infants, task demands interfered with the integration of visual information and visuospatial reasoning about the barrier with the reaching action.     

MAKING THE CASE ONLINE: HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL MULTIMEDIA

New media technologies provide opportunities to expand academic curriculum offerings and enhance student learning. Yet web-based and online learning tools should not be just repurposed text and information, or videotaped faculty lectures. Instead, the web calls for the inclusion of sound, text and visuals for learning tools that provide a media-rich environment. This allows faculty to create multidimensional experiences that cater to different learning styles and provide opportunities for problem solving. Drawing on my production experiences at HBS, as well as my own experience teaching visual anthropology and creating films, videos, photographs and web products, I discuss the teaching opportunities that new technologies and media can provide.     

Brand management: Unveiling the delusion of control

Mainstream brand management literature views brands as products or organisations carrying brand names and brand managers as being in control of brand-related actions and outcomes. By contrast, recent empirical research shows the substantial influence of stakeholders on brands. Together with brand management, stakeholders shape brands by participating in brand-related interaction. European brand research accordingly treats brands as ongoing and complex processes in constant flux. Nevertheless, literature suffers from a significant lack of theoretical underpinnings for understanding brands as complex processes; in this respect, building on European philosophy is a fruitful avenue. This paper introduces the metaphor of the rhizome and draws on European process philosophy to further develop an integrative processual understanding of brands. Brand management claiming control over brands as processes turns out to be a delusion.     

The developmental phasing of internalization: Implications for diagnosis and treatment

This article proposes that the concepts of internalization and mental representation are the theoretical linkages capable of bridging most if not all of the developmental theories despite the formulation of these theories at varying levels of abstraction. Previously unresolvable theoretical dilemmas fade away before the integrative power of these concepts. A brief review of levels of brain function acknowledges the biological substrate from which all developmental and adaptive processes unfold. As with a single developmental line, normative patterns and deviations are of equal significance to preliminary efforts toward integration. Utilizing the concepts of mental representation and internalization, points of intersection of major developmental theories are illustrated. Application to the therapeutic arena via more developmentally informed diagnosis and specificity of attunement and therapeutic use of self is briefly demonstrated.     

The Curriculum to Meet Special Educational Needs

The development of objectives-based curricula in special education has brought considerable benefits to the education of children with special educational needs. Schools can look to even greater successes as they become more experienced in using and modifying their curricula. In the integrationist climate, provision for children with special educational needs has become increasingly flexible.

The role of the special school is changing, and is developing a system of 'resource centres' to enable wider provisions for meeting pupils special educational needs in mainstream. Such development has created new and important challenges in the field of special education. The opportunities which objectives-based curricula extend through planned and structured teaching initiatives for pupils with special educational needs, are commensurate with the opportunities provided through integration.

The article draws attention to matters of particular concern for teachers meeting pupils' special educational needs, and highlights the aims and objectives critical to curriculum design.     

Review essay: Between two wars: The rise and fall of Chattel Slavery in Georgia

Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750–1860. Julia Floyd Smith. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia. Clarence L. Mohr. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1986.