A screening system for tardive dyskinesia: development and implementation.

1. Most diagnosed cases of tardive dyskinesia (TD) are mildly inconvenient to the patient, but some can be severe or life-threatening. The primary goal of intervention should be early identification of abnormal movements related to TD and the prescribing of an appropriate medication regimen. 2. Unless specific training occurs and a specific monitoring system is in place, TD movements may be missed. However, not all movements are necessarily related to TD. 3. Although screening and monitoring are valuable, nothing is more important than prevention. New medications must be developed that do not carry the risk of TD, and other approaches to treat TD must be developed.     

Near‐Misses and Future Disaster Preparedness

Disasters garner attention when they occur, and organizations commonly extract valuable lessons from visible failures, adopting new behaviors in response. For example, the United States saw numerous security policy changes following the September 11 terrorist attacks and emergency management and shelter policy changes following Hurricane Katrina. But what about those events that occur that fall short of disaster? Research that examines prior hazard experience shows that this experience can be a mixed blessing. Prior experience can stimulate protective measures, but sometimes prior experience can deceive people into feeling an unwarranted sense of safety. This research focuses on how people interpret near‐miss experiences. We demonstrate that when near‐misses are interpreted as disasters that did not occur and thus provide the perception that the system is resilient to the hazard, people illegitimately underestimate the danger of subsequent hazardous situations and make riskier decisions. On the other hand, if near‐misses can be recognized and interpreted as disasters that almost happened and thus provide the perception that the system is vulnerable to the hazard, this will counter the basic “near‐miss” effect and encourage mitigation. In this article, we use these distinctions between resilient and vulnerable near‐misses to examine how people come to define an event as either a resilient or vulnerable near‐miss, as well as how this interpretation influences their perceptions of risk and their future preparedness behavior. Our contribution is in highlighting the critical role that people's interpretation of the prior experience has on their subsequent behavior and in measuring what shapes this interpretation.     

A stepwise discrete variable selection procedure

A stepwise variable selection procedure for multinomial discrimination is presented and discussed. Based upon the work of Kullback and Hills, stopping rules are proposed and illustrated for a set of data on communication buyer behavior.     

On the Limitations of Redundancies in the Improvement of System Reliability

Some program managers share a common belief that adding a redundant component to a system reduces the probability of failure by half. This is true only if the failures of the redundant components are independent events, which is rarely the case. For example, the redundant components may be subjected to the same external loads. There is, however, in general a decrease in the failure probability of the system. Nonetheless, the redundant element comes at a cost, even if it is less than that of developing the first one when both are based on the same design. Identical parts save the most in terms of design costs, but are subjected to common failure modes from possible design errors that limit the effectiveness of the redundancy. In the development of critical systems, managers thus need to decide if the costs of a parallel system are justified by the increase in the system's reliability. NASA, for example, has used redundant spacecraft to increase the chances of mission success, which worked well in the cases of the Viking and Voyager missions. These two successes, however, do not guarantee future ones. We present here a risk analysis framework accounting for dependencies to support the decision to launch at the same time a twin mission of identical spacecraft, given incremental costs and risk-reduction benefits of the second one. We illustrate this analytical approach with the case of the Mars Exploration Rovers launched by NASA in 2003, for which we had performed this assessment in 2001.     

Methods for Development Work and Research: A New Guide for Practitioners

From the outset, Britha Mikkelsen is careful to identify thelimitations of this rather detailed and extensive book (345pages). We are appropriately cautioned that it does not tryto do everything: it is a ‘guide’ ‘to a varietyof field study methods from which the reader may combine her/hisown mixture to suit the problem, time and resources available’(p. 23); ‘it is not a cookbook for the study of all developmentissues’ (p. 28) and it can be read selectively; and ‘itdoes not replace more elaborate texts, but will serve as a supplementto the basic methodology texts of sociology, anthropology...’(p. 46). Despite these protestations, it is a     

The Authority of the Holy Revisited: Habermas, Religion, and Emancipatory Possibilities

This article argues that Jürgen Habermas's view of religion as anathema to rational critical discourse reflects his misunderstanding that religion comprises a monolithic and immutable body of dogma that is closed to reason. Illustrative data from Catholic history and theology and empirical data gathered from contemporary American Catholics are used to show the weaknesses in Habermas's negation of the possibility of a self-critical religious discourse. Specifically, I highlight the doctrinal differentiation within Catholicism, its longstanding theological emphasis on the coupling of faith and reason, institutional reflexivity, and the doctrinally reflexive reasoning that contemporary Catholics use in negotiating what might appear as "contradictory" identities (e.g., being gay or lesbian and Catholic). Although the data presented take issue with Habermas's disavowal of religion, the article shows that the practical relevance of doctrinal reasoning at both the institutional and the individual level vindicate Habermas's faith in the emancipatory potential of reasoned argumentation to advance participative equality.     

Attributions about Addiction among Latina Women

This cross-sectional, secondary analysis study utilizes data from a prior study of intergenerational substance use among Latina women (n = 316). We explored the influence of substance use frequency and type, as well as cultural and socioeconomic factors on attributions about addiction among a predominantly immigrant sample of Latina women. Women who were less proficient in English (an indicator of adoption of the receiving culture in the acculturation process) and more proficient in Spanish (an indicator of heritage-culture retention) endorsed more spiritual model attributions than women who were more proficient in English and less proficient in Spanish. Women were more proficient in Spanish more frequently endorsed the disease attribution model. Alcohol, marijuana use and non-medical sedative use were linked with spiritual, moral /character and disease attribution models respectively. Participants reporting higher education levels indicated less agreement with the moral/character model of addiction. Implications for culturally tailored social work interventions for Latina women are discussed.     

The Role of the Private Market in Day-care Provision for Children in Need

This article examines the role that the private day-care market plays within the range of day-care services offered by 12 local authorities for children in need. It examines how local authorities have developed their use of private day-care services generally, and goes on to discuss three models of sponsored childminding practice which were identified in the study. Although authorities have generally been innovative in developing their work with independent day-care providers, if they are to continue to purchase good quality services for children in need they need to ensure that private day-care providers receive adequate levels of training and support, and that steps are taken to address existing gaps in both private and local authority day-care services.     

Respect: A philosophical perspective

This article explicates the concept of respect as philosophers discuss and utilize it. After identifying the main questions about respect which philosophers have raised and addressed, including questions about the nature, importance, objects, grounds, psychological and behavioral elements, and implications of respect, I sketch an account of the most general elements of the attitude of respect and identify different kinds of respect and their connections to and differences from similar attitudes such as esteem and honor. I then discuss the most influential account of respect for persons, that of Immanuel Kant. The final section explores the importance of respect in moral, social and political life and in moral, social, and political theory, and highlights some implications for issues in applied ethics and social and political theory.