Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Payments To Medicare Advantage Plans Exceed Fee-For-Service Costs: Options For Medicare Savings From 2008 Through 2012, Brian Biles, Emily Adrion

Health Policy and Management Faculty Publications

The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) and the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2005 include provision intended to increase the role of private health plans in Medicare. These provisions set Medicare Advantage plan payment rates at levels higher than average costs would be in tradition free-for-service Medicare in every county in the nation. The total amount of extra payments to Medicare Advantage plans resulting from these provisions is projected to total over $8 billion in 2008 and $70 billion over the five year period, 2008 to 2012.

This briefing paper outlines the specific MMA and DRA provisions that generate …

Purposeful Mentoring And Healthcare, Joyce Schmidt Dehmer

Theses and Graduate Projects

Mentoring is not a new concept to leadership. It is as old as civilization. It is a transfer of wisdom through the mentoring relationship. Healthcare organizations have recognized and supported the need for mentoring relationships. Mentors possess a combination of attributes that others are compelled to want to follow or work with. Mentors have a keen interest in sharing, guiding and helping others develop. Mentoring may take place formally or informally. A structured useful type of mentoring is purposeful mentoring. Purposeful mentoring in healthcare has an agreed upon purpose between a mentor and mentee. The goal of the relationship is …

Foundations Of Refinement Operators For Description Logics, Jens Lehmann, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In order to leverage techniques from Inductive Logic Programming for the learning in description logics (DLs), which are the foundation of ontology languages in the Semantic Web, it is important to acquire a thorough understanding of the theoretical potential and limitations of using refinement operators within the description logic paradigm. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study which analyses desirable properties such operators should have. In particular, we show that ideal refinement operators in general do not exist, which is indicative of the hardness inherent in learning in DLs. We also show which combinations of desirable properties are theoretically …

A Refinement Operator Based Learning Algorithm For The Alc Description Logic, Jens Lehmann, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

With the advent of the Semantic Web, description logics have become one of the most prominent paradigms for knowledge representation and reasoning. Progress in research and applications, however, faces a bottleneck due to the lack of available knowledge bases, and it is paramount that suitable automated methods for their acquisition will be developed. In this paper, we provide the first learning algorithm based on refinement operators for the most fundamental description logic ALC. We develop the algorithm from thorough theoretical foundations and report on a prototype implementation.

The Impact Of Bullying And Sexual Harassment On Health Outcomes Of Middle School And High School Girls, James Gruber, Susan Fineran

School of Social Work

The impact of bullying and sexual harassment on six health outcomes among middle school girls were compared to these outcomes among high school girls. High school girls experienced more bullying and sexual harassment and poorer health outcomes than their middle school counterparts, but the impact of these experiences was less among high school students. Differences in outcomes may be the result of better support systems and coping mechanisms among high school girls and/or challenging developmental changes during middle school. Sexual orientation, race, and disability had some notable relationships to bullying and sexual harassment experiences as well as health outcomes.

Color-Blind Individualism, Intercountry Adoption And Public Policy, Pamela Anne Quiroz

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

A prevailing ideology of color-blindness has resulted in privatizing the discourse on adoption. Color-blind individualism, the adoption arena's version of color-blind discourse, argues that race should not matter in adoption; racism can be eradicated through transracial adoption; and individual rights should be exercised without interference of the state. As privatization has increasingly dominated our world and disparities between countries have grown, so too has intercountry adoption. This paper examines the colonial aspects of intercountry adoption and implications for conceptualizing global human rights from our current emphasis on individual rights, as the real issue continues to be which children are desired …

The Challenge Of Community Work In A Global Economy, Howard Karger, Christian Iyiani, Pat Shannon

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article examines how and why five major stakeholders-international financial organizations; NGOs; governmental entities; multinational corporations; and community development projects- have failed to significantly and uniformly reduce aggregate global poverty. The article uses the results of a case study of HIV/ AIDS prevention in a low-income Nigerian city to argue that effective action must involve local and global stakeholders in collaborative partnerships. It concludes by discussing the critical role of facilitators in such partnerships.

Journal Of Sociology & Social Welfare Vol. 34, No. 2 (June 2007)

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• SPECIAL ISSUE ON GLOBALIZATION, SOCIAL JUSTICE & SOCIAL WELFARE
• INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE - Frederick (Fritz) MacDonald and James Midgley, Special Editors
• PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBALIZATION, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND WELFARE - James Midgley
• GLOBALIZATION AND DRUG AND ALCOHOL USE IN RURAL COMMUNITIES IN NIGERIA: A CASE STUDY - Charles Fiki
• COLOR-BLIND INDIVIDUALISM, INTERCOUNTRY ADOPTION AND PUBLIC POLICY - Pamela Anne Quiroz
• THE CHALLENGE OF COMMUNITY WORK IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY - Howard Karger, Christian Iyiani and Pat Shannon
• GLOBALIZATION, IMMIGRATION AND THE WELFARE STATE: A CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARISON - Qingwen Xu
• GLOBALIZATION AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING - Loring Jones, …

Toward Global Welfare State Convergence?: Family Policy And Health Care In Sweden, Canada And The United States, Gregg M. Olsen

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Accounts of the welfare state and the dynamics governing its development have been pivotal and highly contentious in the social policy literature over the past few decades. Since the 1980s, research has suggested that, as a result of domestic pressures and strains and/or the impact of globalization, welfare states were declining in tandem. However, most of these studies were quantitativefocusing upon 18 or more advanced capitalist nations and, in their search to uncover broad cross-national trends, utilized narrow welfare state indicators. This study investigates the extent to which the social democratic welfare state in Sweden, the social liberal welfare state …

Globalization, Welfare Reform And The Social Economy: Developing An Alternative Approach To Analyzing Social Welfare Systems In The Post-Industrial Era, Vanna Gonzales

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Our understanding of the relationship between globalization and contemporary social welfare systems is heavily influenced by three conventional approaches to studying welfare reform: the political economy, moral economy, and mixed economy approaches. In addition to analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches, a central aim of this article is to introduce the social economy approach as an emergent alternative. Drawing from a growing body of work on institutional innovation within the European third sector, I argue that the social economy approach makes a valuable contribution to understanding the role of welfare networks in reconfiguring globalizations' impact on …

Among Empires: American Ascendancy And Its Predecessors. Charles S. Maier.

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Book note for Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. $ 27.95 hardcover.

Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge And Value In Global Psychiatry. Andrew Lakoff., Peter Manoleas

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Book note for Andrew Lakoff, Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry. Cambridge University Press, 2006. $75.00 hardcover, $29.99 papercover.

Digg.Com And Socially-Driven Authority, Steven Ovadia

Publications and Research

For years, librarians have been able to distill the notion of authority, in its purest form, to two simple questions: “Who said it?” and “Under whose auspices?” The answer to either, or preferably both, of these questions could tell a researcher whether to rely on the information retrieved. Today, however, in the world of online information, the notion of authority is shifting and librarians working in an instructional capacity must understand the shift and determine ways to help students cope with the changes. Searching in today’s socially-driven information era requires a different skill set for researchers looking for authoritative information. …

Library Survey, Vol.5 (3) May - June 2007, Houston Academy Of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library

The Insider (2003-2008)

No abstract provided.

Nebraska Farm Real Estate Market Developments 2006-2007, Bruce B. Johnson

Nebraska Farm Real Estate Reports

Nebraska agricultural land values rose sharply during the year ending February 1st, 2007 according to the UNL Nebraska Farm Real Estate Survey. The all-land value increase was 14.0 %, the largest annual percentage increase in 19 years. Sharply higher crop commodity prices towards the end of 2006, the result of a rapidly-expanding ethanol industry in the state, appeared to contribute greatly to the run-up in land values. In addition, potential for further irrigation development in some areas of the state led to spirited bidding for such land; while regions experiencing water restrictions had more muted value changes for the year. …

June Roundtable: Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“On Israel, America and AIPAC” by George Soros. New York Review of Books. April 12, 2007.

Engagement As A Way Toward Peace, Mahmood Monshipouri

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The Bush administration’s active support for the Israeli government is counterproductive in its refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government which includes Hamas. A great majority of American Jews have called for Israel to withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967 and support the creation of a Palestinian state. A hard-line minority of politicians in the United States, along with their affiliated media networks and think-tanks, have continued to dominate the main Jewish lobbying group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Kathleen Barrett On Challenges To Peacebuilding: Managing Spoilers During Conflict Resolution Edited By Edward Newman And Oliver Richmond. New York: United Nations University Press, 2006. 329pp., Kathleen Barrett

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Challenges to Peacebuilding: Managing Spoilers During Conflict Resolution Edited by Edward Newman and Oliver Richmond. New York: United Nations University Press, 2006. 329pp.

Selecting Labels For News Document Clusters, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Trivikram Immaneni, Mastan Vali Shaik

Kno.e.sis Publications

This work deals with determination of meaningful and terse cluster labels for News document clusters. We analyze a number of alternatives for selecting headlines and/or sentences of document in a document cluster (obtained as a result of an entity-event-duration query), and formalize an approach to extracting a short phrase from well-supported headlines/sentences of the cluster that can serve as the cluster label. Our technique maps a sentence into a set of significant stems to approximate its semantics, for comparison. Eventually a cluster label is extracted from a selected headline/sentence as a contiguous sequence of words, resuscitating word sequencing information lost …

2007 June, Office Of Communications & Marketing, Morehead State University.

Morehead State Press Release Archive, 1961 to the Present

Press releases for June of 2007.

A Case For Legal Quotas For Women In The Egyptian Parliament, Hebatallah Saleh El Naggar

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Advertising Of In-Flight Magazines In The Middle East: A Content Analysis, Mona Badran

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Metasearching And Beyond: Implementation Experiences And Advice From An Academic Library, Gail Herrera

Library Publications

In March 2003 the University of Mississippi Libraries made our MetaSearch tool publicly available. After a year of working with this product and integrating it into the library Web site, a wide variety of libraries interested in our implementation process and experiences began to call. Libraries interested in this product have included consortia, public, and academic libraries in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. This article was written in an effort to share the recommendations and concerns given. Much of the advice is general and could be applied to many of the MetaSearch tools available. Google Scholar and other open …

Le Lecteur Face Aux Stéréotypes : Entre Participation Et Distanciation, Valérie Lotodé

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In some of Rachid Boudjedra’s novels, the study of stereotyped representations proves particularly operational to define the interaction between virtual reader and characters. This article aims to analyze the reader’s reactions to stereotypes. It also attempts to show how the reader oscillates between a participatory reading – during which, recognizing a traditional ideological speech, he is charmed by fiction – and a distancing reading. By means of the analysis of female and male archetypes, this paper will also reveal the implicit reader’s face, and more specifically his/her sexual identity.

Tennessee Archivist 30, No. 2, Society Of Tennessee Archivists

Tennessee Archivist newsletters

Summer 2007 issue of the Tennessee Archivist, a newsletter produced by the Society of Tennessee Archivists.

Analysis Of Army Transformation And The Effects On Customer Ordering Behavior, Joseph M. Colacicco

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Army began a major force transformation in 2003, which required a significant shift in logistics support constructs. This thesis provides an in-process review of the effects of the current transformation efforts on supply effectiveness and attempts to determine factors that influence customer ordering behavior. Specifically, the thesis sought to answer three subproblems addressing the effect of transformation on supply effectiveness, the correlation of supply effectiveness metrics to customer ordering behavior, and other potential sources of variance in ordering behavior. The subproblems were answered through an examination of the supply document histories of two Brigades, one legacy Brigade …

Robust Virtual Implementation, Dirk Bergemann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

In a general interdependent preference environment, we characterize when two payoff types can be distinguished by their rationalizable strategic choices without any prior knowledge of their beliefs and higher order beliefs. We show that two payoff types are strategically distinguishable if and only if they satisfy a separability condition. The separability condition for each agent essentially requires that there is not too much interdependence in preferences across agents. A social choice function — mapping payoff type profiles to outcomes — can be robustly virtually implemented if there exists a mechanism such that every equilibrium on every type space achieves an …

Exact Distribution Theory In Structural Estimation With An Identity, Peter C.B. Phillips

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Some exact distribution theory is developed for structural equation models with and without identities. The theory includes LIML, IV and OLS. We relate the new results to earlier studies in the literature, including the pioneering work of Bergstrom (1962). General IV exact distribution formulae for a structural equation model without an identity are shown to apply also to models with an identity by specializing along a certain asymptotic parameter sequence. Some of the new exact results are obtained by means of a uniform asymptotic expansion. An interesting consequence of the new theory is that the uniform asymptotic approximation provides the …

Tilted Nonparametric Estimation Of Volatility Functions With Empirical Applications, Peter C.B. Phillips, Ke-Li Xu

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper proposes a novel positive nonparametric estimator of the conditional variance function without reliance on logarithmic or other transformations. The estimator is based on an empirical likelihood modification of conventional local level nonparametric regression applied to squared mean regression residuals. The estimator is shown to be asymptotically equivalent to the local linear estimator in the case of unbounded support but, unlike that estimator, is restricted to be non-negative in finite samples. It is fully adaptive to the unknown conditional mean function. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the finite sample performance of the estimator. Two empirical applications are reported. One …

Limit Theory For Explosively Cointegrated Systems, Peter C.B. Phillips, Tassos Magdalinos

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A limit theory is developed for multivariate regression in an explosive cointegrated system. The asymptotic behavior of the least squares estimator of the cointegrating coefficients is found to depend upon the precise relationship between the explosive regressors. When the eigenvalues of the autoregressive matrix are distinct, the centered least squares estimator has an exponential rate of convergence and a mixed normal limit distribution. No central limit theory is applicable here and Gaussian innovations are assumed. On the other hand, when some regressors exhibit common explosive behavior, a different mixed normal limiting distribution is derived with rate of convergence reduced to …