Constitution of the market through social media: Dialogical co-production of medicine in a virtual health community organization

This research explores new systems of marketing, and new roles and relationships of organizations and consumers developing in healthcare as a result of transformations occurring in technology, consumer/marketer value systems, forms of discourse and institutional roles. Inspired by observations from a Medicine 2.0 community organization, which turn social networking into a business phenomenon – PatientsLikeMe (PLM) – I explore how such systems develop and function and the institutionalizations that reconstitute roles and maintain relationships among actors in these systems through netnographic research. That is, (1) why and how patients in PLM participate in the social co-production of medical knowledge and experience, and (2) how the ‘community’ organizes roles and relations, and institutionalize ‘sharing’ in healthcare where privacy dominates relations. Findings articulate a dialogical approach to organizing roles and relations with the dilution of provisioning in this co-mediated market system, which reflects collaborative, connective and communal relations built on dialogues among diverse healthcare actors. From a theoretical vantage point, Foucauldian notions of biopower and govern-mentality are reconsidered in order to articulate why and how such a system may be attracting healthcare actors and maintain their interest and sharing in this community

Illuminating Secrecy: A New Economic Analysis of Confidential Settlements

Even the most hotly contested lawsuits typically end in a confidential settlement forbidding the parties from disclosing their allegations, evidence, or settlement amount. Confidentiality draws fierce criticism for harming third parties by concealing serious misdeeds like discrimination, pollution, defective manufacturing, and sexual abuse. Others defend confidentiality as a mutually beneficial pay-for-silence bargain that facilitates settlement, serves judicial economy, and prevents frivolous copycat lawsuits. This debate is based in economic logic, yet most analyses have been surprisingly shallow as to how confidentiality affects incentives to settle. Depicting a more nuanced, complex reality of litigation and settlement, this Article reaches several conclusions that are quite different from the economic conventional wisdom--and absent from the existing literature. First, contrary to the conventional wisdom that banning confidentiality would inhibit settlement, a ban could promote early settlements. No ban could effectively cover settlements reached before litigation, so any ban would incentivize parties to settle confidentially prefiling--and such early settlements save more litigation costs. Second, a ban would affect high- and low-value cases differently, depending on whether publicity-conscious defendants worry more about one big settlement or several small ones. Third, more settlement data would decrease litigation uncertainty, helping parties settle and deterring frivolous lawsuits. Fourth, more data would also reveal unlawful practices, yielding more efficient decisions by consumers, workers, and investors who otherwise engage in over-avoidance when unable to distinguish hazardous from safe goods. Contrary to the traditional economic story, we cannot predict the net effect of all these competing effects. Economics thus does not counsel against a confidentiality ban. This analysis typifies the schism between traditional economic analyses, which reach definite conclusions by simplifying complex realities, and many contemporary economic analyses, which are realistically nuanced but do not yield categorical conclusions. The latter brand of economics is sounder and still can clarify important matters such as parties\u27 incentives, rules\u27 costs and benefits, and the tradeoffs and competing effects of a policy like a confidentiality ban

The Missouri Miner, January 13, 1956

https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/missouri_miner/2520/thumbnail.jp

Smart dust in the industrial economic sector : on application cases in product lifecycle management

Smart dust is an autonomous sensing, computing, and communication system that can be packed into a cubic-millimeter mote to form the basis of integrated, massively distributed sensor networks. The purpose of this manuscript is to identify potential applications of smart dust in product lifecycle management with a focus on the industrial economic sector. Resting upon empirical data from the European DACH region, we describe six applications: (1) Advancement of requirements engineering, (2) Improvement of manufacturing processes, (3) Enhancement of logistics monitoring, (4) Optimization of operations, (5) Ameliorated maintenance and repair processes, and (6) Augmented retirement planning. Bearing the exploratory, qualitative approach and early-stage character of applications in mind, we can reason that smart dust offers great potentials to both product lifecycle management and research on it

Attitudinal perception of cosmetic wear and damage of materials within the use phase of portable electronic products

During the use phase of products, a series of obsolescing factors contribute to why a product is disposed of. Currently the visual state of a product is considered primarily in terms of aesthetic obsolescence which is synonymous with influential factors such as changes in fashion or personal preferences in style. The physical condition of a product is not commonly understood within the context of product replacement and the physical changes due to use are not understood fully. The research contributes to and provides original empirical research findings for the current literature on product lifetime extension, material semantics, the circular economy, emotionally durable design and material culture. Through an initial exploratory study (Photographic Analysis (PA) Study) of previously unexplained types of wear and damage that occur on portable electronic devices a taxonomy of damage (TOD) was established which provided the nomenclature for further studies. The second study (Retrospective Assessment (RA) Study) established the attitudes to wear based on the wear type, location, material and the stage during ownership that the wear occurred at. The RA Study highlighted the differences in the attitudinal responses to differing types of wear and damage and identified the differences in the temporal assessments of wear and damage. A third study (Real Time Assessment (RTA) Study) aimed to confirm or repudiate the findings found in the RA Study. The focus during the study was attitudes to the wear and damage in relation to the differences in materials, the location of the wear and the type of wear and damage was also looked at and led to a fuller understanding of how products and materials are perceived during the use phase; a stage of the product lifetime that is not currently well understood in terms of users aesthetic or cosmetic sensibilities. The final study (Semantic Perception of Materials (SPM) Study) focused on the visual and tactile perceptions of materials. The study established attitudinal perceptions of wear and damage of materials with a quantitative research methodology which has produced a better understanding of material semantics within the context of electronic objects. Through the four studies, discussion topics arose and major findings of the doctoral study were drawn out and seen to be interesting enough for further research and study. These discussions include the importance of including cosmetic obsolescence into the lexicon of product obsolescence and product lifetime extension literature, the differences in the perceptions of materials when they are within the context of a product or being assessed as samples, how differing product contexts affect user perceptions of wear and damage on materials and the potential inclusion of a material wear index that could inform the material selection process that goes further than the technical aspects outlined in current material selection tools and literature

The Free University of New York: The New Left's Self-Education and Transborder Activism

This dissertation addresses the unique history of the Free University (School) of New York (FUNY), 1965-1968, in the context of the American radical movement that occurred amidst the international upheaval of national liberations. The Free University of New York was founded by young radical intellectuals who were inspired by the struggles for self-determination that were taking place in Third World countries. Radicals concerned with Third World liberation movements created the anti-Vietnam War group May 2nd Movement, from which the Free University was born. Although FUNY only existed for a short period of time, from 1965 to 1968 it functioned as a center for radical education and politics for intellectuals in leftist circles within New York and in the United States as a whole. The uniqueness of the Free University lay in its experimental education and in its instructors' activities beyond the U.S. borders. The radical education at the Free University clearly reflected the interests of New Left intellectuals in the Sixties in America. The transborder activism of the Free University instructors included organizing an international pacifist movement against the U.S. involvement in the War in Vietnam, discussing the meaning of liberation with European intellectuals, and importing the idea of national liberation from the Third World revolutions. The FUNY activists played a significant role in the International War Crimes (Russell-Sartre) Tribunal in Europe in 1967, which accused the U.S. of atrocities in Vietnam. They also participated in the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London in 1967 and the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1968 to discuss the relevance of liberation and self-determination in the First and Third worlds. FUNY instructors brought these ideas back with them and built the philosophical foundation for the domestic protest activities in post-1968 America. The activities of the Free University of New York were considered to be part of the larger New Left movement in the United States. However, the mainstream New Leftists in the United States not only rejected the "foreign" ideas of national liberation and the accusation of U.S. war crimes, but also marginalized the New York radical intellectual circle as an extremist fringe of the American left. This conflict reveals the peculiar nature of the American New Left movement in the momentum of the global sixties. Nevertheless, the Free University of New York contributed significantly to the development of the American Sixties by bridging the gap between the intellectual position of leftist activists during the Third World revolutions in the late fifties and beyond and the struggle of people of color for decolonization within the United States in the later sixties and seventies

Border Ends: Anti-Imperialism, Settler Colonialism, And The Mexican Revolution In U.s. Modernism

From 1910-1920, the Mexican Revolution became a source of anxiety, interest, and inspiration to those who paid attention to its political turmoil as reported in the popular press. It would lead to the reinvigorating of a debate about U.S. intervention in the political affairs of Mexico, indeed, for some, the question was one of annexation. Responding to a growing imperialist culture in the U.S., William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, John Reed and Max Eastman of The Masses were among those who looked to modernist aesthetic practice to critique military and economic expansionism in Mexico. This dissertation explores that discursive interplay between U.S. modernism and anti-imperialism through representations of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), in writing itself conceptualized as “revolutionary.” While the writers that I take up in this study each, though in different ways, represented Mexico as a site of revolutionary modernity that points to a shared, transnational cultural affinity toward constructions of “the new” as the basis of an anti-imperialist politics, each also, confronts in their writing the disrupting presence of the American Indian within this anti-imperialist vision. Each of these writers in their own way explicitly connects an interest in the aesthetics of the “new” with the colonial history of the “New World.” At the same time, they register self-consciously in their texts the contradiction of using an anti-imperialist discourse to consolidate national identity in the face of ongoing settler colonialism: the appropriation and occupation of native land, the genocide of native peoples, and the erasure of native culture. In key texts about Mexico written by Stein, Williams, Reed, and Eastman, references to a history of U.S. settler colonialism and the presence of the American Indian emerge as a limit to their anti-imperialist poetics and a challenge to their desires for the construction of a “new,” modernist national culture

Alamogordo News, 03-15-1900

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/alamogordo_news/1014/thumbnail.jp