What Were They Thinking? The Federal Reserve In The Run-Up To The 2008 Financial Crisis

The Federal Reserve (the Fed) is responsible for monitoring, analyzing and ultimately stabilizing US financial markets. It also has unrivalled access to economic data, high-level connections to financial institutions, and a large staff of professionally trained economists. Why then was it apparently unconcerned by the financial developments that are now widely recognized to have caused the 2008 financial crisis? Using a wide range of Fed documents from the pre-crisis period, particularly the transcripts of meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), this paper shows that Fed policymakers and staff were aware of relevant developments in financial markets, but paid infrequent attention to them and disregarded significant systemic threats. Drawing on literatures in economics, political science and sociology, the paper then demonstrates that the Fed\u27s intellectual paradigm in the years before the crisis focused on ‘post hoc interventionism’ – the institution\u27s ability to limit the fallout should a systemic disturbance arise. Further, the paper argues that institutional routines played a crucial role in maintaining this paradigm and in contributing to the Fed\u27s inadequate attention to the warning signals in the pre-crisis period

Practitioners' views about equity within prenatal services

The British National Health Service (NHS) is based on principles of equal access, treatment and outcomes. This article reviews health professionals' aims to provide equitable prenatal services and their views on whether women could be equal in their access to services, understanding during choice-making, and satisfaction about their care. Inequalities which compromise equity, conflicting meanings of equity, and the contribution of in-hospital ethics seminars to ethical health services are considered. Qualitative research, combining sociological and philosophical methods, investigated the experiences of health care staff attempting to provide equitable services and their practical and ethical problems. A total of 70 staff at a teaching hospital and a district general hospital took part in semi-structured interviews, followed by 11 innovative in-hospital ethics seminars based on themes derived from the interviews. The 56 seminar participants usually began with clear statements of their equitable aims, but, encouraged by the health care ethicist, they went on to discuss their many concerns about obstacles which complicated the achievement of these aims. The sociological-ethics seminars provided unique opportunities for multi-disciplinary discussion of these inequalities and their impact on equitable intentions in health care. Analysis of the contradictions revealed during the seminars is guided by sociological theories that seek to explain the persistence of inequalities in health, and how NHS policies appear to perpetuate and increase them, despite practitioners' stated intentions to promote equality

Improvement Research Carried Out Through Networked Communities: Accelerating Learning about Practices that Support More Productive Student Mindsets

The research on academic mindsets shows significant promise for addressing important problems facing educators. However, the history of educational reform is replete with good ideas for improvement that fail to realize the promises that accompany their introduction. As a field, we are quick to implement new ideas but slow to learn how to execute well on them. If we continue to implement reform as we always have, we will continue to get what we have always gotten. Accelerating the field's capacity to learn in and through practice to improve is one key to transforming the good ideas discussed at the White House meeting into tools, interventions, and professional development initiatives that achieve effectiveness reliably at scale. Toward this end, this paper discusses the function of networked communities engaged in improvement research and illustrates the application of these ideas in promoting greater student success in community colleges. Specifically, this white paper:* Introduces improvement research and networked communities as ideas that we believe can enhance educators' capacities to advance positive change. * Explains why improvement research requires a different kind of measures -- what we call practical measurement -- that are distinct from those commonly used by schools for accountability or by researchers for theory development.* Illustrates through a case study how systematic improvement work to promote student mindsets can be carried out. The case is based on the Carnegie Foundation's effort to address the poor success rates for students in developmental math at community colleges.Specifically, this case details:- How a practical theory and set of practical measures were created to assess the causes of "productive persistence" -- the set of "non-cognitive factors" thought to powerfully affect community college student success. In doing this work, a broad set of potential factors was distilled into a digestible framework that was useful topractitioners working with researchers, and a large set of potential measures was reduced to a practical (3-minute) set of assessments.- How these measures were used by researchers and practitioners for practical purposes -- specifically, to assess changes, predict which students were at-risk for course failure, and set priorities for improvement work.-How we organized researchersto work with practitioners to accelerate field-based experimentation on everyday practices that promote academic mindsets(what we call alpha labs), and how we organized practitioners to work with researchers to test, revise, refine, and iteratively improve their everyday practices (using plando-study-act cycles).While significant progress has already occurred, robust, practical, reliable efforts to improve students' mindsets remains at an early formative stage. We hope the ideas presented here are an instructive starting point for new efforts that might attempt to address other problems facing educators, most notably issues of inequality and underperformance in K-12 settings

Living absence:the strange geographies of missing people

In this paper ‘missing people’ gain an unstable presence through their (restaged) testimonies recounting individual occupations of material urban public space during the lived practice of absence. We explore ‘missing experience’ with reference to homeless geographies, and as constituted by paradoxical spatialities in which people are both absent and present. We seek to understand such urban geographies of absence through diverse voices of missing people, who discuss their embodiment of unusual rhythmic occupations of the city. We conclude by considering how a new politics of missing people might take account of such voices in ways to think further about rights-to-be-absent in the city

Where Do Facts Matter? The Digital Paradox in Magazines\u27 Fact-Checking Practices

Print magazines are unique among nonfiction media in their dedication of staff and resources to in-depth, word-by-word verification of stories. Over time, this practice has established magazines’ reputation for reliability, helped them retain loyal readers amid a glut of information sources, and protected them from litigation. But during the past decade, websites, mobile platforms, and social media have expanded the types of stories and other content that magazines provide readers. Doing so has shortened the time between the creation and dissemination of content, challenging and in some cases squeezing out fact-checkers’ participation. This study examines the procedures applied to stories in magazines and their non-print platforms, seeking to discern what decisions were made in response to the speed of digital publication, what effects these decisions have had, what lessons have been learned and what changes have been made over time. The results suggest that fact-checking practices for print content remain solidly in place at most magazines, if executed with diminished resources; however, magazine media are also exploring new processes to ensure accuracy and protect their reputations in an accelerated media environment

Safeguarding in schools : best practice

"This report illustrates and evaluates the features of best practice in safeguarding, based on inspection evidence from the 19% of all maintained primary, secondary and special schools, residential special schools and pupil referral units inspected between September 2009 and July 2010 where safeguarding had been judged outstanding. It also draws on a more detailed analysis and evaluation of safeguarding practice in a small sample of outstanding schools visited by Her Majesty’s Inspectors" -- front cover

How often do you wash your hair? Design as disordering: everyday routines, human object theories, probes and sustainability

The  paper  proposes  an  approach  of investigating routinised  practices  in relation to  deliberately  creating disorder in everyday routines and practice theory. Further, it outlines a pilot study that uses the design­led method of 'probes' and considers its potentials  in generating disorder. It identifies creative disorder in the process of designers developing the probes, participants interacting with them to finally designers receiving the results. Thinking about the process in terms of disorder is seen to be valuable in facilitating, applying and developing probes, not only to inspire the designer but also to sensitise the designer to private and intimate areas of everyday life such as hair care

Media(ted) fabrications: How the science-media symbiosis helped ‘sell’ cord banking

This paper considers the problematic role of the science–media symbiosis in the dissemination of misleading and emotionally manipulative information regarding services offered by CordBank, New Zealand's only umbilical cord blood banking facility. As this case study illustrates, the growing reliance of health and science reporters on the knowledge capital of medical specialists, biogenetic researchers, and scientists potentially enhances the ability of ‘expert’ sources to set the agenda for media representations of emerging medical and scientific developments, and may undermine the editorial independence of journalists and editors, many of whom in this case failed to critically evaluate deeply problematic claims regarding the current and future benefits of cord banking. Heavy reliance on established media frames of anecdotal personalization and technoboosterism also reinforced a proscience journalistic culture in which claims by key sources were uncritically reiterated and amplified, with journalistic assessments of the value of cord banking emphasizing potential benefits for individual consumers. It is argued that use of these media frames potentially detracts from due consideration of the broader social, ethical, legal, and health implications of emerging biomedical developments, along with the professional, personal, and increasingly also financial interests at stake in their public promotion, given the growing commercialization of biogenetic technologies