Challenges and Considerations Related to Studying Dementia in Blacks/African Americans

Blacks/African Americans have been reported to be ~2–4 times more likely to develop clinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) compared to Whites. Unfortunately, study design challenges (e.g., recruitment bias), racism, mistrust of healthcare providers and biomedical researchers, confounders related to socioeconomic status, and other sources of bias are often ignored when interpreting differences in human subjects categorized by race. Failure to account for these factors can lead to misinterpretation of results, reification of race as biology, discrimination, and missed or delayed diagnoses. Here we provide a selected historical background, discuss challenges, present opportunities, and suggest considerations for studying health outcomes among racial/ethnic groups. We encourage neuroscientists to consider shifting away from using biologic determination to interpret data, and work instead toward a paradigm of incorporating both biological and socio-environmental factors known to affect health outcomes with the goal of understanding and improving dementia treatments for Blacks/African Americans and other underserved populations

Community Mental Health Centers as Human Service Organizations

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67333/2/10.1177_000276428502800506.pd

Leveraging the sport participation legacy of the London 2012 Olympics: Senior managers’ perceptions

The purpose of this study was to understand how a sports mega event (SME) was leveraged to try and increase participation, through the investigation of national governing bodies (NGBs) opinions and atti- tudes. Critical realism (CR) was used as a tool to aid understanding of leveraging and legacy conceptualisation, through an empirical investiga- tion. An extensive, mixed method online survey was conducted post London 2012 with senior staff members of NGBs, the main delivery agent chosen to support the participation initiatives associated with the London 2012 Olympics. This research provides valuable findings surrounding the use of CR as a tool to investigate legacy creation, whilst at the same time offering insights to enhance the policy implementation process within the sports development sector. The importance of com- munication, competitive nature of sports system, media, club engage- ment, organisational capacity and monitoring and evaluation were highlighted, which provided useful insights into the multidimensional constructs that can aid future leveraging strategies prior to hosting SMEs

Management Capabilities and Policy Capacity Where are the Links?

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Towards an Economy of Higher Education

This paper draws a distinction between ways thinking and acting, and hence of policy and practice in higher education, in terms of different kinds of economy: economies of exchange and economies of excess. Crucial features of economies of exchange are outlined and their presence in prevailing conceptions of teaching and learning is illustrated. These are contrasted with other possible forms of practice, which in turn bring to light the nature of an economy of excess. In more philosophical terms, and to expand on the picture, economies of excess are elaborated with reference, first, to the understanding of alterity in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and, second, to the idea of Dionysian intensity that is to be found in Nietzsche. In the light of critical comment on some current directions in policy and practice, the implications of these ways of thinking for the administrator, the teacher and the student in higher education are explored

The politics of regulatory enforcement and compliance: Theorizing and operationalizing political influences

There is broad consensus in the literature on regulatory enforcement and compliance that politics matters. However, there is little scholarly convergence on what politics is or rigorous theorization and empirical testing of how politics matters. Many enforcement and compliance studies omit political variables altogether. Among those that address political influences on regulatory outcomes, politics has been defined in myriad ways and, too often, left undefined. Even when political constructs are explicitly operationalized, the mechanisms by which they influence regulatory outcomes are thinly hypothesized or simply ignored. If politics is truly as important to enforcement and compliance outcomes as everyone in the field seems to agree, regulatory scholarship must make a more sustained and systematic effort to understand their relationship, because overlooking this connection risks missing what is actually driving regulatory outcomes. This article examines how the construct of “politics” has been conceptualized in regulatory theory and analyzes how it has been operationalized in empirical studies of regulatory enforcement and compliance outcomes. It brings together scholarship across disciplines that rarely speak but have much to say to one another on this subject in order to constitute a field around the politics of regulation. The goal is to sharpen theoretical and empirical understandings of when and how regulation works by better accounting for the role politics plays in its enforcement

Mind the implementation gap?:Police reform and local policing in the Netherlands and Scotland

In 2013 the governments of the Netherlands and Scotland established national police forces, replacing a tradition of largely autonomous regional police organizations. In both jurisdictions, these radical reforms have raised concerns about the consequences of these national police structures for local policing and for relationships with local communities and local government. Drawing on documentary sources and interview material from each jurisdiction and informed by insights from the policy implementation literature, the key question addressed in this article is how has the legislation that created the new national police forces been put into effect at a local level? Focusing on the impact on the governance, organization and delivery of local policing, the article reveals how the implementation in both jurisdictions involves interpretation and discretion by multiple actors so that gaps are emerging between the national ‘policy promises’ set out in the legislation and the ‘policy products’ experienced in local contexts

Post-Acquisition Processing Confounds in Brain Volumetric Quantification of White Matter Hyperintensities

BACKGROUND: Disparate research sites using identical or near-identical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition techniques often produce results that demonstrate significant variability regarding volumetric quantification of white matter hyperintensities (WMH) in the aging population. The sources of such variability have not previously been fully explored. NEW METHOD: 3D FLAIR sequences from a group of randomly selected aged subjects were analyzed to identify sources-of-variability in post-acquisition processing that can be problematic when comparing WMH volumetric data across disparate sites. The methods developed focused on standardizing post-acquisition protocol processing methods to develop a protocol with less than 0.5% inter-rater variance. RESULTS: A series of experiments using standard MRI acquisition sequences explored post-acquisition sources-of-variability in the quantification of WMH volumetric data. Sources-of-variability included: the choice of image center, software suite and version, thresholding selection, and manual editing procedures (when used). Controlling for the identified sources-of-variability led to a protocol with less than 0.5% variability between independent raters in post-acquisition WMH volumetric quantification. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHOD(S): Post-acquisition processing techniques can introduce an average variance approaching 15% in WMH volume quantification despite identical scan acquisitions. Understanding and controlling for such sources-of-variability can reduce post-acquisition quantitative image processing variance to less than 0.5%. DISCUSSION: Considerations of potential sources-of-variability in MRI volume quantification techniques and reduction in such variability is imperative to allow for reliable cross-site and cross-study comparisons

External tagging does not affect the feeding behavior of a coral reef fish, Chaetodon vagabundus (Pisces: Chaetodontidae)

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Environmental Biology of Fishes 86 (2009): 447-450, doi:10.1007/s10641-009-9545-9.Increasingly, the ability to recognize individual fishes is important for studies of population dynamics, ecology, and behavior. Although a variety of methods exist, external tags remain one of the most widely applied because they are both effective and cost efficient. However, a key assumption is that neither the tagging procedure nor the presence of a tag negatively affects the individual. While this has been demonstrated for relatively coarse metrics such as growth and survival, few studies have examined the impact of tags and tagging on more subtle aspects of behavior. We tagged adult vagabond butterflyfish (Chaetodon vagabundus) occupying a 30-ha insular reef in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea, using a commonly-utilized t-bar anchor tag. We quantified and compared feeding behavior (bite rate), which is sensitive to stress, of tagged and untagged individuals over four separate sampling periods spanning four months post-tagging. Bite rates did not differ between tagged and untagged individuals at each sampling period and, combined with additional anecdotal observations of normal pairing behavior and successful reproduction, suggest that tagging did not adversely affect individuals.The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Fulbright Program, National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council