The Beef about Beef

The grading of beef has become a controversial issue, with both government and the cattle industry working to ensure uniformity. The author contends that meat quality, and the resulting tenderness, juiciness, and flavor desired by consumers, is being threatened by such pressures and actions

Reactions of Juvenile Delinquents to "Justified" and "Less Justified" Movie Violence

In order to determine whether juvenile delinquents would respond to the sight of someone being beaten up the same way as previously studied university students, two-thirds of the in stitutionalized delinquents in the sample watched a brief filmed prize fight after having been insulted or treated in a neutral fashion by the experimenter's confederate. A story summary given to the subjects depicted the defeated movie character as either a callous exploiter of other persons or as a more sym pathetic individual. Immediately after the film the insulted de linquents shown the exploiter being beaten administered stronger electric shocks to the confederate than a no-movie control group and somewhat more than other provoked subjects seeing the sympathetic character being hurt. Like the university students, the delinquents had apparently regarded the exploiter's beating as "justified" aggression; and this interpretation temporarily legitimated their own attacks upon their tormentor.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68641/2/10.1177_002242787401100103.pd

Evaluating the Effects of an Interdisciplinary Practice Model with Pharmacist Collaboration on HIV Patient Co-Morbidities

Treatment of HIV now occurs largely within the primary care setting, and the principal focus of most visits has become the management of chronic disease states. The clinical pharmacist’s potential role in improving chronic disease outcomes for HIV patients is unknown. A retrospective cohort study was performed for HIV-positive patients also diagnosed with diabetes, hypertension, or hyperlipidemia. Characteristics and outcomes in 96 patients treated by an interdisciplinary team which included a clinical pharmacist (i.e., the intervention group) were compared to those in 50 patients treated by an individual healthcare provider (i.e., the control group). Primary outcomes were changes from baseline over 18 month period of HbA1c, low density lipoprotein (LDL), and blood pressure, respectively. Secondary outcomes included number of drug-drug interactions, HIV viral load, CD4 count, percent change in smoking status, and percent of patients treated to cardiovascular guideline recommendations. The interdisciplinary team had a significant improvement in lipid management over the control group (LDL: -8.8 vs. +8.4 mg/dL; p=0.014), and the smoking cessation rate over the study period was doubled in the interdisciplinary group (20.4% vs. 11.8%). Among those with an indication for aspirin, a significantly higher percentage of patients were prescribed the medication in the interdisciplinary group compared to the control group (85.5% v. 64.9%; p=0.014). An informal cost analysis estimated savings of more than $3000 per patient treated by the interdisciplinary team. Based on these results, pharmacist involvement in an HIV primary care clinic appears to lead to more appropriate management of chronic co-morbidities in a cost-effective manner

Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions

In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual's mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual's history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.Comment: Best Paper Award at CSCW 201

Product Design: A Review and Research Agenda for Management Studies

This paper reviews research on product design in the broad domain of business studies. It highlights established and emerging perspectives and lines of inquiry, and organizes them around three core areas, corresponding to different stages of the design process (design activities, design choices, design results). Avenues for further research at the intersection of these bodies of research are identified and discussed, and the authors argue that management scholars possess conceptual and methodological tools suited to enriching research on design and effectively pursuing lines of investigation only partially addressed by other communities, such as the construction and deployment of design capabilities, or the organizational and institutional context of design activities

SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity are associated with genetic variants affecting gene expression in a variety of tissues

Variability in SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity between individuals is partly due to genetic factors. Here, we identify 4 genomic loci with suggestive associations for SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and 19 for COVID-19 disease severity. Four of these 23 loci likely have an ethnicity-specific component. Genome-wide association study (GWAS) signals in 11 loci colocalize with expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) associated with the expression of 20 genes in 62 tissues/cell types (range: 1:43 tissues/gene), including lung, brain, heart, muscle, and skin as well as the digestive system and immune system. We perform genetic fine mapping to compute 99% credible SNP sets, which identify 10 GWAS loci that have eight or fewer SNPs in the credible set, including three loci with one single likely causal SNP. Our study suggests that the diverse symptoms and disease severity of COVID-19 observed between individuals is associated with variants across the genome, affecting gene expression levels in a wide variety of tissue types