Medical Students Educate Teens About Skin Cancer: What Have We Learned?

Skin cancer is a serious societal problem, and public awareness outreach, including to youth, is crucial. Medical students have joined forces to educate adolescents about skin cancer with significant impacts; even one 50-min interactive outreach session led to sustained changes in knowledge and behavior in a cohort of 1,200 adolescents surveyed. Medical students can act as a tremendous asset to health awareness public outreach efforts: enthusiastic volunteerism keeps education cost-effective, results in exponential spread of information, reinforces knowledge and communication skills of future physicians, and can result in tangible, life-saving benefits such as early detection of melanoma

Tiebout Sorting in Metropolitan Areas

In this article, we tackle the issue of sorting at the metropolitan area by utilizing an alternative methodological approach that permits us to avoid problems plaguing earlier studies. For this analysis, we take two Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) as our test cases: the Houston MSA and the Atlanta MSA. For each metropolitan area, we employ Monte Carlo computer simulations to randomly create a large number of metropolitan "jurisdictional" groupings. Based upon these Monte Carlos, we are able to estimate the level of jurisdictional homogeneity that is attributable to random chance. The observed levels of sorting, including the increasing homogeneity as populations decrease, are entirely consistent with what one might find if clusters of households were randomly grouped together into municipalities. Copyright 2006 by The Policy Studies Organization.