An investigation into the government extension services operating in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland, North and South Island, New Zealand : June 1 to July 7, 1991

Brian Carlin Memorial Award Study Tour Repor

J Community Health

IntroductionAn estimated 43.5 million American adults currently smoke cigarettes. Well-designed tobacco education campaigns with adequate reach increase cessation and reduce tobacco use. Smokers report great interest in quitting but few use effective treatments including quitlines. This review examined traditional (TV, radio, print ads) versus innovative tobacco cessation (internet, social media) promotions for quitline services.MethodsBetween November 2011 and January 2012, searches were conducted on EBSCO, PubMed, Wilson, OCLC, CQ Press, Google Scholar, Gale, LexisNexis, and JSTOR.ResultsExisting literature shows that the amount of radio and print advertising, and promotion of free cessation medications increases quitline (QL) call volume. Television advertising volume seems to be the best predictor of QL service awareness. Much of the literature on Internet advertising compares the characteristics of participants recruited for studies through various channels. The majority of the papers indicated that Internet-recruited participants were younger; this was the only demographic characteristic with high agreement across studies.ConclusionsTraditional media was only studied within mass media campaigns with TV ads having a consistent impact on increasing calls to quitlines, therefore, it is hard to distinguish the impact of traditional media as an independent QL promotion intervention. With innovative media, while many QL services have a presence on social media sites, there is no literature on evaluating the effectiveness of these channels for quitline promotion.CC999999/Intramural CDC HHS/United States2017-02-23T00:00:00Z24515948PMC532227

Do government policies that promote competition encourage or discourage new product and process development in low and middle-income countries?

Previous work has shown that firms in low and middle-income countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that feel greater pressure to innovate from their competitors are more likely to introduce new products and services than firms that donot feel pressure (Carlin and others 2001; World Bank 2004). However, competition also appears to affect innovation in other ways. In particular, firms in these countries that face greater price competition appear to be less likely to innovate than other firms (Carlin and others 2001). The author assesses how competition and trade policy affect these different aspects of competition and, consequently, assesses their net impact on innovation. He finds that reducing tariffs and enacting and enforcing competition laws modestly increases both the pressure that firms feel regarding innovation and the level of price competition in the domestic economy. The net impact that lower tariffs have on new product and process development appears to be negative but small-for the most part the opposing effects cancel out. In contrast, stricter competition laws and better enforcement of those laws appear to increase the likelihood of new product and process development, especially when competition is treated as endogenous to innovation.Environmental Economics&Policies,Markets and Market Access,Labor Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets

Politically Correct Language in George Carlin

American stand-up comedian George Carlin is notable for his long-standing popularity from the early 60s up until his death in 2008. In this paper, I examine George Carlin’s stance on politically correct language. Focusing on his three books Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty, and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, I show how his attempts to remove himself from a politically correct system ultimately fail as he adheres to his own ideals of language and morality. Using his texts and various work from Stanley Fish to support these claims, I show how Carlin ridicules the redundancies and hypocrisies that exist when groups claim words as their own. While breaking down these claims on political correctness, Carlin implements his own set of values. I show how there is no direct way to escape politicizing language. However, Carlin’s position as stand-up comic allows for a more fluid approach to politically correct language, as it offers a way to shift leanings and explore various forms of ideology permitting audiences a way to think differently about the world around them

Geochemistry of pyrite and whole rock samples from the Getchell Carlin–type gold deposit, Humboldt County, Nevada

Carlin-type gold deposits were not recognized as a new major type of gold deposit until the 1960’s. The Getchell deposit, which is now known to be a Carlin-type gold deposit, was discovered in 1934 (Joralemon, 1951). This deposit is located in north central Nevada (Fig. 1). Much is known about the physical characteristics of Carlin-type gold deposits (Cline et al., 2005). An unusual characteristic of these deposits is that free gold is generally not present. Instead, gold occurs as sub-micrometer particles in the mineral pyrite or marcasite. The marcasite and pyrite that are gold bearing commonly occur as rims on gold-free pyrite or marcasite cores. These rims typically contain, in addition to gold, elevated arsenic, antimony, thallium, mercury, and copper. We have samples of ore from the Getchell deposit that contain metals that are not typically present in these deposits. For example, silver, which is typically very minor, is as abundant as gold. It is currently unclear if this silver is in the pyrite rims with the gold and other hydrothermally transported metals, or if the silver is in other minerals in the rock. If this is the case, this would indicate another source for the silver. In this study we are conducting petrographic examinations and chemical analyses of pyrites to quantify gold and other metals. First we used the microscope to look at polished thin sections of the samples. Pyrite crystals were identified that had visible rims giving us a location to analyze for gold and other trace metals. Second, we are using an electron microprobe to quantitatively determine elements and their abundances in pyrite and marcasite cores and rims. We expect to see a suite of elements typical of the Carlin-type systems, such as: Au, Sb, Hg, As, Cu, and Tl in the pyrites. Our study is determining the chemistry of four types of pyrite that have been identified, to locate gold, silver, and other trace metals. Our analyses will indicate whether or not silver occurs with the other Carlin metals, or if it is alternatively present in other minerals in the rock

Divided government shields leaders from blame for the economy but affords no quarter in the fight against terrorism

When disaster strikes, governments tend to be held accountable whether it is an economic disaster, such as the recent financial crisis, or a terrorist attack. In new research, Ryan E. Carlin, Gregory J. Love and Cecilia Martínez-Gallardo use data from Latin America to examine the effects of unified and divided government on how citizens ascribe blame when terrorism and negative economic outcomes occur. They find that because the executive shares responsibility with national and international factors for the state of the economy, citizens are more forgiving when government is divided. After terrorist attacks, on the other hand, citizens blame their leaders even if government is divided as they see their leaders as having near sole responsibility for issues of national security

Int J Stat Med Res

Missing data commonly occur in large epidemiologic studies. Ignoring incompleteness or handling the data inappropriately may bias study results, reduce power and efficiency, and alter important risk/benefit relationships. Standard ways of dealing with missing values, such as complete case analysis (CCA), are generally inappropriate due to the loss of precision and risk of bias. Multiple imputation by fully conditional specification (FCS MI) is a powerful and statistically valid method for creating imputations in large data sets which include both categorical and continuous variables. It specifies the multivariate imputation model on a variable-by-variable basis and offers a principled yet flexible method of addressing missing data, which is particularly useful for large data sets with complex data structures. However, FCS MI is still rarely used in epidemiology, and few practical resources exist to guide researchers in the implementation of this technique. We demonstrate the application of FCS MI in support of a large epidemiologic study evaluating national blood utilization patterns in a sub-Saharan African country. A number of practical tips and guidelines for implementing FCS MI based on this experience are described.2015CC999999/Intramural CDC HHS/United States27429686PMC4945131668

An Empirical Bayes Approach for Constructing the Confidence Intervals of Clonality and Entropy

This paper is motivated by the need to quantify human immune responses to environmental challenges. Specifically, the genome of the selected cell population from a blood sample is amplified by the well-known PCR process of successive heating and cooling, producing a large number of reads. They number roughly 30,000 to 300,000. Each read corresponds to a particular rearrangement of so-called V(D)J sequences. In the end, the observation consists of a set of numbers of reads corresponding to different V(D)J sequences. The underlying relative frequencies of distinct V(D)J sequences can be summarized by a probability vector, with the cardinality being the number of distinct V(D)J rearrangements present in the blood. Statistical question is to make inferences on a summary parameter of the probability vector based on a single multinomial-type observation of a large dimension. Popular summary of the diversity of a cell population includes clonality and entropy, or more generally, is a suitable function of the probability vector. A point estimator of the clonality based on multiple replicates from the same blood sample has been proposed previously. After obtaining a point estimator of a particular function, the remaining challenge is to construct a confidence interval of the parameter to appropriately reflect its uncertainty. In this paper, we have proposed to couple the empirical Bayes method with a resampling-based calibration procedure to construct a robust confidence interval for different population diversity parameters. The method has been illustrated via extensive numerical study and real data examples