Utilitarian And Community Values In Mainstream And Alternative Health Care On Martha\u27s Vineyard

Problems endemic to Martha’s Vineyard’s health care system and community efforts to resolve them led to the this community study on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Such problems included Martha’s Vineyard’s sole hospital and nursing home’s declarations of bankruptcy in 1996, the fluctuation of quality of Vineyard health care organization relations with the community overall, the rate of uninsured that was two times that of Massachusetts overall, the Island’s isolation from mainland medical services, and its health care service scarcities. This ethnography focuses on utilitarian values to explain difficulties that Vineyarders experienced during their efforts to obtain health care and to improve access to health care. Efforts to promote access included the development of health care policies and the formation of mainland and local organization business networks and of local community networks (Wellever 2004:228, 229-230). Participant observation, structured interview (n=262) and archival data were used. Structured interviews were sought from Vineyarders who expressed an interest in health care. The Martha’s Vineyard Times Supplement (2006) list of property owners and their property values enabled interviews with Vineyarders of a wide range of property assessment values. Still others who had been employed by or had volunteered for a health care organization were found though recommendation, Vineyard media, and chance encounters. This dissertation uses content analysis of actions performed by individuals, organizations, and communities. Utilitarian values were used to explain such actions. The types of utilitarian values could be thought of as “existing” along a continuum of egoistic (individualistic) utilitarian values and collectivistic utilitarian values or along the further extremes of exploitive egoistic and altruistic collectivistic values. Though Martha’s Vineyard’s communities were diverse, Vineyarders tended to be united by their sense of community. They made efforts to protect their communities from those they believed held opposing definitions that could threaten their communities. Such threats led Vineyarders to strengthen their community ties and to form new communities. Arguably, the malleable, versatile and imprecise (Cohen 1985:18, 21) symbol, “community,” promoted Vineyarders’ social solidarity. Their belief in “community” promoted harmonious social relations because it enabled individuals to reach surface agreements (Cohen 1985:18, 109)

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We analyze charging effects in graphene quantum dots. Using a simple model, we show that, when the Fermi level is far from the neutrality point, charging effects lead to a shift in the electrostatic potential and the dot shows standard Coulomb blockade features. Near the neutrality point, surface states are partially occupied and the Coulomb interaction leads to a strongly correlated ground state which can be approximated by either a Wigner crystal or a Laughlin like wave function. The existence of strong correlations modify the transport properties which show non equilibrium effects, similar to those predicted for tunneling into other strongly correlated systems.Comment: Extended version accepted for publication at Phys. Rev.

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Re-Examination of Litigation Trends in the United States: Galanter Reconsidered, A

The general commentary on recent litigation patterns in the United States depicts a worrisome, and occasionally panicked, scenario often called the litigation explosion. \u27 The commentaries characteristically direct attention to a supposed epidemic of hair-trigger suing burying the courts under an avalanche of civil actions. 2 Moreover, judicial scholars proffer a myriad of purported explanations for the alleged prodigious growth in the number of civil lawsuits. The common theme throughout these explanations is that changes or disruptions in our social, economic, political-legal environments have caused Americans to become a contentious and overly-litigious people