Charter School Funding: Inequity’s Next Frontier

Of all the controversies swirling around the nation’s charter schools, none is more hotly contested than the debate over funding. Charter opponents charge that] these autonomous public schools are draining scarce resources from public school districts. Proponents, by contrast, complain that charter schools do not get their fair share of public education dollars

Religious faith and psychosocial adaptation among stroke patients in Kuwait: A mixed method study

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Springer Science+Business Media.Religious faith is central to life for Muslim patients in Kuwait, so it may influence adaptation and rehabilitation. This study explored quantitative associations among religious faith, self-efficacy, and life satisfaction in 40 female stroke patients and explored the influence of religion within stroke rehabilitation through qualitative interviews with 12 health professionals. The quantitative measure of religious faith did not relate to life satisfaction or self-efficacy in stroke patients. However, the health professionals described religious coping as influencing adaptation post-stroke. Fatalistic beliefs were thought to have mixed influences on rehabilitation. Measuring religious faith among Muslims through a standardized scale is debated. The qualitative accounts suggest that religious beliefs need to be acknowledged in stroke rehabilitation in Kuwait

Income distribution: Second thoughts

As a follow-up of his book on income distribution the author reformulates his version on the scarcity theory of income from productive contributions. The need to introduce into an earnings theory several job characteristics, non-cognitive as well as cognitive, and the corresponding personality traits is stressed, the latter subdivided into innate and learnable capabilities. The theory is presented in two alternative mathematical versions: one where job and person characteristics are continuous and one where they have discrete values and their frequencies assume continuous values. Although, mainly in the United States, numerous empirical inquiries have been made, job characteristics and the corresponding personal characteristics have not been included in sufficient number. I want to express my profound gratitude to Professor Robert H. Haveman, who not only published a deep-delving review article on my book Income Distribution: Analysis and Policies but also commented on an earlier text of the present article. I also owe a great debt to Professor Jan Pen who in a long series of discussions challenged a number of my concepts and figures. Finally I want to thank Dr. S. K. Kuipers for helpful comments on an earlier draft

Distributive politics and regional development: assessing the territorial distribution of Turkey’s public investment

Turkey is often perceived as a country with low bureaucratic capacity and prone to political manipulation and ‘pork-barrel’. This article tests whether this is the case, by analysing the extent to which politics, rather than equity and efficiency criteria, have determined the geographical allocation of public investment across the 81 provinces of Turkey between 2005 and 2012. The results show that although the Turkish government has indeed channelled public expenditures to reward its core constituencies, socioeconomic factors remained the most relevant predictors of investment. Moreover, in contrast to official regional development policy principles, we uncover the concentration of public investment in areas with comparatively higher levels of development. We interpret this as the state bureaucracy’s intentional strategy of focussing on efficiency by concentrating resources on ‘the better off among the most in need’

Universal surface-enhanced Raman tags : individual nanorods for measurements from the visible to the infrared (514 – 1064 nm)

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a promising imaging modality for use in a variety of multiplexed tracking and sensing applications in biological environments. However, the uniform production of SERS nanoparticle tags with high yield and brightness still remains a significant challenge. Here, we describe an approach based on the controlled co-adsorption of multiple dye species onto gold nanorods to create tags that can be detected across a much wider range of excitation wavelengths (514 – 1064 nm) compared to conventional approaches that typically focus on a single wavelength. This was achieved without the added complexity of nanoparticle aggregation or growing surrounding metallic shells to further enhance the surface-enhanced resonance Raman scattering (SERRS) signal. Correlated Raman and scanning electron microscopy mapping measurements of individual tags were used to clearly demonstrate that strong and reproducible SERRS signals at high particle yields (>92 %) were readily achievable. The polyelectrolyte-wrapped nanorod-dye conjugates were also found to be highly stable as well as non-cytotoxic. To demonstrate the use of these universal tags for the multimodal optical imaging of biological specimens, confocal Raman and fluorescence maps of stained immune cells following nanoparticle uptake were acquired at several excitation wavelengths and compared with dark-field images. The ability to colocalize and track individual optically encoded nanoparticles across a wide range of wavelengths simultaneously will enable the use of SERS alongside other imaging techniques for the real-time monitoring of cell-nanoparticle interactions

Why Are Outcomes Different for Registry Patients Enrolled Prospectively and Retrospectively? Insights from the Global Anticoagulant Registry in the FIELD-Atrial Fibrillation (GARFIELD-AF).

Background: Retrospective and prospective observational studies are designed to reflect real-world evidence on clinical practice, but can yield conflicting results. The GARFIELD-AF Registry includes both methods of enrolment and allows analysis of differences in patient characteristics and outcomes that may result. Methods and Results: Patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) and ≥1 risk factor for stroke at diagnosis of AF were recruited either retrospectively (n = 5069) or prospectively (n = 5501) from 19 countries and then followed prospectively. The retrospectively enrolled cohort comprised patients with established AF (for a least 6, and up to 24 months before enrolment), who were identified retrospectively (and baseline and partial follow-up data were collected from the emedical records) and then followed prospectively between 0-18 months (such that the total time of follow-up was 24 months; data collection Dec-2009 and Oct-2010). In the prospectively enrolled cohort, patients with newly diagnosed AF (≤6 weeks after diagnosis) were recruited between Mar-2010 and Oct-2011 and were followed for 24 months after enrolment. Differences between the cohorts were observed in clinical characteristics, including type of AF, stroke prevention strategies, and event rates. More patients in the retrospectively identified cohort received vitamin K antagonists (62.1% vs. 53.2%) and fewer received non-vitamin K oral anticoagulants (1.8% vs . 4.2%). All-cause mortality rates per 100 person-years during the prospective follow-up (starting the first study visit up to 1 year) were significantly lower in the retrospective than prospectively identified cohort (3.04 [95% CI 2.51 to 3.67] vs . 4.05 [95% CI 3.53 to 4.63]; p = 0.016). Conclusions: Interpretations of data from registries that aim to evaluate the characteristics and outcomes of patients with AF must take account of differences in registry design and the impact of recall bias and survivorship bias that is incurred with retrospective enrolment. Clinical Trial Registration: - URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov . Unique identifier for GARFIELD-AF (NCT01090362)

The emergent curriculum: navigating a complex course between unguided learning and planned enculturation

This study uses the ‘logic’ of emergence to rethink the practice and purposes of modern Western schooling which, conventionally, is organized around a representational epistemology and aims to enculture the student into a particular way of being. The idea of ‘planned enculturation’ is, however, problematic for contemporary multicultural societies for it raises the question of which or whose culture should be promoted through schooling. The authors argue that emergentist challenges to representational epistemology have not released schooling from its problematic function of planned enculturation. However, if the logic of emergence is applied not only to knowledge but also to human subjectivity then the educational problem of planned enculturation disappears. When emergentist logic is applied in this double sense, it becomes possible to understand the primary responsibility of the educator not as a responsibility to promote a particular way of being, but as a responsibility to the singularity and uniqueness of each individual student. If this is what counts as ‘educational responsibility’ then this would distinguish ‘responsible’ educational practices from unguided learning on the one hand and practices of planned enculturation/socialization (training) on the other

Is it vulnerability or economic insecurity that matters for health?

This paper contrasts the mental and physical health impacts of vulnerability and economic insecurity. An individual is vulnerable if they are at risk of future absolute material deprivation, while they are insecure if they are threatened by losses in relative status. Using data from the first eleven waves of the Australian HILDA panel, we generate four alternative measures of real or perceived downside economic risk and employ panel data models to estimate their impacts on SF-36 mental and physical health indices. We test our hypotheses using a series of polynomial interactions which allow the effect sizes to vary non-linearly with income. Baseline estimates show that economic risks have consistently negative consequences for both mental and physical health, with the former effect being around three times the size of the latter. However our main finding is that increasing incomes do little to mitigate the sensitivity of health to these risks. This suggests it is mostly the prospect of loss rather than deprivation that impacts upon wellbeing. The finding is important as it helps distinguish between competing models (i.e. Beveridge vs Bismarck) for social insurance

Responsibility, complexity science and education: Dilemmas and uncertain responses

While complexity science is gaining interest among educational theorists, its constructs do not speak to educational responsibility or related core issues in education of power and ethics. Yet certain themes of complexity, as taken up in educational theory, can help unsettle the more controlling and problematic discourses of educational responsibility such as the potential to limit learning and subjectivity or to prescribe social justice. The purpose of this article is to critically examine complexity science against notions of responsibility in terms of implications for education. First, themes of complexity science prominent in contemporary educational writing are explained. Then dilemmas of responsibility in complexity are explored, such as what forms and meanings responsibility can have in a ‘complexified’ perspective of education, how care for others is mobilised, and how desire can be understood. Analyses of ethical action grounded in complexity science are then examined, as well as theories of the ethical subject and participatory responsibility that are congruent with certain tenets of a complexity ontology. Finally, the possibility of an educational vision of responsibility animated by complexity theories is considered, drawing from related writings of Bai, Biesta, Derrida, Levinas and Varela

From representation to emergence: complexity's challenge to the epistemology of schooling

In modern,Western societies the purpose of schooling is to ensure that school-goers acquire knowledge of pre-existing practices, events, entities and so on.The knowledge that is learned is then tested to see if the learner has acquired a correct or adequate understanding of it. For this reason, it can be argued that schooling is organised around a representational epistemology: one which holds that knowledge is an accurate representation of something that is separate from knowledge itself. Since the object of knowledge is assumed to exist separately from the knowledge itself, this epistemology can also be considered ‘spatial.’ In this paper we show how ideas from complexity have challenged the ‘spatial epistemology’ of representation and we explore possibilities for an alternative ‘temporal’ understanding of knowledge in its relationship to reality. In addition to complexity, our alternative takes its inspiration from Deweyan ‘transactional realism’ and deconstruction. We suggest that ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’ should not be understood as separate systems which somehow have to be brought into alignment with each other, but that they are part of the same emerging complex system which is never fully ‘present’ in any (discrete) moment in time. This not only introduces the notion of time into our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and reality, but also points to the importance of acknowledging the role of the ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘incalculable’. With this understanding knowledge reaches us not as something we receive but as a response, which brings forth new worlds because it necessarily adds something (which was not present anywhere before it appeared) to what came before. This understanding of knowledge suggests that the acquisition of curricular content should not be considered an end in itself. Rather, curricular content should be used to bring forth that which is incalculable from the perspective of the present. The epistemology of emergence therefore calls for a switch in focus for curricular thinking, away from questions about presentation and representation and towards questions about engagement and response