The research crisis in American institutions of complementary and integrative health: one proposed solution for chiropractic profession.

A crisis confronts the Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) teaching institutions in the US. Research infrastructure is needed to build and sustain productive research programs and retain their own research faculty. In most health professions, this infrastructure is largely built through research grants. In CIH, most educational institutions are funded through student tuition, which has historically also had to be the source for building their research programs. Only a limited number of these institutions have emerged as National Institute of Health (NIH) grant-funded programs. As a result, the American chiropractic institutions have seen a retrenchment in the number of active research programs. In addition, although research training programs e.g., NIH's K awards are available for CIH researchers, these programs generally result in these researchers leaving their institutions and depriving future CIH practitioners of the benefit of being trained in a culture of research. One proposed solution is to leverage the substantial research infrastructure and long history of collaboration available at the RAND Corporation (https://www.rand.org) This article presents the proposed five components of the RAND Center for Collaborative CIH Research and the steps required to bring it to being: 1) the CIH Research Network - an online resource and collaborative site for CIH researchers; 2) the CIH Research Advisory Board - the governing body for the Center selected by its members; 3) the RAND CIH Interest Group - a group of RAND researchers with an interest in and who could provide support to CIH research; 4) CIH Researcher Training - access to existing RAND research training as well as the potential for the Center to provide a research training home for those with training grants; and 5) CIH RAND Partnership for Research - a mentorship program to support successful CIH research. By necessity the first step in the Center's creation would be a meeting between the heads of interested CIH institutions to work out the details and to obtain buy-in. The future success of CIH-directed research on CIH will require a pooling of talent and resources across institutions; something that the American chiropractic institutions have not yet been able to achieve. This article discusses one possible solution

The Mobile Generation: Global Transformations at the Cellular Level

Every year we see a new dimension of the ongoing Digital Revolution, which is enabling an abundance of information to move faster, cheaper, in more intelligible forms, in more directions, and across borders of every kind. The exciting new dimension on which the Aspen Institute focused its 2006 Roundtable on Information Technology was mobility, which is making the Digital Revolution ubiquitous. As of this writing, there are over two billion wireless subscribers worldwide and that number is growing rapidly. People are constantly innovating in the use of mobile technologies to allow them to be more interconnected. Almost a half century ago, Ralph Lee Smith conjured up "The Wired Nation," foretelling a world of interactive communication to and from the home that seems commonplace in developed countries today. Now we have a "Wireless World" of communications potentially connecting two billion people to each other with interactive personal communications devices. Widespead adoption of wireless handsets, the increasing use of wireless internet, and the new, on-the-go content that characterizes the new generation of users are changing behaviors in social, political and economic spheres. The devices are easy to use, pervasive and personal. The affordable cell phone has the potential to break down the barriers of poverty and accessibility previously posed by other communications devices. An entire generation that is dependant on ubiquitous mobile technologies is changing the way it works, plays and thinks. Businesses, governments, educational institutions, religious and other organizations in turn are adapting to reach out to this mobile generation via wireless technologies -- from SMS-enabled vending machines in Finland to tech-savvy priests in India willing to conduct prayers transmitted via cell phones. Cellular devices are providing developing economies with opportunities unlike any others previously available. By opening the lines of communication, previously disenfranchised groups can have access to information relating to markets, economic opportunities, jobs, and weather to name just a few. When poor village farmers from Bangladesh can auction their crops on a craigslist-type service over the mobile phone, or government officials gain instantaneous information on contagious diseases via text message, the miracles of mobile connectivity move us from luxury to necessity. And we are only in the early stages of what the mobile electronic communications will mean for mankind. We are now "The Mobile Generation." Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology. To explore the implications of these phenomena, the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program convened 27 leaders from business, academia, government and the non-profit sector to engage in three days of dialogue on related topics. Some are experts in information and communications technologies, others are leaders in the broader society affected by these innovations. Together, they examined the profound changes ahead as a result of the convergence of wireless technologies and the Internet. In the following report of the Roundtable meeting held August 1-4, 2006, J. D. Lasica, author of Darknet and co-founder of Ourmedia.org, deftly sets up, contextualizes, and captures the dialogue on the impact of the new mobility on economic models for businesses and governments, social services, economic development, and personal identity

A neural marker for social bias toward in-group accents

Accents provide information about the speaker's geographical, socio-economic, and ethnic background. Research in applied psychology and sociolinguistics suggests that we generally prefer our own accent to other varieties of our native language and attribute more positive traits to it. Despite the widespread influence of accents on social interactions, educational and work settings the neural underpinnings of this social bias toward our own accent and, what may drive this bias, are unexplored. We measured brain activity while participants from two different geographical backgrounds listened passively to 3 English accent types embedded in an adaptation design. Cerebral activity in several regions, including bilateral amygdalae, revealed a significant interaction between the participants' own accent and the accent they listened to: while repetition of own accents elicited an enhanced neural response, repetition of the other group's accent resulted in reduced responses classically associated with adaptation. Our findings suggest that increased social relevance of, or greater emotional sensitivity to in-group accents, may underlie the own-accent bias. Our results provide a neural marker for the bias associated with accents, and show, for the first time, that the neural response to speech is partly shaped by the geographical background of the listener

Automating software design system DESTA

'DESTA' is the acronym for the Dialogue Evolutionary Synthesizer of Turnkey Algorithms by means of a natural language (Russian or English) functional specification of algorithms or software being developed. DESTA represents the computer-aided and/or automatic artificial intelligence 'forgiving' system which provides users with software tools support for algorithm and/or structured program development. The DESTA system is intended to provide support for the higher levels and earlier stages of engineering design of software in contrast to conventional Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems which provide low level tools for use at a stage when the major planning and structuring decisions have already been taken. DESTA is a knowledge-intensive system. The main features of the knowledge are procedures, functions, modules, operating system commands, batch files, their natural language specifications, and their interlinks. The specific domain for the DESTA system is a high level programming language like Turbo Pascal 6.0. The DESTA system is operational and runs on an IBM PC computer

Reference Pricing of Pharmaceuticals for Medicare: Evidence from Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand

This paper describes three prototypical systems of therapeutic reference pricing (RP) for pharmaceuticals -- Germany, the Netherlands, and New Zealand -- and examines their effects on the availability of new drugs, reimbursement levels, manufacturer prices and out-of-pocket surcharges to patients. RP for pharmaceuticals is not simply analogous to a defined contribution approach to subsidizing insurance coverage. Although a major purpose of RP is to stimulate competition, theory suggests that this is unlikely and this is confirmed by the empirical evidence. Other effects of RP differ across countries in predictable ways, reflecting each country's system design and other cost control policies. New Zealand's RP system has reduced reimbursement and limited the availability of new drugs, particularly more expensive drugs. Compared to these three countries, if RP were applied in the US, it would likely have a more negative effect on prices of on-patent products, due to the more competitive US generic market, and a more negative effect on R&D and on the future supply of new drugs, due to the much larger US share of global pharmaceutical sales.