The Impact of Right-to-Work Laws on Union Organizing

In contrast to previous studies which have examined the impact of Right-to-Work (RTW) laws on the level or stock of union membership, this paper examines their impact on the most updated flow into membership and the organizing of workers through certified elections. Since detailed annual data are available by state, we are able to estimate an accelerator model of the flow into unionism, and adjust for possible omitted variable and simultaneity bias. The results show dramatic falls in organizing immediately after the passage of a RTW law, with more moderate declines in later years, just as an accelerator model could predict. Overall, the results are consistent with a 5-10 percent reduction in unionism as a result of the passage of RTW laws.

Aligning Acute and Chronic Functional Readouts and utilizing Zolpidem to improve Neurological Impairments after Cardiac Arrest

While cardiac arrest survival rates have improved alongside recent advances in modern resuscitation techniques and targeted temperature management, many survivors experience multiple ongoing symptoms after their hypoxic-ischemic brain injury (HIBI) including movement disorders, depression, and low cognitive arousal. Neurological assessments like the neurological deficit score (NDS), and physiological readouts from blood chemistry values are used to assess acute post-injury outcome, but little has been done to evaluate how these acute readouts distinguish heterogeneity within the injury population, or how they align with long term behavioral and neurological outcomes as a prognostic tool. Recent evidence also highlights zolpidem as an effective treatment for post-HIBI symptoms, but its clinical use has been met with mixed results. This study utilized a regression model and correlational analyses to evaluate associations among NDS, blood lactate, and blood acid base excess values as acute post-injury readouts, behavioral outcome, and dopamine neurotransmission outcomes obtained via fast scan cyclic voltammetry two weeks after a 5-min asphyxia cardiac arrest (ACA). A pilot study was also performed to evaluate the effects of chronic systemic zolpidem administration on improving behavioral outcomes and reversing striatal hyper-dopaminergia after ACA. NDS significantly aligned with survival probability after ACA. NDS and both blood chemistry readouts aligned with several behavioral and dopamine neurotransmission outcomes, and several dopaminergic and behavioral outcomes robustly correlated with one another. Additionally, chronic zolpidem reflexive and cognitive behavioral outcomes, as defined by the acoustic startle response and the sucrose preference test, respectively. This work highlights novel associations between post-HIBI behavioral and neurological outcomes as well as benefits of chronic zolpidem administration in ameliorating post-HIBI neurological sequelae. Future work should further characterize the effects of zolpidem administration after cardiac arrest and utilize molecular assays to identify protein expression changes that will unravel neurobiological mechanisms driving HIBI-induced functional impairments and highlight therapeutic targets to treat CA survivors

Teach the Partnership: Critical University Studies and the Future of Service-Learning

Edward Zlotkowski’s (1995) article “Does Service-Learning Have a Future?” challenges the academy to integrate community-engaged learning into the curriculum. As Zlotkowski suggests, students, staff, and faculty ought to engender a culture of civic action and ethical accountability enhanced by rigorous coursework, but this goal necessitates resources: administrators must invest in service-learning to reap its full benefits. Issues arise, however, when one considers this investment in light of the academy’s corporatization. Nussbaum (2010) has noted, for instance, how colleges and universities increasingly emphasize vocational training and professional readiness at the expense of humanist inquiry and civic responsibility. The academy’s corporatization, she argues, threatens to erode the skills at the heart of democratic citizenship. Williams (2012) likewise censures this market-driven academy “with research progressively governed more by corporations that fund and benefit from it, with faculty downsized and casualized, and with students reconstituted as consumers subject to escalating tuition and record levels of debt” (p. 25). He insists that students, staff, and faculty must engage critically with these unsettling trends in higher education—an appeal, I argue, service-learning educators in particular must heed. As higher education, deeply influenced by neoliberalism’s pressures to marketize, adopts the structure and value systems of big business, it risks placing private interest before public concern. This danger, even more acute twenty-one years after the publication of Zlotkowski’s article, underscores the need for a reassessment of the institutional means by which service-learning happens. “Perhaps,” Zlotkowski (2015) wonders in his framing essay for the Future Directions Project, “there is a fundamental mismatch at the heart of our work that we have not wanted to recognize” (p. 84). Higher education may not prove the best location, after all, from which to effect progressive democratic change. In what follows, I stay the course with this provocation and argue that service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) educators must teach their partnerships—the specific histories, missions, and stakeholders involved—and thereby contextualize SLCE within the often problematic forces at work within and upon higher education. I thus call on the movement to interrogate, pedagogically, the motivations behind institutional “commitments” to SLCE and to account, ethically, for the economic and social privilege animating this service

The use of anatomically based models for the analysis of imaged tracer experiments in humans

A thesis submitted to the faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg , in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, November 1994Organ function is often characterised using imaging techniques. In particular a tracer is often used which does not react with tissue, is low in concentration, follows body fluid flows and is distinguishable from the observed system and thus measurable. These requirements ensure linear characteristics of the tracer. In this thesis, these linear characteristics are used to develop a generalised mathematical theory to determine organ function from imaged tracer experiments. The theory is based on anatomical and physiological information for single and multiple input organs. [Abbreviated Abstract. Open document to view full version]MT201