Americans’ Views of Higher Education as a Public and Private Good

Citizen preferences play a key role in a democracy, and there is a substantial body of work that tries to understand the role that public preferences play in the policy process. Despite the important role public opinion plays, there are only limited efforts to document public opinion about education, psychology, and health. The Public Mind project seeks to address this gap by providing reliable, valid public opinion data to inform public debate. The Project includes a series of public opinion surveys on a variety of issues related to governance, policies, and practice that have the potential to affect human development. This research brief extends our understanding of public views of American higher education. Since their inception, American universities and colleges have been charged both with enabling talented individuals to advance through higher education and with enhancing the quality of American life through scientific discoveries and the invigoration of the American economy. To what extent do Americans believe these promises have been met

International criteria for electrocardiographic interpretation in athletes: Consensus statement.

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is the leading cause of mortality in athletes during sport. A variety of mostly hereditary, structural or electrical cardiac disorders are associated with SCD in young athletes, the majority of which can be identified or suggested by abnormalities on a resting 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG). Whether used for diagnostic or screening purposes, physicians responsible for the cardiovascular care of athletes should be knowledgeable and competent in ECG interpretation in athletes. However, in most countries a shortage of physician expertise limits wider application of the ECG in the care of the athlete. A critical need exists for physician education in modern ECG interpretation that distinguishes normal physiological adaptations in athletes from distinctly abnormal findings suggestive of underlying pathology. Since the original 2010 European Society of Cardiology recommendations for ECG interpretation in athletes, ECG standards have evolved quickly, advanced by a growing body of scientific data and investigations that both examine proposed criteria sets and establish new evidence to guide refinements. On 26-27 February 2015, an international group of experts in sports cardiology, inherited cardiac disease, and sports medicine convened in Seattle, Washington (USA), to update contemporary standards for ECG interpretation in athletes. The objective of the meeting was to define and revise ECG interpretation standards based on new and emerging research and to develop a clear guide to the proper evaluation of ECG abnormalities in athletes. This statement represents an international consensus for ECG interpretation in athletes and provides expert opinion-based recommendations linking specific ECG abnormalities and the secondary evaluation for conditions associated with SCD

Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Recent Trends (2007)

The nation’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are diverse. Although we discuss them as a category based on their historical racial makeup, these institutions are in fact quite different from one another. According to the government’s definition, black colleges are bound together by the fact that they were established prior to 1964 (the year of the Civil Rights Act) with the express purpose of educating African Americans. These institutions, of which there are 103, are public, private, large, small, religious, nonsectarian, selective, and open-enrolling. They educate 300,000 students and employ over 14,000 faculty members.1 Some black colleges are thriving, others are barely making ends meet, and many fall in between. Regardless, most of them are providing a much needed education to African American students (and many others)

A Survey on Approximation Mechanism Design without Money for Facility Games

In a facility game one or more facilities are placed in a metric space to serve a set of selfish agents whose addresses are their private information. In a classical facility game, each agent wants to be as close to a facility as possible, and the cost of an agent can be defined as the distance between her location and the closest facility. In an obnoxious facility game, each agent wants to be far away from all facilities, and her utility is the distance from her location to the facility set. The objective of each agent is to minimize her cost or maximize her utility. An agent may lie if, by doing so, more benefit can be obtained. We are interested in social choice mechanisms that do not utilize payments. The game designer aims at a mechanism that is strategy-proof, in the sense that any agent cannot benefit by misreporting her address, or, even better, group strategy-proof, in the sense that any coalition of agents cannot all benefit by lying. Meanwhile, it is desirable to have the mechanism to be approximately optimal with respect to a chosen objective function. Several models for such approximation mechanism design without money for facility games have been proposed. In this paper we briefly review these models and related results for both deterministic and randomized mechanisms, and meanwhile we present a general framework for approximation mechanism design without money for facility games

Aluminum-induced de novo bone formation in the beagle. A parathyroid hormone-dependent event.

L'aluminium stimule la néo-ostéogenèse et produit un bilan osseux positif. Cependant cet effet semble dépendre de la disponibilité d'un pool d'ostéoblastes fonctionnels qui, s'il est réduit par la thyroparathyroïdectomie limite l'expression de la néoformation d'os provoquée par l'aluminium

The Incremental Cooperative Design of Preventive Healthcare Networks

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Soheil Davari, 'The incremental cooperative design of preventive healthcare networks', Annals of Operations Research, first published online 27 June 2017. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 27 June 2018. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2569-1.In the Preventive Healthcare Network Design Problem (PHNDP), one seeks to locate facilities in a way that the uptake of services is maximised given certain constraints such as congestion considerations. We introduce the incremental and cooperative version of the problem, IC-PHNDP for short, in which facilities are added incrementally to the network (one at a time), contributing to the service levels. We first develop a general non-linear model of this problem and then present a method to make it linear. As the problem is of a combinatorial nature, an efficient Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) algorithm is proposed to solve it. In order to gain insight into the problem, the computational studies were performed with randomly generated instances of different settings. Results clearly show that VNS performs well in solving IC-PHNDP with errors not more than 1.54%.Peer reviewe

Sanction Consequences and Citizen Support: A Survey Experiment

Recent research disputes the conventional wisdom that “sanctions do not work.” It demonstrates that states may impose sanctions for purposes beyond seeking an immediate change in the behavior of targeted regimes. For example, democratic leaders often impose sanctions to satisfy their own domestic constituencies. However, we know little about how the consequences of sanctions shape whether or not citizens favor them. Building on insights from prior studies on the use and consequences of sanctions, we develop theoretical expectations regarding the aspects of sanctions that citizens might favor or disfavor. We use these to design and conduct a survey experiment to explore degrees of support for proposed sanctions. We find that on average, citizens support proposed sanctions that they expect will have a long-run impact on the behavior of the targeted state

Hybrid Meta-heuristics with VNS and Exact Methods: Application to Large Unconditional and Conditional Vertex p-Centre Problems

Large-scale unconditional and conditional vertex p-centre problems are solved using two meta-heuristics. One is based on a three-stage approach whereas the other relies on a guided multi-start principle. Both methods incorporate Variable Neighbourhood Search, exact method, and aggregation techniques. The methods are assessed on the TSP dataset which consist of up to 71,009 demand points with p varying from 5 to 100. To the best of our knowledge, these are the largest instances solved for unconditional and conditional vertex p-centre problems. The two proposed meta-heuristics yield competitive results for both classes of problems

Abnormal ECG Findings in Athletes: Clinical Evaluation and Considerations.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Pre-participation cardiovascular evaluation with electrocardiography is normal practice for most sporting bodies. Awareness about sudden cardiac death in athletes and recognizing how screening can help identify vulnerable athletes have empowered different sporting disciplines to invest in the wellbeing of their athletes. RECENT FINDINGS: Discerning physiological electrical alterations due to athletic training from those representing cardiac pathology may be challenging. The mode of investigation of affected athletes is dependent on the electrical anomaly and the disease(s) in question. This review will highlight specific pathological ECG patterns that warrant assessment and surveillance, together with an in-depth review of the recommended algorithm for evaluation