The Power of the Puff: Mary Robinson’s Celebrity and the Success of Walsingham

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Gambling on Gaming: Mary Robinson’s Literary Censures of the Fashionable Vice

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Listening in on the Conversations: An Overview of Digital Humanities Pedagogy

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Preparing, Facilitating, Assessing: A Reflection on Digital Humanities Consultations

A key component of the Digital Humanities Librarian’s work, the consultation involves the skills of listening, questioning, parsing, and planning aided by an understanding of the broader digital humanities landscape, project requirements, and the campus environment. Productive consultations provide researchers the direction they need to get their project started or advance it to the next stage, often resulting in sustained, collaborative engagement that makes assessing the impact of this work challenging.Publisher allows immediate open acces

Ambulatory Care Skills: Do Residents Feel Prepared?

Abstract: Objective: To determine resident comfort and skill in performing ambulatory care skills. Methods: Descriptive survey of common ambulatory care skills administered to internal medicine faculty and residents at one academic medical center. Respondents were asked to rate their ability to perform 12 physical exam skills and 6 procedures, and their comfort in performing 7 types of counseling, and obtaining 6 types of patient history (4 point Likert scale for each). Self-rated ability or comfort was compared by gender, status (year of residency, faculty), and future predicted frequency of use of the skill. Results: Residents reported high ability levels for physical exam skills common to both the ambulatory and hospital setting. Fewer felt able to perform musculoskeletal, neurologic or eye exams easily alone. Procedures generally received low ability ratings. Similarly, residents’ comfort in performing common outpatient counseling was also low. More residents reported feeling very comfortable in obtaining history from patients. We found little variation by gender, year of training, or predicted frequency of use. Conclusion: Self-reported ability and comfort for many common ambulatory care skills is low. Further evaluation of this finding in other training programs is warranted

A practice-centered intervention to increase screening for domestic violence in primary care practices

BACKGROUND: Interventions to change practice patterns among health care professionals have had mixed success. We tested the effectiveness of a practice centered intervention to increase screening for domestic violence in primary care practices. METHODS: A multifaceted intervention was conducted among primary care practice in North Carolina. All practices designated two individuals to serve as domestic violence resources persons, underwent initial training on screening for domestic violence, and participated in 3 lunch and learn sessions. Within this framework, practices selected the screening instrument, patient educational material, and content best suited for their environment. Effectiveness was evaluated using a pre/post cross-sectional telephone survey of a random selection of female patients from each practice. RESULTS: Seventeen practices were recruited and fifteen completed the study. Baseline screening for domestic violence was 16% with a range of 2% to 49%. An absolute increase in screening of 10% was achieved (range of increase 0 to 22%). After controlling for clustering by practice and other patient characteristics, female patients were 79% more likely to have been screened after the intervention (OR 1.79, 95% CI 1.43–2.23). CONCLUSION: An intervention that allowed practices to tailor certain aspects to fit their needs increased screening for domestic violence. Further studies testing this technique using other outcomes are needed

Metro System of Local Government (A Survey)

Growth of many American cities into vast metropolitan communities of suburban cities, towns and villages clustered about the central city is creating complex problems of local government. Duplication of services and costs is matched by artificial compartmentalization of adjacent areas, all developing with little or no overall plan or logic.Herein, four outstanding community leaders examine the problem in terms of the situation in the Ohio area of Cuyahoga County, around the core city of Cleveland. Extracts from four speeches are set forth here, all delivered at a recent luncheon of the Cleveland-Marshall Alumni Association

Poverty, Disease, and the Ecology of Complex Systems

Understanding why some human populations remain persistently poor remains a significant challenge for both the social and natural sciences. The extremely poor are generally reliant on their immediate natural resource base for subsistence and suffer high rates of mortality due to parasitic and infectious diseases. Economists have developed a range of models to explain persistent poverty, often characterized as poverty traps, but these rarely account for complex biophysical processes. In this Essay, we argue that by coupling insights from ecology and economics, we can begin to model and understand the complex dynamics that underlie the generation and maintenance of poverty traps, which can then be used to inform analyses and possible intervention policies. To illustrate the utility of this approach, we present a simple coupled model of infectious diseases and economic growth, where poverty traps emerge from nonlinear relationships determined by the number of pathogens in the system. These nonlinearities are comparable to those often incorporated into poverty trap models in the economics literature, but, importantly, here the mechanism is anchored in core ecological principles. Coupled models of this sort could be usefully developed in many economically important biophysical systems—such as agriculture, fisheries, nutrition, and land use change—to serve as foundations for deeper explorations of how fundamental ecological processes influence structural poverty and economic development