Orange County: Changing Market Fuels New Models of Provider Collaboration

Since 2010, Orange County has largely recovered from the economic downturn and remains a relatively well-educated community with high rates of private insurance coverage overall. Socioeconomic variation persists in this county, with the number of low-income residents growing and a large jump in the proportion of the population that gained Medi-Cal coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Other key findings include:The region's major hospital systems are expanding ambulatory services and geographic reach.Orange County physicians are increasingly giving up independence to varying degrees and joining larger physician organizations or hospital-affiliated groups to gain shelter from mounting financial pressures and administrative burdens.Providers are collaborating on new payment arrangements, with some Orange County physician organizations and hospitals working toward assuming more risk for more patients, particularly the growing numbers in preferred-provider organizations (PPOs).The proportion of Orange County residents covered by Medi-Cal has jumped, with a greater proportional increase in Medi-Cal enrollment than other California regions studied.Safety-net provider capacity is tight; private providers are playing a significant role in serving the Medi-Cal expansion population

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW--STATUTORY INTERPRETATION UNDER LABOR-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS ACT--PROHIBITION OF UNION POLITICAL EXPENDITURES

The C.I.O., with the consent of its president, Philip Murray, made expenditures from the funds of the organization for the publication of an editorial in the C.I.O. News, a regularly issued periodical, urging the members of the C.I.O. to vote for a particular candidate in a special Congressional election in Maryland. Additional funds were expended for the publication and transportation of one thousand extra copies. Both the C.I.O. and Mr. Murray were charged with violation of section 304 of the Labor-Management Relations Act in the district court. Defendants moved to dismiss the indictment, alleging that the statute abridged rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and that it was too indefinite to satisfy the requirements of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. The district court sustained the motion to dismiss on the ground that the statute was, on its face, an unconstitutional abridgement of freedom of speech, press, and assembly. On direct appeal to the United States Supreme Court, held, affirmed. Four justices, concurring in an opinion by Justice Reed, believed that the publication did not violate the statute. Justice Frankfurter concurred, believing that, although the parties had failed properly to argue constructions of the statute which would avoid the question of constitutionality, such an interpretation should be made. In an opinion written by Justice Rutledge, four justices concurred in the result but declared that the statute was an unjustified invasion of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. United States v. C.I.O., (U.S. 1948) 68 S.Ct. 1349

Linking Research to Educational Policy and Practice: What Kind of Relationships in How (de)Centralized a Context?

There have been debates on two issues related to the process of improving educational quality. The first concerns the alternative models for the relationship between researchers and policymakers/practitioners in efforts in efforts to link research and policy/practice. The second involves arguments about merits of centralized, linear versus decentralized, iterative strategies for reforming education. In this chapter, we summarize the issues raised in these debates and then explore them using illustrations drawn from documentation research of a USAID-funded project, Improving Educational Quality (IEQ), which operated in Ghana, Guatemala and Mali during the years from 1992 to 1996

Speaking of Moral Rights: A Conversation Between Eva E. Subotnik and Jane C. Ginsburg

This piece is the transcription of a conversation between two law faculty members speaking about moral rights in the digital age. Prof. Subotnik questions Prof. Ginsburg about some of the legal and technological developments that have occurred since Prof. Ginsburg’s 2001 essay, Have Moral Rights Come of (Digital) Age in the United States?. If moral rights have come of digital age, should their realization be achieved by conveying more information about the copy, or by controlling the copy itself? This question is now asked from the vantage point of 2012, ten years since Prof. Ginsburg first posed it

Speaking of Moral Rights: A Conversation Between Eva E. Subotnik and Jane C. Ginsburg

This piece is the transcription of a conversation between two law faculty members speaking about moral rights in the digital age. Prof. Subotnik questions Prof. Ginsburg about some of the legal and technological developments that have occurred since Prof. Ginsburg’s 2001 essay, Have Moral Rights Come of (Digital) Age in the United States?. If moral rights have come of digital age, should their realization be achieved by conveying more information about the copy, or by controlling the copy itself? This question is now asked from the vantage point of 2012, ten years since Prof. Ginsburg first posed it

Latent protein trees

Unbiased, label-free proteomics is becoming a powerful technique for measuring protein expression in almost any biological sample. The output of these measurements after preprocessing is a collection of features and their associated intensities for each sample. Subsets of features within the data are from the same peptide, subsets of peptides are from the same protein, and subsets of proteins are in the same biological pathways, therefore, there is the potential for very complex and informative correlational structure inherent in these data. Recent attempts to utilize this data often focus on the identification of single features that are associated with a particular phenotype that is relevant to the experiment. However, to date, there have been no published approaches that directly model what we know to be multiple different levels of correlation structure. Here we present a hierarchical Bayesian model which is specifically designed to model such correlation structure in unbiased, label-free proteomics. This model utilizes partial identification information from peptide sequencing and database lookup as well as the observed correlation in the data to appropriately compress features into latent proteins and to estimate their correlation structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the model using artificial/benchmark data and in the context of a series of proteomics measurements of blood plasma from a collection of volunteers who were infected with two different strains of viral influenza.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOAS639 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org