A political scientist's view of the income maintenance experiments

Public welfare ; Public policy

Critical ecologies: Violence and life in the work of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno

My dissertation offers the first sustained engagement with the question of violence in the works of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno. I argue that the conjunction of questions of violence and with those of “life” indicates a profound sympathy in their thinking and suggests the need to develop a critical dialogue between discourses of life (ecology, environmental science, etc) and philosophy. In early works such as Of Grammatology and “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Derrida and Adorno contend that the structures of thought, meaning, and signification are necessarily incomplete and, as such, are always marked by violent exclusions. “Archē-violence” and “dialectics” are names for this originary violence. Both Derrida and Adorno argue that this violence fundamentally shapes thought’s relationship to the world. The notions of “reparatory violence” and “interpretation” in the works cited above give way in later texts to notions of “sovereignty,” “autoimmunity,” “identity thinking,” and “exchange” as ways to understand the passage from structural to empirical violence. Of particular interest is the relationship between violence and “life.” In their later works (Rogues, The Beast and the Sovereign Lectures, Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectics, etc), this relation emerges both in terms of the violent denial and annihilation of life implied in the reductive logics of “logocentrism” and “identitarian thinking,” and in the question of “animal life,” the question of who counts as “human,” and who or what can be included in the “human” community. Hence, my dissertation situates the historical and philosophical concern for violence in relationship to the questions of “life” and, in so doing, enters into the growing conversation surrounding violence and environmentalism that can be heard across the humanities

When Accountability Knocks, Will Anyone Answer?

Pressure for increased school accountability is a distinctive hallmark of the present period of educational reform. Account- ability, as presently defined in state and local educational policy, includes four major ideas: the school is the basic unit for the delivery of education and hence the primary place where teachers and administrators are held to account; schools are primarily accountable for student performance, generally defined as measured achievement on tests in basic academic subjects; school-site student performance is evaluated against externally-set standards that define accept- able levels of student achievement as mandated by states or localities; and evaluation of school performance is typically accompanied by a system of rewards, penalties, and intervention strategies targeted at rewarding successful schools and remediating or closing low-performing schools (Ladd, 1996). These accountability policies are typically directed toward individual schools or teachers, and increasingly, students, as in Texas, New York, Virginia, and Florida where exit exams or proficiency requirements are central to educational reform policies. Coupled with these new account- ability systems, states and localities often are pursuing policies such as charter schools and choice programs that move schools outside the existing bureaucratic structure and are intended to sharpen the focus on academic quality and student performance. Growing political and fiscal pressure on schools lies behind this conception of accountability. The political pressure stems from the increasing visibility of school performance as a policy issue at the state and local levels and the increasing capacity of states and localities to measure and monitor student achievement. The fiscal pressure derives from heightened awareness of accountability present in the literature on school reform, but to leave the definitions as open as possible. This study is focused primarily on schools and how they construct their own conceptions of accountability. We chose this focus for conceptual and practical reasons. First, we are interested in understanding how teachers, administrators, students, and parents think about and behave toward accountability issues in schools, apart from how they respond to new external accountability systems. Schools function, in part, as accountability systems in their own right, and these systems are worth understanding in and of themselves. Second, we are interested in learning, from the variations we observe among schools, about the range of responses that schools of various types formulate to the problem of accountability. To the degree that schools vary in their responses to the accountability problem, we learn something about how conceptions of account- ability are formed and how they change in the daily life of schools. Third, we are ultimately interested in joining our research on school-level accountability with research on external accountability systems to understand the sources of school-site variation in response to state and local accountability structures

Holding Schools Accountable: Is It Working?

The authors share findings from a body of research on emerging accountability systems conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education

Reflexiones sobre la contribución de la tutoría al futuro del aprendizaje

In late October and early November I helped organize a workshop for tutoring promoters in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. The purpose of the workshop was to involve adult mentoring promoters in the first efforts to more explicitly generate rules and practices on the role of both adults and young people in mentoring work. So far, tutoring has spread widely, in individual demonstrations, face-to-face and in possible professional development sessions, but without the explicit intention of codifying the practice. The Guanajuato workshop was expressly conceived to see if a more explicit formulation of the tutoring practice would help to develop the new way of teaching and learning as well as accelerating its dissemination.A finales de octubre y principios de noviembre ayudé a organizar un taller para promotores de tutoría en el estado de Guanajuato, México. El propósito del taller fue involucrar a los adultos promotores de tutoría en los primeros esfuerzos por generar de manera más explícita normas y prácticas sobre el papel tanto de adultos como de gente joven en el trabajo de tutoría. Hasta ahora la tutoría se ha difundido de viva voz, en demostraciones individuales, cara a cara y en eventuales sesiones de desarrollo profesional, pero sin la intención explícita de codificar la práctica. El taller de Guanajuato se concibió expresamente para ver si una formulación más explícita de la práctica tutora ayudaría a desarrollar la nueva manera de enseñar y aprender así como acelerar su difusión

The Value of Environmental Enrichments to Gestating Sows

Housing swine in unstimulating environments can lead to increases in abnormal and harmful social behavior, stress and impaired immune function. Environmental enrichments can alleviate the negative impacts of unstimulating housing and can improve sow welfare. In a series of studies, we asked sows which enrichments they found most valuable. Behavior and motivation measures revealed that sows valued access to an enriched group pen, though sow social status impacted enrichment use. Rubber mats were preferred and shared in a group pen, though were not as highly valued by individual sows. Stall-housed sows valued compost in a trough and straw in a rack, though showed little interest in a hanging cotton rope. The addition of enrichments, which sows find valuable, to unstimulating environments should be considered as a method to improve sow welfare

Query Health: standards-based, cross-platform population health surveillance

Objective: Understanding population-level health trends is essential to effectively monitor and improve public health. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Query Health initiative is a collaboration to develop a national architecture for distributed, population-level health queries across diverse clinical systems with disparate data models. Here we review Query Health activities, including a standards-based methodology, an open-source reference implementation, and three pilot projects. Materials and methods Query Health defined a standards-based approach for distributed population health queries, using an ontology based on the Quality Data Model and Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture, Health Quality Measures Format (HQMF) as the query language, the Query Envelope as the secure transport layer, and the Quality Reporting Document Architecture as the result language. Results: We implemented this approach using Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) and hQuery for data analytics and PopMedNet for access control, secure query distribution, and response. We deployed the reference implementation at three pilot sites: two public health departments (New York City and Massachusetts) and one pilot designed to support Food and Drug Administration post-market safety surveillance activities. The pilots were successful, although improved cross-platform data normalization is needed. Discussions This initiative resulted in a standards-based methodology for population health queries, a reference implementation, and revision of the HQMF standard. It also informed future directions regarding interoperability and data access for ONC's Data Access Framework initiative. Conclusions: Query Health was a test of the learning health system that supplied a functional methodology and reference implementation for distributed population health queries that has been validated at three sites

Rabies Management Implications Based on Raccoon Population Density Indexes

An estimate or index of target species density is important in determining oral rabies vaccination (ORV) bait densities to control and eliminate specific rabies variants. From 1997–2011, we indexed raccoon (Procyon lotor) densities 253 times based on cumulative captures on 163 sites from Maine to Alabama, USA, near ORV zones created to prevent raccoon rabies from spreading to new areas. We conducted indexing under a common cage trapping protocol near the time of annual ORV to aid in bait density decisions. Unique raccoons (n = 8,415) accounted for 68.0% of captures (n = 12,367). We recaptured raccoons 2,669 times. We applied Schnabel and Huggins mark‐recapture models on sites with ≥3 years of capture data and ≥25% recaptures as context for raccoon density indexes (RDIs). Simple linear relationships between RDIs and mark‐recapture estimates supported application of our 2 index. Raccoon density indexes ranged from 0.0–56.9 raccoons/km . For bait density decisions, we evaluated RDIs in the following 4 raccoon density groups, which were statistically different: (0.0–5.0 [n = 70], 5.1–15.0 [n = 129], 15.1–25.0 [n = 31], and \u3e25.0 raccoons/km2 [n = 23]). Mean RDI was positively associated with a higher percentage of developed land cover and a lower percentage of evergreen forest. Non‐target species composition (excluding recaptured raccoons) accounted for 32.0% of captures. Potential bait competitors accounted for 76.5% of non‐targets. The opossum (Didelphis virginiana) was the primary potential bait competitor from 27°N to 44°N latitude, north of which it was numerically replaced by the striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis). We selected the RDI approach over mark-recapture methods because of costs, geographic scope, staff availability, and the need for supplemental serologic samples. The 4 density groups provided adequate sensitivity to support bait density decisions for the current 2 bait density options. Future improvements to the method include providing random trapping locations to field personnel to prevent trap clustering and marking non‐targets to better characterize bait competitors