Congressional Committee Requests Revisited: Professional Expertise, Multiple Goals and Representation

House members pursue multiple goals during their legislative career. The goals of reelection, good policy making and power affect member voting and committee composition. Yet in arguably a legislator’s most important choice, committee request, only the goal of reelection has empirical support. I argue that a member utilizes all three goals when going through the committee process and requests a committee assignment that will maximize their utility across all legislative goals. Utility maximization is achieved when a member can gain influence within a policy jurisdiction through leveraging their prior expertise. I employ a multinomial logit model in examining committee requests, for eight committees over fifty years. My findings indicate that across five of the eight committees a member’s prior occupation is a strong and consistent predictor of a legislator’s request. It is plausible, given the results that members pursue multiple goals in making their request for committee assignment

The politics of public versus private social welfare

The United States has a divided social system in that both the public and private sectors provide citizens with benefits and services. The effects of political party control on public social policy are widely known. An area of study less understood is how partisanship influences private social benefits. I develop and test a theoretical argument that political parties' choice between indirect and direct social expenditures is primarily motivated by a desire to alter the balance between public and private power in society. The two major political parties have divergent philosophies on the role of government in society due to their significant differences in core democratic values and electoral coalitions. First, I properly conceptualize social policy as a choice between direct and indirect spending, using a new data set of federal tax expenditures. Next, I find no statistically significant difference between the Democratic and Republican parties in annual changes to total social expenditures. Additionally, my results show that Republican influence in the legislature results in a higher ratio of indirect to direct social spending, more private-sector spending, and increases to income inequality. These results have implications for determining the providers and beneficiaries of social benefits, the balance of power in society, and economic inequality

Pulmonary Metagenomic Sequencing Suggests Missed Infections in Immunocompromised Children

This article is made available for unrestricted re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic or until permissions are revoked in writing.BACKGROUND: Despite improved diagnostics, pulmonary pathogens in immunocompromised children frequently evade detection, leading to significant mortality. Therefore, we aimed to develop a highly sensitive metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) assay capable of evaluating the pulmonary microbiome and identifying diverse pathogens in the lungs of immunocompromised children. METHODS: We collected 41 lower respiratory specimens from 34 immunocompromised children undergoing evaluation for pulmonary disease at 3 children's hospitals from 2014-2016. Samples underwent mechanical homogenization, parallel RNA/DNA extraction, and metagenomic sequencing. Sequencing reads were aligned to the National Center for Biotechnology Information nucleotide reference database to determine taxonomic identities. Statistical outliers were determined based on abundance within each sample and relative to other samples in the cohort. RESULTS: We identified a rich cross-domain pulmonary microbiome that contained bacteria, fungi, RNA viruses, and DNA viruses in each patient. Potentially pathogenic bacteria were ubiquitous among samples but could be distinguished as possible causes of disease by parsing for outlier organisms. Samples with bacterial outliers had significantly depressed alpha-diversity (median, 0.61; interquartile range [IQR], 0.33-0.72 vs median, 0.96; IQR, 0.94-0.96; P < .001). Potential pathogens were detected in half of samples previously negative by clinical diagnostics, demonstrating increased sensitivity for missed pulmonary pathogens (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: An optimized mNGS assay for pulmonary microbes demonstrates significant inoculation of the lower airways of immunocompromised children with diverse bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Potential pathogens can be identified based on absolute and relative abundance. Ongoing investigation is needed to determine the pathogenic significance of outlier microbes in the lungs of immunocompromised children with pulmonary disease

Job satisfaction and commitment : a comparison of medical and legal careers

The research presented in this thesis sought to identify the key issues underlying the current recruitment and retention problems in general practice. Previous studies have tended to focus on medical careers in isolation, neglecting the wider context of professional careers in the non-medical workplace. In an attempt to untangle the effects of being in general practice from the effects of being in professional practice per se, medical professionals were compared with those in a parallel profession - law. Therefore the present research focused on identifying, and comparing, the career aspirations of doctors and lawyers. The work comprised two qualitative studies. Study 1 compared the values, beliefs and work perceptions of experienced doctors and lawyers, to establish similarities and differences between the two groups. Study 2 focused on the career expectations of both general and hospital trainees to allow comparisons between trainee groups, and between trainees and experienced practitioners. Participants totalled fifty nine for both studies. Data pertaining to the first study were analysed within the framework of the Job Characteristics Model (JCM). These findings subsequently determined the direction and shape of the second study. Problems in general practice related to a combination of organisational change, and doctors' reasons for their career choice. Whilst both lawyers and doctors have experienced aggressive government intervention, doctors seemed to have interpreted this as a violation of their relational psychological contract with the State. Moreover, many doctors appear to have chosen general practice for less than positive reasons. Findings according to the JCM showed general practice to be low in motivating potential, with experienced practitioners strongly resenting their diminishing professional autonomy. Trainee GPs appeared very similar to their predecessors, in terms of reasons for choosing general practice. Furthermore, they were overly optimistic regarding both the job's characteristics, and their ability to cope with potential difficulties. They were also less committed than their experienced counterparts. The data could offer few assurances of retention problems being eased by this new generation of GPs

The Humanities

xii, 436 p.; 23 cm