Poverty Welfare : Designing a Welfare System

This publication is the tenth segment of an educational series on poverty and welfare in South Dakota. This leaflet examines what the goals, recipient requirements, output, and functions of a welfare system should be, and the relationship of the system to others

Comparison of dexmedetomidine, pethidine and tramadol in the treatment of post-neuraxial anaesthesia shivering

Objective: This study was performed to compare the effectiveness of intravenous dexmedetomidine with that of pethidine and tramadol in the treatment of post-neuraxial anaesthesia shivering.Design: This was a prospective, randomised, double-blinded study.Setting and subjects: One hundred and two patients of both genders, aged 18–70 years with American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status I and II undergoing spinal or combined spinal and epidural anaesthesia for elective surgery were enrolled in this study. Sixty of them developed shivering after an intrathecal injection of 0.5% hyperbaric bupivacaine 15 mg. They were then randomly allocated to receive either intravenous dexmedetomidine 0.5 μg/kg, pethidine 0.5 mg/kg or tramadol 0.5 mg/kg.Outcome measures: The response rate to treatment, the degree of sedation and the side-effects were recorded.Results: The response rate to treatment was highest in the dexmedetomidine group, and it was only significant when compared to tramadol group (p = 0.0012). It was noted that the response rate was higher in the pethidine than in the tramadol group. This difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.082). The sedation score post treatment was similar in all three groups, but more patients in the dexmedetomidine group developed hypotension and bradycardia (p < 0.05).Conclusion: Dexmedetomidine 0.5 μg/ml was more effective than tramadol 0.5 mg/ml and pethidine 0.5 mg/ml, and both tramadol and pethidine were found to have similar efficacy, in the treatment of post-neuraxial anaesthesia shivering. However, dexmedetomidine caused a higher incidence of  hypotension and bradycardia.Keywords: dexmedetomidine, pethidine, post-neuraxial anaesthesia shivering, tramado

The Role of the Press in Framing the Bilingual Education Debate: Ten Years after Sheltered Immersion in Massachusetts

In 2002 Massachusetts voters passed a voter initiative that changed the way children who are not fluent in English are taught. The initiative overturned the state’s requirement for “transitional bilingual education,” through which children are gradually transitioned, usually over a three-year period, from instruction in their native language to instruction entirely in English. Transitional bilingual education was replaced with “sheltered English immersion,” which places children with little or no English-language fluency in classes where almost all instruction is in English, with the expectation that they will move to regular English-only classrooms after one year. We used frame analysis to examine news coverage of this issue in the Boston Globe for the decade following the election, aiming to assess the press’s contribution to public understanding of the controversy over bilingual education and to shed light on the press’s role in enforcing the dominant language ideology of the United States, which supports English monolingualism. The study examined fifty-seven news articles identified through the use of key words. We organized the articles into three periods and focused on (1) headlines, (2) main events and themes, (3) characters, (4) use of expert sources, and (5) the placement of stories. We found most articles bunched in the period immediately following the election. The press frame featured conflicts among politicians and struggles with implementation and emphasized local concerns through placement of the stories in the paper. Some stories reported lack of success for sheltered English immersion, but very few experts on language learning or bilingual education were brought into the press frame. The news stories provided the reader little information about language learning and no perspective on the potential importance or usefulness of bi- and multilingual education. As a major news source, the Boston Globe told the story in a manner that reinforced a language ideology supporting the hegemony of English

Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

Chomsky (1973) attributes the island status of nominal subjects to the Subject Condition, a constraint specific to subjects. English and Spanish are interesting languages for the comparative study of extraction from subjects, because subjects in English are predominantly preverbal, whereas in Spanish they can be either preverbal or postverbal. In this paper we argue that the islandhood of subject DPs in both English and Spanish is not categorical. The degradation associated with extraction from subjects must be attributed to the interplay of a range of more general constraints which are not specific to subjects. We argue that the interaction of these constraints has a cumulative effect whereby the more constraints that are violated, the higher the degree of degradation that results. We also argue that some speakers have a greater tolerance for constraint violations than others, which would account for widespread inter-speaker judgment variability

New hydrogen-like potentials

Using the modified factorization method introduced by Mielnik, we construct a new class of radial potentials whose spectrum for l=0 coincides exactly with that of the hydrogen atom. A limiting case of our family coincides with the potentials previously derived by Abraham and MosesComment: 6 pages, latex, 2 Postscript figure

Transracial Foster Care and Adoption: Issues and Realities

The article places transracial foster care and adoption into a broader perspective that highlights social and cultural factors and the reasons for controversy about this adoption option. The first section describes the demographics of children in the foster care system. This is followed by an overview of requirements for approval as foster and adoptive parents in Massachusetts and information about the laws governing transracial adoption. The controversy over transracial adoption is laid out by explaining the race-blind and race-matching positions. Policy priorities are outlined that take into account the main points of controversy. The final section focuses on growth in the multiracial and multiethnic population and how it will continue to shape transracial adoption. Race significantly structures peoples’ perceptions, which must be recognized. But race can overly determine judgments and policy decision. A balance is necessary to ensure that the overarching priority emphasizes the needs of children

Nonlinear Dynamics in Distributed Systems

We build on a previous statistical model for distributed systems and formulate it in a way that the deterministic and stochastic processes within the system are clearly separable. We show how internal fluctuations can be analysed in a systematic way using Van Kanpen's expansion method for Markov processes. We present some results for both stationary and time-dependent states. Our approach allows the effect of fluctuations to be explored, particularly in finite systems where such processes assume increasing importance.Comment: Two parts: 8 pages LaTeX file and 5 (uuencoded) figures in Postscript forma