Unrest

Unrest is a twenty-one minute long piece written for chamber ensemble. Inspiration for the piece is drawn from the struggles that Black Americans face with regard to police brutality and social injustices, with extensive references to the Black Lives Matter movement. The two outer movements, Prologue and Epilogue provide an introduction and closure to the piece, while the inner four movements provide snapshots of scenes where innocent Black lives were taken; namely: Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Tamir Rice. When I began planning this piece, I wanted to make sure that the strong messages of the Black Lives Matter movement translated to the music I composed. I wanted to create something that was meaningful and powerful. I did this by making references to songs relevant to the community. I reference “Going Up Yonder” by Tramaine Hawkins in the Prologue and Epilogue movements and “Beef” by Lil’ Durk in Jordan. “Going Up Yonder” is often sung at funerals in the Black community and “Beef” was the song that played in the car when Jordan Davis was shot and killed. These songs already had connections to situations related to the Black Lives Matter movement, thus making it easier make connections in the music. The four inner movements seek to take on the scene where the individual was killed and convey the scene musically. This is achieved by mimicking the sounds of the crowd in the YouTube video that contains footage recorded at the shooting death of Eric Garner, referencing the melody from “Going Up Yonder” in the Prologue and Epilogue movements, and using rhythmic and harmonic content from “Beef” in Jordan. For the movements for which there was no musical reference, I used the background story to created unique soundscapes that depicted the characters and their emotions. Unrest is a piece that draws on the strength of the Black Lives Matter movement and forces the listener to deal with the issues associated with it. It is a piece that addresses current social issues in the United States of America in an evocative and meaningful way. This thesis will also include an overview of music in social and political movements and an explanation of how the piece was constructed

Creative fidelity : the study of compassionate consciousness in a technological world

In the tradition of western philosophy often focused on in the perennial search for wisdom is the foundations of philosophy that have based ontology and epistemology on abstract systems of thought. In these systems, thought is considered in and of itself, not in terms of its interrelationship to feelings and actions. These traditions of philosophy, founded on abstraction rather than on the concreteness of human experiencing, rarely touch the meaning of the questions, dilemmas, joys of being human. A void ensues in our understanding which both shapes and continuously reinforces existence thought of as thinking separated from feeling, mind separated from body and soul, and knowledge separated from being

Attitudes of Organized Labor Officials toward Health Care Issues: An Exploratory Survey of Alabama Labor Officials

Delegates to the Alabama AFL-CIO Convention were surveyed concerning their attitudes toward their health benefits and various options for health care reform. Most are satisfied with their current health care coverage, but dissatisfied with its high costs. Participants attribute the high costs to providers' pricing policies and insurance companies' overhead

Aligning Strategic Orientation with Information Resources

In today’s digital society, technology-based resources are emerging and changing far more rapidly than organizational systems and structures. While information management is critical to strategy at both the formulation and implementation stages, strategic decisions often must be made quickly, and with less rationality than is desirable. This paper provides an analytical framework based on the types of information needed for specific strategic orientations. The proposed framework, or information resource matrix (IRM), integrates the strategy typology of Miles and Snow (1978), the uncertainty dimensions of Milliken (1987), and the decision-making model of Simon (1963). The IRM identifies a firm’s information needs for a given strategic orientation. Using the IRM, managers can tailor information systems to fit their strategic information needs

Environmental factors and health information technology management strategy.

Background: Previous studies have provided theoretical and empirical evidence that environmental forces influence hospital strategy. Purposes: Rooted in resource dependence theory and the information uncertainty perspective, this study examined the relationship between environmental market characteristics and hospitals' selection of a health information technology (HIT) management strategy. Methodology/Approach: A cross-sectional design is used to analyze secondary data from the American Hospital Association Annual Survey, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Analytics Database, and the Area Resource File. Univariate and multinomial logistic regression analyses are used. Findings: Overall, 3,221 hospitals were studied, of which 60.9% pursed a single-vendor HIT management strategy, 28.9% pursued a best-of-suite strategy, and 10.2% used a best-of-breed strategy. Multivariate analyses controlling for hospital characteristics found that measures of environmental factors representing munificence, dynamism, and/or complexity were systematically associated with various hospital HIT management strategy use. Specifically, the number of generalist physicians per capita was positively associated with the single-vendor strategy (B = -5.64, p = .10). Hospitals in urban markets were more likely to pursue the best-of-suite strategy (B = 0.622, p < .001). Dynamism, measured as the number of managed care contracts for a given hospital, was negatively associated with the single-vendor strategy (B = 0.004, p = .049). Lastly, complexity, measured as market competition, was positively associated with the best-of-breed strategy (B = 0.623, p = .042). Practice Implications: By and large, environmental factors are associated with hospital HIT management strategies in mostly theoretically supported ways. Hospital leaders and policy makers interested in influencing the adoption of hospital HIT should consider how market conditions influence HIT management decisions as part of programs to promote meaningful use

Information Systems and Healthcare XXIX: Information Technology Investments and Returns – Uniqueness in the Healthcare Industry

The way in which information technology (IT) impacts firm productivity is an enduring question in organizational research and practice. Rather than adopting the common explanation that IT spending improves organizational performance, we hypothesize that IT spending determines the amount of IT assets, such as IT hardware, IT personnel, IT systems, and IT outsourcing, that can be acquired. These IT assets, in turn, affect productivity. The context of our study is the healthcare industry. Because of the unique set of managerial values, incentives, and constraints in this industry, we also hypothesize that IT personnel play a key role in determining hospital productivity. Analysis of panel data on acute-care centers provides support for our hypotheses. This paper contributes to literature by (1) refining earlier research that explains that IT spending improves organizational productivity; (2) examining the interrelationships between various types of IT assets; and (3) providing initial indications that outsourcing of the IT function may not have effects in healthcare that it does in other industries

Community Based Coalitions‘ Capacity for Sustainable Action: The Role of Relationships

Given both the importance and difficulty of promoting community-based public health coalitions, their capacity for sustainable action merits systematic examination. The current study addresses this need, focusing specifically on the relational dimension of capacity, that is, how relationships both among members and with external actors affect coalition-level activity. The context is a multimethod comparative case study of two rural cancer control coalitions. The authors began by using quantitative and qualitative data to characterize relational capacity in each coalition and then assessed the association between coalition-level relational capacity and level of subsequent interventions. The more active coalition had a more inclusive relational structure than did its less active counterpart but also placed less emphasis on personal friendships. The authors conclude that coalitions‘ relational structures are measurable and that this dimension of capacity may affect sustainable capacity for health promotion

Patient Satisfaction Scores and Their Relationship to Hospital Website Quality Measures

Hospitals and health systems are using web-based and social media tools to market themselves to consumers with increasingly sophisticated strategies. These efforts are designed to shape the consumers' expectations, influence their purchase decisions, and build a positive reputation in the marketplace. Little is known about how these web-based marketing efforts are taking form and if they have any relationship to consumers' satisfaction with the services they receive. The purpose of this study is to assess if a relationship exists between the quality of hospitals' public websites and their aggregated patient satisfaction ratings. Based on analyses of 1,952 U.S. hospitals, our results show that website quality is significantly and positively related to patients' overall rating of the hospital and their intention to recommend the facility to others. The potential for web-based information sources to influence consumer behavior has important implications for policymakers, third-party payers, health care providers, and consumers