Union Maids: Unions and the Female Workforce

How have women fared in unions in recent years? The major findings of this paper are that unions have been more beneficial for women in the public sector than in the private sector, and that unionism for women is primarily a public sector wriite collar phenomenon distinguished from that of males. According to our analysis:(1) Women have come to be an increasingly large proportion of the unionized work force, and are critical in the one area in which unions have recently succeeded --the public sector.(2) In the public sector and in white collar occupations where women unionists are concentrated, unions raise women's wages more than they raise the wages of men.(3) In the private sector unions have essentially the same effect on women in wages, turnover, employment and so forth, and do not deter affirmative action programs to raise female employment. (4) Comparable worth presents a rare confluence of interests of unions in search of members, particularly in the public sector,and women in search of higher wages, and will likely continue to be used by both especially within the confines of collective bargaining.

Pitfalls and Artifacts in Nuclear Imaging Studies

In interpreting scintillation images, one often is confronted with a variety of deviations from the typically normal study that need not represent definite pathology. Apart from normal anatomic variants in the position, shape, or configuration of an organ, one must also be prepared to appreciate alterations due to the radiodiagnostic agent employed and aberrations caused by faulty or improperly used instruments. Additionally, physiologic and/or functional changes associated with specific organ studies have provided a major source of error in routine image interpretation. It is the purpose of this article to acquaint (or reacquaint, as the case may be) the reader with many of these problems so that they may easily recognize them and, one hopes, improve their overall interpretative abilities. The discussion will follow the lines of general considerations relating to instrumentation and radiopharmaceuticals followed by specific organ considerations. In this type of review, some intentional as well as some unintentional omissions may appear. The author hopes that most of the common sources of error have been included. Undoubtedly, some readers may think of other problems that they may personally have been confronted with

Radionuclide Imaging Evaluation of the Patient with Trauma

Trauma is now a major medical problem. Accidental injuries constitute the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, and the primary cause of death below the age of 37. The costs of immediate medical and surgical care, prolonged hospitalization, and lost productivity amount to several billions of dollars annually

A system for de-identifying medical message board text

There are millions of public posts to medical message boards by users seeking support and information on a wide range of medical conditions. It has been shown that these posts can be used to gain a greater understanding of patients’ experiences and concerns. As investigators continue to explore large corpora of medical discussion board data for research purposes, protecting the privacy of the members of these online communities becomes an important challenge that needs to be met. Extant entity recognition methods used for more structured text are not sufficient because message posts present additional challenges: the posts contain many typographical errors, larger variety of possible names, terms and abbreviations specific to Internet posts or a particular message board, and mentions of the authors’ personal lives. The main contribution of this paper is a system to de-identify the authors of message board posts automatically, taking into account the aforementioned challenges. We demonstrate our system on two different message board corpora, one on breast cancer and another on arthritis. We show that our approach significantly outperforms other publicly available named entity recognition and de-identification systems, which have been tuned for more structured text like operative reports, pathology reports, discharge summaries, or newswire