Survival Models of Community Tenure and Length of Hospital Stay for the Seriously Mentally Ill: A 10-year Perspective

Objective: To examine the effects of personal and community characteristics, specifically race and rurality, on lengths of state psychiatric hospital and community stays using maximum likelihood survival analysis with a special emphasis on change over a ten year period of time. Data Sources: We used the administrative data of the Virginia Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation, and Substance Abuse Services (DMHMRSAS) from 1982- 1991 and the Area Resources File (ARF). Given these two sources, we constructed a history file for each individual who entered the state psychiatric system over the ten year period. Histories included demographic, treatment, and community characteristics. Study Design: We used a longitudinal, population-based design with maximum likelihood estimation of survival models. We presented a random effects model with unobserved heterogeneity that was independent of observed covariates. The key dependent variables were lengths of inpatient stay and subsequent length of community stay. Explanatory variables measured personal, diagnostic, and community characteristics, as well as controls for calendar time. Data Collection: This study used secondary, administrative and health planning data. Principal Findings: African-American clients leave the community more quickly than whites. After controlling for other characteristics, however, race does not affect hospital length of stay. Rurality does not affect length of community stays once other personal and community characteristics are controlled for. However, people from rural areas have longer hospital stays even after controlling for personal and community characteristics. The effects of time are significantly smaller than expected. Diagnostic composition effects and a decrease in the rate of first inpatient admissions explain part of this reduced impact of time. We also find strong evidence for the existence of unobserved heterogeneity in both types of stays and adjust for this in our final models. Conclusions: Our results show that information on client characteristics available from inpatient stay records is useful in predicting not only the length of inpatient stay but also the length of the subsequent community stay. This information can be used to target increased discharge planning for those at risk of more rapid readmission to inpatient care. Correlation across observed and unobserved factors affecting length of stay has significant effects on the measurement of relationships between individual factors and lengths of stay. Thus, it is important to control for both observed and unobserved factors in estimation.community tenure, length of psychiatric inpatient stay, survival analysis, state psychiatric hospital, maximum likelihood estimation

Laughter at Last: Playfulness and laughter in interaction

Conversation analysis is used to examine a collection of sequences involving playful turns that are not immediately explicitly framed as laughable through laughter. Rather, laughter by the same speaker occurs after or in overlap with the recipient's response. Elements of the turns contribute to their playfulness, such as using exaggerated, formal and colloquial language. However, they are ambivalent in that they also do serious work. Many are first pair parts such as questions. Sacks (1992, p. 627) pointed out that non-serious first pair parts can be responded to with laughter, and thus not treated as having the sequential implications they might otherwise have. But in this collection responses align with serious sequential implications while sometimes simultaneously acknowledging and contributing to their playfulness. Laughter following or in overlap with the response then explicitly frames first turns (and, to an extent, the pair) as playful. However, its role in aligning with the just prior turn is often ambiguous, raising questions about the relationship of turns in this sequence. In general the analysis supports consideration of how playfulness is constructed and responded to in talk and of a technical understanding of the phenomenon

Letter to Dillard Gardner regarding mailings, April 26, 1949

A letter from Elizabeth Holt to Dillard Gardner informing Gardner that Holt typed and mailed letters that Gardner had requested her to do

Cold War in the Arabic Press: Ḥiwār (Beirut, 1962–67) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom

ABSTRACT Extensively quoting from the archives of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, a Cold War organization founded as a CIA front in 1950, this chapter provides a history for their Arabic literary activities, including the journals Aṣwāt, Adab, and their best known work in the region: Ḥiwār (1962–67), edited by Palestinian poet Tawfīq Ṣāyigh from Beirut with broad dissemination in the Arab world. The chapter also outlines the CCF’s other interventions in the Arab cultural sphere from 1955 in the wake of Bandung. Over the course of its nearly five-year run, Ḥiwār and other CCF journals published both emerging and established authors, serving as a register of some of the most important Arab historians, critics, essayists, short-story writers, novelists and poets of the 1960s, including Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Ghādah al-Sammān, Albert Hourani, Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, Walīd al-Khālidī, Zakariyyā Tāmir, Laylā Baʿalbakī, Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd al-Ṣubūr, Salmā al-Khaḍrāʾ al-Jayyūsī, Ṣabrī Ḥāfiẓ, Luwịs ʿAwaḍ, Fuʾād al-Takarlī, al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ and Yūsuf Idrīs. Ḥiwār also published CCF-supplied interviews with major international cultural figures such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, György Lukács, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Picasso, and letters from CCF representatives and authors across the world

Narrative and the Reading Public in 1870s Beirut

ABSTRACT This paper reads narrative published in the journals of 1870s Beirut in the context of an emerging bourgeois readership and argues that the significance of this archive to modern Arabic fiction has been neglected by critics. Taking the intensification of the silk trade with France following the civil war of 1860 as a point of historical departure, this paper traces the nexus of multiple influences upon narrative forms published in the burgeoning press of this period. Reading two serialized novels of 1870 alongside one another, this paper reveals the centrality of suspense to the proliferation of the press and the novel form. Anticipation, anxiety and hope pervade the pages of these periodicals as readers and writers negotiate changing notions of class and gender. The final portion of the paper returns to the question of influence, exposing the overdetermined narrative weave that connects these early serialized Arabic novels to not only the European novel, but also the heritage of popular Arabic storytelling epitomized by A Thousand and One Nights

Cartography and Clandestinité in Leïla Sebbar’s Shérazade: 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts

Abstract. In this paper, I read Leı ¨la Sebbar’s staging in her novel She´razzed: 17 ans,brune, frise´ e, les yeux verts of the resistance by children of North African and other immigrants in the early 1980s to the French state’s cartographic modes and documentsof control. The paper will consider the many uses to which the map was put by theFrench state in its colonization of North Africa and particularly Algeria, and later in itsattempts to control the banlieues its policies of citizenship and cartographic controlyielded on the margins of Paris. In this context, I will explore the ways in which thenovel’s characters, living clandestinely in asquatt, simultaneously resist, put to use, andeven supercede state documents of control as they disrupt everyday life and conductheists across the city of Paris. The paper will explore unofficial cartographies of Paris,from those afforded by the radios libres and alternative publications such as Libe´ ration and Sans Frontierez, to oral and almost proverbial networks of knowledge criss-crossingthe city of Paris, while also tracing the uses to which supplemental cartographic sketchesand counterfeit identity cards are put in the pages of the novel. The paper will be indialogue with theoretical and critical formulations of space, cartography, and statecontrol put forward by Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and TomConley. The paper will conclude with a consideration of the means and limits of resistance by the novel’s characters in the context of this body of theory and criticis

Extracellular Scavenging of Oxygen Radicals Produced by Polymorphonuclear Leukocytes - The Relevance to Rheumatoid Arthritis

This thesis is the account of laboratory research which I undertook in the Department of Medical Biochemistry, University of Wales College of Medicine between October 1981 and September 1983, while funded by an Arthritis and Rheumatism Council Research Training Fellowship. The aim of the work was to investigate the role of oxygen radicals produced by polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis, and in particular to establish the availability of these reactive moieties for extracellular tissue damage

“Bread or Freedom”: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and the Arabic Literary Journal Ḥiwār (1962-67)

Abstract In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with its main offices in Paris. The CCF was designed as a cultural front in the Cold War in response to the Soviet Cominform, and founded and fiinded a worldwide network of literary journals (as well as conferences, concerts, art exhibits and other cultural events). From 1962 until its scandalous collapse over the course of 1966 and the early months of 1967, Tawfiq Säyigh edited the CCF's Arabic outpost Hiwdr from Beirut, joining a growing web of CCP journals, including London's Eneounter, Kampala's Transition, Bombay's Quest, and the Latin American, Paris-based Mundo Nuevo. Hiwdr, a journal fiinded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and thus covertly by the CIA, sought to co-opt the Arab avant-garde, offering authors both material compensation for their writing, as well as the much lauded cultural freedom. By 1966, Hiwdr'% promise to writers of both bread and freedom collapsed in the pages of the Arabic press under the weight of paradox and a worldwide scandal on the eve of the 1967 Arab defeat