NEPC Review: The Tax-Credit Scholarship Audit: Do Publicly Funded Private School Choice Programs Save Money? (EdChoice, October 2016)

This report asserts that tax credit scholarship programs, that distribute scholarships to students via Scholarship Tuition Organizations (STOs), have saved state treasuries between $1.7 and$3.4 billion dollars since 1998. The report argues that these programs are able to realize fiscal savings as a result of students leaving public schools and entering private schools (defined as &ldquo;switchers&rdquo;). The report claims that the percentage of students leaving public schools, coupled with the offset of variable per-student costs that districts no longer need to expend, have resulted in the sizable financial savings for state governments. This review questions the method used to estimate the percentage of switcher students across these various programs, and examines how the report determines variable cost fluctuations for each student that leaves public schooling. Since no STO programs require officials to track data on which students transfer out of public schooling into private, these lax accountability standards have led the report author to estimate fiscal savings using conjecture. Instead of following students, they interpreted broad population changes to STOs. Consequently, the results of this report do not provide an acceptable causal conclusion for policymakers. Suggestions for more extensive accounting procedures along with more nuanced methodologies for calculating true variable student costs are discussed.</p

NEPC Review: Fiscal Effects of School Choice: Analyzing the Costs and Savings of Private School Choice Programs in America (EdChoice, November 2021)

Advocates for increased privatization of public schools have long contended that private schools could provide equal or better outcomes at lesser costs. To bolster that argument, this EdChoice report asserts that voucher and voucher-like (tax credit scholarship and education savings account) programs have saved state and local treasuries some $12.4 to$28.3 billion dollars as student &ldquo;switchers&rdquo; use those programs to leave public schools and enter private schools. However, the report&rsquo;s findings do not provide a sound base for policy decisions. Included in this review are suggestions for more detailed accounting procedures and more nuanced methodologies for calculating reliable variable student costs. </div

Strategies for Surveillance of Pediatric Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome: Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), 2000–2007

Background. Postdiarrheal hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) is the most common cause of acute kidney failure among US children. The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) conducts population-based surveillance of pediatric HUS to measure the incidence of disease and to validate surveillance trends in associated Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O157 infection

Vascular responses of the extremities to transdermal application of vasoactive agents in Caucasian and African descent individuals

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in European Journal of Applied Physiology on 04/04/2015, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-015-3164-2 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. Purpose: Individuals of African descent (AFD) are more susceptible to non-freezing cold injury than Caucasians (CAU) which may be due, in part, to differences in the control of skin blood flow. We investigated the skin blood flow responses to transdermal application of vasoactive agents. Methods: Twenty-four young males (12 CAU and 12 AFD) undertook three tests in which iontophoresis was used to apply acetylcholine (ACh 1 w/v %), sodium nitroprusside (SNP 0.01 w/v %) and noradrenaline (NA 0.5 mM) to the skin. The skin sites tested were: volar forearm, non-glabrous finger and toe, and glabrous finger (pad) and toe (pad). Results: In response to SNP on the forearm, AFD had less vasodilatation for a given current application than CAU (P = 0.027–0.004). ACh evoked less vasodilatation in AFD for a given application current in the non-glabrous finger and toe compared with CAU (P = 0.043–0.014) with a lower maximum vasodilatation in the non-glabrous finger (median [interquartile], AFD n = 11, 41[234] %, CAU n = 12, 351[451] %, P = 0.011) and non-glabrous toe (median [interquartile], AFD n = 9, 116[318] %, CAU n = 12, 484[720] %, P = 0.018). ACh and SNP did not elicit vasodilatation in the glabrous skin sites of either group. There were no ethnic differences in response to NA. Conclusion: AFD have an attenuated endothelium-dependent vasodilatation in non-glabrous sites of the fingers and toes compared with CAU. This may contribute to lower skin temperature following cold exposure and the increased risk of cold injuries experienced by AFD.Published versio

Understanding the effects of a decentralized budget on physicians' compliance with guidelines for statin prescription – a multilevel methodological approach

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Official guidelines that promote evidence-based and cost-effective prescribing are of main relevance for obvious reasons. However, to what extent these guidelines are followed and their conditioning factors at different levels of the health care system are still insufficiently known.</p> <p>In January 2004, a decentralized drug budget was implemented in the county of Scania, Sweden. Focusing on lipid-lowering drugs (i.e., statins), we evaluated the effect of this intervention across a 25-month period. We expected that increased local economic responsibility would promote prescribing of recommended statins.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We performed two separate multilevel regression analyses; on 110 827 individual prescriptions issued at 136 <it>publicly</it>-administered health care centres (HCCs) nested within 14 administrative areas (HCAs), and on 72 012 individual prescriptions issued by 115 <it>privately</it>-administered HCCs. Temporal trends in the prevalence of prescription of recommended statins were investigated by random slope analysis. Differences (i.e., variance) between HCCs and between HCAs were expressed by median odds ratio (MOR).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>After the implementation of the decentralized drug budget, adherence to guidelines increased continuously. At the end of the observation period, however, practice variation remained high. Prescription of recommended statins presented a high degree of clustering within both publicly (i.e., MOR_HCC= 2.18 and MOR_HCA= 1.31 respectively) and privately administered facilities (MOR_HCC= 3.47).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A decentralized drug budget seems to promote adherence to guidelines for statin prescription. However, the high practice differences at the end of the observation period may reflect inefficient therapeutic traditions, and indicates that rational statin prescription could be further improved.</p

(Re)visions: A Senior Thesis in Film and Photography Exploring The Mechanics of Vision and the Technologies of Perception

In many ways this project evolved from a single image of my mother. From the moment I discovered the Ektachrome slide in an old box of photographs I was enchanted by its peculiar beauty and strange sense of mystery. In the following months I could not shake the imprint it had left on my mind and I found myself continually coming back to it, trying to dissect it in different ways and trying to make sense of what was so magical to me about the image. I eventually came to realize that I was struck by its physicality. I could hold it in my hand; I could see the dust collecting on it. The slide projector gave it a life that it never would have had on a screen. There was just something undigital about it.It had not been taken in a digital world with a digital eye. Dirt and scratches laid bare its materiality, and it had a vivid sense of color thanks to the particularities of the film that was used to capture the moment. I began to see my own image through this image of my mother and it led me to want to discover what was different about an image made of myself today. How is the technology different, how are we different? How has our vision changed? Through this project, I set out to investigate how identity and self-image are formed in a digital world, attempting to reconcile the analog world of the past and the world of today. Ideas about the evolving and malleable nature of perception and representation that I encountered in Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer led me to want to trace the evolution of vision. I wanted to explore the altered visual landscape that digital technologies have given us. Grains have become pixels. We expect a digital manipulation before we accept the reality of the strange phenomena before us. Overall, this project evolved into an investigation of the mechanics of vision, the technologies of perception and an attempt to figure out how their transformations have transformed us. It has become a personal exploration of how the technologies I interact with daily have changed the way I see both my surroundings and myself. This image of my mother makes its way into numerous pieces in the project. I feel it has become a representation of a visual world I never got to fully experience and has acted as a catalyst for me to want to more fully experience the visual world I live in today