Perceptions of and attitudes to HIV/AIDS among young adults at the University of Cape Town

Given the exponential rate of growth of HIV/AIDS in the Western Cape in recent years, and university concerns about the health of students and others, knowledge about young peoples' ideas and social constructs of the virus and syndrome is important. Medical anthropology lecturers Fiona Ross and Susan Levine present here their preliminary findings about University of Cape Town student perceptions regarding HIV/AIDS. This paper shows that young adults tend to imagine that they have an immunity to HIV infection and so continue to practice unsafe sex, irrespective of their educational background and specific knowledge about HIV/AIDS. The data suggest a critical need to reassess the efficacy of education as a means of disease prevention, and to examine more closely the knowledge, attitudes and practices of young adults

Gesturing with an Injured Brain: How Gesture Helps Children with Early Brain Injury Learn Linguistic Constructions

Children with pre/perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL) show remarkable plasticity for language development. Is this plasticity characterized by the same developmental trajectory that characterizes typically developing (TD) children, with gesture leading the way into speech ? We explored this question, comparing eleven children with PL – matched to thirty TD children on expressive vocabulary – in the second year of life. Children with PL showed similarities to TD children for simple but not complex sentence types. Children with PL produced simple sentences across gesture and speech several months before producing them entirely in speech, exhibiting parallel delays in both gesture+speech and speech-alone. However, unlike TD children, children with PL produced complex sentence types first in speech-alone. Overall, the gesture–speech system appears to be a robust feature of language learning for simple – but not complex – sentence constructions, acting as a harbinger of change in language development even when that language is developing in an injured brain

Employee Involvement and Pay at U.S. and Canadian Auto Suppliers

We use survey data and field research to investigate the effects of employee involvement practices on outcomes for blue-collar workers in the auto supply industry. We find these practices raise wages by 3-5%. The causal mechanism linking involvement and wages appears to be most consistent with efficiency wage theories, and least consistent with compensating differences. We find no evidence that employee involvement affects plants? survival or employment growth.MIT International Motor Vehicle Program and the Case Western Reserve University Center for Regional Economic Issue

Does linguistic input play the same role in language learning for children with and without early brain injury?

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that children with BI receive from their caregivers also contributes to this early plasticity, and whether linguistic input plays a similar role in children with BI as it does in typically developing (TD) children. Growth in vocabulary and syntactic production is modeled for 80 children (53 TD, 27 BI) between 14 and 46 months. Findings indicate that caregiver input is an equally potent predictor of vocabulary growth in children with BI and in TD children. In contrast, input is a more potent predictor of syntactic growth for children with BI than for TD children. Controlling for input, lesion characteristics (lesion size, type, seizure history) also affect the language trajectories of children with BI. Thus, findings illustrate how both variability in the environment (linguistic input) and variability in the organism (lesion characteristics) work together to contribute to plasticity in language learning

HIV Antibody Screening: An Ethical Framework for Evaluating Proposed Programs

The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) poses a compelling ethical challenge to medicine, science, public health, the legal system, and our political democracy. This report focuses on one aspect of that challenge: the use of blood tests to identify individuals who have been infected with the retrovirus human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In this article, we follow the terminology recently proposed by the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses; that is, we use the term human immunodeficiency virus. This replaces the more cumbersome dual terminology of human T-cell lymphotropic virus type III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus (HTLV-III/LAV). The issue is urgent: the tests are already in use and plans to implement them much more broadly are being proposed. The issue is also complex: at stake is a potential conflict between the community\u27s interests in stopping the spread of a devastating disease and in preserving important values of individual liberty and equal rights

Social-Emotional Keys to the Division of Power

Social organizers concerned with facilitating the reallocation of power must not overlook psychological issues. Within groups, power hierarchies are a function of individual methods of coping with social-emotional interactions. Clinical insights suggest that both empowered and disempowered people participate in the process of establishing and maintaining this hierarchial structure

The costs and revenues generated by low and moderate income housing in the suburbs; a study of Newton, Massachusetts.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. Thesis. 1973. M.C.P.Bibliography: leaves 176-179.M.C.P