Updating HMDA

Carol Lewis of the Boston Fed provides lenders and others who track HMDA (Home Mortgage Disclosure Act) with an overview of changes to the Regulation that takes effect in 2003. She reviews the Regulation's expanding coverage, additional data reporting requirements, and definition changes.Home Mortgage Disclosure Act

Foreclosure in Rhode Island

Rhode Island is a nonjudicial foreclosure state. That results in a fast-moving foreclosure process and few official statistics. It also means that pinpointing leading causes and hotspots is tough.Foreclosure - Rhode Island

Regulatory Q & A

Regulatory Q&A discusses a variety of topics including payday lending, notifications regarding private mortgage insurance (PMI), individual development accounts (IDAs), and other issues.Regulation Z: Truth in Lending ; Regulation C: Home Mortgage Disclosure ; Regulation H: Membership of State Banking Institutions in the Federal Reserve System ; Regulation BB: Community Reinvestment ; Regulation E: Electronic Fund Transfers ; Regulation D: Reserve Requirements of Depository Institutions

Check 21 basics: a quick guide for consumer advocates

Check 21 is changing how the country’s checks are processed. The Boston Fed’s Carol Lewis answers questions about how this new law affects consumers.Check collection systems

The Fair Credit Reporting Act gets an overhaul

Carol Lewis, a compliance examiner at the Boston Fed, reviews the major changes to the Fair Credit Reporting Act.Consumer protection ; Consumer credit ; Fair Credit Reporting Act

Contesting Genetic Knowledge-Practices in Livestock Breeding: Biopower, Biosocial Collectivities, and Heterogeneous Resistances

Cattle and sheep breeders in the UK and elsewhere increasingly draw on genetic techniques in order to make breeding decisions. Many breeders support such techniques, while others argue against them for a variety of reasons, including their preference for the ‘traditions' of visual-based and pedigree-based selections. Meanwhile, even for those institutions and breeders who promote genetic techniques, the outcomes are not always as predicted. We build on our recent use of Foucault's discussions of biopower to examine the effects of the introduction of genetic techniques in UK livestock breeding in order to begin to explore the diffuse and capillary nature of resistance within relations of biopower. We focus specifically on how resistance and contestation can be understood through the joint lenses of biopower and an understanding of livestock breeding as knowledge-practices enacted within heterogeneous biosocial collectivities. In some instances these collectivities coalesce around shared endeavour, such as increasing the valency of genetic evaluation within livestock breeding. Yet such mixed collectivities also open up opportunities for counter-conduct: heterogeneous resistances to and contestations of genetic evaluation as something represented as progressive and inevitable. We focus on exploring such modes of resistance using detailed empirical research with livestock breeders and breeding institutions. We demonstrate how in different and specific ways geneticisation becomes problematised, and is contested and made more complex, through the knowledge-practices of breeders, the bodies of animals, and the complex relationships between different institutions in livestock breeding and rearing

The contested aesthetics of farmed animals : visual and genetic views of the body

Farmed animals have long been the subject of aesthetic appreciation. They are valued for their particular contribution to the aesthetics of agricultural landscapes and can act as important visual signifiers of geographical locality (Evans and Yarwood 1995). In these ways farmed animals may be seen as contributing to the formation of a longstanding romantic or pastoral gaze upon rural or farmed landscapes, a gaze associated with notions of the rural idyll which structure many visitors’ appreciation of the countryside (Urry 1990, 1995). For those actually involved in agriculture, as livestock breeders and farmers, the visual evaluation of farmed animals in the particular sites and spaces of the farm has further layers of interest and intricacy centring around a persistent tension: that within the particularly embodied, biological practices of livestock breeding, there is a constant and complex interplay and relationship between these animals’ functionality and aesthetic appeal. Although anyone might experience an aesthetic response to a farmed animal, it is the particularly intense engagements with them experienced by breeders that produce the situated aesthetic encounters with and knowledges of them that interest us in this chapter

Misc. Pub. 99-6

Sausages, one of the oldest forms of processed food, are a means of using and preserving animal trimmings. The hot dog is a specialized sausage. It originated in Germany where it was named “dachshund” sausage because it looked like the popular badger (dachs) hound (hund). The U.S. hot dog originated at the Polo Grounds in New York. Vendors hawked dachshund sausages in buns while a sports cartoonist sketched a barking dachshund nestled warmly in a bun. He labeled the cartoon “hot dog”. Today the hot dog enjoys popularity throughout the world

Multiple Factors Affect Job Satisfaction of Hospital RNs

Highlights findings from an analysis of variables associated with job satisfaction levels of registered nurses working in hospitals, including health status, race/ethnicity, career orientation, working conditions, workload, and benefits

Nursing Informatics: is IT for All Nurses?

Given the definition if nursing informatics it should be a core activity for all nurses, and seen as a tool to support high quality care giving. Three studies reported in this paper show that this is not the case. Qualified nurses are perceived as having poor skills and knowledge, and as being resistant to IT as it takes them away from patient care. Educators share this lack of knowledge, and neither academics nor students consider nursing informatics to be a clinical skill. In order to use computers while on placement students were found to need confidence in their skills, and to feel that the use of computers was encouraged. Socialisation into the profession is an important part of nurse education, and currently students are being socialised into a professional role where they are not encouraged to use computers, or to consider their use to be a key nursing task. If nursing informatics is to truly become a way of improving patient care this needs to be changed, and preregistration education is a key place to start to bring this change about