4,948 research outputs found
Statistical and Clinical Aspects of Hospital Outcomes Profiling
Hospital profiling involves a comparison of a health care provider's
structure, processes of care, or outcomes to a standard, often in the form of a
report card. Given the ubiquity of report cards and similar consumer ratings in
contemporary American culture, it is notable that these are a relatively recent
phenomenon in health care. Prior to the 1986 release of Medicare hospital
outcome data, little such information was publicly available. We review the
historical evolution of hospital profiling with special emphasis on outcomes;
present a detailed history of cardiac surgery report cards, the paradigm for
modern provider profiling; discuss the potential unintended negative
consequences of public report cards; and describe various statistical
methodologies for quantifying the relative performance of cardiac surgery
programs. Outstanding statistical issues are also described.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342307000000096 the
Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Less-Networked Speaker Communities and Digital Language Archives
Fieldwork, description, and preservation of research results are often seen as endpoints of language documentation projects. Although archives are doing their best to ensure that source communities can ultimately gain access to the language materials they produce, little is being done to facilitate their involvement in the ongoing curation of those materials. Enhancing and extending such involvement will significantly increase both the scholarly value of documented materials and its impact in source communities. Using the situations of rural Papua New Guinea and Cameroon as model cases, this project will bring together an international group of scholars, technical experts, and community members for a two day conference to intensively explore appropriate âbridgingâ technologies and make recommendations to help digital language archives overcome fundamental obstacles to maintaining direct, ongoing relationships with archive stakeholders who reside in less-networked communities
Lexis as most local context: towards an SFL approach to lexicology
The world of lexis is vast and complex and it is generally accepted in psycholinguistics that it is represented as part of a large complex network. However, in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) modelling lexis has remained a relatively underdeveloped area of the theory. The ideas underpinning this paper stem from exploring the interface of context and lexicology, asking how SFL does and could handle lexis within the theory. Here the SFL concept of context is used to develop a similar account of lexis. The argumentation is based on the assumption that âknowing aboutâ context and 'knowing aboutâ lexis is contained and maintained within a networked cognitive system. The common view of the relationship between context and lexis is generally one of disambiguation, frequently through collocation. However, I argue that there is more involved than that. In this paper, I use the SFL approach to context to establish the first steps towards an analogous approach to lexicology. The conclusion offered here is that it is theoretically plausible to draw on the dimension of instantiation, in a complementary way to delicacy, in order to model lexis as most local context, where the lexeme (or lemma) is modelled as meaning potential
A Critique of Four Grounded Theory Texts
This article is a review of Discovery of Grounded Theory by Glaser and Strauss, Basics of Qualitative Research by Strauss and Corbin, Constructing Grounded Theory by Charmaz, and Situational Analysis by Clarke across six categories, including the authors\u27 purposes, structure of the books, practical applications of the books\u27 methods, how the authors approach theory and data emergence, how the authors judge grounded theory research and finally, if the authors have achieved their purposes. For the most part, I found that all books accomplished their purposes. Discovery was weak in practical applications but strong on logical arguments for the usage of grounded theory. Basics contained many practical tools but some of the techniques discussed forced data into certain categories. Constructing was written in a very clear, easy-to-follow format that novices might find useful. Situational contained many tools, but with a focus on situations rather than actors
Denzin\u27s The Qualitative Manifesto Book Summary and Critique
Ethnography, Corporate Ethnography, and Corporate Researc
Bringing Down the Establishment: Faith-Based and Community Initiative Funding, Christianity, and Same-Sex Equality
As if born to: The social construction of a deficit identity position for adopted persons
Many adopted persons report experiencing ongoing problems with identity, often resulting in feelings of personal deficiency to imprison their sense of self. The dominant position of the literature eon adoption individualizes and problematizes âidentityâ issues by locating the source of difficulties to individual traits of the adopted person and his/her adoptive family. Consequently, the struggle associated with the identity âadoptedâ is typically constructed as an individual struggle.
Drawing on my own lived experience as an adopted women, I have been engaged in a critical inquiry of the traditional view of adoption in order to understand the problem of identity not as an individual problem but as a social construction rooted in power. From this critical inquiry, I have developed a post-structuralist framework of adoption which offers a more liberatory interpretation of the adoption experience, in general, and the problem of identity, in particular. This theoretical perspective radically reframes the problems of identity formation within adoption by showing its social origins through the concrete production of difference at the level of the individual.
The purpose of this inquiry is to show the social construction of adoption as a problem of identity and to examine the ideological purposes of that construction. I interviewed eight participants who are self-identified âadoption advocatesâ and who openly acknowledged having struggled with the identity âadopted.â The methodological approach is an in-depth interview study informed by feminist research principles and hermeneutics.
I argue that identity formation is an intersubjective process of construction acquired through shared experiences of recognition. For adopted persons, the template âas if born toâ that is active in the formation of identity is problematic because to think and live âas ifâ something is true when it is not intolerable and injurious to oneâs developing view of self. Additionally, I argue that being produced âadoptedâ is harmful because potentials are harmed in that process of construction.
In reviewing some of the salient experiences of adoption identified by the participantsâ stories, as well as my own, I have selected four sites of injury sustained to our identity formation. Specifically, the four sites of injury selected for discussion include: The Birth Story⌠Living a Pretense; Living Silence⌠Living Silent; The Experience of Being Mothered⌠The Desire to Belong; and Looking for Recognition⌠Claiming our Difference. Generally, my interpretation disputes widely held beliefs that suggest problems of identity in adoption are caused by early attachment disturbance and infant trauma. Instead, following a social construction approach, my different interpretation of adoption claims that the primacy of the biological family as a cultural ideal in Western Society causes harm to adopted persons
Norwegian dairy farmer's preferences for breeding goal traits and associations with herd and farm characteristics
The aims of this study were to investigate variation and clustering in breeding goal trait preferences among Norwegian dairy farmers and to identify factors with a systematic influence on their preferences. An internet-based questionnaire was sent out to dairy farmers connected to the Norwegian co-operative breeding organization Geno (N = 8222), of which 10.8% answered (N = 888). Of the 15 suggested traits fertility had the highest overall ranking, while parasite resistance and methane emission had the lowest. Four distinct preference clusters were identified by the means of cluster analysis, of which two had a high preference for milk production. Differences in terms of farm and herd characteristics between clusters suggests a mixture of systematic and
intrinsic effects on breeding goal trait priorities. This study shows that Norwegian dairy farmersâ preferences for breeding goal traits fall into four distinct clusters, both affected by herd and farm characteristics along with intrinsic value
Self-organisation to criticality in a system without conservation law
We numerically investigate the approach to the stationary state in the
nonconservative Olami-Feder-Christensen (OFC) model for earthquakes. Starting
from initially random configurations, we monitor the average earthquake size in
different portions of the system as a function of time (the time is defined as
the input energy per site in the system). We find that the process of
self-organisation develops from the boundaries of the system and it is
controlled by a dynamical critical exponent z~1.3 that appears to be universal
over a range of dissipation levels of the local dynamics. We show moreover that
the transient time of the system scales with system size L as . We argue that the (non-trivial) scaling of the transient time in the
OFC model is associated to the establishment of long-range spatial correlations
in the steady state.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures; accepted for publication in Journal of Physics
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