Situating care in mainstream health economics: an ethical dilemma?

Standard health economics concentrates on the provision of care by medical professionals. Yet ‘care’ receives scant analysis; it is portrayed as a spillover effect or externality in the form of interdependent utility functions. In this context care can only be conceived as either acts of altruism or as social capital. Both conceptions are subject to considerable problems stemming from mainstream health economics’ reliance on a reductionist social model built around instrumental rationality and consequentialism. Subsequently, this implies a disregard for moral rules and duties and the compassionate aspects of behaviour. Care as an externality is a second-order concern relative to self-interested utility maximization, and is therefore crowded out by the parameters of the standard model. We outline an alternative relational approach to conceptualising care based on the social embeddedness of the individual that emphasises the ethical properties of care. The deontological dimension of care suggests that standard health economics is likely to undervalue the importance of care and caring in medicine

The development of self-efficacy in the teaching of reading

Licensed primary teachers (N = 93) in nine schools completed surveys of their self-efficacy beliefs, level of implementation, and the value they placed on the strategies before and after participating in four levels of inservice training in the Tucker Signing Strategies for Reading. The independent variable was the structure of the training teachers received, and the dependent variables were teacher sense of efficacy in general, teacher sense of efficacy for reading, implementation of the reading strategies, and the value of the reading strategies taught. Components of the training for the use of Tucker Signing Strategies for Reading were structured into four treatment groups aligned with three of the four sources of self-efficacy development identified by Bandura (1997). Findings indicated that implementation of the Tucker Signing Strategies for Reading increased as inservice training increased in intensity. The most powerful training format was mastery experience, which was distinguished from the other training formats by the addition of follow-up coaching. Inservice training format made a significant contribution to the change in teacher sense of efficacy for reading. Initial teacher sense of efficacy in general and initial teacher sense of efficacy for reading were not factors in predicting the level of implementation of the reading strategies. Final teacher sense of efficacy for reading made a significant contribution to explaining variance in implementation. The strength of the effect of the follow-up coaching workshop model on implementation overpowered the other tested variables. Statistical significance of the change in sense of efficacy for reading was lost when compared with the impact of the follow-up coaching model. Value covaried almost perfectly with implementation for this sample. Unexpected decreases occurred in the change in efficacy scores across treatment groups; a surprising number of participants rated their sense of efficacy lower on the final survey than on the first. Dips in self-efficacy beliefs with exposure to a potentially powerful new teaching strategy underscore the importance of the final treatment component, follow-up coaching, to bolstering teachers\u27 motivation to overcome the anxiety of trying something new

Change in focus due to motion

The physical properties of a system at rest are not the same when the system is in motion. These relativistic effects, such as changes of length and mass, are usually minute when the velocity of the system is small compared to the speed of light and therefore of little practical interest. However, this paper reports changes of the velocity of light in a moving medium which lead to changes in refractive index and therefore focal length that are not small. The change in focal length can be as much as a fraction of a millimeter when the velocity of the system is as low 1/10,000th the speed of ltght. Conceivably these effects could cause \u27 defocusing of optical instruments carried on space flights

(WP 2019-02) A Road Not Taken? A Brief History of Care in Economic Thought

Care is central to the human experience and part of the social provisioning process. Adam Smith recognized this, associating care with sympathy. Later contributions in the political economy tradition also provide scope for an analysis of care, but none as developed as Smith’s. With the emergence of the current mainstream, care is marginalized. Kenneth Boulding’s analysis provides an opportunity to interrogate care in the economy, but he fails to explicitly acknowledge care. It is left to feminist economics to highlight the centrality of care. An implication is that it challenges the conventional rubric of economic organization predicated on self-interest

SAM-2 ground-truth plan: Correlative measurements for the Stratospheric Aerosol Measurement-2 (SAM 2) sensor on the Nimbus G satellite

The SAM-2 will fly aboard the Nimbus-G satellite for launch in the fall of 1978 and measure stratospheric vertical profiles of aerosol extinction in high latitude bands. The plan gives details of the location and times for the simultaneous satellite/correlative measurements for the nominal launch time, the rationale and choice of the correlative sensors, their characteristics and expected accuracies, and the conversion of their data to extinction profiles. The SAM-2 expected instrument performance and data inversion results are presented. Various atmospheric models representative of polar stratospheric aerosols are used in the SAM-2 and correlative sensor analyses

Substituent effects in the mass spectra of substituted benzils

The mass spectra of a series of m- and p-substituted benzils have been determined at several ionizing voltages below 20 eV, and at 70 eV. The fractional intensities of the molecule-ion (FM), substituted benzoyl ion (FX) and unsubstituted benzoyl ion (FH) were obtained as a function of energy from measured ionization efficiency (IE) curves. Ionization potentials (IP), and appearance potentials for the substituted (APX) and unsubstituted (APH) benzoyl ions were determined from the IE curves by a semi-logarithmic method. Various correlations of ion intensity and energy parameters with substituent constants (σ+,σ) are examined; by the best standards of solution chemistry these are generally poor. Fair correlations are obtained between log (FX/FH) or APX-APH and σ+(σ )and these are interpreted in terms of the expected effect of substituents on the stabilities of the product ions in the decompositions. A good correlation is observed between log (FX/FH) and APX-APH; it suggests that substituents mainly affect FX/FH by changinq the activation energies for the competing decompositions of the benzil molecule-ions. The competitive shift has a marked effect on these appearance potentials, and in this system AP - IP is therefore not a good measure of the activation energy for the primary decompositions

LOCALIS: Locally-adaptive Line Simplification for GPU-based Geographic Vector Data Visualization

Visualization of large vector line data is a core task in geographic and cartographic systems. Vector maps are often displayed at different cartographic generalization levels, traditionally by using several discrete levels-of-detail (LODs). This limits the generalization levels to a fixed and predefined set of LODs, and generally does not support smooth LOD transitions. However, fast GPUs and novel line rendering techniques can be exploited to integrate dynamic vector map LOD management into GPU-based algorithms for locally-adaptive line simplification and real-time rendering. We propose a new technique that interactively visualizes large line vector datasets at variable LODs. It is based on the Douglas-Peucker line simplification principle, generating an exhaustive set of line segments whose specific subsets represent the lines at any variable LOD. At run time, an appropriate and view-dependent error metric supports screen-space adaptive LOD levels and the display of the correct subset of line segments accordingly. Our implementation shows that we can simplify and display large line datasets interactively. We can successfully apply line style patterns, dynamic LOD selection lenses, and anti-aliasing techniques to our line rendering

CELLULAR REQUIREMENTS FOR THE PRIMARY IN VITRO ANTIBODY RESPONSE TO DNP-FICOLL

The cellular requirements for the primary in vitro IgM and IgG response to dinitrophenyl-substituted Ficoll were examined. Neither thymus-derived lymphocytes nor macrophage-rich splenic adherent cells were required for anti-DNP antibody synthesis. DNP-Ficoll is therefore tentatively classified as a "thymic-independent" antigen