Health Care in California and National Health Reform

CED believes that the U.S. employer-based health insurance system is failing -- and the recently enacted health reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), will not reverse that dynamic. Fewer American workers have insurance now than did ten years ago; and fewer American firms are offering health insurance now than did then. Many people do without care because they are not covered, or fear -- with justification -- that one illness or the loss of a job will cost them their coverage. The competitiveness of American firms is threatened by the cost of health insurance. Public budgets at every level of government are eroded by the costs of health care, including costs that previously were paid by employers. Although the new law will create pathways to private coverage for some people who are not insured by their employers, and many others will be made eligible for Medicaid, the clear intent is to maintain employer coverage for as many as possible -- and there is precious little in the law to improve this core structure of the U.S. healthcare system. We have proposed a fundamental restructuring of the health-care system to address this crisis. With the nation having focused on this issue, we have worked to learn what the health-care system of California can teach us about national reform, and how national reform might affect California

Presentation: The Budget In Free-Fall

The presenter asks: How much, and how quickly, has the federal budget picture changed?How realistic is the budget "baseline" today?What is the outlook for the public debt?Conclusions in brief: The budget has worsened enormously in the past six months.Huge anomalies make the current budget projections necessarily unhelpful and potentially misleading.Most current budget presentations make the deficit and debt outlook appear far less troubling than it really is

Ideological efficacy before martial efficacy: on the relationship between martial arts, theatricality and society

This article relates the training of gendai budō/mudo to theatrical performance. While there are already studies that discuss theatricality in martial arts, the aim of this paper is to provide a systematic overview of the theatrical structuring of elements of martial arts training. This could be further developed in the study of different martial arts and in comparative case studies. For this purpose, Andreas Kotte’s theory of scenic processes is used to arrange different phenomena in martial arts training systematically, representing the constitutive aspects of theatricality as derived from theatre and performance art. Gendai budō/mudo are used as cases to elaborate a systematic approach to the analysis of martial arts as theatrical performance. These examples were chosen because of their emphasis on aesthetics and technical expertise, rather than practical fighting applications. While theatricality in martial arts is usually seen as something for enjoyment or possibly to improve and display athleticism, it is argued here that theatricality has to be viewed as a mode of communication to convincingly elevate and spread information. It is therefore possible to trace ideological features such norms, values, and ideals in the theatrical staging of martial arts training

Tip Your HAT to Your New Teammate

As the evolution of human-AI teams (HATs) progresses, it will cause a paradigm shift of previously accepted group dynamic and social exchange principles. Though the broad context of HAT development encompasses three dimensions: job displacement, job augmentation, and job creation, we focus on job augmentation, where AI (Artificial Intelligence) and humans will work best in collaboration. We investigate the impact on theory and implications to practice as the unique challenges and opportunities presented by these new collaborative interactions and exchange dynamics arise

Disability History: Humanity Worth Defending

The authors consider the potential impact of teaching disability history and awareness in social studies classrooms. Social studies educators are encouraged to use disability history to move the concept of disability beyond Individualized Education Program (IEP) labels and medical pathology, allowing students to study and better understand the evolving social and cultural context of disability. An examination of disability “models” and the historical evolution of disability language is followed by strategies and resources for incorporating disability history and awareness in the social studies classroom. Ohio social studies educators are encouraged to support a Disability History and Awareness week or month in their state

EEG cross-frequency phase synchronization as an index of memory matching in visual search

Visual perception is influenced by our expectancies about incoming sensory information. It is assumed that mental templates of expected sensory input are created and compared to actual input, which can be matching or not. When such mental templates are held in working memory, cross-frequency phase synchronization (CFS) between theta and gamma band activity has been proposed to serve matching processes between prediction and sensation. We investigated how this is affected by the number of activated templates that could be matched by comparing conditions where participants had to keep either one or multiple templates in mind for successful visual search. We found a transient CFS between EEG theta and gamma activity in an early time window around 150Â ms after search display presentation, in right hemispheric parietal cortex. Our results suggest that for single template conditions, stronger transient theta-gamma CFS at posterior sites contralateral to target presentation can be observed than for multiple templates. This can be interpreted as evidence to the idea of sequential attentional templates. But mainly, it is understood in line with previous theoretical accounts strongly arguing for transient synchronization between posterior theta and gamma phase as a neural correlate of matching incoming sensory information with contents from working memory and as evidence for limitations in memory matching during multiple template search