Teen Smoking and Birth Outcomes

In the U.S. teen mothers are more likely to give birth to low birth weight babies than non-teen mothers. There is also substantial evidence that smoking is a risk factor correlated with low birth weight. Low birth weight is a costly outcome in both the short and long term for parents, children, and society at large. This paper examines the causal link between teen age smoking behavior and low birth weight. We use a variety of empirical techniques including fixed effects and a matching estimator to identify the impact of smoking on babies of teen and non-teen mothers. We find that both OLS and matching estimator results yield large impacts of smoking on birth weight for teens and adults. However, when we control for unobservables through a fixed effects model, the impact of smoking on birth weight is diminished and there are relatively small differences in the impact of smoking on birth weight between teens and non-teens.

Estimating Differential Responses to Local Fiscal Conditions: A Mixture Model Analysis

Alternative hypotheses exist regarding the impact of local sales and income taxes on local governments' taxing and spending decisions. One hypothesis is that local governments use sales and income taxes to pay for spending increases and leave property tax collections unchanged, while an equally plausible alternative is that local governments use sales and income taxes to reduce property taxes. Traditional models that restrict the impact of these local taxes to be the same across all local governments are not able to capture both types of behavior. The methodological difficulty lies in allowing for differences in behavior with no a priori information on which cities belong in which category. In this article, the authors use panel data to estimate a mixture model of spending and property tax response to the existence of local taxes. These empirical results provide evidence to support both hypotheses. These differences are both substantive and statistically significant

Understanding and (dis)trusting food assurance schemes::Consumer confidence and the ‘knowledge fix’

This paper uses evidence from focus groups with consumers in England to consider how consumers understand and evaluate a range of proxies or intermediary organisations that offer assurance about food and consumer products, particularly voluntary certification schemes. This addresses the current concern in developed economies about providing information in order to reconnect consumers with food producers and to support moves towards more local, fairly traded and sustainable production. However, we show that such a ‘knowledge fix’ approach of providing information may not reconnect consumers so easily. Participants found it particularly difficult to work out what certification involved and what kinds of organisations were providing assurance. They built vernacular typologies and comparative judgements that did not necessarily identify or prioritise ‘independent’ third-party certification as the gold standard, not least because of the practical difficulties of monitoring complex supply chains, and expressed confusion and scepticism about how well food assurance schemes could work in practice. Our results therefore problematise the knowledge fix urged in the literature and emphasise instead the need to better understand how consumers make sense of assurance information in different contexts

Expanding Nursing Faculty Development Through a Fitness Initiative

Background: Prioritizing fitness in the workplace can aid in promoting a more contemporary view of faculty development. As a result, a workplace fitness initiative was developed in a Southern college of nursing to address the physical activity of faculty and staff during work hours and to promote a more contemporary view of faculty development. Aim: This study examined perceptions of the fitness initiative and explored opportunities for improvement. Methods:  Faculty and staff completed a survey about the fitness initiative including perceptions of workplace fitness, motivation to join, most enjoyable aspects of the fitness initiative, and opportunities for improvement.  Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and qualitative responses were coded and analyzed using thematic content analysis. Results: One hundred percent of survey respondents (n = 35) believed in the importance of workplace fitness. Four themes were identified related to the perception of workplace fitness: workplace fitness can increase self-reported movement and productivity and support personal goals. Survey respondents also appreciated the comradery, connection, and team-building that the initiative created. However, time was a barrier to engagement. Conclusion: As nurses are urged to model health-promoting behaviors, a college fitness initiative should be considered for encouraging and normalizing workplace fitness and promoting a more contemporary view of faculty development that focuses on factors outside the traditional faculty role. Our fitness initiative demonstrated that such programs are feasible, well-accepted, promote fitness in physical or virtual workplaces, and help to build connection and comradery among faculty and staff

Bystander intervention in coercive control:Do relationship to the victim, bystander gender, and concerns influence willingness to intervene?

With rates of coercive control (CC) increasing, there is a need to ensure that intervention programs are underpinned by evidence-based research. Current interventions are scarce, with their efficacy rarely established. Most current interventions appear to rely on victims seeking support from formal sources/agencies, despite suggestions that victims are more likely to confide in people they know, such as their friends. Researchers suggest that a victim’s friends may provide an effective source of support and intervention. The aim of this study was to fill the gap in the literature exploring whether the closeness of the relationship to the victim, bystander gender, and bystander concerns influenced attitudes toward intervening in CC situations. The study used an experimental design, whereby participants were randomly allocated to read a vignette depicting a CC scenario involving a friend, colleague, or stranger, and quantitative methods were used to examine bystanders’ willingness and concerns about intervening. The sample was 340 Australian participants (229 female, 111 male), recruited from social media, namely community Facebook groups. The results indicated that friends were significantly more willing to intervene than colleagues or strangers, while strangers reported the highest concerns about intervening. Females reported significantly higher willingness to intervene than men despite also reporting higher concerns. Exploratory analysis of concerns about intervening revealed that the participants were most concerned about risk of harm and their beliefs in their ability to successfully intervene. These findings have implications for bystander intervention programs and campaigns, including offering a range of potential directions to enhance intervention program content

Conservation biology and conservation paleobiology meet the Anthropocene together: history matters

As a species, we have reached a tipping point for Earth derived from our unsustainable resource use. While conservation efforts occurred early in human civilization, it was not until 1980 that the full force of environmental destruction, including the Santa Barbara oil spill in the 1970s, culminated in the new discipline of conservation biology focused on the biosphere. Similarly, conservation paleobiology, named two decades later, brings the unique perspective of the fossil record to conservation efforts, uniting biosphere and geosphere scientists. To date, conservation history does not include paleontological or geological perspectives. Further, each discipline has a different benchmark—near time—for when Earth’s ecosystems were modified by humans. Accordingly, the history of conservation efforts leading up to conservation biology and conservation paleobiology was examined from a geological and ecological framework. To provide a benchmark for near time, the hominin record and their geo-environmental modifications were also examined and revealed that by the start of the Holocene, all continents except ice-covered Antarctica and Greenland had human-modified ecosystems. Therefore, near time is dispensable when the Holocene Epoch is universally understood and precisely defined as a time when H. sapiens dominated environments. Lastly, a conservation corps is urgently needed, following the long tradition of F.D. R.’s Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s and J.F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps of the 1960s, to promote a global network connecting all students and practitioners of conservation disciplines to focus on biotic resilience, recovery, and solutions for the world’s most pressing environmental problems

Skeuomorphic Time: How Autocinema and Epilepsy Remake Temporality

This thesis uses feminist film theory and filmmaking practices as an entry point to investigate Geschwind's syndrome, a set of symptoms accompanying temporal lobe epilepsy that I suffer from. Geschwind's syndrome has been hypothesized to be responsible for cases of hypergraphia, a form of compulsive documentation in writing or drawing, as well as hyperreligiosity, states of euphoria, deja and jamais vu, and altered sexuality (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, and various figures of religious importance are speculated to have suffered from the condition, with their works marking the influence of some of these experiences)(LaPlante 2016). Deja vu is an experience familiar to many, whereas jamais vu –the phenomenon of being suddenly unable to recognize familiar locations, faces, and objects – is more rare. The sudden appearance of such states introduces bumps, slips, skips, and loops into one’s sense of linear time. While these kinds of experiences are present in all human encounters to some degree, one finds them intensified in both the Geschwind Syndrome and cinema, with regard to cinema’s ability to convey ecstatic or heightened affective states, warped perceptions of time, and the desire for self-documentation in distinctive ways. Taking this connection as a starting point, this paper explores what the Geschwind Syndrome and cinema can learn from one another by interrogating the affordances of mental and audiovisual intensification for understanding how humanity comes to terms with time and mortality. On a more speculative note, it also asks whether cinema is itself a manifestation of the Geschwind Syndrome or of the desire to transcend the looming end of our mortal perception. Skeuomorphs, my thesis film, works to relate hypergraphia to various complex affective states, including nostalgia, disembodiment, and reflectiveness. "Skeuomorphs" investigates how we document and understand time, and how the technology we use to do so interacts with our inborn senses of the sacred and the sentimental