LRR Focus: NAFTA Monitoring

[Excerpt] A year and a half after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, the rosy picture painted by NAFTA supporters has turned grey. A growing number of labor activists, researchers, and academics are developing a more accurate picture of how NAFTA is affecting our lives

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and regulating capital flows: recommendations for strengthening proposed safeguards in the leaked TPP investment chapter

This repository item contains a policy brief from the Boston University Global Economic Governance Initiative. The Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) is a research program of the Center for Finance, Law & Policy, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. It was founded in 2008 to advance policy-relevant knowledge about governance for financial stability, human development, and the environment.The leaked text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement’s investment chapter reveals that negotiators are giving serious consideration to a safeguard intended to allow nations to regulate capital flows. It is critical that the safeguard be drafted in such a way that governments have sufficient policy flexibility to prevent and mitigate financial instability

Overgeneral past and future thinking in dysphoria: the role of emotional cues and cueing methodology

Overgeneral memory, where individuals exhibit difficulties in retrieving specific episodes from autobiographical memory, has been consistently linked with emotional disorders. However, the majority of this literature has relied upon a single methodology, in which participants respond to emotional cue words with explicit instructions to retrieve/simulate specific events. Through use of sentence completion tasks the current studies explored whether overgenerality represents a habitual pattern of thinking that extends to how individuals naturally consider their personal past and future life story. In both studies, when compared with controls, dysphoric individuals evidenced overgeneral thinking style with respect to their personal past. However, overgeneral future thinking was only evident when the sentence stems included emotional words. These findings highlight the importance of investigating the overgenerality phenomenon using a variety of cueing techniques and results are discussed with reference to the previous literature exploring overgenerality and cognitive models of depression

Making Room in Shelters: Fulfilling the Need for Abused Women, Children and Animals

This paper examines the relationship between abuse to humans and animals by reviewing literature regarding the bond between humans and animals and the ignored problem of abuse. Because women may delay leaving their abusers to keep their animals safe, it is important for organizations to meet the needs of both humans and animals. The following paper evaluate programs that already exist in Minnesota. I examined the best practices in Minnesota shelters to determine what is working to successfully meet the needs of abused women, children and animals. Recommendations were made from the analysis to ensure that the needs of human and nonhuman animals can be met and best practices are developed

Evaluating the RASS and CAP-D in a Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit

Abstract Problem: Pediatric delirium is highly prevalent in the intensive care setting, as much as seventy to eighty-seven percent. Kalvas & Harrison (2020) found that sixty-six percent of critically ill children in a pediatric intensive care unit suffered from a diagnosis of delirium. Delirium has been widely linked with increased costs, mortality, and length of stay. Methods: The quality improvement (QI) project used a descriptive design to collect retrospective and prospective data before and after an individualized bedside education session was completed. The QI project used a purposive convenience sampling to assess the ability to accurately identify the presence of delirium and its sub-type among patients undergoing cardiac surgery in a pediatric cardiac intensive care unit (CICU). Results: Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests were ran and although there was not statistical significance between the identification of delirium and its sub-types, however there was a notable shift. A larger sample size may be necessary to show statistical significance. Implications for practice: There should be continued education on the use of the Richmond Agitation Sedation Score (RASS) and Cornell Assessment of Pediatric Delirium (CAP-D), whether that be quarterly or annually. There should also be initial education on the RASS and CAP-D for newly hired staff. The RASS and CAP-D should continue to be used identify delirium and its sub-types accurately. Multiple Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles may be necessary to reach even greater compliance. One such PDSA cycle might include adding delirium specific rounding to practice

A New Definition of Magic Realism: An Analysis of Three Novels as Examples of Magic Realism in a Postcolonial Diaspora

In the world of literature, magic realism has yet to find its place as an established genre or style. The following paper posits that magic realism stems from marginalized writers in a postcolonial diaspora, attempting to make sense of their world without the influence of Western gaze. Gabriel García Márquez in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight’s Children, and Toni Morrison in her novel Paradise use similar elements of magic realism in order to establish a grounding mythology for their cultures. These three novels can demonstrate the direction of fiction that uses magic realism: one where the marginalized overturn the characteristics of the dominant discourse and take their place in the world of writing

An integrated approach for evaluating the effectiveness of landslide risk reduction in unplanned communities in the Caribbean

Despite the recognition of the need for mitigation approaches to landslide risk in developing countries, the delivery of ‘on-the-ground’ measures is rarely undertaken. With respect to other ‘natural’ hazards it is widely reported that mitigation can pay. However, the lack of such an evidence-base in relation to landslides in developing countries hinders advocacy amongst decision makers for expenditure on ex-ante measures. This research addresses these limitations directly by developing and applying an integrated risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis of physical landslide mitigation measures implemented in an unplanned community in the Eastern Caribbean. In order to quantify the level of landslide risk reduction achieved, landslide hazard and vulnerability were modelled (before and after the intervention) and project costs, direct and indirect benefits were monetised. It is shown that the probability of landslide occurrence has been substantially reduced by implementing surface-water drainage measures, and that the benefits of the project outweigh the costs by a ratio of 2.7 to 1. This paper adds to the evidence base that ‘mitigation pays’ with respect to landslide risk in the most vulnerable communities – thus strengthening the argument for ex-ante measures. This integrated project evaluation methodology should be suitable for adoption as part of the community-based landslide mitigation project cycle, and it is hoped that this resource, and the results of this study, will stimulate further such programmes.Landslide modelling, Risk assessment, Cost Benefit Analysis, Developing countries, Community