6,671 research outputs found
Health Care Fraud
Provides an overview of trends in fraud and abuse involving private insurance, Medicaid, and Medicare; types of schemes; risk factors; and consequences. Examines federal and state laws aimed at healthcare fraud, reported cases, and enforcement efforts
Troubling the âWEâ in art education: Slam poetry as subversive duoethnography
Scholarly dialogues are filled with discussions of teacherâs personal perspectives, experiences, and challenges - but rarely do these dialogues include the narratives that lie beneath the surface. The subversive tales confronting stories of microagressions, alternate histories, and institutionalized norms that shape the educational landscape we navigate daily. This paper is focused on bringing to the surface a call and response lament of two social justice-oriented art educators--one Black, the other White. Using the dialogic methodology of duoethnography and the performative aspects of slam poetry, we share our racialized-teaching accounts as a multisensory experience, where text and performative orality share a chimeric relationship. The slam poem format, along with a critical arts-based perspective, allows us to speak/perform with urgency alongside one another to share tales of an educational landscape rife with racialized inequities. Using the metaphor of eyesight, and its subsequent limitations, our poem references the challenges of human interaction within the rubric of racial categorization. We see slam poetry as a democratic means of performing identity and as a way to subvert the limitations of traditional hegemonic forms and norms and frame our poetic call and response as verses from below. This form of poetic lament frames our socio-political interaction around the concepts of Whiteness and Blackness in and through teaching and learning in art education. We close with brief considerations for how this approach might be generative in critically framing personal and educational interactions between/among/across difference
Emotion words and categories: evidence from lexical decision
We examined the categorical nature of emotion word recognition. Positive, negative, and neutral words were presented in lexical decision tasks. Word frequency was additionally manipulated. In Experiment 1, "positive" and "negative" categories of words were implicitly indicated by the blocked design employed. A signiïŹcant emotionâfrequency interaction was obtained, replicating past research. While positive words consistently elicited faster responses than neutral words, only low frequency negative words demonstrated a similar advantage. In Experiments 2a and 2b, explicit categories ("positive," "negative," and "household" items) were speciïŹed to participants. Positive words again elicited faster responses than did neutral words. Responses to negative words, however, were no different than those to neutral words, regardless of their frequency. The overall pattern of effects indicates that positive words are always facilitated, frequency plays a greater role in the recognition of negative words, and a "negative" category represents a somewhat disparate set of emotions. These results support the notion that emotion word processing may be moderated by distinct systems
Population pressure and the microeconomy of land management in hills and mountains of developing countries:
Concerns about harmful environmental impacts are frequently raised in research and policy debates about population growth in the hills and mountains of developing countries. Although establishing wildlife corridors and biosphere reserves is important for preserving selected biodiverse habitats, for the vast majority of hilly-mountainous lands, the major ecological concerns are for the sustainability of local production systems and for watershed integrity. What matters for sustained use of those lands not only is the number of producers but also what, where and how they produce. Evidence from empirical research indicates that population growth in hills and mountains can lead to land enhancement, degradation, or aspects of both. This can be explained by extending induced innovation theory to address environmental impacts of intensification. Increases in the labor-land endowment ratios of households and in local land demand and labor supply make the opportunity cost of land relative to labor increase. As a result, people use hilly-mountainous land resources more intensively for production and consumption, thus tending to deplete resources and significantly alter habitats. But, at the same time, capital- and labor-intensive methods of replenishing or improving soil productivity may become economically more attractive, production systems that enhance the land if the expected discounted returns are greater than those of systems that degrade the land. Users will choose production systems that enhance the land if the expected discounted returns are greater than those of systems that degrade the land. In addition to population change, other factorsâmarket conditions, local institutions and organizations, information and technology about resource management, and local ecological conditionsâdetermine the returns from various production systems.Environmental impact analysis., Population density.,
On the discrete Peyrard-Bishop model of DNA: stationary solutions and stability
As a first step in the search of an analytical study of mechanical
denaturation of DNA in terms of the sequence, we study stable, stationary
solutions in the discrete, finite and homogeneous Peyrard-Bishop DNA model. We
find and classify all the stationary solutions of the model, as well as
analytic approximations of them, both in the continuum and in the discrete
limits. Our results explain the structure of the solutions reported by
Theodorakopoulos {\em et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 93}, 258101 (2004)] and
provide a way to proceed to the analysis of the generalized version of the
model incorporating the genetic information.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure
Variation in African American parents' use of early childhood physical discipline
Physical discipline is endorsed by a majority of adults in the U.S. including African American (AA) parents who have high rates of endorsement. Although many studies have examined physical discipline use among AA families, few have considered how early
childhood physical discipline varies within the population. Individuals within a cultural group may differ in their engagement in cultural practices (Rogoff, 2003). Furthermore, AA familiesâ characteristics and their contexts, which are shaped by the interaction of social position, racism, and segregation (GarcĂa Coll et al., 1996), likely influence how AA families physically discipline their young children. This study examined variation in early childhood physical discipline among AA families living in low-income communities and relations with demographic and contextual factors. Year 1 data from 310 AA parents living in three regionally distinct low-income communities were used from a sequential longitudinal intervention program study of the development and prevention of conduct disorder. Latent class analyses were conducted using parentsâ responses on a measure, of the frequency of overall physical discipline, spanking, and hitting during prekindergarten and kindergarten. The associations between latent classes and six demographic and contextual factors were examined using the Bolck, Croon, and Hagenaars (BCH) method. The factors were: child gender (59% male); marital status (51% never married); parental education (66% high school graduates and beyond); income (mean = $16.66K, S.D. = 12.50), family stress, and perception of neighborhood safety. Measures included the Family Information Form, Life Changes, and the Neighborhood Questionnaire. After considering two to seven class solutions, five physical discipline classes or sub-groups were identified. Classes were defined by discipline frequency (âInfrequentâ, âWeeklyâ, âMonthlyâ, âAlmost-Every-Dayâ and âWeekly-Allâ) as well as by discipline type (only parents in the âWeekly-Allâ class hit their children). Significant associations were found between class membership, and child gender, marital status, income, and perception of neighborhood safety. Girls were more likely to be physically disciplined infrequently, Ï2(4, N = 310) = 11.88, p = .05. The âWeeklyâ class had significantly fewer married parents than all classes except âAlmost-Every-Dayâ, Ï2(4, N = 310) = 21.56, p < .001. Parents in the âAlmost-Every-Dayâ class had a significantly lower income than parents in all other classes except âWeekly-Allâ, Ï2(4, N = 310) = 10.88, p = .03. Finally, parents in the âAlmost-Every-Dayâ class perceived their neighborhood as significantly less safe compared to those in all other classes except the âWeekly-Allâ class, Ï2(4, N = 310) = 14.13 p = .01. These findings suggest that AA families vary in physical discipline during early childhood; this variation may result in sub-groups with different demographic characteristics. Associations between frequent discipline classes and perceptions of neighborhood safety implies that some AA parents may use physical discipline to protect their children from being harmed if they believe their communities are unsafe. Future research should qualitatively examine how AA parents respond to unsafe neighborhoods in their parenting behaviors, including physical discipline
Classification with Asymmetric Label Noise: Consistency and Maximal Denoising
In many real-world classification problems, the labels of training examples
are randomly corrupted. Most previous theoretical work on classification with
label noise assumes that the two classes are separable, that the label noise is
independent of the true class label, or that the noise proportions for each
class are known. In this work, we give conditions that are necessary and
sufficient for the true class-conditional distributions to be identifiable.
These conditions are weaker than those analyzed previously, and allow for the
classes to be nonseparable and the noise levels to be asymmetric and unknown.
The conditions essentially state that a majority of the observed labels are
correct and that the true class-conditional distributions are "mutually
irreducible," a concept we introduce that limits the similarity of the two
distributions. For any label noise problem, there is a unique pair of true
class-conditional distributions satisfying the proposed conditions, and we
argue that this pair corresponds in a certain sense to maximal denoising of the
observed distributions.
Our results are facilitated by a connection to "mixture proportion
estimation," which is the problem of estimating the maximal proportion of one
distribution that is present in another. We establish a novel rate of
convergence result for mixture proportion estimation, and apply this to obtain
consistency of a discrimination rule based on surrogate loss minimization.
Experimental results on benchmark data and a nuclear particle classification
problem demonstrate the efficacy of our approach
Emotion word processing: does mood make a difference?
Visual emotion word processing has been in the focus of recent psycholinguistic research. In general, emotion words provoke differential responses in comparison to neutral words. However, words are typically processed within a context rather than in isolation. For instance, how does one's inner emotional state influence the comprehension of emotion words? To address this question, the current study examined lexical decision responses to emotionally positive, negative, and neutral words as a function of induced mood as well as their word frequency. Mood was manipulated by exposing participants to different types of music. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditionsâno music, positive music, and negative music. Participants' moods were assessed during the experiment to confirm the mood induction manipulation. Reaction time results confirmed prior demonstrations of an interaction between a word's emotionality and its frequency. Results also showed a significant interaction between participant mood and word emotionality. However, the pattern of results was not consistent with mood-congruency effects. Although positive and negative mood facilitated responses overall in comparison to the control group, neither positive nor negative mood appeared to additionally facilitate responses to mood-congruent words. Instead, the pattern of findings seemed to be the consequence of attentional effects arising from induced mood. Positive mood broadens attention to a global level, eliminating the category distinction of positive-negative valence but leaving the high-low arousal dimension intact. In contrast, negative mood narrows attention to a local level, enhancing within-category distinctions, in particular, for negative words, resulting in less effective facilitation
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