Ethnic Discrimination in Education: The Swiss Case

This paper investigates the role that discrimination plays in the educational marginalization of foreign youth commonly observed in European countries with a long guestworker tradition. Economic theory offers two basic explanations for discrimination of this form: taste-based discrimination arising from personal prejudices and statistical discrimination stemming from ability uncertainty. Which theory applies in reality has important policy implications. If taste-based discrimination is the source of ethnic segregation, then measures to eliminate prejudice are required to promote integration; whereas if statistical discrimination is the cause, then better measures of ability are needed. Using Switzerland as a case study, we provide evidence that statistical discrimination is the source of ethnic segregation in schooling. Further we find that teachers generally do not grade foreign youth differently than native students. This result runs counter to previous research which suggests that disadvantaged pupils are graded more leniently.education, discrimination, migration, PISA

Realism’s Racial Gaze and Stephen Crane’s The Monster: A Lacanian Reading

The article presents Stephen Crane’s The Monster as a realist text that conveys the inability of American society in the 1890s to define itself through use of stereotyped knowledge of racial others. It reads the character Henry Johnson, a black man whose face is “burned away” in a house-fire, leaving behind only a single winking eye, as a literary embodiment of the all-seeing Lacanian gaze that, through the returned look of the racial other, confronts realist America with its own lack. Henry destabilises fantasies of an insular white identity through his performative mimicry of white dress and mannerism. He allows the text to present race as grounded only in performance and a discourse of white superiority. The Monster refutes this discourse, suggesting it is sanction for a brutal monstrosity at the heart of America, one that the returned gaze of the scrutinising racial other now witnesses through the spectacle of America’s racist and imperialistic practices

A serological survey of Iowa stock cows for antibodies to infectious bovine rhinotracheitis virus.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1101374

Ethnic Discrimination in Education: The Swiss Case

This paper investigates the role that discrimination plays in the educational marginalization of foreign youth commonly observed in European countries with a long guestworker tradition. Economic theory offers two basic explanations for discrimination of this form: taste-based discrimination arising from personal prejudices and statistical discrimination stemming from ability uncertainty. Which theory applies in reality has important policy implications. If taste-based discrimination is the source of ethnic segregation, then measures to eliminate prejudice are required to promote integration; whereas if statistical discrimination is the cause, then better measures of ability are needed. Using Switzerland as a case study, we provide evidence that statistical discrimination is the source of ethnic segregation in schooling. Further we find that teachers generally do not grade foreign youth differently than native students. This result runs counter to previous research which suggests that disadvantaged pupils are graded more leniently

A Comparison of Intensive Care Unit Care of Surgical Patients in Teaching and Nonteaching Hospitals

Three hundred forty-eight teaching (TH) and 282 nonteaching (NTH) hospitals were surveyed to determine how intensive care unit (ICU) care is delivered to surgical patients and current views on surgical critical care. Teaching hospitals were more likely than NTHs to have a separate surgical ICU (92% versus 37%), a dedicated ICU service/physician (37% versus 7%), and a surgeon as director of the ICU (67% versus 29%). All THs and 33% of NTHs provided 24 hour in-house coverage for the ICU. A majority of respondents preferred a surgeon as ICU director (TH, 85%; NTH, 67%) and felt that critical care was an essential part of surgery (THs, 87%; NTHs, 74%). Most (THs, 58%; NTHs, 56%) thought that a cooperative effort between the primary service and an ICU service provided better patient care, but only 37% of THs and 22% of NTHs provided care with such a system. Many (THs, 45%; NTHs, 33%) thought that surgeons are willingly relinquishing ICU care. Surgeons continue to desire responsibility for their patients in the ICU and most prefer ICU service involvement provided by surgeons. This discrepancy between what is practiced and what is desired, along with proposed changes in reimbursement for surgery and the recent definition of critical care as an essential part of surgery, may stimulate greater involvement of surgeons in critical care

Steroid Therapy for Bacterial Meningitis

Routine dexamethasone therapy for bacterial meningitis in pediatric patients is controversial. Two experts debated this topic at the 1993 meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Both experts agreed that for management of Haemophilus influenzae meningitis, dexamethasone significantly reduced sensorineural hearing loss and probably reduced other long-term sequelae. Because relatively few patients with pneumococcal and meningococcal meningitis have been studied, no conclusions could be reached regarding the effectiveness of dexamethasone. Dr. Urs Schaad emphasized the impressive anti-inflammatory effects of dexamethasone in experimental pneumococcal meningitis and the lack of any adverse events when given to children for 2 or 4 days. He recommended routine use of dexamethasone in treating pediatric patients with bacterial meningitis. Dr. Sheldon Kaplan expressed concern regarding the effectiveness of steroids in treating pneumococcal meningitis, especially when penicillin-resistant and cephalosporin-resistant isolates are present, and he addressed the question of the long-term effects of administration of dexamethasone in children with viral meningitis. He advised against the routine use of dexamethasone for non-H. influenzae meningiti