Banking and Insurance: Before and after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

This article traces the growth of insurance in America and describes how its regulatory structure developed separately from the regulatory structure of other financial services. The authors describe how banks became involved in insurance activities as a way to expand their traditional banking services. Although regulatory restrictions at first impeded this effort, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 has now opened the door more widely to the combination of banking and insurance. Nevertheless, banks will continue to face regulatory hurdles and restrictions under GLB that will impair their ability to compete in the insurance business. The article examines the landscape for bank insurance activities post-Gramm-Leach-Bliley and questions whether the functional regulation on which Gramm-Leach-Bliley is premised is an efficient or effective method to regulate financial products

Banking and Insurance: Before and after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

This article traces the growth of insurance in America and describes how its regulatory structure developed separately from the regulatory structure of other financial services. The authors describe how banks became involved in insurance activities as a way to expand their traditional banking services. Although regulatory restrictions at first impeded this effort, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 has now opened the door more widely to the combination of banking and insurance. Nevertheless, banks will continue to face regulatory hurdles and restrictions under GLB that will impair their ability to compete in the insurance business. The article examines the landscape for bank insurance activities post-Gramm-Leach-Bliley and questions whether the functional regulation on which Gramm-Leach-Bliley is premised is an efficient or effective method to regulate financial products

PROMOTION OF REPLICATION IN LYMPHOID CELLS BY SPECIFIC THIOLS AND DISULFIDES IN VITRO : EFFECTS ON MOUSE LYMPHOMA CELLS IN COMPARISON WITH SPLENIC LYMPHOCYTES

Numerous lines of mouse lymphoid tumors (13 of 22 tested) showed, with increased sensitivity, a property of normal mouse splenic lymphocytes, the potential for growth promotion in vitro by specific thiols added to standard culture media. For lymphoma L1210 (V), structure activity relationships were examined; 9 of 30 thiols promoted growth; the most active was α-thioglycerol, effective at 0.2 µM. Thiols became oxidized under conditions of tissue culture and had half-lives of less than 8 h. Disulfides of active thiols promoted growth of lymphoma cells. The mitogenic response of splenic lymphocytes to lectins was increased by thiols-disulfides which promoted the growth of lymphoma cells, but the response varied with the mitogen preparation used and under some conditions thiols-disulfides were inhibitory

Threats to epistemic agency in young people with unusual experiences and beliefs

A good therapeutic relationship in mental health services is a predictor of positive clinical outcomes for people who seek help for distressing experiences, such as voice hearing and paranoia. One factor that may affect the quality of the therapeutic relationship and raises further ethical issues is the impact of the clinical encounter on users’ sense of self, and in particular on their sense of agency. In the paper, we discuss some of the reasons why the sense of epistemic agency may be especially fragile in young people with unusual experiences and beliefs. We argue that it is important to identify and avoid behaviours that can undermine young people’s contributions as epistemic agents in the clinical encounter

\u3ci\u3eHaemophilus influenzae\u3c/i\u3e Type b Polysaccharide Vaccine: An Efficacy Study

The Haemophilus influenzae type b polysaccharide vaccine was licensed for use in the United States in April 1985. Postlicensure case-control efficacy studies have yielded markedly different estimates of efficacy, leading to contradictory recommendations to practicing physicians. To obtain additional information about the efficacy of the vaccine, we studied cases of invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b disease ascertained through active surveillance in areas with a total population of 34 million. We enrolled children 24 to 59 months of age who did not attend day-care centers. (Data from our day-care study have been published elsewhere.) For each case child, as many as three 24- to 59-month-old control children were chosen from a roster of acquaintances supplied by the child\u27s parent. Conditional logistic regression was used, and vaccine efficacy was estimated to be 62% (95% confidence interval = 0%, 85%), which did not change significantly after adjusting for age and parental smoking, variables that were significantly different for case and control children. Results of this study support our previous finding of a positive protective efficacy, albeit lower than the efficacy of 90% found in children 18 to 71 months of age in the Finnish prelicensure trial

Migration with local public goods and the gains from changing places

Without public goods and under fairly standard assumptions, in Hammond and Sempere (J Pub Econ Theory, 8: 145–170, 2006) we show that freeing migration enhances the potential Pareto gains from free trade. Here, we present a generalization allowing local public goods subject to congestion. Unlike the standard literature on fiscal externalities, our result relies on fixing both local public goods and congestion levels at their status quo values. This allows constrained efficient and potentially Pareto improving population exchanges regulated only through appropriate residence charges, which can be regarded as Pigouvian congestion taxes

Systematics and Palynology of Picrodendron Further Evidence for Relationship with the Oldfieldioideae (Euphorbiaceae)

Although known to botanical science for 285 years, the genus Picrodendron Planchon has been poorly understood for most of this time. The most pervasive problem has been that of discerning familial relationships, and there have been additional difficulties in typifying the generic name (Hayden & Reveal, 1980) and in distinguishing its three nominate species. This paper provides a systematic treatment for Picrodendron and demonstrates its relationships with Euphorbiaceae subfam. Oldfieldioideae Kohler & Webster as evidenced by data on gross morphology, palynology, anatomy, and cytology

Evolution of the Cancer Registrar in the Era of Informatics

The cancer registrar reports accurate, complete, and timely abstracted cancer data to various healthcare agencies. The data are used for understanding the incidence of cancer, evaluating the effectiveness of public health efforts in the prevention of new cases and improving patient care outcomes and survival. There are increasing demands placed on registrars for additional data points with real-time submission to reporting agencies. To that end, registrars are increasing the use of informatics to meet the demand. The purpose of this article is the role of the registrar in the collection and reporting of critical cancer data and how registrars are currently using informatics to enhance their work. This article describes how informatics can be leveraged in the future and how registrars play a vital role in meeting the increasing demands placed on them to provide timely, meaningful, and accurate data for the cancer community

Why the Realist-Instrumentalist Debate about Rational Choice Rests on a Mistake

Within the social sciences, much controversy exists about which status should be ascribed to the rationality assumption that forms the core of rational choice theories. Whilst realists argue that the rationality assumption is an empirical claim which describes real processes that cause individual action, instrumentalists maintain that it amounts to nothing more than an analytically set axiom or ‘as if’ hypothesis which helps in the generation of accurate predictions. In this paper, I argue that this realist-instrumentalist debate about rational choice theory can be overcome once it is realised that the rationality assumption is neither an empirical description nor an ‘as if’ hypothesis, but a normative claim

Neural Circuitry of Novelty Salience Processing in Psychosis Risk: Association With Clinical Outcome

Psychosis has been proposed to develop from dysfunction in a hippocampal-striatal-midbrain circuit, leading to aberrant salience processing. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during novelty salience processing to investigate this model in people at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis according to their subsequent clinical outcomes. Seventy-six CHR participants as defined using the Comprehensive Assessment of At-Risk Mental States (CAARMS) and 31 healthy controls (HC) were studied while performing a novelty salience fMRI task that engaged an a priori hippocampal-striatal-midbrain circuit of interest. The CHR sample was then followed clinically for a mean of 59.7 months (~5 y), when clinical outcomes were assessed in terms of transition (CHR-T) or non-transition (CHR-NT) to psychosis (CAARMS criteria): during this period, 13 individuals (17%) developed a psychotic disorder (CHR-T) and 63 did not. Functional activation and effective connectivity within a hippocampal-striatal-midbrain circuit were compared between groups. In CHR individuals compared to HC, hippocampal response to novel stimuli was significantly attenuated (P = .041 family-wise error corrected). Dynamic Causal Modelling revealed that stimulus novelty modulated effective connectivity from the hippocampus to the striatum, and from the midbrain to the hippocampus, significantly more in CHR participants than in HC. Conversely, stimulus novelty modulated connectivity from the midbrain to the striatum significantly less in CHR participants than in HC, and less in CHR participants who subsequently developed psychosis than in CHR individuals who did not become psychotic. Our findings are consistent with preclinical evidence implicating hippocampal-striatal-midbrain circuit dysfunction in altered salience processing and the onset of psychosis