Workers' Views of the Impact of Trade on Jobs

Although public policy is influenced by the perception that workers worry about the impact of trade on their jobs, there is little empirical evidence on what shapes such views. This paper uses new data to examine how workers’ perceptions of the impact of trade are related to their career paths, job characteristics, and local labor market conditions. Surprisingly, given prior literature, we find that workers’ perceptions primarily reflect local labor market conditions and education rather than labor market experiences or job characteristics.globalization, trade, job characteristics, local labor markets, job loss, job security

Endnote on “Finding Wholeness”

An editor\u27s note on Finding Wholeness as Scholars, Teachers, and Healers through Narrative Medicine and the Medical Humanities,” a Special Issue of Survive and Thrive, A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine

‘A Spirit of Faction’: The Essex Junto and the Decline of the Federalist Party

Early American politics was largely characterized by fear, distrust, and blatant propaganda. There is perhaps no political faction that more fully embodies this fact than the Essex Junto. This essay delves into the history of this secretive faction from Essex County, Massachusetts and their impact on the post-Revolutionary period. Through analysis of both primary and secondary source material, this study seeks to decipher the true nature of the Junto, whether they wielded significant political influence or merely functioned as a useful propaganda tool for opportunistic Jeffersonians. This paper also examines the existing scholarship on this topic, mainly works created by scholars David H. Fischer and Dinah Mayo-Bobee, offering a comprehensive analysis of the true nature of the Essex Junto, the extent of their influence on political discourse, and their overall importance to the arc of American history

Making Health Agency: Clozapine, Schizophrenia, and Personal Power

This thesis demonstrates how experiences of agency and health persist in spite of confining social and biological circumstances. I take the case of clozapine-treated schizophrenia, where patients are presented with both renewed hope for an independent life at the same time as undertaking an intensive physiological monitoring regimen that prioritises their life in the most immediate sense only. Clozapine patients face a high risk of chronic multi-morbidities that significantly lower their life expectancy, and they are not quite ‘cured’ of their mental disturbances pertaining to chronic schizophrenia. I demonstrate, though, how patients are able to experience a sense of what I term health agency, where we might otherwise imagine their well-being to be significantly compromised. Health agency is a feeling of control over one’s well-being, where well-being is defined in one’s own terms. It was remarkable to find it in the clinical contexts in which I was working, where very narrowly constituted definitions of health were ostensibly endorsed and imposed. But in the thick of life in the clozapine clinic, patients and institution did not occupy strict polar positions. My fine grained ethnographic work revealed how patients worked creatively with the clinical circuitries, biomedical imaginaries and temporal underpinnings of clozapine treatment to personalise their experiences and to exert subtle, personal power over their health and future prospects. My fieldwork was based in the UK and Australia over an 18-month period (2015-2016) between two clozapine clinics. Research participants included 43 people diagnosed with schizophrenia (termed patients, hereafter) and 16 clinical staff at the clozapine clinics (termed clinical caregivers, hereafter). I conducted participant observation and 130 interviews. Drawing on my ethnographic data, this thesis explicates how health agency was available to patients in four central ways. First, health agency was part of a hopeful, personal persistence for holistic health in spite of the ‘physical,’ ‘mental,’ and ‘social’ aspects of health appearing irreconcilable in terms of clinical definitions. Second, patients were able to creatively manipulate and complement the goals of clozapine clinic blood monitoring to actively participate in the aspect of their treatment that is otherwise the furthest from patient control. Third, patients drew on the ambiguities of clozapine and other ‘health’ consumptions or behaviours to negotiate how clozapine impacted their minds and bodies. Fourth, patients utilised the temporalities of clozapine and clinical suspending of non-biological concerns to abundantly “live in the present” and harness focused energies that kept their futures open, while ephemerally suspending clinical symptoms and clozapine side effects. I suggest that patients’ self and social labour, and their quiet everyday efficacies in making their own health, problematise some previous anthropological and clinical conceptions about living with chronic schizophrenia under biomedical treatment models. I make the case for further ethnographic consideration for quiet expressions of agency within highly structured conditions

is Social Security Part of the Social Safety Net?

Building on the existing literature that examines the extent of redistribution in the Social Security system as a whole, this paper focuses more specifically on how Social Security affects the poor. This question is important because a Social Security program that reduces overall inequality by redistributing from high income individuals to middle income individuals may do nothing to help the poor; conversely, a program that redistributes to the poor may nonetheless be regressive according to broader measures if it also redistributes from middle to upper income households. We have four major findings. First, as we expand the definition of income to use more comprehensive measures of well-being, we find that Social Security becomes less progressive. Indeed, when we use an "endowment" defined by potential labor earnings at the household level, rather than actual earnings at the individual level, we find that Social Security has virtually no effect on overall inequality. Second, we find that this result is driven largely by the lack of redistribution across the middle and upper part of the income distribution, so it masks some small positive net transfers to those at the bottom of the lifetime income distribution. Third, in cases where redistribution does occur, we find it is not efficiently targeted: many high income households receive positive net transfers, while many low income households pay net taxes. Finally, the redistributive effects of Social Security change over time, and these changes depend on the income concept used to classify someone as "poor".

UPDATE: Consistency of Home Care Personnel Under Managed Competition: A Case Study from Ontario (Shortened Version Presented at the Knowledge to Wisdom Conference)

Measuring Consistency of Personnel in Home care: Current Challenges and Findings Consistency of personnel is important to ensuring continuity of care for home care clients. It is particularly important to those clients who are at high risk for adverse effects when provider changes occur. Information about the extent to which clients experience consistency of personnel is difficult to collect in Ontario. It resides with individual provider agencies rather than with the Community Care Access Centres (CCACs) that arrange service delivery. We will present findings from the Continuity of Care in Home Care study which obtained information directly from service provider agencies on the number of providers that 500 CCAC clients saw. These clients received either nursing or homemaking services or both. Factors linked with the mean number of providers experienced by a client and with the total number of providers experienced by a client during up to a year of service delivery will be highlighted. Factors affecting the frequency of provider changes will be discussed along with the implications of our findings for clients, service providers, agencies and policy makers.home care services, adults, Ontario, health personnel, consistency of services, providers

A solution NMR approach to determine the chemical structures of carbohydrates using the hydroxyl groups as starting points

An efficient NMR approach is described for determining the chemical structures of the monosaccharide glucose and four disaccharides, namely, nigerose, gentiobiose, leucrose and isomaltulose. This approach uses the 1H resonances of the −OH groups, which are observable in the NMR spectrum of a supercooled aqueous solution, as the starting point for further analysis. The 2D-NMR technique, HSQC-TOCSY, is then applied to fully define the covalent structure (i.e., the topological relationship between C–C, C–H, and O–H bonds) that must be established for a novel carbohydrate before proceeding to further conformational studies. This process also leads to complete assignment of all 1H and 13C resonances. The approach is exemplified by analyzing the monosaccharide glucose, which is treated as if it were an “unknown”, and also by fully assigning all the NMR resonances for the four disaccharides that contain glucose. It is proposed that this technique should be equally applicable to the determination of chemical structures for larger carbohydrates of unknown composition, including those that are only available in limited quantities from biological studies. The advantages of commencing the structure elucidation of a carbohydrate at the −OH groups are discussed with reference to the now well-established 2D-/3D-NMR strategy for investigation of peptides/proteins, which employs the −NH resonances as the starting point

Spreckels, California and Responsible Land Use

Spreckels, an historic town in the Salinas Valley, has found itself in the middle of a struggle to save its identity from corporate farmers who want to build a subdivision on surrounding farmland and increase the town\u27s size by 40%. Spreckels\u27 situation is far from unique. The demand for new homes throughout California is forcing farmland to give way to urban sprawl. Allowing this trend to continue can and will lead to a variety of economic and environmental damage from which our state might never recover