An Evaluation of School Zone Traffic Control Strategies

Throughout the past six decades, the predominant mode of student transport has shifted from walking to riding in a school bus or personal vehicle which has impacted both the safety and efficiency of school zone traffic control strategies. In order to improve school zone operations in West Virginia, current warrants and laws relevant to school zones within West Virginia and other states are researched. Concerns are characterized with respect to traffic efficiency and safety parameters and are addressed in a survey polling county and district transportation officials throughout West Virginia. In addition, school zone crash data provided by the Highway Safety Information System (HSIS) is analyzed for Ohio and North Carolina to gain a better understanding of the cause and nature of school zone crashes. Through multidisciplinary cooperation, school zone traffic control strategies should implement uniform procedures that target driver awareness and education on their actions and the effect they have on safety and efficiency and how the two issues are interrelated

Institutional Ethics Resources: Creating Moral Spaces

Since 1992, institutions accredited by The Joint Commission have been required to have a process in place that allows staff members, patients, and families to address ethical issues or issues prone to conflict. While the commission's expectations clearly have made ethics committees more common, simply having a committee in no way demonstrates its effectiveness in terms of the availability of the service to key constituents, the quality of the processes used, or the outcomes achieved. Beyond meeting baseline accreditation standards, effective ethics resources are requisite for quality care for another reason. The provision of care to the sick is a practice with profound moral dimensions. Clinicians need what Margaret Urban Walker has called “moral spaces,” reflective spaces within institutions in which to explore and communicate values and ethical obligations as they undergird goals of care. Walker proposed that ethicists needed to be concerned with the design and maintenance of these moral spaces. Clearly, that concern needs to extend beyond ethicists to institutional leaders. This essay uses Walker's idea of moral space to describe individuals and groups who are actual and potential ethics resources in health care institutions. We focus on four requisite characteristics of effective resources and the challenges to achieving them, and we identify strategies to build them. In our view, such moral spaces are particularly important for nurses and their colleagues on interprofessional teams and need to be expanded and strengthened in most settings

Reducing Congestive Heart Failure Hospital Readmission Through a Practice Guideline

Patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) are at increased risk for hospital readmission within 30 days of discharge. The gap in practice involves the coordination of care for patients with CHF in the transition from hospital to home. Patients with CHF are at increased risk for hospital readmission due to barriers involving self-care, communication, and coordination of care. The purpose of this project was to implement a clinical practice guideline (CPG) that used a predictive tool and clinical pathway for coordination of care for CHF patients at increased risk for hospital readmission within 30 days. The DNP project involved using the chronic care model as a framework and addressed the practice-focused question, which asked whether the CPG would be accepted by an expert panel for full implementation. The CPG was presented to a 9-member expert panel, all members of a larger QI readmission task force. There were 5 cardiac providers, and 4 nursing or administrative leaders with decision-making abilities at the site. Scores on the Agree II instrument from nine experts ranged from 5.5 to 6.81 across 23 items and 6 domains indicating overall agreement on the CPG. Recommendations of the panel included a change to the clinical practice guideline to reflect ischemic workup and criteria for admission when a patient presents to the emergency department. The expert panel agreed to full implementation of the CPG. The impact of this CPG will lead to decreased needs for hospital readmission, improved coordination of care, improved communication between the patient and the healthcare team, and empowerment of patients, leading to positive social change in terms of caring for patients with chronic CHF

The Representation of Religion in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway

This study examines the representation of religion in Ernest Hemingway's fiction. In most of his stories, references to the church are adversely critical. No protagonist finds solace in conventional religious faith

A Study of Subject-matter Content and Source of Photographs on Three Small-city and Three Metropolitan Texas Daily Newspapers

This study was concerned with the subject-matter content and source of photographs at three small-city and three metropolitan Texas newspapers. An analysis was conducted over a fourteen-day period at six daily newspapers: The Dallas Morning News, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Houston Chronicle, The Sherman Democrat, The Paris News, and The Midland Reporter-Telegram

Recent Cases

Laurence M. Hamric The instant decision demonstrates the inability of the Court, on its own or with the meager guidance provided by Congress, to discern a clear standard by which to measure the propriety of union organizational activity in light of current federal labor and antitrust law. Faced with a fact pattern that did not embody an apparent anticompetitive intent, a classic conspiracy between labor and non-labor entities, or activity clearly unrelated to the legitimate union interest in achieving better wages and working conditions, the Court was forced to abandon the clear showing test of Pennington, the intimately related test of Jewel Tea\u27 and, perhaps, even the Allen Bradley doctrine. ============================= William G. Scott By extending federal jurisdiction to encompass all robbery and extortion potentially affecting interstate commerce, the instant decision not only reflects, but substantially contributes to, the increasing federalization of intrastate crime under the commerce clause. In light of the decision\u27s broad rationale, the case may portend virtually unlimited expansion of federal jurisdiction into the field of crime control. At the very least, the decision constitutes authority for extending the jurisdictional range of other affecting commerce statutes to encompass all conduct potentially affecting commerce. It is difficult to conceive of any criminal activity, no matter how localized, that remains beyond the scope of the instant rationale. =========================== Mitchell M. Purvis The instant decision, relying on one side of conflicting precedent from other circuits, does little to reconcile the divergent answers to the issue raised by the Hayden caveat: what limits, if any, on searches and seizures should be developed to replace the discredited categorizations of the mere evidence rule. The Bennett decision,considering whether an item that possessed the requisite characteristics for protection under the privilege against self-incrimination consequently was proscribed as an object of a reasonable search and seizure, began a series of opinions obscuring the focus of this issue by failing to recognize that the amendments jointly protect overlapping substantive values through procedurally distinct mechanisms. =========================== George M. Kryder, III The instant court attempted to resolve the tension between these interests by permitting rejection of the entire agreement only after a substantial showing that continued operations would lead to collapse of the business. The court then would require a debtor-in-possession to bargain with the incumbent employees. A better approach would be to permit rejection of only those portions of the collective bargaining agreement that the court finds onerous and burdensome, while leaving in force the remaining portions of the agreement upon which the employees have relied. Such an analysis would afford employees greater protection than merely imposing an obligation to bargain, while simultaneously allowing the debtor-in-possession to renegotiate the burdensome provisions of the old agreement. ================================ Richard Michael Pitt The instant court recognized at the outset that the proper extraterritorial application of the securities laws was not to be found in the language of the acts. Neither did the court consider the SEC\u27s disclaimer of the applicability of registration requirements to be controlling. Rather, the court looked to case law and foreign relations policy in determining subject matter jurisdiction. The court analyzed, one at a time, the jurisdictional bases relied upon by the lower court. Considering first the defendants\u27 activities within the United States, the court noted its holding in IT v. Vencap, Ltd., that the United States was not to be a breeding ground for fraud