Yardtapes: History, Identity and Diaspora in a Dancehall Style

A thesis submitted in part-fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of M.A., Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2008

Successful Periodic Continence

Editor\u27s Note: The explanation given below was presented by Dr. Keefe at a meeting of physicians interested in Pre-Can a Conference work in the Archdiocese of New York, May 31 of this year. The Linacre Quarterly includes same to inform other doctors who answer patients\u27 questions in this regard

Death by Dealer: When Addicts Overdose, Should Dealers Be Charged with Murder?

The nation is currently in the throes of an epidemic of opiate addiction. More Americans now die from fatal opiate overdoses than from automobile accidents every year -- and the problem is especially pronounced in white suburban, exurban, and rural communities.One fascinating by product of the whiteness of this new crisis has been the emergence of a more humane vocabulary for understanding -- and combating -- drug addiction. As a headline in the New York Times had it, in battling heroin addiction, "White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs." When the Obama administration committed, recently, to allocate over $1 billion in new funding to address opiate addiction, officials referred to the problem as an epidemic, signaling that the acute social problems related to this type of chemical dependence should be regarded first and foremost as a public health crisis, rather than a law enforcement crisis.As a new addiction crisis sweeps the country, and as presidential candidates from both parties call for greater compassion and more comprehensive treatment options for addicts, there is another intriguing development that has received little media attention or policy debate: a widespread push for harsher sentences for drug dealers, rather than addicts. As addicts die in increasing numbers due to overdoses related to heroin and prescription opiate use abuse, prosecutors in communities across the country have been looking for new ways to hold people responsible for those deaths. Whether they are reviving old statutes, aggressively interpreting the ambit of existing law, or advancing tough new legislation at the state level, prosecutors in at least a dozen jurisdictions are pursuing charges against the dealers who sell drugs that cause overdoses, and they are looking to hold these dealers responsible not simply for drug sales, but for murder

The New Opiate Epidemic

On the subject of narcotics, American public discourse is prone to alarmism, but it is not an exaggeration to say that the United States is currently experiencing an epidemic of opiate addiction. To be exact, we are in the grip of two related epidemics: one involving legal, regulated prescription painkillers, and the other involving black market heroin. Chemically, these two types of drugs have a great deal in common, and both are devastatingly addictive. But the rise in pill addiction and the rise in heroin addiction are linked on a deeper causal level, as well.Drug overdoses now kill more Americans than car accidents, and most of those overdoses are from opiates. Heroin-related deaths have quadrupled since 2000, leading to what the New York Times has suggested may be "the worst drug overdose epidemic in United States history." Former attorney general Eric Holder described the rise in heroin addiction as a "public health crisis," with heroin overdoses leading to 10,574 deaths in 2014.But in fact, the spike in heroin abuse is an outgrowth of a much broader and in some ways more pernicious problem -- the widespread addiction to prescription painkillers. Pharmaceutical opioid overdoses have also quadrupled since 2000, leading to 18,893 deaths in 2014 -- almost double the number of heroin overdoses for the same year. The suppliers of these drugs are not street-corner dealers, but ostensibly respectable physicians, and behind them, multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies, with squadrons of lawyers and lobbyists

Human Resource and Employment Practices in Telecommunications Services, 1980-1998

[Excerpt] In the academic literature on manufacturing, much research and debate have focused on whether firms are adopting some form of “high-performance” or “high-involvement” work organization based on such practices as employee participation, teams, and increased discretion, skills, and training for frontline workers (Ichniowski et al., 1996; Kochan and Osterman, 1994; MacDuffie, 1995). Whereas many firms in the telecommunications industry flirted with these ideas in the 1980s, they did not prove to be a lasting source of inspiration for the redesign of work and employment practices. Rather, work restructuring in telecommunications services has been driven by the ability of firms to leverage network and information technologies to reduce labor costs and create customer segmentation strategies. “Good jobs” versus “bad jobs,” or higher versus lower wage jobs, do not vary according to whether firms adopt a high- involvement model. They vary along two other dimensions: (1) within firms and occupations, by the value-added of the customer segment that an employee group serves; and (2) across firms, by union and nonunion status. We believe that this customer segmentation strategy is becoming a more general model for employment practices in large-scale service | operations; telecommunications services firms may be somewhat more | advanced than other service firms in adopting this strategy because of certain unique industry characteristics. The scale economies of network technology are such that once a company builds the network infrastructure to a customer’s specifications, the cost of additional services is essentially zero. As a result, and notwithstanding technological uncertainty, all of the industry’s major players are attempting to take advantage of system economies inherent in the nature of the product market and technology to provide customized packages of multimedia products to identified market segments. They have organized into market-driven business units providing differentiated services to large businesses and institutions, small businesses, and residential customers. They have used information technologies and process reengineering to customize specific services to different segments according to customer needs and ability to pay. Variation in work and employment practices, or labor market segmentation, follows product market segmentation. As a result, much of the variation in employment practices in this industry is within firms and within occupations according to market segment rather than across firms. In addition, despite market deregulation beginning in 1984 and opportunities for new entrants, a tightly led oligopoly structure is replacing the regulated Bell System monopoly. Former Bell System companies, the giants of the regulated period, continue to dominate market share in the post-1984 period. Older players and new entrants alike are merging and consolidating in order to have access to multimedia markets. What is striking in this industry, therefore, is the relative lack of variation in management and employment practices across firms after more than a decade of experience with deregulation. We attribute this lack of variation to three major sources. (1) Technological advances and network economics provide incentives for mergers, organizational consolidation, and, as indicated above, similar business strategies. (2) The former Bell System companies have deep institutional ties, and they continue to benchmark against and imitate each other so that ideas about restructuring have diffused quickly among them. (3) Despite overall deunionization in the industry, they continue to have high unionization rates; de facto pattern bargaining within the Bell system has remained quite strong. Therefore, similar employment practices based on inherited collective bargaining agreements continue to exist across former Bell System firms