Social interactions of chronic psychiatric patients in organized ward recreational programs

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

The Volcker Rule: A Legal Analysis

This report provides an introduction to the Volcker Rule, which is the regulatory regime imposed upon banking institutions and their affiliates under Section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-203). The Volker Rule is designed to prohibit “banking entities” from engaging in all forms of “proprietary trading” (i.e., making investments for their own “trading accounts”)—activities that former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker often condemned as contrary to conventional banking practices and a potential risk to financial stability. The statutory language provides only general outlines of prohibited activities and exceptions. Through it, however, Congress has empowered five federal financial regulators with authority to conduct coordinated rulemakings to fill in the details and complete the difficult task of crafting regulations to identify prohibited activities, while continuing to permit activities considered essential to the safety and soundness of banking institutions or to the maintenance of strong capital markets. In December 2014, more than two years after enactment of the law, coordinated implementing regulations were issued by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The Rule is premised on a two-pronged central core restricting activities by “banking entities”—a term that includes all FDIC-insured bank and thrift institutions; all bank, thrift, or financial holding companies; all foreign banking operations with certain types of presence in the United States; and all affiliates and subsidiaries of any of these entities. Specifically, the Rule broadly prohibits banking entities from engaging in “proprietary trading” and from making investments in or having relationships with hedge and similar “covered funds” that are exempt from registering with the CFTC as commodity pool operators or with the SEC under the Investment Advisors Act. The Rule couples its broad prohibitions with numerous exclusions and by designating myriad activities as permissible so long as various terms and conditions are met, unless they otherwise would involve or result in a material conflict of interest; a material exposure to high-risk assets or high-risk trading strategies; pose a threat to the safety and soundness of the banking entity; or pose a threat to the financial stability of the United States. The exceptions to the ban on proprietary trading include underwriting by securities underwriters; market-making “designed not to exceed the reasonably expected near term demands of clients”; trading in government securities; fiduciary activities; insurance company portfolio investments; and risk-mitigating hedging activities. The ban on investing in and owning “covered funds” exempts certain types of funds, under specified conditions, and permits de minimis investment in any such fund up to 3% of the outstanding ownership interests of the fund with an aggregate cap on the total ownership interest in “covered funds” of 3% of the banking entity’s core capital. To prevent evasion, the Rule has extensive requirements mandating comprehensive compliance programs that include ongoing management involvement, precise metrics measuring risk assessment, verification and documentation of any activities conducted under one of the Rule’s exceptions or exclusions, and recurring reports and assessments. Full compliance is required by July 21, 2015, subject to the possibility that further extensions may be provided by the regulators. In the case of investments involving “illiquid funds” subject to contractual provisions seriously impacting their marketability or sale, full divestiture might not be required until July 21, 2022

Mutran, Munira H. (Org.), O Mundo e suas Criaturas. Uma Antologia do Conto Irlandês

Mutran, Munira H. (Org.), O Mundo e suas Criaturas. Uma Antologia do Conto Irlandês. São Paulo: Associação Editorial Humanitas, 309 pp

Walking the Land of Irish Studies

Using the old rural Irish custom of walking the land, this essay locates the Irish presence in the old and new world and surveys the global territory of Irish studies. It considers shared themes of language and cultural, responses to colonialism and history and national identity, and it charts the development of Irish Studies from Ireland to North and South America, to the continent, to Africa, to Asia and the Pacific. Perhaps the most astonishing development is the new page in Irish Studies, the New Irish of the twenty-first century

Ghosts and Roger Casement in the Work of W.B. Yeats: A Paper and a Post-Script

W.B. Yeats first summoned the 1916 patriot Roger Casement as one of the unnamed heroes in his poem “Sixteen Dead Men” which appeared in his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). He returned to Casement late in his career when, having read with sympathy William J. Maloney’s The Forged Casement Diaries (1936), the poet returned to Casement in three poems in his late New Poems (1938): “Roger Casement,” “The Ghost of Roger Casement” and “The Municipal Gallery Revisited.” Yeats makes his case that Casement was libeled in “Roger Casement”; he describes the figure of Casement in Sir John Lavery’s painting of the trial. “The Ghost of Roger Casement,” Yeats’s most dramatic Casement poem, describes Casement’s ghost’s return tobeat on the door and to indict John Bull. The image of the returned ghost of Roger Casement made the poem popular with fellow Dubliners after it was published in The Irish Press (February 2, 1937). This essay will examine Yeats’s use of ghost tradition in Irish folklore in his early poems and plays and his return to that ghost lore in the Casement poems in New Poems.

A Preliminary Framework for Usability Analysis in Healthcare

We propose a usability analysis framework for healthcare information technology to help identify potential errors and evaluate their impact on medical processes

A Usability Analysis Framework for Healthcare Information Technology

Healthcare organizations are investing in healthcare information technology (HIT) to improve quality and outcomes. However, HIT has also been known to introduce unintended consequences and adverse effects. The adverse effects range from process changes to serious clinical errors. In order to ensure the safety of healthcare information technologies, we propose a usability analysis framework for healthcare information technology that can help identify, classify and prioritize potential errors. Such a framework can help design better usability studies specifically targeted at studying technology-induced errors and therefore help in the design of safer healthcare information technologies

Evaluation of prototype air/fluid separator for Space Station Freedom Health Maintenance Facility

A prototype air/fluid separator suction apparatus proposed as a possible design for use with the Health Maintenance Facility aboard Space Station Freedom (SSF) was evaluated. A KC-135 parabolic flight test was performed for this purpose. The flights followed the standard 40 parabola profile with 20 to 25 seconds of near-zero gravity in each parabola. A protocol was prepared to evaluate the prototype device in several regulator modes (or suction force), using three fluids of varying viscosity, and using either continuous or intermittent suction. It was felt that a matrixed approach would best approximate the range of utilization anticipated for medical suction on SSF. The protocols were performed in one-gravity in a lab setting to familiarize the team with procedures and techniques. Identical steps were performed aboard the KC-135 during parabolic flight

Harney, Elizabeth. – In Senghor’s Shadow. Art Politics, and the Avant-garde in Senegal, 1960-1995

L’« idée » d’Afrique , telle qu’elle s’est construite au fil des siècles en Occident, renvoie à une réalité aux contours flous, située hors du temps, circonscrite aux frontières du continent et globalement « autre ». Mis en exergue à partir des années 1980, les ressorts de cet imaginaire ont fait l’objet de nombreuses analyses développées essentiellement dans le monde anglo-saxon, au cœur d’un courant de recherches dit « postcolonial ». Ces travaux de déconstruction, dont le parti pris fut bi..