Focus on Your Users: Using PubMed Filters to Support Your Users and Promote Evidence-Based Medicine

This poster presentation identifies the most common user research problems when using PubMed. By creating customized search filters in PubMed, librarians will be able to provide the user with the maximum amount of relevant results

QUALIFIED OPPORTUNITY FUNDS: PRIVATE EQUITY EXEMPTIONS FROM PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY

The historic Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), passed and signed into law in 2017, included a pilot program of a new kind of tax advantage: the Qualified Opportunity Zone. The obscure provision has since spawned novel investment vehicles, called Qualified Opportunity Funds, through which qualified individuals and entities participate in what are often significant tax advantages, including deferral of capital gains for up to ten years. Because Qualified Opportunity Funds have come into existence so recently, regulation has been slow to catch up to the ways in which this tax program is rapidly attracting capital from private equity, investment banks, and even real estate crowdfunding platforms. While the program purports to improve underdeveloped areas of the United States, in practice the dearth of guidelines directing these investments perpetuates a black hole of information surrounding the risk and reporting of the investments, and also invokes securities laws as merely a minimum threshold, rather than meaningfully regulating how and with whom the funds can invest. This Note suggests that greater mandated disclosure requirements, and an extension of the tax incentives to investments only in particular kinds of projects—those that actually advance the goals envisioned by the TCJA provision—would improve the program’s efficacy and protect investors across the spectrum

Librarians as Participants in a Medical School Advanced Teaching Program

Librarians of Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library are now participating in a joint program of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) and the Graduate School of Education and Human Development of the George Washington University. The program, called the Master Teacher Leadership and Development Program (MTLDP), has increased library visibility and an expanded faculty understanding of how library resources and services can enhance education. This poster presentation is a general outline of the program\u27s benefits to the library

Capitalizing on our Strengths: Teaching Health Informatics Courses

This poster presents the experiences of two health sciences librarians teaching health informatics in semester-length credit courses--one for undergraduate health sciences students in a distance education format and the other for graduate students in a health information technology program in a traditional classroom environment

Constitutional Limitations on Anticompetitive State and Local Solid Waste Management Schemes: A New Frontier in Environmental Regulation

The enactment of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and the expansion of the scope of interstate commerce have nationalized solid waste management, a field that was formerly the exclusive domain of state and local governments. Today, state and local governments act as both sovereigns and market participants in the solid waste management context; nonetheless, these entities may limit the role of private market participants in the solid waste management field only in a manner that does not obstruct the Sherman Act\u27s objectives. Abate and Bennett explore the limits that the Sherman Act, the Commerce Clause, and the Supremacy Clause impose on anticompetitive state and local solid waste management activities within the framework of RCRA\u27s regulatory scheme. The authors explain how the market participant doctrine illuminates the nature of the interplay among RCRA, the Sherman Act, and the Commerce and Supremacy Clauses and argue that this doctrine may provide the missing analytical link in resolving questions in this new area of the law. The Article concludes that any governmental entity held by a court to be acting as a market participant in a solid waste management scheme should be subject to possible antitrust liability for anticompetitive conduct. Such a rule would preclude such entities from using the state action immunity doctrine to avoid dormant Commerce Clause scrutin

You Can Do That in a Library? Building Sound Minds and Healthy Bodies

Recognizing that while medical students are learning to care for others, they are often taking poor care of themselves, librarians at the George Washington University\u27s Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library developed a three-pronged Healthy Living initiative, launched in the fall 2012 semester. Focusing on diet/nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction, the initiative included new collections and multiple activities with partners from both on and off-campus

Innovations in Instruction: Use of Blogs & Clickers to Solicit Real-Time Responses

Seeking to enhance student interactivity and provide real-time feedback in the area of medical informatics, the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library developed a series of interactive blogs and clickers. This poster presents the methods and results of using blogs and clickers to increase students\u27 interest in the field of medical informatics