Kerala's cashew workers

Lindberg, Anna. 2005. Modernization and Effeminization in India: Kerala Cashew Workers since 1930. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. 200 pages, ISBN 87 91114 21

Is there a mismatch between the perspectives of patients and regulators on healthcare quality?:A survey study

Objectives: Internationally, healthcare quality regulators are criticized for failing to respond to patients' complaints. Patient involvement is, therefore, an important item on the policy agenda. However, it can be argued that there is a discrepancy between the patients' perspective and current regulatory approaches. This study examines whether a discrepancy exists between the perspectives of patients and regulators on healthcare quality. Methods: A questionnaire was sent to 996 people who had registered a complaint with the Dutch Healthcare Inspectorate to measure expectations of and experiences with the Inspectorate. A taxonomy was used to classify their complaints into the clinical, relationship, or management domains. Results: The response was 54%. More complaints about clinical issues (56%, P = 0.000) were investigated by the regulator than complaints about organizational (37%) and relational issues (51%). Patients with complaints about management issues less often indicated (13%, P = 0.002) that healthcare is improved by making their complaint than patients with complaints about clinical or relationship issues did (22%–23%). Patients who reported about relational issues with care providers attached more importance to issuing sanctions against the care provider than other patients (mean score 2.89 versus 2.62–2.68, P = 0.006). Conclusions: The predominant clinical approach taken by regulators does not match the patients' perspective of what is relevant for healthcare quality. In addition, patients seem to be more tolerant of what they perceive to be clinical or management errors than of perceived relational deficiencies in care providers. If regulators want to give patients a voice, they should expand their horizon beyond the medical framework

Toezien op zorgkwaliteit door de ogen van patiënten:Andere werkwijze van inspectie nodig

De inspectie gezondheidszorg en Jeugd (ig J) wil het per- spectief van patiënten meer betrekken bij haar toezicht. Burgermeldingen geven de inspectie inzicht in dit patiën- tenperspectief. Patiënten die klachten melden willen dat het probleem dat zij melden zich niet herhaalt, maar het overgrote deel van die meldingen wordt niet nader onder- zocht door de inspectie. Daarnaast worden meldingen met een klinisch aspect veel vaker onderzocht dan organisatori- sche of communicatieve problemen. Bij meldingen van pati- enten gaat het niet noodzakelijkerwijs om het afwijken van de professionele richtlijnen met schade als gevolg. Als de inspectie kwaliteit van zorg door het perspectief van de patiënt wil bekijken, kan zij het beeld dat de patiënt hun aanreikt serieuzer nemen. Het patiëntenperspectief sugge- reert dat het voor de inspectie van belang is meer aandacht te besteden aan organisatorische factoren, relationele aspecten en andere aspecten van de gezondheidszorg, naast de medisch professionele normen

Chickspress: a resource for chicken gene expression

High-throughput sequencing and proteomics technologies are markedly increasing the amount of RNA and peptide data that are available to researchers, which are typically made publicly available via data repositories such as the NCBI Sequence Read Archive and proteome archives, respectively. These data sets contain valuable information about when and where gene products are expressed, but this information is not readily obtainable from archived data sets. Here we report Chickspress (http://geneatlas.arl.arizona.edu), the first publicly available gene expression resource for chicken tissues. Since there is no single source of chicken gene models, Chickspress incorporates both NCBI and Ensembl gene models and links these gene sets with experimental gene expression data and QTL information. By linking gene models from both NCBI and Ensembl gene prediction pipelines, researchers can, for the first time, easily compare gene models from each of these prediction workflows to available experimental data for these products. We use Chickspress data to show the differences between these gene annotation pipelines. Chickspress also provides rapid search, visualization and download capacity for chicken gene sets based upon tissue type, developmental stage and experiment type. This first Chickspress release contains 161 gene expression data sets, including expression of mRNAs, miRNAs, proteins and peptides. We provide several examples demonstrating how researchers may use this resource.National Institutes of Health [R24 GM079326]; US Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture [2011-67015-30332]Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Private Law and the European Constitutionalisation of Values

According to the CFREU, the EU is founded on the general values such as values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity. In addition, the TEU refers to a more political set of foundational values, ie respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. These references could be understood as purely ornamental, or as irrelevant in any case for private law. Indeed, it is true that the Court of Justice so far has never made any references to these values in private law cases. Still, the Court already has shown boldness before in the context of the interpretation and review of secondary EU law in private law cases, when it discovered general principles of EU law and general principles of civil law. Therefore, it should not be excluded that the Court may be tempted one day to follow the example of the German constitutional court that famously understands its national constitution as expressing an objective system of constitutional values. This paper explores what such an understanding of private law as an instrument for furthering common European values would entail and examines whether such an ethical reading of European private law would be desirable. It argues that the promotion by the EU of a set of official values through its laws is not compatible we the respect we owe each other in a society characterised by reasonable pluralism. In addition, it points to further difficulties, both of a moral and a practical nature, of the idea of advancing ethical values through private law. It concludes that although it is very well thinkable that the values to which the TEU and the Charter refer will one day be interpreted as an objective value system with (indirect) horizontal effects, the Court of Justice nevertheless should refrain from going down that road

SyMAP v3.4: a turnkey synteny system with application to plant genomes

SyMAP (Synteny Mapping and Analysis Program) was originally developed to compute synteny blocks between a sequenced genome and a FPC map, and has been extended to support pairs of sequenced genomes. SyMAP uses MUMmer to compute the raw hits between the two genomes, which are then clustered and filtered using the optional gene annotation. The filtered hits are input to the synteny algorithm, which was designed to discover duplicated regions and form larger-scale synteny blocks, where intervening micro-rearrangements are allowed. SyMAP provides extensive interactive Java displays at all levels of resolution along with simultaneous displays of multiple aligned pairs. The synteny blocks from multiple chromosomes may be displayed in a high-level dot plot or three-dimensional view, and the user may then drill down to see the details of a region, including the alignments of the hits to the gene annotation. These capabilities are illustrated by showing their application to the study of genome duplication, differential gene loss and transitive homology between sorghum, maize and rice. The software may be used from a website or standalone for the best performance. A project manager is provided to organize and automate the analysis of multi-genome groups. The software is freely distributed at http://www.agcol.arizona.edu/software/symap