Do Community College Students Benefit When Transferring with Other Transfers? A Cross-Section Peer Effects Analysis

Using grouped data, Ehrenberg and Smith (2004) found that community college students who transfer to four-year colleges have higher graduation rates when attending four-year campuses with large shares of transfer students. I test this hypothesis with student-level data and control for heterogeneity among transfer students. “Traditional” transfers—transfers who spend two or more years at community college—are the majority of community college transfers, and graduate at higher rates when attending campuses with larger shares of traditional transfer students. However, this effect is not significant when I omit students who have not declared a major at a late point in their academic careers from the estimations, or when I omit one outlier campus with a large number of transfer students with undeclared majors from the estimations. I also find that traditional transfers have significantly lower graduation rates when they declare majors in departments with large shares of traditional transfers. This last finding is robust to multiple specifications

A service evaluation of ‘Partners in Learning’ involvement in the BSc (Hons) Applied Nursing (Learning Disability) & Generic Social Work, Sheffield Hallam University.

The needs of people with learning disabilities (PWLDs) are not sufficiently met (DoH, 2014). To reduce inequalities, PWLDs must be involved in pre-registration education of nurses and social workers (HCPC, 2014, NMC, 2010). ‘Partners in Learning’ (PinL) is a group of PWLDs involved in the BSc (Hons) Applied Nursing (Learning Disability) and Generic Social Work (ANSW) in the Faculty of Health and Wellbeing. A service evaluation of PinL’s ANSW input in relation to faculty service-user involvement policy was undertaken using a qualitative, cross-sectional design. Whilst PinL facilitates regulatory duties barriers were evident and recommendations to facilitate PinL input made

« Répétez après moi » ou Les rituels d’interaction dans Billy Strauss de Lise Vaillancourt (1991)

Qualifiée, par son auteure (Lise Vaillancourt), de « théâtre épique marqué », la pièce Billy Strauss rejette le conflit dramatique et la résolution cathartique de la mimesis aristotélicienne en faveur de mécanismes qui dévoilent les rouages de la représentation théâtrale. Parmi ces mécanismes, se trouve l’amplification, voire l’exacerbation, des rituels de communication. En observant de plus près ces rituels, on est frappé par le primat de trois procédés particuliers : la répétition, l’interview et la conférence. Quelles sont les conséquences de cette pratique sur la construction des personnages et qu’est-ce que cette pratique révèle de la représentation des relations sociales en rapport avec le contexte sociohistorique ? On constatera que l’idiome cérémonial, traditionnellement employé pour renforcer et gérer les connexions sociales, devient ici synonyme d’une violence postmoderne. C’est ainsi que Vaillancourt opère une radiographie de la poussée individualiste et d’un malaise existentiel au féminin qui a pris de l’ampleur à partir des années 1980, et plus particulièrement dans la décennie qui a suivi l’époque du théâtre féministe militant au Québec.The play Billy Strauss has been described by its author, Lise Vaillancourt, as a clear example of epic theatre. It rejects the dramatic conflict and the cathartic resolution typically associated with Aristotelian mimesis in favour of mechanisms that expose the workings of theatrical representation. One of these devices is the exacerbation of communication rituals. A closer observation reveals the primacy of three operating process in particular: repeated speech, interviews and conferences. What effect does this practice have on the construction of the play’s characters and what does it reveal about the representation of social relationships in their social and historical context? One discovers that the ceremonial idiom, traditionally used to reinforce and manage social connections, is used here as a synonym of a type of post-modern violence. It is in this way that Vaillancourt performs an x-ray of the individualist trend and the accompanying existential malaise afflicting women in the 1980s, that is, in the decade following the heyday of a committed feminist theatre in Québec

Get screened: a pragmatic randomized controlled trial to increase mammography and colorectal cancer screening in a large, safety net practice

Abstract Background Most randomized controlled trials of interventions designed to promote cancer screening, particularly those targeting poor and minority patients, enroll selected patients. Relatively little is known about the benefits of these interventions among unselected patients. Methods/Design "Get Screened" is an American Cancer Society-sponsored randomized controlled trial designed to promote mammography and colorectal cancer screening in a primary care practice serving low-income patients. Eligible patients who are past due for mammography or colorectal cancer screening are entered into a tracking registry and randomly assigned to early or delayed intervention. This 6-month intervention is multimodal, involving patient prompts, clinician prompts, and outreach. At the time of the patient visit, eligible patients receive a low-literacy patient education tool. At the same time, clinicians receive a prompt to remind them to order the test and, when appropriate, a tool designed to simplify colorectal cancer screening decision-making. Patient outreach consists of personalized letters, automated telephone reminders, assistance with scheduling, and linkage of uninsured patients to the local National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection program. Interventions are repeated for patients who fail to respond to early interventions. We will compare rates of screening between randomized groups, as well as planned secondary analyses of minority patients and uninsured patients. Data from the pilot phase show that this multimodal intervention triples rates of cancer screening (adjusted odds ratio 3.63; 95% CI 2.35 - 5.61). Discussion This study protocol is designed to assess a multimodal approach to promotion of breast and colorectal cancer screening among underserved patients. We hypothesize that a multimodal approach will significantly improve cancer screening rates. The trial was registered at Clinical Trials.gov NCT00818857http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78264/1/1472-6963-10-280.xmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78264/2/1472-6963-10-280.pdfPeer Reviewe

The Father Birth

This creative dissertation is a fabulist and satirical novel. The book follows the story of main character and narrator Earleen, an atypical and hyper-intelligent sixteen-year-old who continues to be traumatized by her sociopathic father even after he dies. A self-taught bookworm born in the early 1980s, her formative years were spent trapped inside her parents\u27 rural methamphetamine cookhouse. When her parents blow up inside their house during a drug-manufacturing incident on the eve of Earleen\u27s early adolescence, she finds herself in the arms of an affluent adoptive couple (Dennis Stark, a fertility specialist, and his homemaker wife Beverly) who have been unable to conceive. Her presence is an unwelcome addition to Dennis\u27s mother, who is a mute stroke victim and was formerly the couple\u27s coddled center of attention. Throughout her childhood, Earleen had a tumultuous relationship with her reckless father (known as Pops ), whose drug-addled paranoia often resulted in her abuse and torture. Although Earleen\u27s mother never reappears to haunt her after the explosion, Pops\u27 spirit is determined to find a way to get back to Earth and rejoin the living. He frequently visits Earleen — his ghost can return through the medium of liquid, and he\u27s convinced she\u27s the only one who can help him get back. Though no longer starved and stabbed, Earleen is still invisible and voiceless in her new home. Her adoptive mother Beverly values Earleen only as a path to grandchildren and is disappointed Earleen doesn\u27t share her obsession with outward beauty. Dennis and Beverly live in total ignorance of Earleen\u27s hauntings, although Dennis\u27 mother seems to detect something amiss. Dismayed by the social aspects of school, Earleen graduates early in order to take on secretarial work at Dennis\u27 fertility clinic. Her father\u27s ghost, which is growing weaker but also more desperate and therefore dangerous, decides that this is his ticket back to life: he is convinced he can enter into a donor sample just as he can enter other liquid, and hypothesizes that if Earleen impregnates herself with the sample, he can be reborn. Although Earleen doesn\u27t want to help him or to have him back among the living, she is afraid of him, and he threatens the safety of her new family if she doesn\u27t obey. Earleen chooses a donor and successfully impregnates herself, but weeks later she runs into the unknowing donor at the store and agrees to go on a date with him. A relationship begins, and Earleen finds herself in the precarious situation of carrying the baby of a man who doesn\u27t know she\u27s pregnant, doesn\u27t know it\u27s by his sperm, and has never slept with her. Worse yet, though Huckle soon shows himself to be self-absorbed and misogynistic, Earleen never seems to have a say in how quickly their relationship is moving forward. Inside a barn during a storm, she gives birth to an inky creature that crawls into the rain. Yet once born, her father does not stay away and leave her alone as promised. His development is not going as planned, and each year of his new life seems to make him weaker rather than stronger. When Earleen becomes a young bride and gets pregnant, Pops returns wanting to overtake the fetus and be reborn once more in the hopes that the process will be more successful the second time around. She must find a way to protect herself from Pops and cut him off from the living world

Preferences Toward Leniency under Mandatory Criminal Sentencing Guidelines: Role-in-the-Offense Adjustments for Federal Drug Trafficking Defendants

This paper tests whether judges and/or prosecutors manipulated mandatory federal sentencing guidelines to shorten prison sentences. It finds that, among drug traffickers convicted under the federal guidelines’ former mandatory sentencing system, those who faced harsher underlying charges were found to have played significantly lower-level roles in their conspiracies. This is consistent with guideline manipulation for defendants facing longer sentences. Women received significantly larger role-in-the-offense reductions related to harsher underlying charges than men. Effects were insignificant if defendants were eligible for lower-cost alternative methods of sentence reduction, namely substantial assistance departures and safety-valve reductions from mandatory minimum sentences