677 research outputs found
Institutional Racism and the Dynamics of Privilege in Public Health
No full textInstitutional racism, a pattern of differential access to material resources and power determined by race, advantages one sector of the population while disadvantaging another. Such racism is not only about conspicuous acts of violence but can be carried in the hold of mono-cultural perspectives. Overt state violation of principles contributes to the backdrop against which much less overt yet insidious violations occur. New Zealand health policy is one such mono-cultural domain. It is dominated by western bio-medical discourses that preclude and under-value Māori, the indigenous peoples of this land, in the conceptualisation, structure, content, and processes of health policies, despite Te Tiriti o Waitangi guarantees to protect Māori interests.
Since the 1980s, the Department of Health has committed to honouring the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document of Māori-settler relationships and governance arrangements. Subsequent Waitangi Tribunal reports, produced by an independent Commission of Inquiry have documented the often-illegal actions of successive governments advancing the interests of Pākehā at the expense of Māori. Institutional controls have not prevented inequities between Māori and non-Māori across a plethora of social and economic indicators.
Activist scholars work to expose and transform perceived inequities. My research interest lies in how Crown Ministers and officials within the public health sector practice institutional racism and privilege and how it can be transformed. Through dialogue with Māori working within the health sector, fuelled by critical analysis and strategic advice from a research whānau (family) of Māori health leaders and a Pākehā Tiriti worker, and embracing the traditions of feminist and critical race theory I provide evidence of racism that can invoke strong emotional reactions. More disturbing is its normalisation to nigh imperceptibility within ones personal and professional life. The exposure of racism as a socially created phenomenon is a strength of the research presented here.
My action orientation is my ethical response. Honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a pathway to transforming racism. Such change is likely to be resisted by the Pākehā majority. This anticipated resistance is not a credible reason to weaken responsibility for such necessary change. Transforming institutional racism needs to be driven by senior managers, professional bodies, unions, and by communities. Policies, practices and leadership that enable institutional racism need to be systematically eliminated from the health sector. Crown officials must be supported to strengthen their professional accountabilities and to embrace ethical bicultural practice. Greater transparency could enable more effective monitoring of Crown behaviour and support transformed practice
Using imagery to solve spatial problems
No full textThis report focuses on the use of imagery to solve a range of spatial problems. The research projects reviewed in this report offer some insight into the range of strategies used by solvers of spatial problems and point to relationships between spatial and verbal skills
Dialogue and Collaboration in the Creation of New Works for Clarinet
No full textThis PhD thesis explores dialogue-based, “intimate” collaboration through the creation of new works for clarinet. It borrows from Grounded Theory in order to facilitate an analysis through which emergent themes within a dialogue-based
collaboration are discovered. The aim has not been to insist on one model of collaboration, but to discover methods for improving one’s collaborative skills and to identify ways in which one benefits from a focus on dialogue in
collaboration. Furthermore, it aims to suggest that through collaboration one can make discoveries about the instrument: original contributions to clarinet technique are made within this thesis. The literature from which the research draws inspiration to further collaborative “technique” is cross-disciplinary and wide-ranging: it draws from social theory, collaborative creative writing, dance, the visual arts and of course, music. Added to this is a select discussion of collaboration throughout the repertoire of the clarinet. Finally, this consists of practice-based research. Seven new pieces for clarinet accompany the text
D-Spaces and L-Special Trees
No full textThis dissertation concerns D-spaces and set-theoretic trees. A topological space, X, is a D-space if for every neighbornet of the space there is a closed, discrete set from X whose images in the neighbornet are a cover for X. A set-theoretic tree is a poset where for any element the set of its predecessors is well-ordered.
In this dissertation it is shown that certain L-special trees are D-spaces and some of them are hereditarily so.In particular, let L=[0,1]α with α a countable ordinal be given the lexicographic order. For α \u3c ω+1, the author shows that any L-special tree is hereditarily a D-space. For certain α with ω \u3c α \u3c ω1 the author shows that any L-special tree is a D-space. For the remaining countable ordinals α, the current progress is shown
Can screening and brief intervention lead to population-level reductions in alcohol-related harm?
No full textA distinction is made between the clinical and public health justifications for screening and brief intervention (SBI) against hazardous and harmful alcohol consumption. Early claims for a public health benefit of SBI derived from research on general medical practitioners' (GPs') advice on smoking cessation, but these claims have not been realized, mainly because GPs have not incorporated SBI into their routine practice. A recent modeling exercise estimated that, if all GPs in England screened every patient at their next consultation, 96% of the general population would be screened over 10 years, with 70-79% of excessive drinkers receiving brief interventions (BI); assuming a 10% success rate, this would probably amount to a population-level effect of SBI. Thus, a public health benefit for SBI presupposes widespread screening; but recent government policy in England favors targeted versus universal screening, and in Scotland screening is based on new registrations and clinical presentation. A recent proposal for a national screening program was rejected by the UK National Health Service's National Screening Committee because 1) there was no good evidence that SBI led to reductions in mortality or morbidity, and 2) a safe, simple, precise, and validated screening test was not available. Even in countries like Sweden and Finland, where expensive national programs to disseminate SBI have been implemented, only a minority of the population has been asked about drinking during health-care visits, and a minority of excessive drinkers has been advised to cut down. Although there has been research on the relationship between treatment for alcohol problems and population-level effects, there has been no such research for SBI, nor have there been experimental investigations of its relationship with population-level measures of alcohol-related harm. These are strongly recommended. In this article, conditions that would allow a population-level effect of SBI to occur are reviewed, including their political acceptability. It is tentatively concluded that widespread dissemination of SBI, without the implementation of alcohol control measures, might have indirect influences on levels of consumption and harm but would be unlikely on its own to result in public health benefits. However, if and when alcohol control measures were introduced, SBI would still have an important role in the battle against alcohol-related harm
Late Pleistocene Heather Vole, Phenacomys, on the North Pacific Coast of North America: Environments, Local Extinctions, and Archaeological Implications
No full textPhenacomys cf. intermedius (Merriam 1889), the heather vole, is known from three late Pleistocene and early Holocene localities on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, where they are absent today. This study describes the heather vole specimens from one of these sites, P2 Cave, and provides a human behavioural context for its presence and eventual extirpation as a consequence of changing environments. Phenacomys is a cold-adapted rodent. The early Holocene thermal maximum and subsequent development of coastal western hemlock forests contributed to its Vancouver Island extinction without an apparent corresponding range restriction in higher elevation habitats as has been noted elsewhere in Western North America. Tendencies for low population densities in closed-canopy forests, anti-social intraspecies behaviours, and limited immigration from the mainland would have supported its local extinction. The absence of heather vole in the modern environment elsewhere along the coasts of British Columbia, Southeast Alaska, and Washington are probably due to similar factors as are highlighted here. This study suggests that humans are unlikely to have occupied the Vancouver Island area during a hiatus in the vertebrate faunal record from about 19,700 to 14,700 years ago when the Cordilleran Ice Sheet expanded west to the continental shelf. It also suggests that the glacial conditions in which the heather vole occupied the island diverge from the Holocene interglacial setting that saw an expansion of a human presence and of the corresponding archaeological record.The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the pdf file of the accepted manuscript may differ slightly from what is displayed on the item page. The information in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript reflects the original submission by the author
Toxicological profile for DEET ((N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide))
No full textA Toxicological Profile for DEET, Draft for Public Comment was released in September 2015. This edition supersedes any previously released draft or final profile.Chemical manager(s)/author(s): Sam Keith, Carolyn Harper, Annette Ashizawa, Robert Williams, ATSDR, Division of Toxicology and Human Health Sciences, Atlanta, GA;Fernando Llados, Christina Coley, Heather Carlson-Lynch, North Syracuse, NY.tp185.pd
Stranded Irrigation Assets
No full textThe staff working paper "Stranded Irrigation Assets" (Roper, H., Sayers, C. and Smith, A) was released on 28 June 2006. Prior to the National Water Initiative (NWI), irrigation authorities imposed restrictions on outward trade of water entitlements partly to protect remaining irrigators against the risks and consequences of having to recover the costs of "stranded" or under-utilised assets. This could be one of a number of reasons behind low levels of permanent water trade. This paper examines ways of minimising the financial impact of stranded assets on remaining irrigators with the relaxation of trading restrictions. The aim of the project was to research the options to address the perceived adverse financial consequences of stranded irrigation assets. The authors concluded that it is not certain that proposals under the NWI to relax restrictions on permanent water trading will necessarily result in widespread stranded irrigation assets. Furthermore, stranded assets do not represent an impediment to the efficient use of infrastructure, the allocation of entitlements, or the use of water. The key findings are that instead of using the ongoing payment of access fees, "retail tagging" and "exit" fees to manage financial impacts, a more efficient approach would involve abandoning charges for renewals annuities predicated on the full replacement of existing assets; revaluing under-utilised assets "appropriately" to reflect their current economic value in use; charging to recover costs fully; and the introduction of cost differentiated charges for individual irrigators within irrigation areas. The project is part of a larger suite of Commission research on water policy, which includes modelling regional economic impacts of changes in water trade and research into irrigation externalities. It also complements the commissioned research study on rural water use and the environment. The views expressed in this paper are those of the staff involved and do not necessarily reflect those of the Productivity Commission.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,
Controlled drinking, harm reduction and their roles in the response to alcohol-related problems
No full textThis article first distinguishes three meanings of the term ‘harm reduction’ in the literature on alcohol problems: a European sense in which a change in drinking is not necessarily required; an American sense which includes the controlled drinking (CD) goal of treatment; and a government policy sense in which it is seen as an alternative to whole population alcohol policies. The article then goes on to consider the roles of the CD goal and the harm reduction philosophy in response to three groups of people with alcohol problems or increased risk of such problems: the non-treatment-seeking population of hazardous and harmful drinkers; the population of socio-economically disadvantaged street drinkers or others who are thought unlikely to make radical changes in drinking behaviour; and the regular population of treatment-seeking problem drinkers. It is concluded, inter alia, that the equation of harm reduction and the CD goal in the American sense of harm reduction is confusing and may have had a detrimental effect of the practice of CD treatment. The CD goal should imply an aim of harm-free drinking
Author Correction: Environmental variability supports chimpanzee behavioural diversity
No full textThe original version of the Supplementary Information associated with this Article included an incorrect Supplementary Data 1 file, in which three columns (L, M and P) had slightly different variable names from those written in the code. The HTML has been updated to include a corrected version of Supplementary Data 1; the correct version of Supplementary Data 1 can be found as Supplementary Information associated with this Correction.Additional co-authors: Mattia Bessone, Gregory Brazzola, Valentine Ebua Buh, Rebecca Chancellor, Heather Cohen, Charlotte Coupland, Bryan Curran, Emmanuel Danquah, Tobias Deschner, Dervla Dowd, Manasseh Eno-Nku, J. Michael Fay, Annemarie Goedmakers, Anne-Céline Granjon, Josephine Head, Daniela Hedwig, Veerle Hermans, Sorrel Jones, Jessica Junker, Parag Kadam, Mohamed Kambi, Ivonne Kienast, Deo Kujirakwinja, Kevin E. Langergraber, Juan Lapuente, Bradley Larson, Kevin C. Lee, Vera Leinert, Manuel Llana, Sergio Marrocoli, Amelia C. Meier, David Morgan, Emily Neil, Sonia Nicholl, Emmanuelle Normand, Lucy Jayne Ormsby, Liliana Pacheco, Alex Piel, Jodie Preece, Martha M. Robbins, Aaron Rundus, Crickette Sanz, Volker Sommer, Fiona Stewart, Nikki Tagg, Claudio Tennie, Virginie Vergnes, Adam Welsh, Erin G. Wessling, Jacob Willie, Roman M. Wittig, Yisa Ginath Yuh, Klaus Zuberbühler & Hjalmar S. Küh
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