Climate Change: Effects on the Older Adult

The effects of climate change include floods, hurricanes, heat waves, and fires; these natural disasters can result in respiratory, cardiovascular, and psychological harm in older adults, who experience the highest morbidity and mortality during heat waves. Advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) need education on preparing, assessing, and treating older adults for climate-change disasters, especially heat waves. This article will help APRNs understand the effects of climate-change events on the vulnerable older adults and advocates for the need to integrate health effects of climate change into curricula, practicums, policy, and research agendas.     

Participatory research in Northwest Atlanta's Proctor Creek Watershed: Using photovoice to explore environmental health risks at the water's edge

In this study we used a participatory research method, photovoice, to explore community perceptions about environmental health risks, community assets, and strengths in and around an urban, degraded watershed in Northwest Atlanta, Georgia. This watershed, formed by Proctor Creek, is a focal point for redevelopment and infrastructure investments for years to come. Using a community-based participatory research approach, 10 Proctor Creek residents (watershed researchers), and a university partner, engaged in data collection; participatory data analysis; internal discussions; translation of research findings into watershed restoration, community revitalization, remedial action, and policy solutions; and dissemination of results to fellow watershed residents, stakeholders, and decision makers. We present a conceptual model linking the watershed researchers' understanding of urban policies and practice in the Proctor Creek Watershed to environmental, neighborhood and housing conditions and their influence on health outcomes and quality of life. Engaging community members in defining their own community environmental health challenges and assets yielded the following primary themes: 1) threats to the natural environment, 2) built environment stressors that influence health, 3) blight and divestment of public resources, and 4) hope for the future. Residents’ vision for the future of the watershed - a restored creek, revitalized neighborhoods, and restored people - is fueled by a strong connection to history, memory, and sense of place. We demonstrate the value of local knowledge in identifying previously unaddressed environmental health risks in the Proctor Creek Watershed as well as solutions to reduce or eliminate them.     

A mechanism for gratitude development in a child

Most scholars consider gratitude as a moral emotion, with only few seeing it as a character trait. As a result, no systematic mechanism has ever been attempted to develop gratitude in children. Given the social issue of widespread lack of gratitude in the one-child generations of China, this article attempts to outline a mechanism of parental moral education for gratitude development. The mechanism is underpinned by love, induction and discipline; and theoretically justified in accordance with key psychological and sociological theories, such as Piaget's theory of moral development, Kohlberg's moral stages theory, attachment theory, Hoffman's internalisation theory, Rest's social justice theory and Baumrind's parenting styles theory. The benefits and potential risks of each strategy of the mechanism are addressed.     

How to Right a Wrong: Empirically Evaluating Whether Victim,Offender, and Assault Characteristics can Inform Rape Kit Testing Policies

ABSTRACT

Hundreds of thousands of previously untested sexual assault kits (SAKs) have been uncovered in police property storage facilities across the United States, representing a national failure in institutional response to sexual assault. Faced with this discovery, jurisdictions must now decide if and how they should test these kits. Some stakeholders have suggested prioritizing kits for testing by victim, offender, or assault characteristics, based on the belief that these characteristics can predict the likely utility of DNA testing. However, little research has examined the empirical merits of such prioritization. To address this gap in the literature and inform SAK testing policies, we randomly sampled 900 previously untested SAKs from Detroit, MI. The sampled SAKs were submitted for DNA testing, and eligible DNA profiles were entered into Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the federal DNA database. Police records associated with each SAK were coded for victim, offender, and assault characteristics, and logistic regression analyses were conducted to test whether these characteristics predict which SAKs yield DNA profiles that match (“hit”) to other criminal offenses in CODIS. Testing this sample of previously-untested SAKs produced a substantial number of CODIS hits, but few of the tested variables were significant predictors of CODIS hit rate. These findings suggest that testing all previously-unsubmitted kits may generate information that is useful to the criminal justice system, while also potentially addressing the institutional betrayal victims experienced when their kits were ignored.     

程序公平对工作满意度、组织承诺的影响:工作不安全感的中介作用

目的:探讨程序公平对工作满意度、组织承诺的影响以及工作不安全感在其中的中介作用。方法:对来自国内某大型国营企业592名员工的关于程序公平、工作满意度、组织承诺和工作不安全感的问卷调查数据进行中介回归分析(Mediatingregressionanalysis)。结果:①程序公平和员工的工作满意度、组织承诺存在显著的正向关系,而和其工作不安全感之间存在显著的负向关系;②工作不安全感部分中介程序公平对整体工作满意度和组织承诺的影响。结论:通过改善程序公平,可以减少员工的工作不安全感,并进而增强其工作满意度和组织承诺。     

义利关系的不同类型及其实质

义与利之间的关系，从不同的角度和层面考察有不同的类型范式。从内容上考察，可从物质利益与伦理道德的关系、个人利益与社会公共利益的关系、物质生活需要与精神生活需要的关系、志向动机与功利效果的关系等角度来予以分析。从形式上考察，其关系有义利同一型、义利对立型、义利相互包含型、义利相互交叉型等类型。从价值取向上考察，大体有重义轻利型、重利轻义型、义利俱轻型和义利并重型。了解这些不同的义利关系类型，有助于我们深入而全面地把握义利关系的不同涵蕴及其实质，进而选择合乎社会需要的义利观。社会主义义利观既反对封建主义的重义轻利，又反对资本主义的重利轻义。它在义利观上的基本价值取向是义利并重，义利统一。     

Location-specific strategies for eliminating US national racial-ethnic [... formula ...] exposure inequality

Air pollution levels in the United States have decreased dramatically over the past decades, yet national racial-ethnic exposure disparities persist. For ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5), we investigate three emission-reduction approaches and compare their optimal ability to address two goals: 1) reduce the overall population average exposure (“overall average”) and 2) reduce the difference in the average exposure for the most exposed racial-ethnic group versus for the overall population (“national inequalities”). We show that national inequalities in exposure can be eliminated with minor emission reductions (optimal: ~1% of total emissions) if they target specific locations. In contrast, achieving that outcome using existing regulatory strategies would require eliminating essentially all emissions (if targeting specific economic sectors) or is not possible (if requiring urban regions to meet concentration standards). Lastly, we do not find a trade-off between the two goals (i.e., reducing overall average and reducing national inequalities); rather, the approach that does the best for reducing national inequalities (i.e., location-specific strategies) also does as well as or better than the other two approaches (i.e., sector-specific and meeting concentration standards) for reducing overall averages. Overall, our findings suggest that incorporating location-specific emissions reductions into the US air quality regulatory framework 1) is crucial for eliminating long-standing national average exposure disparities by race-ethnicity and 2) can benefit overall average exposures as much as or more than the sector-specific and concentration-standards approaches.

The Clean Air Act has dramatically reduced outdoor air pollution levels in the United States, with (during 1990 through 2020) aggregate benefits exceeding costs 30-to-1 ($2 trillion versus $65 billion) (1). Important regulatory strategies include the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) and sector-specific emission-reduction technology requirements (e.g., Best Achievable Control Technology [BACT] standards). However, exposure inequalities persist (2–7). Disparities by race-ethnicity are larger than, and distinct from, those by income (4–6, 8, 9). Racial-ethnic inequalities in US ambient air pollution and subsequent exposures are attributable in part to racist planning, including historical, race-based housing segregation and land-use practices (10–18). Environmental racism scholars have suggested that strategies and policies for eliminating disparities will be most effective when racial-ethnic injustices are centered and directly addressed (19–22).The existing literature documents exposure inequities (3–7, 9, 23–26) and investigates the impacts on inequities of emission changes for specific sources (e.g., refs. 27–36) or locations (37–43). However, the scientific literature has not investigated how to eliminate national racial-ethnic inequalities in air pollution or what level of emission reduction would be required to do so (44).We examine three potential approaches to reduce or eliminate national exposure inequalities: 1) location-specific emission reductions (hereafter, “location”), 2) sector-specific emission reductions (“sector”; analogous to BACT-type approaches), and 3) requiring regions to meet a concentration standard (“NAAQS-like”). Approaches 2 and 3 mirror aspects of current regulations; approach 1 would be a new regulatory approach. We find that the location approach is by far the most effective (can eliminate national disparities with only small absolute emission reductions); the sector approach is poor (can reduce disparities, but requires substantially larger emission reductions; cannot eliminate disparities except by eliminating nearly all emissions); and NAAQS-like is the least effective (does not eliminate disparities). The location approach is also the strongest of the three for reducing population-average exposures.To quantitatively compare the three approaches, we use the publicly available InMAP (Intervention Model for Air Pollution) source-receptor matrix (ISRM) (45) to estimate long-term average ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations across the contiguous United States caused by anthropogenic emissions in 2014. Disparity here refers to the difference between population-weighted average PM2.5 concentrations for the most exposed racial-ethnic group minus the overall population (in sensitivity analyses, we instead investigate government-designated “high vulnerability” [HV] locations; Materials and Methods). ISRM predicts the concentration of primary PM2.5 and secondary PM2.5 formed from nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur oxides (SOx), ammonia (NH3), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). We employ the 2014 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Emission Inventory, grouped into 14 source sectors (see Fig. 2B, SI Appendix, and below). ISRM contains 52,411 grid cells (locations) with size (i.e., spatial resolution) ranging from 1 km in densely populated urban centers to 48 km in sparsely populated rural areas; the average spatial resolution is 2.6 km in Urban Areas and 22.6 km in non-Urban Areas (13.2 km overall). Emissions reductions for location and sector are an optimization to maximally reduce disparities for the most exposed group relative to the overall population average. They use the spatial resolution of the simulation grid and the 14 source sectors, respectively. Thus, our results inform what that method could optimally do to reduce or eliminate racial-ethnic exposure disparities. The NAAQS-like approach simulates successive, proportional emission reductions in each region violating the hypothetical NAAQS (e.g., 6 µg/m3), until the NAAQS-like standard is met.Open in a separate windowFig. 2.Emission reductions for the three approaches: by location (i.e., corresponding to the green lines, Fig. 1) (A), by sector (corresponding to blue lines, Fig. 1) (B), and NAAQS-like (orange lines, Fig. 1) (C). A displays national results (Left) and zoomed-in results for 10 large areas (Right). Spatial units displayed in C are CBSAs, the geographic unit for NAAQS evaluation. The three approaches offer fundamentally different ways of formulating and prioritizing emission reductions. Ag., agriculture; Const., construction; Elec., electricity; HD, heavy duty; LD, light duty; Misc., miscellaneous; Res., residential; Veh., vehicle.     

Book reviews

Defining Madness P. Shea Leichhardt Sydney: Federation Press, 1999, 168 pp., $29.95, ISBN I 876067 12 8 (paperback).

Mental Health Review Tribunals: Law and Practice A Eldergill Sweet & Maxwell. London, 1997, hb 1333pp. 59 pounds fifty.     

Advances in the generation of mouse models to elucidate the pathways of drug metabolism in rodents and man

Clinical pharmacologists have three distinct contributions to make in the economic evaluation of new and existing pharmaceutical products: they should play a significant role in promoting the principles of “opportunity costs” in healthcare; they need to have a broad understanding of the methodology of economic evaluation in healthcare; they have a critical role in bringing their specialist knowledge, skills and experience in decision-making. In fulfilling these essential roles clinical pharmacologists may find themselves outside their conventional “comfort zones”. Nevertheless, clinical pharmacologists need to rise to the occasion if they are to meet their obligations to patients and to society as a whole.     

Detection,Advice, and Referral to Services (DARTS) Procedures Among Clients With Public Defenders

Although screening and brief intervention techniques have been found to be efficacious in a variety of medical settings, their use in the criminal justice system has been limited. We present data from Chief Public Defenders (PDs) in 24 Pennsylvania counties who were surveyed about their approach to substance-using clients and their attitudes toward treatment and talking to clients about substance use. A random subsample (n = 8) participated in an additional semistructured interview. Results provide preliminary support for the use of Detection, Advice, and Referral to Services (DARTS) procedures by PDs and identify potential barriers to its implementation.