Helping Hand Research Articles

A helping hand for the good guy; novel pharmacological approaches for augmenting the cardiovascular benefits of high density lipoproteins.

Pharmacological modulation of serum lipid levels is a powerful means of favourably modifying the risk and incidence of coronary disease. High density lipoproteins (HDL) exert a beneficial influence on atherosclerotic disease, in part by modulating blood lipid metabolism. Three factors have contributed to the growing interest in HDL as a therapeutic target. Firstly, recent, if limited, clinical trials have demonstrated the cardiovascular benefits of modulating HDL. Secondly, on-going studies have clarified several aspects of HDL metabolism and opened new avenues for pharmacological intervention. Thirdly, the WHO foresees an enormous global increase in the incidence of type 2 diabetes, as well as a related disorder, the metabolic syndrome. Both have, as their primary complication, cardiovascular disease whilst one of the principal lipid disorders is a reduction in HDL. Thus for several cogent reasons, HDL has become a primary target for drug development. The review covers our understanding of HDL metabolism, and notably the contribution of recent studies, in the context of potential sites for intervention. The rationale for targeting such sites, and available human and animal data on the cardiovascular consequences of modulating their activities, is discussed. Finally, the current status of drugs developed with a view to influencing HDL metabolism is presented.

State-Based versus Federal-Based Approaches to Reducing the Medicare Pharmaceutical Coverage Gap

A state-based approach, such as the Immediate Helping Hand proposal put forward by the Bush administration, is likely to be less effective than a federal-based approach at reducing the Medicare pharmaceutical coverage gap. In addition, the voluntary nature of a state-based approach, coupled with variations across states in existing coverage benefits and the limited reach of state pharmacy assistance programs, would likely lead to a perpetuation of uneven coverage. This article argues in favor of adding a federal-based universal prescription drug benefit to Medicare on the grounds of both equity and empirical evidence. Adding a universal drug benefit to the currently existing Medicare program would extend application of the social insurance concept across hospital care, physician service, and prescription drug coverage components of Medicare. As a result, a more equitable distribution of prescription drug coverage would be promoted while mitigating the effects of selection risk.

California's Professional Mentoring Program: How to develop a statewide mentoring program

Trends in downsizing, restructuring, increased diversity, and individual responsibility for career development have sparked a renewed interest in mentoring. Technology is changing the way professionals practice, including dieticians. This is reflected in the strategic goals for the American Dietetic Association (ADA). In 1999, with the aid of an ADA Affiliate/Dietetic Practice Group (DPG) Collaborative Strategic Initiatives Grant, a Mid-Career Mentoring Program (MCMP) was developed in California. This program provided an opportunity for dietitians with advanced skills (mentors) to be matched with those desiring to develop new skills (mentees). A six-step process was used to develop the program. The six steps include: appoint a coordinator; identify prospective mentors; locate resources; define tasks and establish procedures; identify mentees; and begin the program. A final product of the grant was the development of the handbook The Helping Hand. This handbook can be used by other affiliates or practice groups that may wish to develop a mentoring program. Mentoring programs can assist registered dietitians and DTRs (dietetic technicians, registered) in developing their educational plans for the new Professional Development 2001 certification process. J Am Diet Assoc. 2003;103:73-76.

Chirality of Living Systems: A Helping Hand from Crystals and Oligopeptides

Chirality of Living Systems: A Helping Hand from Crystals and Oligopeptides

Chirality of Living Systems: A Helping Hand from Crystals and Oligopeptides

Chirality of Living Systems: A Helping Hand from Crystals and Oligopeptides

Still Giving Nature a Helping Hand? Surrogacy: A Debate About Technology and Society

Still Giving Nature a Helping Hand? Surrogacy: A Debate About Technology and Society

Chirality of living systems: a helping hand from crystals and oligopeptides.

Left-right asymmetry is ubiquitous in nature. Recent studies reveal changes in the energy and growth rate of crystal surfaces to which D or L amino acids bind, with the binding itself being dictated by stereochemical matching. Likewise, oligomerization of amino acids appears to be a chiroselective process that enables the propagation of sequences with defined handedness.[[For a definition of chiroselective self-assembly, see: M. Bolli, R. Micura, A. Eschenmoser, Chem. Biol. 1997, 4, 309-320.]] These results, along with related findings on symmetry breaking and further amplification of asymmetry at a supramolecular level, constitute new insights into the origin of homochirality in living species.

A Helping Hand in Assessing Children's Knowledge: Instructing Adults to Attend to Gesture

The spontaneous hand gestures that accompany children's explanations of concepts have been used by trained experimenters to gain insight into children's knowledge. In this article, 3 experiments tested whether it is possible to teach adults who are not trained investigators to comprehend information conveyed through children's hand gestures. In Experiment 1, we used a questionnaire to explore whether adults benefit from gesture instruction when making assessments of young children's knowledge of conservation problems. In Experiment 2, we used a similar questionnaire, but asked adults to make assessments of older children's mathematical knowledge. Experiment 3 also concentrated on math assessments, but used a free-recall paradigm to test the extent of the adult's understanding of the child's knowledge. Taken together, the results of the experiments suggest that instructing adults to attend to gesture enhances their assessment of children's knowledge at multiple ages and across multiple domains.

News analysis

Includes: (1) Europe's Cellulars To Share Infrastructure? (2) Why the Fuss About 3G? (3) Senate Changes Will Shake Telecom, Defense R&D, Energy. (4) In Energy, Will Bingaman Out-Cheney Cheney? (5) India's Power Grid Finds Helping Hand. (6) The Itanium Platform Lands Its First Computing Systems. (7) Ion Beam Keeps Liquid Crystals in Line. (8) How to Raise UV Nanolasers. (9) Swedish Start-Up Puts New Spin on Pen and Paper. (10) Big Welcome for MIT's Web-Based Courseware.

A Helping Hand for Newcomers to Ethnography

A Helping Hand for Newcomers to Ethnography

Someone to Lend a Helping Hand: Women Growing Old in Rural America

Someone to Lend. Helping Hand: Women Growing Old in Rural America. Dena Shenk. Amesterdam: Gorden and Breach Publishers 1998.lx. 233pp.,photograph, tables, appendixes, index.

Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime

Will increasing the number of minority and women police officers make law enforcement more effective by drawing on abilities that have gone untapped and creating better contact with communities and victims? Or will standards have to be lowered too far before large numbers of minorities and women can be hired? Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. cities, I find that more black and minority police officers increase crime rates, but this apparently arises because lower hiring standards involved in recruiting more minority officers reduces the quality of both new minority and new nonminority officers. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black populated areas. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when more women are hired, and this raises questions about whether norming tests or altering their content to create equal pass rates is preferable. The paper examines how the changing composition of police departments affects such measures as the murder of and assaults against police officers.

Evaluation of the “Helping Hands” Volunteer Program for People with Mental Illness

Volunteer programs have been used to alter attitudes, provide long-term knowledge towards mental illness and increase the quality of life of consumers receiving volunteer services. Sixteen volunteers completed an 18-hour training program and in pairs worked with 11 consumers over 4 months. Sixteen volunteers completed training measures of knowledge and attitudes scales. Pre and post program quality of life and behavioural functioning measures were taken on 5 consumers. Volunteers maintained their knowledge of mental illness over 6 months and had significant increases in their comfort in interactions with people who have mental illness. Case managers, consumers and volunteers all reported high levels of satisfaction with the program but there were no significant changes in behavioural functioning or quality of life for consumers over 4 months of receiving volunteer support. High levels of client disability and the need for longer term follow-up were identified as factors needing to be addressed in future studies.

From the Grabbing Hand to the Helping Hand

I present a study of ownership of firms under government rent seeking. Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such a government rent seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership is shown to serve as a second best commitment mechanism through which the government agency will restrain itself from the rent seeking activity and even offer the manager support and favor such as tax breaks and subsidies. This mechanism works at a cost because government ownership creates distortion in resource allocation. In contrast to the property rights literature, the analysis shows that government ownership may Pareto dominate private ownership even when the government agency has only unproductive roles in the investment. The analysis corresponds to a host of stylized empirical observations concerning local government-owned firms during China's transition to a market economy. Based on this analysis, I suggest that local government owned firms may be transformed to private ownership as China's input markets become more liberalized.

Lending a Helping Hand: The Effects of Gender Stereotypes and Gender on Likelihood of Helping1

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of gender and gender‐role stereotypes on judgments of help‐giving. As part of a 2 × 2 within‐subjects design, 40 undergraduates read 4 different scenarios that described either a man or a woman needing help in either a stereotypically masculine or a stereotypically feminine situation. Although male participants felt more sympathy for men in stereotypically feminine situations and for women in stereotypically masculine situations, they were no more likely to help these individuals than they were to help those in gender‐consistent situations. By contrast, women were more likely to help people in gender‐inconsistent situations, despite feeling the most sympathy for people needing help in masculine situations. Implications for Weiner's (1980) attribution model of help‐giving and Nadler & Fisher's (1986) threat‐to‐self‐esteem model are discussed.

Giving a Helping Hand to a Hunger Program: Combining Service Learning and Managerial Communication Basics

This article is an overview of a freshman-level managerial communication class project. It provides a successful method of overcoming time constraints while maintaining instructional relevance and reaping the benefits of service learning.

Of Mops and Maids: Contradictions and Continuities in Bureaucratized Domestic Work

This paper explores domestic employment relations in the context of the growth of the post-industrial service sector and the “stalled revolution.” The data comes from fieldwork conducted among domestic workers, employers, and clients, as well as managers and owners of housecleaning agencies. By presenting a case study of the household service agency “Helping Hands Housekeeping,” I compare and contrast bureaucratized arrangements of paid domestic work with the “traditional” private employment arrangement, demonstrating how the bureaucratization of paid domestic work has (and has not) affected the relations, conditions, and experiences of this occupation. To sell their service, managers train workers to “care” for clients. In addition, HHH managers create a work culture of caring and service as a form of worker control and as a strategy to combat worker turnover. The gender ideologies and personalized management tactics used by these organizations mask the low pay, part-time hours and lack of benefits that persist within the more bureaucratized arrangements of paid domestic work. Workers also implement “strategic personalism” in their relations with employers and clients and may seek out personalistic relationships and use them to their advantage. This research challenges the modernist notion that more formal and structured work relations are sufficient to eliminate the emotional and psychological exploitation of domestic workers. Indeed, my fieldwork suggests that private employment arrangements offer workers more options and greater potential for negotiating wages and control over the work process than do the more rationalized organizations and relations of household service agencies.

Physician-Assisted Suicide

Preface Part I. Historical Interpretations 1. The Significance of Inaccurate History in Legal Considerations of Physician-Assisted Suicide/ Darrell W. Amundsen 2. Doctors and the Dying of Patients in American History/ Harold Y. Vanderpool Part II. Ethical Assessments and Positions 3. Self-Extinction: The Morality of the Helping Hand/ Daniel Callahan 4. Physician-Assisted Suicide is Sometimes Morally Justified/ Dan W. Brock Part III. Medical Practices and Perspectives 5. Physician-Assisted Suicide is Not an Acceptable Practice for Physicians/ Ira R. Byock 6. Assisting in Patient Suicides Is an Acceptable Practice for Physicians/ Howard Brody Part IV. Potentially Vulnerable Patients 7. Physician-Assisted Death in the Context of Disability/ Kristi L. Kirschner, Carol J. Gill, and Christine L. Cassel 8. Physician-Assisted Suicide, Abortion, and Treatment Refusal: Using Gender to Analyze the Difference/ Susan Wolf Part V. Public-Policy Options and Recommendations 9. Considerations of Safeguards Proposed in Laws and Guidelines to Legalize Assisted Suicide/ Steven Miles, Demetra M. Pappas, and Robert Koepp 10. Physician-Assisted Suicide: Evolving Public Policy/ William J. Winslade Appendixes 1. People v. Kevorkian, Supreme Court of Michigan, 1994 2. Compassion in Dying v. State of Washington, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, 1996 3. Quill v. Vacco, United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 1996 Contributors Index

Giving the 'Hidden Hand' a Helping Hand? The rhetoric and reality of neoliberal education reform in England and New Zealand

ABSTRACT Recent moves in many parts of the world to restructure and deregulate state education have sought to link significant degrees of institutional autonomy with an emphasis on parental choice and competition, thereby creating 'quasi-markets' in education. This paper discusses such developments as part of a neoliberal project for education in two of the contexts in which these policies have so far been taken furthest-England/Wales and New Zealand. It compares five aspects of policy in these countries, namely school autonomy, diversity and choice, private sector involvement, privatised provision and accountability mechanisms. It argues that the rhetoric of neoliberal schooling policies is far removed from their reality, as governments confront the classic tension between fiscal imperatives and the need for legitimation. It points to the need for new political ways forward in a situation where there appears to be little creative thinking about alternatives to the policies of the New Right.

How Far is Indochina from ASEAN?

The enlargement of ASEAN to include the Indochinese countries is an important step in the creation of an integrated Southeast Asian marketplace. Nevertheless, the divergent levels of economic development between these countries will pose important challenges for the acceding countries as well as for ASEAN itself. This article considers the economic of the Indochinese countries from the ASEAN norm and ponders the implications of this divergence from the perspective of regional integration, with the experience of the European Union (EU) and the Central and Eastern European countries as a yardstick. I. Introduction Except for North Korea, the Indochinese countries' are the last countries in Asia to emerge from economic backwardness. Political isolation, captiveness in the economic system of central planning and autarky, and civil war have been powerful obstacles against capital formation and economic growth in Indochina for more than two decades. Now, after the demise of the ancien regime, Indochina has been released from external (Soviet Union) subordination. This is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for take-off. Since economic liberalization is (correctly) purported to shape fundamentally political weights, overcoming politically-rooted internal resistance against market opening is still an unfinished job. Yet, time is on the side of the reformers. Political leaders in Indochina increasingly understand that market opening in low-income, unregulated countries neighbouring vibrant emerging markets will more rapidly promote economic recovery than in over-industrialized (as a heritage of the socialist system), highlyregulated Central and Eastern European countries neighboured by low-growth high income countries. Hence, if the transition period in former socialist Asia is shorter than in former socialist Europe, and there are good arguments why this can be expected (Sachs and Woo 1994; Diehl 1994), political leaders with high time preference rates will not oppose market opening. This can be expected since market opening strengthens their tax base and allows them to nourish political entitlements of their political clientele without depressing real incomes of the mass of population. In this situation, regional co-operation within ASEAN offers a helpful hand for market networking, access to know-how and risk capital, and institution building at easier terms than is provided by joining the multilateral institutions. The latter requires a process which is more tedious given higher political and economic hurdles imposed by non-Asian countries and the legal complexities of multilateral institutions. This article reviews and evaluates which arguments for integrating Indochina into ASEAN can be derived from the new theoretical literature treating regionalism as an endogenous response to the development of the multilateral trading system (Section II). Section III investigates the degree of divergence between the two regions, which has increased over the entire life span of ASEAN, and identifies leading indicators of emerging convergence attributable to policy changes and the transformation of economic structures in Indochina. Comparisons to the EU and its eastern neighbours are drawn. Section IV stylises the distance between AFTA and the most advanced Indochinese economy, Vietnam, in terms of trade policies. Section V integrates the theoretical discussion introduced in Section II and assesses its practical relevance for Indochina and ASEAN enlargement. Section VI gives some concluding remarks. II. Small Countries Linking up to Successful Integration Schemes: The Underpinnings of a Qualitative New Regionalism The underpinnings of new regionalism have been introduced by Ethier (1996) as follows: Multilateral liberalization among OECD countries and the NIEs is so advanced (at least with respect to trade in manufactures) that the old Vinerian dichotomy of trade creation versus trade diversion has lost much of its empirical relevance. …