This report provides information on select international and regional measures and the laws of 97 jurisdictions from around the world that relate to allowing children to reside in prison with an incarcerated parent. Most of the countries surveyed impose specific age limits for a child’s admission into and length of stay in prison. Additionally, most of jurisdictions surveyed require that prisons that admit children meet certain standards.Source: Law Library of Congress
In 2013, 45.3 million people were counted as poor in the United States under the official poverty measure—a number statistically unchanged from the 46.5 million people estimated as poor in 2012. The poverty rate, or percent of the population considered poor under the official definition, was reported at 14.5% in 2013, a statistically significant drop from the estimated 15.0% in 2012. Poverty in the United States increased markedly over the 2007-2010 period, in tandem with the economic recession (officially marked as running from December 2007 to June 2009), and remained unchanged at a post-recession high for three years (15.1% in 2010, and 15.0% in both 2011 and 2012). The 2013 poverty rate of 14.5% remains above a 2006 pre-recession low of 12.3%, and well above an historic low rate of 11.3% attained in 2000 (a rate statistically tied with a previous low of 11.1% in 1973).Source: Congressional Research Service
Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) has become a health emergency of international concern. The World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have developed guidance to educate and inform healthcare workers and travelers worldwide. Symptoms of EVD include abrupt onset of fever, myalgias, and headache in the early phase, followed by vomiting, diarrhea and possible progression to hemorrhagic rash, life threatening bleeding, and multi-organ failure in the later phase. The disease is not transmitted via airborne spread like influenza, but rather from person-to-person, or animal to person via direct contact with bodily fluids or blood. It is crucial that emergency physicians are well educated on disease presentation and how to generate a timely and accurate differential diagnosis that includes exotic diseases in the appropriate patient population. A patient should be evaluated for EVD with suggestive symptoms including unexplained hemorrhage; AND risk factors within 3 weeks prior, such as travel to an endemic area, direct handling of animals from outbreak areas, or ingestion of fruit or other uncooked foods contaminated with bat feces containing the virus. There are experimental therapies for treatment of the virus; however the mainstay of therapy is supportive care. Emergency department personnel on the frontlines must be prepared to rapidly identify and isolate febrile travelers if indicated. All healthcare workers involved in their care should wear personal protective equipment. Despite the intense media focus on EVD rather than other threats, emergency physicians must master and follow essential public health principles for management of all infectious diseases. This includes not only identification and treatment of individuals, but also protection of healthcare workers and prevention of spread, keeping in mind the possibility of other more common disease processes.Source: Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, Articles In Press [via eScholarship Repository]
Eyewitnesses play an important role in criminal cases when they can identify culprits. Estimates suggest that tens of thousands of eyewitnesses make identifications in criminal investigations each year. Research on factors that affect the accuracy of eyewitness identification procedures has given us an increasingly clear picture of how identifications are made, and more importantly, an improved understanding of the principled limits on vision and memory that can lead to failure of identification. Factors such as viewing conditions, duress, elevated emotions, and biases influence the visual perception experience. Perceptual experiences are stored by a system of memory that is highly malleable and continuously evolving, neither retaining nor divulging content in an informational vacuum. As such, the fidelity of our memories to actual events may be compromised by many factors at all stages of processing, from encoding to storage and retrieval. Unknown to the individual, memories are forgotten, reconstructed, updated, and distorted. Complicating the process further, policies governing law enforcement procedures for conducting and recording identifications are not standard, and policies and practices to address the issue of misidentification vary widely. These limitations can produce mistaken identifications with significant consequences. What can we do to make certain that eyewitness identification convicts the guilty and exonerates the innocent?
Stereotypes associating men and masculine traits with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are ubiquitous, but the relative strength of these stereotypes varies considerably across cultures. The present research applies an intersectional approach to understanding ethnic variation in gender-STEM stereotypes and STEM participation within an American university context. African American college women participated in STEM majors at higher rates than European American college women (Study 1, Study 2, and Study 4). Furthermore, African American women had weaker implicit gender-STEM stereotypes than European American women (Studies 2–4), and ethnic differences in implicit gender-STEM stereotypes partially mediated ethnic differences in STEM participation (Study 2 and Study 4). Although African American men had weaker implicit gender-STEM stereotypes than European American men (Study 4), ethnic differences between men in STEM participation were generally small (Study 1) or nonsignificant (Study 4). We discuss the implications of an intersectional approach for understanding the relationship between gender and STEM participation.Source: Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology
This report is one of a series of reports on legislative process and research; it is intended to serve as a finding aid to sources of information, such as documents, news articles, analysis, contacts and services, used in legislative research. It does not define or describe the purpose of various government documents; that information can be found in companion CRS Report R41865, Legislative History Research: A Guide to Resources for Congressional Staff, and CRS Report RL33895, Researching Current Federal Legislation and Regulations: A Guide to Resources for Congressional Staff. This report is not intended to be a definitive list of all resources, but rather a guide to pertinent subscriptions available in the House and Senate in addition to select resources freely available to the public. This report is intended for use by Members and congressional office staff and will be updated annually.Source: Congressional Research Service
The 2014 Ebola outbreak is the largest Ebola outbreak in history and the first Ebola outbreak in West Africa. This outbreak is the first Ebola epidemic the world has ever known — affecting multiple countries in West Africa. Although the risk of an Ebola outbreak in the United States is very low, CDC and partners are taking precautions to prevent this from happening. Source: Center for Disease Control
A number of West African countries are currently experiencing the worst Ebola epidemic in history. As the situation continues to deteriorate rapidly, the European Commission has stepped up its response since March 2014 and is now pledging more than €147 million in response to the devastating human, sanitary, economic and political effects of this crisis for the region. Since the beginning of the epidemic, the European Parliament has shown its concern as regards this critical situation. Source: European Parliamentary Research ServiceWHO Ebola Response Team: Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa — The First 9 Months of the Epidemic and Forward Projections
Abstract: A total of 4507 confirmed and probable EVD cases were reported to the WHO between December 30, 2013, and September 14, 2014 — a 37-week period. A total of 718 confirmed and probable cases and 289 deaths were reported in the week of September 8 through September 14 alone. The numbers of confirmed and probable cases reported by each country over time are shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2. Detailed information was available on 3343 confirmed and 667 probable cases; these cases were used in all our analyses, with the exception of projections (results of analyses based on confirmed, probable, and suspected cases are provided in Supplementary Appendix 1). The median age of persons with EVD was 32 years (interquartile range, 21 to 44), and there were no significant differences in the age distribution of persons with EVD among countries. The majority of persons with EVD (60.8%) were between 15 and 44 years of age (this age group makes up only 44% of the population) (Table 1Table 1Demographic Characteristics and Signs and Symptoms in Confirmed and Probable Ebola Case Patients with a Definitive Clinical Outcome in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.). There were also no significant differences among countries in the total numbers of male and female persons with EVD reported (49.9% of the total were male patients; within-country differences have not yet been fully investigated). EVD has taken a heavy toll among health care workers in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. By September 14, a total of 318 cases, including 151 deaths, had been reported among health care workers. Source: New England Journal of Medicine
...provides a selection of statistics on the European Union (EU) — considered as a single entity — in comparison with the 15 non-EU countries from the Group of Twenty (G20). It aims to give an insight into the European economy, society and environment in comparison with the major economies from the rest of the world.
Table of contents
IntroductionSource: Eurostat
1. Population
2. Living conditions
3. Health
4. Education and training
5. Labour market
6. Economy and finance
7. International trade
8. Industry, trade and services
9. Research and communication
10. Transport
11. Agriculture, forestry and fisheries
12. Environment
13. Energy
The World Alzheimer Report 2014, Dementia and Risk Reduction: An analysis of protective and modifiable factors critically examines the evidence for the existence of modifiable risk factors for dementia.Source: Alzheimer’s Disease International
It focuses on sets of potential modifiable risk factors in four key domains: developmental, psychological and psychosocial, lifestyle and cardiovascular conditions. The report makes recommendations to drive public health campaigns and disease prevention strategies.
The report which was researched and authored by Prof Martin Prince, Prof Emiliano Albanese, Dr Maëlenn Guerchet and Dr Matthew Prina on behalf of the Global Observatory for Ageing and Dementia Care which is hosted at the Health Service and Population Research Department, King’s College London.
National governments frequently pull strings to get their citizens appointed to senior positions in international institutions. We examine, over a 60 year period, the nationalities of the most senior positions in the United Nations Secretariat, ostensibly the world's most representative international institution. The results indicate which nations are successful in this zero-sum game, and what national characteristics correlate with power in international institutions. The most overrepresented countries are small, rich democracies like the Nordic countries. Statistically, democracy, investment in diplomacy, and economic/military power are predictors of senior positions--even after controlling for the U.N. staffi ng mandate of competence and integrity. National control over the United Nations is remarkably sticky; however the in influence of the United States has diminished as US ideology has shifted away from its early allies. In spite of the decline in US influence, the Secretariat remains pro-American relative to the world at large.Source: Center for Global Development
People often treat diversity as an objective feature of situations that everyone perceives similarly. The current research shows, however, that disagreement often exists over whether a group is diverse. We argue that diversity judgments diverge because they are social perceptions that reflect, in part, individuals’ motivations and experiences, including concerns about how a group would treat them. Therefore, whether a group includes in-group members should affect how diverse a group appears because the inclusion or apparent exclusion of in-group members signals whether perceivers can expect to be accepted and treated fairly. Supporting our claims, three experiments demonstrate that racial minority group members perceive more diversity when groups included racial in-group members rather than members of other racial minority groups. Moreover, important differences exist between Asian Americans and African Americans, which underscore the need for more research to explore uniqueness rather than commonalities across racial minority groups.Source: Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin October 2014
Using statistical analysis to analyze how a defendant's skin color and hair texture relate to the sentencing decisions of jurors, Eberhardt has shown that black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty if their facial characteristics are stereotypically black and their victims are white...Read more about Jennifer Eberhardt's work | Read/listen to the NPR Story on all award winners.
Using a recently released confidential dataset from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), we find some evidence of "white flight" from public schools into private schools partly in response to minority schoolchildren. We also examine whether "white flight" is from all minorities or only from certain minority groups, delineated by race or income. We find that white families are fleeing public schools with large concentrations of poor minority schoolchildren. In addition, the clearest flight appears to occur from poor black schoolchildren. The results for "white flight" from Asians and Hispanics are less clear.Source: Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz [via eScholarship Repository]
The Affordable Care Act created an approval pathway for less expensive generic versions of biologic drugs, known as biosimilars, or follow-on biologics. This Insight on the Issues discusses controversial new state legislation that could greatly limit the savings from biosimilars and notes similarities to the debate ignited by the passage of federal legislation that encouraged the development of traditional generic drugs.Source: AARP Public Policy Institute
