Minding our Categories

Minding our manners: Accounting as social norms

The accounting standardization project, kicked off by the passage of US securities laws in the 1930s, has steadily gained momentum over seven decades. Today, written standards dominate accounting thought, practice, regulation, instruction, even research. Generally accepted accounting principles—originally a mere description in its plain English meaning—have since been capitalized into a proper ...

Paying physicians in Canada: minding our Ps and Qs.

Do Classifier Categories Structure our Concepts?

Whether and to what extent our conceptual structure is universal is of great importance for our understanding of the nature of human concepts. Two major factors that might affect our concepts are language and culture. In this research, we tested whether these two factors affect our concepts of everyday objects in any significant ways. For this purpose we compare adults of three cultural/languag...

Overuse of Medical Imaging and Its Radiation Exposure: Who's Minding Our Children?

Re-minding our Ps and Qs: medical cost controls in Canada.

During the past few years the landscape of Canadian physician reimbursement policy has undergone dramatic change. Rapidly eroding fiscal environments for provincial (and federal) governments have forced provinces to "get serious" about controlling a significant, previously uncontrolled, budget line: physician expenditures. All provinces now impose medical expenditure caps, with eight of these b...