Panhandlers are a highly visible group of street people in urban areas. Some believe panhandlers must beg because they have fallen through the social safety net, but others have suggested that panhandlers make considerable amounts of money and spend most of it on their addictions. This raises the question of whether giving money to panhandlers is beneficial to them or not. Income from panhandli...

Scientists develop a vaccine to prevent a disease, collaborate ith manufacturers to establish its safety and efficacy and bring t to scale, and manufacturers then submit it for licensure by the ood and Drug Administration. Only then do federal public health uthorities, guided by the scientific evidence and expert opinion, ormulate recommendations for its use. In turn, such recommenations then s...

M edical researchers are now paying increasing attention to findings of racial or ethnic (“racial/ethnic” hereafter) differences in quality and access to care, health outcomes, risk factors, genetic markers, and therapeutic response. However, this attention has been met with growing controversy and debate. Society’s history of discrimination, racism and eugenics, and continued disparities in ac...

hat is “Women’s Health”? Women’s Health is medical practice that touches all aspects of women’s lives—from daily wellness and “thriving” to access to quality medical care. It includes medical research that takes into account gender differences—both biologic and sociologic. It includes innovative programs that constantly push the envelope to provide the highest quality and service. It includes p...

Effect modification occurs in biomedical research when a measure of statistical association between an exposure and a health outcome, as represented on some specific scale, differs according to the levels of a third variable—the effect modifier. The heterogeneity of a measure of association across the levels of a modifying variable has an importance that might be statistical, epidemiologic, and...

The fast-paced evolution of mobile networking demand has brought problems of ever-increased complexity to the network research domain. Many of these problems often do not have all the elements for a complete solution. We have however to meet the market demand for a denser and simpler, pervasive, web of communicating objects. In as many domains as possible, we have to search for elements of know...

To correct for confounding, the method of instrumental variables (IV) has been proposed. Its use in medical literature is still rather limited because of unfamiliarity or inapplicability. By introducing the method in a nontechnical way, we show that IV in a linear model is quite easy to understand and easy to apply once an appropriate instrumental variable has been identified. We also point out...

Since Paul Broca, the relationship between mind and brain has been the central preoccupation of cognitive neuroscience. In the 19th century, recognition that mental faculties might be understood by observations of individuals with brain damage led to vigorous debates about the properties of mind. By the end of the First World War, neurologists had outlined basic frameworks for the neural organi...

Pedagogy has always been open to other disciplines that reflect about the educational process (philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, technology, etc.). Its interdisciplinary openness puts education, as the subject of pedagogy within a broader context of the community, enabling the knowledge of other disciplines to contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental pedagogical no...

Justice in Central and Eastern Europe The conclusion of the recent EHP monograph on environmental justice (Shepard et al. 2002) is that environmental exposures and environmental health issues impact disproportionately on vulnerable populations. In Central and Eastern Europe, we enviously read about the studies (primarily American) carried out in this field. As a consequence of the lack of moral...