Reading in Community,Reading for Community: A Survey of Book Clubs in Regional Australia

Worries about weakening community are central to assessments of modern Australia, yet it is easy to overlook the everyday ways we “do” and participate in community life. Book clubs are one area of community participation largely ignored by researchers despite the local and national proliferation of such clubs. Surveying twenty-two book groups and ninety-seven book club members, this study investigates the roles that book clubs play in the cultural and community life of a regional area of Tasmania. The results show that book clubs promote regular intellectual engagement and provide for a distinct female sociality that consolidates and creates new social connections and function as everyday “escape attempts” from the obligations of work and family. We suggest that the support and development of local book club programs may have considerable potential as a strategy for Australian governments and communities to foster a sense of community.     

Participatory Reactions to Policy Threats: Senior Citizens and the Defense of Social Security and Medicare

The sociodemographic factors emphasized in much participation research cannot explain abrupt changes in levels of activity. This study shows how threat of undesirable policy change acts as an impetus to participatory activity, helping to explain temporal variation in participation. Newly available individual-level time-series data are used to show surges in senior citizen letter writing in response to threats to Social Security and Medicare during the 1980s. Policy threat interacts with individual characteristics to produce variations in participatory reaction congruent with the magnitude of the threat to the individual.     

Staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome mimicking child abuse by burning

Child abuse by burning comprises 6–20% of all child abuse cases, but misdiagnosis may arise in cases of some medical conditions. We present two cases of suspected inflicted burns, later diagnosed as staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome (SSSS).     

Die Grünen and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

This paper discusses the German Greens' recent policy on Israel and Palestine, from the beginning of the first red-green federal government to the present. It looks at Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's diplomatic role in the Middle East, and the Greens' current very "mild" policy with regards to Israel, especially when compared to earlier Green attitudes to the region. This is explained with reference to both the continuing relevance of German history to German foreign policy, and the constraints that participation in the federal coalition — and supplying Germany's Foreign Minister — place on the Greens. The influence of history and power on the German Greens is further illustrated by a comparison of German Green attitudes to Israel with the US Greens' much more critical position.     

An evaluation of the quality of impact assessment in the European Union with lessons for the US and the EU

Governments throughout the world are requiring greater use of economic analysis as a way of informing policy decisions. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the use of impact assessment in the European Union, using US assessments as a benchmark. We find that recent EU impact assessments include more economic information than they did in the past, although important items are still missing. We also provide evidence that the quality of EU impact assessment increases with the expected cost of a proposal. Furthermore, we find that the quality of EU assessments that report high total costs is similar to that of US assessments.     

Public vs. Private in Hospital Efficiency: Exploring Determinants in a Competitive Environment

This study investigates the determinants of efficiency in an Italian regional health system and estimates the effect exerted by ownership on hospitals’ performance. To achieve this aim, the Veneto region was considered as a case study and a full dataset (2011–2012) containing nonpublicly available technical data and cost and income items was analyzed. Efficiencies are measured applying a three-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA). Our results suggest that private hospitals perform better than public hospitals in productivity and cost saving, not considering the effect of other environmental and operational variables such as length of stay and beds per capita.