The practical labor lawyer: an employers' guide to strike contingency planning

An employer's capacity successfully to survive a strike will depend largely on the extent to which it has anticipated the strike and taken the steps necessary to defend against it. It is the purpose of this article to catalog the factors employers should consider in approaching an imminent strike and devising contingency plans. It attempts to focus on the types of problems, legal and practical, that frequently arise in strike situations, and suggests certain measures that employers may adopt in preparing for, and defending against, the economic impact of a strike.     

Mnemic disturbances following experimental alcohol-tranquilizer application (author's transl)

Mnemic disturbances occurred in 8 of 14 subjects during a pharmcopsychological investigation of possible interactions between alcohol and dipotassium chlorazepate (Tranxilium). The blood alcohol concentrations were between 0.87% and 1.32%; the serum concentrations of the active metabolite nordiazepam were in the therapeutic range between 145 ng/ml and 345 ng/ml. The constitutional, dispositional, and situative conditions are presented. The forensic medical interpretation of such mnemic disturbances must be made critically and with reservation when evaluating a psychopathological state.     

Experiments in filtering political opinions

Changes in the wording of core measures of political attitudes in the American National Election Studies have generated a good deal of controversy about artifactual sources of change in the U.S. electorate. This research, based on several field experiments and replications, investigates the effects of using or not using various types of opinion filter questions that have appeared in the SRC/CPS series over the years. The analysis shows that the use of a filter interacts significantly with a respondent's level of education and interest in politics, particularly the latter, in determining whether a respondent will offer an opinion on a given public policy issue. But the study also demonstrates that such an interaction occurs primarily when the question about interest in politics is askedafter, rather thanbefore, a set of political issue items. In interpreting these order-and-context effects the authors develop a self-perception model of how respondents infer their interest in politics from information that isavailable in memory about their own behavior in the survey interview.     

Health care in Canada: patterns of funding and regulation

During the 1970s the share of health care expenditure in Canadian GNP remained roughly stable, in the range of 7-71/2 percent of GNP, in marked contrast to its escalation in most other countries (the U.S. in particular) and to previous Canadian experience. The shift to a stable pattern coincided with the completion of the Canadian system of universal comprehensive public hospital and medical care insurance. This paper explores how and why the public insurance system served to contain cost escalation. It then discusses the inadequacy of expenditure experience per se as a basis for health system evaluation--the same data will support claims of both "underfunding" and "spiralling costs." More serious questions involve the influence of alternative patterns of health care funding and delivery on the effectiveness and efficiency of care provision, and the resulting distributional patterns of care and income. A brief sketch is given of the present situation and future possibilities of Canadian health care under these heads.     

Refining the definition of death for Australian legislation

In the article Mr. Smith considers the need for reform in the area of defining when death occurs and the various approaches that exist to define death. He then analyses the stages of the developments in the various Australian jurisdictions and discusses the substantive content of the basic definition adopted and the practical implications of any enactment. The author suggests that the concept of death should be legislatively enacted in relevant pieces of legislation which call for a resolution of the question at the present time and a more general separate statement defining death should be avoided at the moment. Conceptually death should be defined as the permanent and irreversible loss of consciousness of the individual as determined by irreversible cessation of the brain stem function. The actual operational criteria of death should form the subject of a circular published by the relevant statutory health authority for the guidance of medical practitioners in relation to the specific problems they face.