THE UNITED STATES OCEAN RESOURCES SERVICE: A PROPOSAL

Responding to recent calls for a multiple use, multiple resource approach to marine resource management, this paper sketches the organizational and legislative features of a hypothetical U. S. Ocean Resources Service modeled on the land-based U.S. Forest Service. The organization of the Washington, DC headquarters of the USDRS and the staff groups within what is called the National Ocean System of the USORS are outlined. USORS field units which correspond to USFS Regions, Forests, and Ranger Districts are described. Potential USORS legislative interventions are reviewed, using the chain of legislative interventions into Forest Service operations over the past quarter century as a model. Five potential legislative acts are discussed as are arguments favoring and opposing USORS formation.     

The medical licensing examination debate

National licensing examinations are typically large‐scale examinations taken early in a career or near the point of graduation, and, importantly, success is required to subsequently be able to practice. They are becoming increasingly popular as a method of quality assurance in the medical workforce, but debate about their contribution to patient safety and the improvement of healthcare outcomes continues. A systematic review of the national licensing examination literature demonstrates that there is disagreement between assessment experts about the strengths and challenges of licensing examinations. This is characterized by a trans‐Atlantic divide between the dominance of psychometric reliability assurance in North America and the wider interpretations of validity, to include consequences, in Europe. We conclude that the debate might benefit from refocusing to what a national licensing examination should assess: to achieve a balance between assessing a breadth of skills and the capacity for such skills in practice, and focusing less on reproducibility.     

Folklore as a source for creating exile identity among Latvian Displaced Persons in post-World War II Germany

This article draws on archival and print materials produced by Latvian Displaced Persons during the years they lived in UNRRA refugee camps after World War II. Its focus is on the ‘how’ of their cultural production and identity formation in camps that were established to expedite repatriation but became instead contexts in which Latvians as social actors opposed the goals of authoritative others to endow experience with their own textual meanings. This essay demonstrates how they recontextualized a variety of folklore genres as flexible and powerful resources for addressing their existential crisis and for solidifying exile as the basis for living purposefully off the territory of ‘home.’     

Tasmania's Tamar Valley Pulp Mill: A Comparison of Planning Processes Using a Good Environmental Governance Framework

In November 2004, the Tasmanian government requested the state's planning body, the Resource Planning and Development Commission (RPDC), to undertake an evaluation of a proposal to establish a pulp mill at Long Reach near Bell Bay on Tasmania's Tamar Estuary. In early 2007, Gunns Limited, the project's proponent, pulled out of the RPDC process and the government established an alternative, ‘fast‐track’ process under the Pulp Mill Assessment Act (PMAA). This article evaluates the RPDC and the PMAA assessment processes using a ‘good environmental governance’ framework composed of eight criteria – transparency, accountability, openness, balance, deliberation, efficiency, science and risk. The comparison reveals that although the RPDC process fell short of the ideal, it was markedly superior to the PMAA process that replaced it. The case highlights how political economic power can be used to the detriment of public planning and the communities and environment that rely on it.     

Variability in Hormone Concentrations and Self-Reported Menstrual Histories in Young Adolescents: Menarche as an Integral Part of a Developmental Process

Menarche has been considered a marker for examining interindividual differences in biobehavioral development and for separating pubertal development into 2 stages. The purpose of this study was (1) to compare hormone concentrations in pre- and postmenarcheal girls to determine whether they fit a continuous or dichotomous model of pubertal development surrounding menarche; and (2) to address methodological issues of variability in self-reports of menstrual histories and reliability in reporting age at menarche. Girls (N = 52) ages 9 to 14 years were enrolled in a longitudinal study. Blood was drawn for hormone concentrations. Menstrual-cycle information was collected by questionnaire and oral report. Discrepancies in reporting of age at menarche ranged from 0 to 18 months and variability was noted in length of cycle. There was great overlap in hormones between pre- and postmenarcheal categories. Future studies might consider menarche as the culmination of underlying developmental processes rather than as a discrete event. Limitations of each measure of puberty should be considered by investigators conducting biobehavioral studies of adolescents.