The “Professionalized” Solution to the “College Bubble”

It has been argued that higher education is about to encounter a “bubble” comparable to the one the housing market did. Critics charge either that current college resources cannot meet the potential demand or that the demand is likely to decline such as to produce excess supply. Among the problems cited are spiraling high costs, shrinking enrollments, low graduation rates, declines in humanities majors, extended periods of matriculation, inferior quality, and a lack of social justice. By the same token, there is a lack of agreement about how colleges should be reformed. Some commentators insist that higher education must be more efficient. Meanwhile others focus on academic relevance. For still others the crucial goal is fairness, which generally comes down to social mobility, affordability, and affirmative action. The question then becomes: How are we to decide what should be done, which, in turn, depends on how we conceptualize the mission of higher education.     

Flualprazolam distribution in postmortem samples

The constant emergence of novel psychoactive substances is troubling to both public health officials and legislators. Additionally, sufficient data collection for each new compound can take months up to years. Flualprazolam, a triazolobenzodiazepine, quickly garnered attention as a sedative drug that likely expresses adverse reactions similarly to alprazolam. This study focuses on the distribution of flualprazolam in multiple common postmortem matrices. Central blood, vitreous humor, liver homogenate, brain homogenate, gastric contents, and urine samples from death investigation cases were quantitated when available. Samples were screened with liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight with limit of detection set at 4 ng/ml and quantitated on liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, with concentration range from 4 to 256 ng/ml. From August 2018 to September 2020, 24 central blood samples were quantitated for flualprazolam. Central bloods of 22 cases had concentrations above the limit of quantitation. The average flualprazolam central blood concentration was 16.3 ng/ml with a median of 9.95 ng/ml (4.24–48.0). Additional analyses for unconjugated flualprazolam were performed on at a total of 15 urine samples ( = 14.4, 4.07–36.1 ng/ml), 23 brain homogenates ( = 23.2, 3.99–69.3 ng/g), 23 liver homogenates ( = 50.7, 13.6–156 ng/g), five vitreous humor samples ( = 7.70, 4.03–12 ng/ml), and 12 gastric contents samples ( = 0.36, 0.02–2.51 mg). The cause of death for 13 of the 24 cases listed flualprazolam as a contributing factor of death.     

Governance as multiplicity: the Assemblage Thinking perspective

Policy Sciences - Governance, the process of steering for collective action, is being theorized and empirically explored on a variety of subjects, private and collective issues and spatial levels....