Medicare/medicaid billing fraud and abuse by psychologists.

Medicare/Medicaid billing fraud and abuse can be prosecuted under a wider array of laws than apply within the private sector. Cases are typically initiated by whistleblowers or through detection of unusual billing patterns. Few psychologists in independent practice have ever been convicted of Medicare/Medicaid billing fraud or abuse, but government antifraud efforts against psychologists appear to be on the rise. These efforts are pursued under the auspices of containing spiraling health care costs, but they can uncover unintentional billing abuse by psychologists, arising from general ignorance of claim-processing procedures, lack of uniformity across insurance programs, constantly changing guidelines, and ambiguous interpretations. Recent investigations in south Texas have especially targeted the use of extenders for psychological and neuropsychological testing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Invention from War: a circumstantial modernism for Australian architecture

Between 1942 and 1945, Australian architects and engineers within the Allied Works Council and the US Army Corps of Engineers undertook a vast programme of building works to assist the campaign to drive Japanese forces northward through the Southwest Pacific and avoid invasion.¹ Huge distances, lack of time and the need to wage a campaign from the air lay behind US General Douglas Macarthur’s phrase that it would be an ‘engineer’s war’. By necessity, buildings such as airfields, hospitals, camps, warehouses, and other structures had to be light weight, constructed quickly, and inevitably dropped in by air as easily handled pre-cut packages. With the lack of American and European softwoods in the Australasian region, an unlikely local material was pressed into war service – unseasoned or ‘green’ Australian hardwood. It was a material choice that would have profound implications for two reasons. First, in the years of conflict, circumstances dictated the unprecedented innovation and experiment in light-weight timber structures. Second, in an echo of Lewis Mumford’s poignant maxim that ‘war is the health of the machine’², the systematisation and ruthless economy inherent in wartime timber buildings would influence the development and practice of a particular form of modern architecture in Australia in the late 1940s and the 1950s.     

Pain, depression, and physical functioning following burn injury.

Objective: Little is known about how pain and depression after burn injury may influence long-term outcomes such as physical functioning. This prospective study examined associations between pain, depression, and physical functioning in a sample of burn injury survivors. Design and Participants: Questionnaires assessing pain, depression, and physical functioning were completed by 64 (52% of original sample) adult burn survivors shortly after discharge from burn care and at 1- and 2-year follow-ups. Results: Pain and physical functioning improved over the 2 years of the study, whereas depression levels were stable. Pain and depression were associated with poorer physical functioning over time, but associations varied according to the time span under consideration. Also, the association between pain and physical functioning was strongest among persons with higher depression scores. Conclusions: Pain and depression may contribute independently to compromises in physical functioning. The co-occurrence of pain and depression represents even greater risk for reduced physical functioning over time among burn survivors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of email use by teachers and implications: A Singapore experience

This paper attempts to identify the patterns of email use by schoolteachers. The findings are based on a survey of 2998 Singapore teachers whose teaching experiences ranged from 24 to 48 months. The result shows that teachers use email mainly to communicate with colleagues, and the degree of email use varies according to the school level that the teachers are working in. While the teachers teaching at higher school levels (Grades 11–12) email their colleagues more frequently than their counterparts teaching at lower school levels especially primary school teachers, the latter tend to email parents more frequently than other teachers. Implications of the findings are discussed in relevance to pre-service teacher education, teacher professional development and ICT adoption in organisations.     

The standard enthalpies of formation of some intermetallic compounds of early 4d and 5d transition metals by high temperature direct synthesis calorimetry

The standard enthalpies of formation of some intermetallic compounds of early 4d and 5d transition metals have been measured by high temperature direct synthesis calorimetry at 1373±2 K. The following results (in kJ/mol of atoms) are reported: ZrMn₂(−24.7±2.7); ZrMo₂(−5.8±5.3); Zr₁₁Os₄(−8.9±2.1); HfCr₂(−4.8±4.3); HfMn₂(−20.3±2.0); HfMo₂(−6.4±4.3); NbRh₃(−21.6±1.8); TaRh₃(−14.0±4.0).     

Analysis of a complete DNA–protein affinity landscape

Properties of biological fitness landscapes are of interest to a wide sector of the life sciences, from ecology to genetics to synthetic biology. For biomolecular fitness landscapes, the information we currently possess comes primarily from two sources: sparse samples obtained from directed evolution experiments; and more fine-grained but less authentic information from ‘in silico’ models (such as NK-landscapes). Here we present the entire protein-binding profile of all variants of a nucleic acid oligomer 10 bases in length, which we have obtained experimentally by a series of highly parallel on-chip assays. The resulting complete landscape of sequence-binding pairs, comprising more than one million binding measurements in duplicate, has been analysed statistically using a number of metrics commonly applied to synthetic landscapes. These metrics show that the landscape is rugged, with many local optima, and that this arises from a combination of experimental variation and the natural structural properties of the oligonucleotides.     

Architecture,Environment, History: Questions and Consequences

There is increasing interest among architectural historians in addressing environmental concerns on both historical and theoretical terms. Simultaneously, other fields have been looking to architectural scholarship to understand the historical relationship between the built and the natural environment. For architectural historians, and others, this has also involved correlating the shifting discourse on environment with a history of architectural transformations and disciplinary expansions. These engagements have made clear that the environmental history of architecture does not simply add more objects to the historical database, but also changes the terms of historical analysis, as new matters of concern and new conceptual frameworks come to the fore. This paper gathers together a dialogic set of projections from scholars responding to the question of how we might newly understand the historical relationship between the built and the natural environment, and the opportunities and challenges this new phase presents to scholars, design researchers, and architects.