Navigating politics, policy, and procedure: A firsthand perspective of advocacy on behalf of the profession.

Psychology's expertise as a behavioral science is essential to effectively address society's most pressing concerns. Advocacy for clients and the public good--and in turn, for the profession of psychology--occurs on multiple levels through active participation in local and federal legislatures, agencies, foundations, and nonprofit organizations that influence implementation of regulations and policies. The authors offer a number of observations and recommendations from their cumulative past experience to argue that presence, persistence, and long-term vision are absolutely essential for the ultimate success and advancement of professional psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How to influence public policy: A blueprint for activism.

Public interest advocacy and political activism are vital to the guild interests of psychology, just as they are essential to the evolution of any discipline that seeks professional recognition outside of the university laboratory. Division 38 (Health Psychology) of the American Psychological Association (APA) has conducted monthly policy dinner meetings featuring national health policy experts as speakers to develop an appreciation within the division for the complexities of formulating public policy. Groups of psychologists outside the structure of the APA Central Office need to make efforts to build political support if psychology is to play a larger role in public policy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology and the law: A shared vision for the 21st century.

Traces how the interface between psychology and law has emerged as a unique speciality within psychology, and notes initiatives by the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) on regarding legal issues. James Ogloff, president-elect of the CPA, has launched an initiative, "Taking Psychology and Law into the 21st Century," which includes a focus on "Law and Psychology: A Bridge to the Future." This project will review the field, with the goal of determining where areas of research have been, are now, and should head. The APA presidential initiative started with the appointment of a working group that is planning for the first APA miniconference on Psychology and Law at the annual convention in 2000. The conference theme will be "Law and Psychology in the Workplace." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adolescent health care: A public policy perspective.

Focuses on the importance of psychosocial and behavioral components of health care in the area of adolescent health care. The authors contend that it will ultimately be as a direct result of psychology's tangible (and visual) successes in areas such as adolescent health that will lead to psychological services becoming fully accepted within the overall health care system. The underlying policy notion is that if psychology addresses society's perceived needs, society (i.e., the nation's public policy/political leadership) will strive to meet the mental health profession's needs. The majority of problems adolescents face, regardless of apparent physical symptomatology, are essentially behavioral (psychosocial) in nature. The symptom distress model provides for a school-based integration of psychological knowledge with clinical and educational expertise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The critical importance of personal involvement.

Suggests that the deliberations surrounding Medicare may once again become the key to the enactment of national health care reform legislation and argues that if psychologists want to directly influence public policy, more of them must become personally involved in full-time advocacy and public policy work. Examples of federal policies that affect psychologists are discussed as well as the importance of joint psychology-law programs and the efforts of a psychologist and associate commissioner in Maine to shape a unified, outcome-driven mental health and mental retardation system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Application kernels: HPC resources performance monitoring and variance analysis

Application kernels are computationally lightweight benchmarks or applications run repeatedly on high performance computing (HPC) clusters in order to track the Quality of Service (QoS) provided to the users. They have been successful in detecting a variety of hardware and software issues, some severe, that have subsequently been corrected, resulting in improved system performance and throughput. In this work, the application kernels performance monitoring module of eXtreme Data Metrics on Demand (XDMoD) is described. Through the XDMoD framework, the application kernels have been run repetitively on the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Stampede and Lonestar4 clusters for a total of over 14,000 jobs. This provides a body of data on the HPC clusters operation that can be used to statistically analyze how the application performance, as measured by metrics such as execution time and communication bandwidth, is affected by the cluster's workload. We discuss metric distributions, carry out regression and correlation analyses, and use a PCA study to describe the variance and relate the variance to factors such as the spatial distribution of the application in the cluster. Ultimately, these types of analyses can be used to improve the application kernel mechanism, which in turn results in improved QoS of the HPC infrastructure that is delivered to the end users. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychology and labor unions working together.

The relationship between organized psychology and labor takes on renewed interest in the context of marketplace changes leading some health care providers to unionize. Although they were once distant, organized psychology and labor have moved closer together in recent years in collaborations around mutual interests. Labor unions have been able to offer psychology effective models of grass roots organization, some ability to engage in collective bargaining, and legislative and legal advocacy to curb marketplace abuses and to protect scope of practice. Psychologists have been able to offer labor unions clinical and consulting services to help union members deal with workplace stressors and injuries, pro bono services for striking or furloughed workers, and innovative programs to promote workplace safety. Increased collaboration between psychology and labor helps the American workforce, including psychologists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)