Howard University Hospital is hosting the International Conference on Stigma on World AIDS Day December 1, 2010.

An article in USA Today (More Americans’ credit scores sink to new lows) article details the downward spiral of consumer credit during what it calls the “Great Recession.”

From the article:

Figures provided by FICO show that 25.5% of consumers — nearly 43.4 million people — now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders. It’s unlikely they will be able to get credit cards, auto loans or mortgages under the tighter lending standards banks now use.

An article in the New York Times (Europeans Fear Crisis Threatens Liberal Benefits) discusses looming economic changes for Europe.

The New York Times (District May End N.C. Economic Diversity Program) describes the polarization of the Wake County school district’s economic diversity policy.  The distance wealthier children have to travel from their home, performance scores, and discipline rates are discussed as touchstones for measuring progress or failure, yet there are two major flaws in this article.

First, there are no student perspectives on how the policy effects them.  Second, the article doesn’t provide a business case for diversity, which is odd considering the issue is economic diversity.  The economic reward for diversity extends throughout students’ lives, and the article could have approached this aspect from human, social, or cultural capital perspectives.  Human capital includes marketable knowledge, skills, and abilities; social capital includes the gains from networking (which business schools emphasize is a primary means of success); and cultural capital includes the values, beliefs, and behaviors writ-large (e.g., collaboration, community service, human rights).  Each is greatly enhanced by diversity.

The Washington Post published an interesting opinion piece on the word Retard and the effort of the Special Olympics and others to eliminate its use in everyday speech (The case against banning the word “retard”).  Within the piece, the offense and harm the word causes is overridden with an argument for free speech, an assertion that it can be “friendly” depending on context, and a claim that it was historically neutral.

These arguments are hollow.   Just because you can open your mouth and utter what you want, it doesn’t mean you should.  The word is crass and demeaning to the uneducated.  That it has a positive meaning to some is a matter of questionable personal taste, and comparing it to the acceptability of words such as “gay,” “queer,” and the N-word within some social circles is a desperate reach to rationalize its use.  I doubt the author of the opinion piece had a lifetime worth of epithets launched at him, and I hope the Post publishes several reactive letters from people who will detail their experiences.  Finally, the evolution of the term within institutions doesn’t make the word sacrosanct. Margret Winzer details its use as a negative category of difference to justify segregation and even elimination of the “feebleminded.”

Choosing not to use the word because we can choose our speech, because it isn’t positive if we feel true empathy for those it harms, and because the future can be better than the past through our willingness to speak differently are excellent reasons to take the Special Olympics pledge and reflect on how our words effect others.

An article in today’s BusinessWeek (Health Care: Rx for MBA Job Blues) gushes over the opportunities for MBAs in the healthcare industry; “I feel like a kid in a candy shop” is the quote they selected from an aspiring MBA student.

My advice to new MBAs as someone who works in healthcare and has one: get some clinical experience, have a passion for it, and make sure you maintain a network.  The healthcare “system” isn’t a system without people, and it’s going to be a difficult journey in the next decade without social support.

Between a Jan. 31, 2010 New York Times Op-ed (Sex Ed in Washington) and follow-up responses on Feb. 6 (Sex Ed, With No Federal Strings?) debating the merits and disconnects of sexual education, the Times reported on the findings of a recent study of an abstinence-only intervention (Quick Response to Study of Abstinence Education).

From the Times article about the study: In Dr. Jemmott’s research, only about a third of the students who participated in a weekend abstinence-only class started having sex within the next 24 months, compared with about half who were randomly assigned instead to general health information classes, or classes teaching only safer sex. Among those assigned to comprehensive sex-education classes, covering both abstinence and safer sex, about 42 percent began having sex.

The reference for the research study is:

Jemmott, J. B., Jemmott, L. S., & Fong, G. T. (2010). Efficacy of a theory-based abstinence-only intervention over 24 months: A randomized controlled trial with young adolescents. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 164(2), 152–159.

The “about a third,” “about half,” and 42% cited by the Times sounds impressive, but the spread between abstinence-only and comprehensive is about 8 people. The figures translate to 31 out of 95 who started having sex who were in the abstinence-only group, compared with 41 out of 88 in the regular health class.  The 12-hour comprehensive sexual education intervention, in comparison, yields 39 out of 92. In addition, the outcomes table within the research article reads that the Ever Had Sexual Intercourse group “excludes participants who reported sexual intercourse at baseline” (Jemmott, Jemmott, & Fong, 2010, p. 156), which is an important omission since it standardizes the participants but also means these were not sexually experienced individuals.

More interestingly, the research findings for Had Unprotected Sexual Intercourse in the Past 3 Months are the exact same number (8 individuals) and proportion (7.1%) for both the abstinence-only and 12-hour comprehensive groups at the 24-month mark.  The findings for Used Condoms Consistently During Intercourse in the Past 3 Months present a similar wash, with 25 of 33 in the abstinence-only group and 26 of 35 in the 12-hour comprehensive group at the 24-month mark.

However, using all available data at each follow-up stage and quashing these together to then parse (what the article describes as an “intention-to-treat approach in which participants’ data were analyzed regardless of the number of intervention or data collection sessions they attended” (p. 155), more statistically significant differences emerge.

Numbers-fun aside, there’s an issue within this study in need of reflection.  The authors state that “the facilitators” for the study “were 16 men and 51 women (mean age,43.1 years); 61.2% had a master’s degree; and 38.8% had a bachelor’s degree. All were African American except for 1 Puerto Rican individual. We hired facilitators with the skills to implement any of the interventions” (p. 154).

Since the youth participants are 6th and 7th graders, why are youth not involved as facilitators?  I’m all for employing adults, especially in this economy, but an iteration of the study could have the adults train youth as facilitators.  A comparative study examining differences between adult and youth facilitators would make for a very interesting examination of how youth participating in the training are receptive to the interventions.  Do you need another study director, Dr. Jemmott?

Chapters 1-3 are rounding out, and the pilot study is imminent!

USA Today reports (U.S. exported its aggressive credit card fees worldwide) on the history of credit cards and their export. A timeline of key developments is included, and wow! Look at those balances! The U.S. has 775 billion in credit card debt.

From the article: “For a while the United States was exporting … tobacco and Coca-Cola,” says Kathleen Engel, a law professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. “The United States’ big export now is different financial services products, abusive mortgage loans and credit card practices.”

How much is that cash in your pocket worth? How’s your credit limit from one day to the next?  The top of the pyramid will let you know, as North Korea’s president Kim Jong Il recently did.  The Washington Post reports (In N. Korea, a strong movement recoils at Kim Jong Il’s attempt to limit wealth) on the effects of a currency revaluation:

From the article: As part of a surprise currency revaluation, the government sharply restricted the amount of old bills that could be traded for new and made it illegal for citizens to have more than $40 worth of local currency.