The effects of flipped classrooms on undergraduate pharmaceutical marketing learning: A clustered randomized controlled study.

BACKGROUND: Recently, flipped classrooms (FCs) have gradually been used in Chinese higher education settings. However, few studies have focused on the effects of FCs on interdisciplinary curricula. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of an FC on the engagement, performance, and perceptions of students and on teacher-student interaction in a pharmaceutical marketing course. DESIGN: A clustered randomized controlled study was conducted, with 137 junior-year pharmacy undergraduates using an FC serving as the intervention group, in contrast to students using lecture-based learning (LBL) as the control group. Flanders' interaction analysis system (FIAS) was used to measure teacher-student interaction, and questionnaires regarding attitudes toward and satisfaction with the teaching model were administered. RESULTS: The students in the FC group scored significantly higher than those in the LBL group (88.21±5.95 vs. 80.05±5.59, t = -8.08, p = 0.000) on pharmaceutical marketing. The multiple linear regression results showed that the FC model had a significant impact on student performance (ß = 8.16, p<0.0001). The percentages of teacher talk in the FC and LBL groups were 21% and 96%, respectively (χ2 = 2170.274, p = 0.000); however, the percentages of student talk in the FC and LBL groups were 75% and 2.6%, respectively (χ2 = 2012.483, p = 0.000). Compared with the LBL group, most students in the FC group held more positive attitudes toward the teaching model; the mean scores for the 8 attitude attributes in the FC group were significantly higher than those in the LBL group (p = 0.000). There were significant differences in the ratings of satisfaction with teacher-student interaction (p = 0.000), the students' learning attitude (p = 0.000), the teacher's preparatory work (p = 0.000), the teaching objective (p = 0.000), and the teaching effect (p = 0.000) between the two groups. CONCLUSION: Compared with LBL methods, implementing the FC model improved student performance, increased teacher-student interaction and generated positive student attitudes toward the experience. As an effective pedagogical model, it can also stimulate pharmacy students' learning interest and improve their self-learning abilities.

The Significance of an MBA Degree for a Podiatric Physician-Is It Worth It? A Survey Study.

BACKGROUND:: The Kent State University College of Podiatric Medicine is negotiating with the College of Business Administration at Kent State University to establish a dual Doctor of Podiatric Medicine (DPM)/Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree. Of the nine colleges of podiatric medicine in the nation, there are two schools that have a joint DPM/MBA program listed in their catalogue, but no joint program was operational at the time this survey was conducted. A telephone survey of the other eight podiatric medical colleges was conducted to obtain that information. This survey was used to assess further data for the exploration of a dual DPM/MBA program at Kent State University College of Podiatric Medicine. METHODS:: A survey was sent out to 38 individuals who possessed both a DPM and an MBA degree. They responded to questions about why they obtained the business degree, how they are using their business degree, what courses in the MBA program are most relevant, and whether they would recommend that DPM students pursue a dual degree. RESULTS:: The majority of respondents indicated that they obtained an MBA degrees to gain a better understanding of the marketplace, to increase their income, and to better manage a podiatric medical practice. The respondents were generally very happy to have obtained their MBA degree and would encourage a dual-degree option. They admitted that a minor or series of courses with a business focus may be helpful to a DPM student who did not opt for an MBA degree. CONCLUSIONS:: The positive survey results from respondents encourage continued research into a dual-degree DPM/MBA program. During research for a DPM/MBA degree, we feel a DPM with an MBA degree will allow our students to be better prepared for leadership roles within their community and administrative positions and to have a deeper understanding of the business of health care.

Can realtor education reduce lead exposures for vulnerable populations?

Lead is known for its devastating effects on people, particularly children under the age of six. Disturbed lead paint in homes is the most common source of lead poisoning of children. Preventive approaches including consumer education on the demand side of the housing market (purchasers and renters of housing units) and disclosure regulations on supply side of the housing market (landlords, homeowners, developers, and licensed realtors) have had mixed outcomes. The study described in this article considered whether a novel supply-side intervention that educates licensed real estate agents about the specific dangers of lead poisoning would result in better knowledge of lead hazards and improved behavior with respect to the information they convey to potential home buyers. Ninety-one licensed realtors were trained for four hours on lead hazards and their health impacts. Pre- and postsurveys and a six-month follow-up interview were conducted to assess the impact of the intervention on their knowledge and self-reported behaviors with clients. The findings suggest that supply-side education could have a salutary impact on realtor knowledge and behavior.

Does reviewing lead to better learning and decision making? Answers from a randomized stock market experiment.

BACKGROUND: The literature is not univocal about the effects of Peer Review (PR) within the context of constructivist learning. Due to the predominant focus on using PR as an assessment tool, rather than a constructivist learning activity, and because most studies implicitly assume that the benefits of PR are limited to the reviewee, little is known about the effects upon students who are required to review their peers. Much of the theoretical debate in the literature is focused on explaining how and why constructivist learning is beneficial. At the same time these discussions are marked by an underlying presupposition of a causal relationship between reviewing and deep learning. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of the study is to investigate whether the writing of PR feedback causes students to benefit in terms of: perceived utility about statistics, actual use of statistics, better understanding of statistical concepts and associated methods, changed attitudes towards market risks, and outcomes of decisions that were made. METHODS: We conducted a randomized experiment, assigning students randomly to receive PR or non-PR treatments and used two cohorts with a different time span. The paper discusses the experimental design and all the software components that we used to support the learning process: Reproducible Computing technology which allows students to reproduce or re-use statistical results from peers, Collaborative PR, and an AI-enhanced Stock Market Engine. RESULTS: The results establish that the writing of PR feedback messages causes students to experience benefits in terms of Behavior, Non-Rote Learning, and Attitudes, provided the sequence of PR activities are maintained for a period that is sufficiently long.

Unbending the mind: or, commercialized leisure and the rhetoric of eighteenth-century diversion.

This essay opens by asking why the formative period in the "commercialization of leisure" in England (c. 1690­1760) happens also to be the period during which intrusion, obstruction, and interruption first began to thrive as conspicuous rhetorical techniques in commercial literature. The essay answers this question through a series of close readings that reveal the complex reciprocity between what I call "cultural diversion" and "discursive diversion," between those social amusements which provide relief from the serious concerns of daily life and those linguistic and textual devices which characteristically disrupt so much of the discourse of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century­devices such as extravagant metaphors, rows of asterisked ellipses, and, most pervasively, digressions. Where modern discussion of such devices has tended to rely on the critical touch-stone of "self-consciousness," this essay restores disruptive rhetoric to what I see as its original cultural context by demonstrating how frequently self-conscious authors associate the form and function of devices like digression with London's "Reigning Diversions."

The positioning of sustainability within residential property marketing.

This article investigates the evolution of sustainability positioning in residential property marketing to shed light on the specific role and responsibility of housebuilders and housing investors in urban development. To this end, an analysis is made of housing advertisements published in Basel, Switzerland, over a period of more than 100 years. The paper demonstrates how to draw successfully on advertisements to discern sustainability patterns in housing, using criteria situated along the dimensions building, location and people. Cluster analysis allows five clusters of sustainability positioning to be described­namely, good location, green building, comfort living, pre-sustainability and sustainability. Investor and builder types are differently located in these clusters. Location emerges as an issue which, to a large extent, is advertised independently from other sustainability issues.

Reading baby books: medicine, marketing, money and the lives of American infants.

This article examines American baby books from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century. Baby books are ephemeral publications­formatted with one or more printed pages for recording developmental, health, and social information about infants and often including personal observations, artifacts such as photographs or palm prints, medical and other prescriptive advice, and advertisements. For historians they serve as records of the changing social and cultural worlds of infancy, offering insights into the interplay of childrearing practices and larger social movements.Baby books are a significant historical source both challenging and supporting current historiography, and they illustrate how medical, market and cultural forces shaped the ways babies were cared for and in turn how their won behavior shaped family lives. A typology of baby books includes the lavishly illustrated keepsake books of the late nineteenth century, commercial and public health books of the twentieth century, and on-line records of the present day. Themes that emerge over time include those of scientific medicine and infant psychology, religion and consumerism. The article relies on secondary literature and on archival sources including the collections of the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library as well as privately held baby books.

Investigating customer racial discrimination in the secondary baseball card market.

A growing body of literature in a variety of disciplines has appeared over the last 20 years examining customer racial bias in the secondary sports card market; however, consensus on the matter has yet to emerge. In this article, we explore the more subtle ways that a player's race/ethnicity may affect the value of his sports card including a player's skin tone (light- to dark-skinned). Data were obtained for 383 black, Latino, and white baseball players who had received at least one vote for induction into Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame including their career performance statistics, rookie card price, card availability, Hall of Fame status, and skin tone. Findings indicate that card availability is the primary determinant of card value while a player's skin tone has no direct effect. Subsequent analysis demonstrates that a player's race (white/non-white) rather than skin tone did have an effect as it interacts with Hall of Fame status to influence his rookie card price.

"Almost invisible scars": medical tourism to Brazil.

Along with a handful of other nations in the developing world, Brazil has emerged as a top destination for medical tourism. Drawing on the author's ethnographic fieldwork in plastic surgery wards, this article examines diverse factors - some explicitly promoted in medical marketing and news sources, others less visible - contributing to Brazil's international reputation for excellence in cosmetic plastic surgery. Brazil's plastic surgery residency programs, some of which are housed within its public health system, attract overseas surgeons, provide ample opportunities for valuable training in cosmetic techniques, and create a clinical environment that favors experimentation with innovative techniques. Many graduates of these programs open private clinics that, in turn, attract overseas patients. High demand for Brazilian plastic surgery also reflects an expansive notion of female health that includes sexual realization, mental health, and cosmetic techniques that manage reproduction. Medical tourism is sometimes represented as being market-driven: patients in wealthier nations travel to obtain quality services at lower prices. This article ends by reflecting on how more complex local and transnational dynamics also contribute to demand for elective medical procedures such as cosmetic surgery.

Crazy for bargains: inventing the irrational female shopper in modernizing English Canada.

Between the 1890s and 1930s, anglophone politicians, journalists, novelists, and other commentators living in western, central, and eastern Canada drew upon established connections among greed, luxury, hysteria, and femininity to describe women who went shopping as irrational. Their motivations for doing so included their desires to assuage feelings of guilt about increased abundance; articulate anger caused by spousal conflicts over money; assert the legitimacy of male authority; and assign blame for the decline of small communities' sustainability, the degradation of labour standards, and the erosion of independent shopkeeping. By calling upon stock stereotypes of femininity, and by repositioning them to fit the current capitalist moment, English-Canadian commentators constructed disempowering representations of women to alleviate their anxieties about what they perceived as the ills of modernization.

Alberta's and Ontario's liquor boards: why such divergent outcomes?

The provinces of Alberta and Ontario have chosen very different methods to distribute alcoholic beverages: Alberta privatized the Alberta Liquor Control Board (ALCB) in 1993 and established a private market to sell beverage alcohol, while Ontario, in stark contrast, opted to retain and expand the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). This article examines the reasons for the divergent policy choices made by Ralph Klein and Mike Harris' Conservative governments in each province. The article draws on John Kingdon's "multiple streams decision-making model," to examine the mindsets of the key decision-makers, as well as "historical institutionalism," to organize the pertinent structural, historical and institutional variables that shaped the milieu in which decision-makers acted. Unique, province-specific political cultures, histories, institutional configurations (including the relative influence of a number of powerful actors), as well as the fact that the two liquor control boards were on opposing trajectories towards their ultimate fates, help to explain the different decisions made by each government. Endogenous preference construction in this sector, furthermore, implies that each system is able to satisfy all relevant stakeholders, including consumers.

Pink truck ads: second-wave feminism and gendered marketing.

Second-wave feminist media had a contentious relationship with corporate advertisers. This article uses automotive advertisements to explore the role of gender, class, and race in the construction of consumer markets from the 1970s through the 1980s. It analyzes the struggle of Gloria Steinem and other liberal feminists to navigate the terrain between the women's movement and corporate advertisers. The increased economic power of women, stemming from the Equal Credit Opportunity Act as well as broader social and political shifts, facilitated their efforts. In the 1980s, automobiles continued to be marketed to women, albeit through "feminine" imagery conforming to the era's dominant trends.

Alchemy in eden: entrepreneurialism, branding, and food marketing in the United States, 1880­1920.

Through an investigation into the origins of American food marketing, this dissertation reveals how branding­specifically, the centennial brands Quaker Oats, Coca-Cola, and Crisco­came to underpin much of today's market-driven economy. In a manner akin to alchemy, the entrepreneurs behind these three firms recognized the inherent value of an agricultural Eden, then found ways to convert common, low-cost agricultural goods­oats, sugar, and cottonseed oil­into appealing, high-revenue branded food products. In the process, these ventures devised new demand-driven business models that exploited technology and communications advances, enabling them to tap a nascent consumer culture. Their pioneering efforts generated unprecedented profits, laid the foundation for iconic billion-dollar brands, and fundamentally changed how Americans make daily food choices.

A twentieth-century triangle trade: selling black beauty at home and abroad, 1945­1965.

This study examines the careers of African American beauty culturists as they worked in the United States, Europe, and Africa between 1945 and 1965. Facing push back at home, African American beauty entrepreneurs frequently sought out international venues that were hospitable and receptive to black Americans in the years following World War II. By strategically using European sites that white Americans regarded as the birthplace of Western fashion and beauty, African American entrepreneurs in the fields of modeling, fashion design, and hair care were able to win accolades and advance their careers. In gaining support abroad, particularly in Europe, these beauty culturists capitalized on their international success to establish, legitimize, and promote their business ventures in the United States. After importing a positive reputation for themselves from Europe to the United States, African American beauty entrepreneurs then exported an image of themselves as the world's premier authorities on black beauty to people of color around the globe as they sold their products and marketed their expertise on the African continent itself. This essay demonstrates the important role that these black female beauty culturists played, both as businesspeople and as race leaders, in their generation's struggle to gain greater respect and opportunity for African Americans both at home and abroad. In doing so it places African American beauty culturists within the framework of transatlantic trade networks, the Black Freedom Movement, Pan-Africanism, and America's Cold War struggle.

Labeling the good: alternative visions and organic branding in Sweden in the late twentieth century.

The past decade's rapid expansion of a global market for organic food has set powerful economic and political forces in motion. The most important dividing line is whether organic food production should be an alternative to or a niche within a capitalist mode of production. To explore this conflict the article analyzes the formation of a market for eco-labeled milk in Sweden. The analysis draws on three aspects: the strategy of agri-business, the role of eco-labeling, and the importance of inter-organizational dynamics. Based on archival studies, daily press, and interviews, three processes are emphasized: the formative years of the alternative movement in the 1970s, the founding of an independent eco-label (KRAV) in the 1980s, and a discursive shift from alternative visions to organic branding in the early 1990s following the entry of agri-business.

[Biomedical engineering today : An overview from the viewpoint of the German Biomedical Engineering Society]. / Biomedizinische Technik heute : Eine Ubersicht aus dem Blickwinkel der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Biomedizinische Technik.

Biomedical engineering is characterized by the interdisciplinary co-operation of technology, science, and ways of thinking, probably more than any other technological area. The close interaction of engineering and information sciences with medicine and biology results in innovative products and methods, but also requires high standards for the interdisciplinary transfer of ideas into products for patients' benefits. This article describes the situation of biomedical engineering in Germany. It displays characteristics of the medical device industry and ranks it with respect to the international market. The research landscape is described as well as up-to-date research topics and trends. The national funding situation of research in biomedical engineering is reviewed and existing innovation barriers are discussed.