The MATISSE study: a randomised trial of group art therapy for people with schizophrenia

Background: Art Therapy has been promoted as a means of helping people who may find it difficult to express themselves verbally engage in psychological treatment. Group Art Therapy has been widely used as an adjunctive treatment for people with schizophrenia but there have been few attempts to examine its effects and cost effectiveness has not been examined. The MATISSE study aims to evaluate the clinical and cost effectiveness of group Art Therapy for people with schizophrenia.

Cost performance of Irish credit unions

There are 424 credit unions in Ireland with assets under their control of €14.3bn and a membership of 2.5m which equates to about 66% of the economically active population, the highest penetration level of any country. That said, the Irish movement sits at a critical development stage, well behind mature markets such as Canada and the US in terms of product provision, technological sophistication, fragmentation of trade bodies and regulatory environment. This study analyses relative cost efficiency or performance of Irish credit unions using the popular frontier approach which measures an entity’s efficiency relative to a frontier of best practice. Parametric techniques are utilised, with variation in inefficiency being attributed to credit union-specific factors. The stochastic cost frontier parameters and the credit-union specific parameters are simultaneously estimated to produce valid statistical inferences. The study finds that the majority of Irish credit unions are not operating at optimal levels. It further highlights the factors which drive efficiency variation across credit unions and they include technological sophistication, ‘sponsor donated’ resources, interest rate differentials and the levels of bad debt written off

Teaching Art History to Design Students

Art History is often seen as a mandatory core course in the curricula of design programs but it is rarely tailored to the needs and goals of such programs. Instead, the traditional chronological organization of lecture topics, invariably beginning with the “Venus of Willendorf” (c. 25,000 BC) is presented in order to impart to the students a supposed holistic “big picture.” This essay outlines the re-structuring of a two-semester first-year faculty-wide introductory art history course, entitled “History of Art and Design,” in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Design at Izmir University of Economics, Izmir, Turkey. The course was re-configured from a conventional chronologically-presented (time-oriented) lecture series to a thematically presented (topic-oriented) lecture series more relevant to the students of the faculty – architecture, interior architecture, graphic design, industrial design, and fashion design students.

Labor unions and Nash bargaining using coalition formation games

In this paper we examine the properties of stable coalitions under sequential and simultaneous bargaining by competing labor unions. We do this using the Nash bargaining solution and various notions of stability, namely, Nash, coalitional, contractual and core stability. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved,