McCormack Speaks

November 17, 2017
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Do The Right Thing: Technology and Ethics

By Jack Whitacre, a McCormack Graduate School student

Tomorrow’s disaster responses may well incorporate drones and other unmanned vehicles that deliver needed food, water and medicines. They may send back images for first responders to process in real time and even communicate in whatever languages are needed. One can argue that militaries and other organizations cannot respond to these disasters without proving that their practices are responsible and humane. Debates on morality don’t always keep pace with human-machine interactions, drone deliveries, and mixed reality portals. Discussing value systems and what’s right helps aid recipients, providers, private companies, and governments. Inventing a new application for technology showed me that humanitarian “solutions” can bring their own problems and dialogue is essential to trust. Continue Reading →

November 13, 2017
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Panel Recommends Ways to Improve Identification, Treatment For Hospital Patients With Dementia

This post originally appeared on the UMass Boston Gerontology Institute blog, written by Steven Syre.

Hospitalization is a stressful experience for most patients. But a person with dementia typically needs three days to recover pre-hospital function for each day hospitalized.

That caution has always stuck with Nina Silverstein, a professor of Gerontology at UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School. She kept it in mind as a member of a state Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias Acute Care Advisory Committee.

The 16-member committee recently published its recommendations for Massachusetts hospitals treating patients with dementia. Their report is intended to drive future discussion that will ultimately shape best practices to identify dementia and/or delirium and adjust care plans accordingly. Read more.

November 11, 2017
by McCormack Speaks
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The Freedom to Fish: International Fishing through a Local Lens by Jack Whitacre

By Jack Whitacre, a McCormack Graduate School student

I’ve heard it said that life is about survival, and just as animals use their teeth, people use the law. Growing up I fished on the shores of Maine, however over the years the fish stopped biting. I learned from National Geographic how commercial vessels have overfished international waters too. A lonely fishing lure launched a question about the roots of the international legal order at sea: Which rules are governing our planet’s fishing and how did they come to be?

While many people associate global fishing with the industrial revolution and the offshore processing plants of the 1930’s, the Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas reveals that itinerant European fishing expeditions crossed the Atlantic well before Columbus. Many of today’s finest fishing vessels pale in comparison to the boats of the past. For example, as early as 1540 the Spanish and French Basques had fishing ships weighing up to 600 tons. Continue Reading →

November 8, 2017
by McCormack Speaks
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Loss and Change: 20 Years after the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement

by Padraig O’Malley, John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation

This is the transcript of an invited lecture at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, held at the Bank of Ireland House of Lords Chamber, College Green, Dublin.

Majorities in both communities in Northern Ireland agree that life is better than 20 years ago. Overall some 71 percent think so, Catholics more so than Protestants.

My talk, however, will not run through a slew of metrics to try to measure the agreement’s social, economic and political impacts, both positive and negative. It will address some of the more collateral psychological impacts the conflict left that should lead one to the conclusion that Northern Ireland (NI) is one sick society and the underpinnings of the trauma that still envelops it are neither fully understood nor sufficiently treated.

Suffice to say that in the absence of dealing with the legacy of the past, NI will always remain a society in recovery, trapped in a vice-like grip between the permanency that comes with a full transition to normalcy and a permanency that stalls all efforts to progress. Continue Reading →

November 7, 2017
by McCormack Speaks
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An Insider’s Look at Battle Over Future of Affordable Care Act, Medicaid

This blog originally appeared on the Gerontology Institute blog, written by Steven Syre

The future of federal policy toward health care, potentially affecting many millions of Americans, became the hottest of all front-burner issues immediately following Election Day last year.

The next president had made repeal of the Affordable Care Act a leading priority of his campaign. Republican legislators who controlled both the House and Senate were eager to make it happen. Plans to drastically cut Medicaid funding were in the works.

None of this was lost on health care advocates who had campaigned for passage of the ACA and later worked to help implement the law now enabling health insurance coverage for millions of Americans with financial support from Medicaid.

“Everything we had been doing for the past seven or eight years was threatened,” said Robert Restuccia, executive director of Community Catalyst, at an October 30 meeting of the Department of Gerontology Speaker Series at UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School.