Joe Whitehurst:  

Joe lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His schools include Hampton High School and a university or two. He will present a paper in Washington, DC.on March 24 at 10:30am that you all are invited to attend. Here is the abstract of the paper: ABSTRACT The Affordable Care Act (ACA) contains provisions that have stimulated interest in analytics among healthcare providers, especially those provisions that address quality of outcomes. High Impact Technologies (HIT) has been addressing these issues since before passage of the ACA and has a Health Care Data Model recognized by Gartner and implemented at several healthcare providers. Recently, HIT acquired SAS®Visual Analytics, and this paper reports our successful efforts to use SAS Visual Analytics for visually exploring “Big Data” for healthcare providers. Healthcare providers can suffer significant financial penalties for readmission rates above a certain threshold and other penalties related to quality of care. We have been able to use SAS Visual Analytics, coupled with our experience gained from implementing the HIT Healthcare Data Model at a number of Healthcare providers, to identify clinical measures that are significant predictors for readmission. As a result, we can help healthcare providers reduce the rate of 30-day readmissions. My latest published paper prepared for this International Congress herts DOT ac DOT pcp DOT pcp: 70 DOT 88 DOT 183 DOT 165. Just replace all the instances of " DOT " with periods and add this, "SLASH training SLASH KellianMindExplorer DOT pdf" to the second IP address and change SLASH to / if you are interested. Outline of paper I will present at IMPS 2016. I. Brief overview of Personal Construct Theory PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION Like other theories, the psychology of personal constructs is the implementation of a philosophical assumption. In this case, the assumption is that whatever nature may be, or howsoever the quest for truth will turn out in the end, the events we face today are subject to as great a variety of construction as our wits will enable us to contrive. This is not to say that one construction is as good as any other, nor is it to deny that at some infinite point in time human vision will behold reality out to the utmost reaches of existence. But it does remind us that all our present perceptions are open to question and reconsideration, and it does broadly suggest that even the most obvious occurrences of everyday life might appear utterly transformed if we were inventive enough to construe them differently. Explication of the Nature of a Personal Construct From the time of Aristotle we have understood propositional speech as a way of denoting entities. We may say, "A is B." This statement is a way of asserting a conclusion the antithesis of which would have been to say, "A is not B." This is a familiar logical form and its intrinsic validity is generally taken for granted. But we can look at this matter as psychologists and pose a scientific question about it. When one says that "A is B," is he, in fact, merely abandoning the alternative proposition that "A is not B?" Or is he, in fact, denying some other alternative? This is a question about human behavior, not a question of classical logic. Since it is a question about human behavior, it should be open to psychological examination. Experience with clients undergoing psychotherapy, as well as with persons in the process of changing their lives under other conditions, leads one to suspect that a person never makes his choice merely between an entity and a non-entity. When he says that "A is B" it seems that he is also asserting that "A is not C." The choice he makes is not, therefore, between "B" and "not-B," but between "B" and "C"—between two entities. Let us call this "the double entity choice," to distinguish it from "the single entity choice" envisioned by classical logic. If you prefer, we can state this observation in behavioral terms. We may then say that a person never chooses between behaving in a certain way and not behaving at all. Rather, he chooses between one behavior and another, He does not choose between activity and inactivity; instead, he chooses between alternative kinds of activity. II. Fundamental postulate: "A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he [or she] anticipates events." The construction corollary: "a person anticipates events by construing their replications." This means that individuals anticipate events in their social world by perceiving a similarity with a past event (construing a replication). The experience corollary: "a person's construction system varies as he successively construes the replication of events." The dichotomy corollary: "a person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs." The organization corollary: "each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs." The range corollary: "a construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only." The modulation corollary: "the variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose range of convenience the variants lie." The choice corollary: "a person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system." The individuality corollary: "persons differ from each other in their construction of events." The commonality corollary: "to the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by anoth...Expand for more