Richard M. Morse

Metadata-driven creation of data marts from an EAV-modeled clinical research database

Generic clinical study data management systems can record data on an arbitrary number of parameters in an arbitrary number of clinical studies without requiring modification of the database schema. They achieve this by using an Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) model for clinical data. While very flexible for creating transaction-oriented systems for data entry and browsing of individual forms, EAV-modeled data is unsuitable for direct analytical processing, which is the focus of data marts. For this purpose, such data must be extracted and restructured appropriately. This paper describes how such a process, which is non-trivial and highly error prone if performed using non-systematic approaches, can be automated by judicious use of the study metadata-the descriptions of measured parameters and their higher-level grouping. The metadata, in addition to driving the process, is exported along with the data, in order to facilitate its human interpretation.

Latin American Cities: Aspects of Function and Structure*

This essay will advance two interrelated hypotheses about the Latin American city. The first of them has to do with the role of the city in the settlement of the New World. The second suggests certain characteristics of the modern Latin American metropolis.

Trends and Patterns of Latin American Urbanization, 1750–1920

This paper finds its point of departure in population figures for 8 Latin American countries and 61 cities during the period 1750 to 1920 (Tables 2–9, pp. 435–43). This span is a convenient one for the study of Latin American urban development. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, population statistics, at least those available from printed sources, become sparse and unreliable, and one begins to get totals of householders rather than head counts. Moreover, the wide swings in current estimates of regional populations for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make relative urbanization rates problematical even when one has good data for towns. For the time being, the functional scale for urban places proposed by Hardoy and Aranovich (1969; 1970) seems a more appropriate index for the Hapsburg and early Bourbon periods than a purely quantitative one. After 1920, when more frequent and modern national censuses facilitate data collection, a new era in Latin American urban development commences, marked by economic nationalism, broadened political participation, centralized economic planning, import substitution, the politicoeconomic ascendancy of the United States, and massive internal migrations.

The Strange Career of "Latin-American Studies"

Whatever the recent progress of Latin-American studies in the United States, it is less evident to outsiders than to specialists in the field. Defects of our Latin-American pro grams are most noticeable at the liberal-arts core of humanities and the social sciences. Anthropology, in its present state, offers the best point of departure for examining Latin-American culture; literary and historical studies are especially weak. A drawback to Latin America as a field of study, in contrast to Asia or Africa, is that its culture is deceptively recognizable to Americans. Moreover, our inherited suspicion of the Catho lic world discourages study of its intellectual origins, and pre vents us from identifying its sociological and psychological foundations. Today the wholesale subsidizing of Latin-Ameri can studies threatens to cut them off further from our academic mainstream and to encourage mediocrity. The various causes for the poverty of our Latin-American programs may possibly relate to our submerged doubts about the wisdom of the original Protestant secession.

Historic architecture in the Caribbean Islands

The author records the architectural heritage of the 16 Caribbean islands; and explores the physical, cultural, and political factors that influenced design evolution in the region, including climate, geography, the cultures of early occupants, colonial exploration, slavery, and others.

Lenguage as a key to Latin American Historiography.

Latin americanists have in recent years become increasingly concerned with constructing the basis for a unified history of Latin America. Frequently this enterprise leads them to contemplate the even larger design of a history of the Americas. While the New World may still be, in Hegel’s words, “a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe,” it is now recognized as having an independent heritage; its history is no longer experienced as “only an echo of the Old World.”