Traditional credit and debit cards are not the only plastic payment mechanisms contributing to the decline of paper at the point of sale. Prepaid cards, which include products such as gift cards, travel cards, and payroll cards, are quickly replacing a variety of paper payment products, including gift certificates, travelers’ checks, and paychecks. In addition, merchants, banks, and employers are announcing new stored value card initiatives almost weekly. Also contributing to the prepaid card buzz are impressive estimates as to the product’s potential.
MasterCard and Visa, for example, both estimate that the prepaid market could grow to over $2 trillion and include business-to-business, consumer to consumer, and government to consumer transactions.1 Although such volumes are not expected for many years, prepaid card issuers are already being confronted with a myriad of legal issues that threaten to impede the technology’s growth. It is unclear, for example, whether a host of federal and state statutes that cover traditional payment products can or should reach prepaid cards. Overall, the future of prepaid card law is unsettled.
Upon the induction of the National School Lunch Act in 1946, President Harry Truman said that ‘no nation is any healthier than its children’ (1). Today, our nation is plagued with an obesity epidemic that is indifferent to age. Rates of childhood obesity in America today cannot be paralleled with any other time in our history. The number of obese children with type II diabetes, hypertension, and other diseases is forcing the medical community to redefine the epidemiology of these ‘adult’ disease states.
Emerging into the medical community as a registered dietitian, I am drawn not only by the natural charisma of children, but also that I concur with President Truman on the statement that the health of America is projected by its’ children. I have been empowered with the knowledge of nutrition and am able to deliver the message of good nutrition and overall health to children via a media that entertains, is interactive, and educates. This brings a euphoric feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction.
Definitions of corruption are problematic. Agreed-on definitions are rare, and definitions of corruption run the gamut from being too broad as to be rendered relatively useless to being too narrow and thus be applicable to only limited, rare, well-defined cases. Discussion of the issue seems to be entirely absent in the literature on educational administration. Fortunately for us, other domains and professions deal with the issue of corruption on a more regular basis. From the literature on police corruption we have this definition, a relatively simple one: corruption is “the misuse of public power for private and personal benefit” (Palmer [1992] as cited in Sayed and Bruce, 1998b). This simple definition, according to Sayed and Bruce, provides a good starting point, as it identifies three critical elements in a consideration of corruption: what was done, how, and by whom. The authors develop a much more strict definition of corruption as it relates to police: “any illegal conduct or misconduct involving the use of occupational power for personal, group or organizational gain” (Sayed and Bruce, 1998b, p. 9).
And while this particular definition has advantages over the simpler one (for example, the addition of group and organizational gain—which will be beneficial in the discussion of corruption in educational administration), its drawback for our purposes is the insistence on the illegality of the corruption. Group and organizational benefit or gain were added to the simpler definition of corruption to allow for individuals of a given profession (police) or organization to act in concert to benefit individually and collectively through the abuse of power and position.
