Under-Savers Anonymous: Evidence on Self-Help Groups and Peer Pressure as a Savings Commitment Device

We test the effectiveness of self-help peer groups as a commitment device for precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 Chilean micro-entrepreneurs. The first experiment finds that self-help peer groups are a powerful tool to increase savings (the number of deposits grows 3.7-fold and the average savings balance almost doubles). In contrast, a more classical measure, a substantially increased interest rate, has no effect for most participants. A second experiment tests an alternative delivery mechanism and shows that effects of similar size can be achieved by holding people accountable through feedback text messages, without meetings or peer pressure

A Review of \u3cem\u3eListening to and Learning from Students\u3c/em\u3e

A review of the book Listening to and Learning from Students, edited by Brian Schultz (Information Age Publishing, 2011)

Is This What Democracy Looks Like? A Personal Retrospective

I sometimes feel I’m stuck in an Alice-in-Wonderland world. Other times I feel that someone has created this bewilderment on purpose and I start looking for the Red Queen. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan\u27s National Commission on Excellence in Education submitted a report titled, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Since the publication of that report, we have suffered continual attempts at reform, having now arrived at a time when bureaucrats and politicians far removed from local community schools can use standardized test results to establish criteria for disciplining schools, removing principals and teachers, and defining school curricula. Reforms based on claims that our public schools do a terrible job and are a cause of America\u27s weakened world position are not being driven by parents, local citizens, teachers, or local school boards

Schooling of and for Democracy

The author asserts that it’s time for us to “measure” schools by the values we believe in for public life in general, and to “measure” our students, then, by the long-term impact they will have on our larger society and the vitality of our democracy

Earthquake Early Warning ShakeAlert System: Testing and Certification Platform

Earthquake early warning systems provide warnings to end users of incoming moderate to strong ground shaking from earthquakes. An earthquake early warning system, ShakeAlert, is providing alerts to beta end users in the western United States, specifically California, Oregon, and Washington. An essential aspect of the earthquake early warning system is the development of a framework to test modifications to code to ensure functionality and assess performance. In 2016, a Testing and Certification Platform (TCP) was included in the development of the Production Prototype version of ShakeAlert. The purpose of the TCP is to evaluate the robustness of candidate code that is proposed for deployment on ShakeAlert Production Prototype servers. TCP consists of two main components: a real‐time in situ test that replicates the real‐time production system and an offline playback system to replay test suites. The real‐time tests of system performance assess code optimization and stability. The offline tests comprise a stress test of candidate code to assess if the code is production ready. The test suite includes over 120 events including local, regional, and teleseismic historic earthquakes, recentering and calibration events, and other anomalous and potentially problematic signals. Two assessments of alert performance are conducted. First, point‐source assessments are undertaken to compare magnitude, epicentral location, and origin time with the Advanced National Seismic System Comprehensive Catalog, as well as to evaluate alert latency. Second, we describe assessment of the quality of ground‐motion predictions at end‐user sites by comparing predicted shaking intensities to ShakeMaps for historic events and implement a threshold‐based approach that assesses how often end users initiate the appropriate action, based on their ground‐shaking threshold. TCP has been developed to be a convenient streamlined procedure for objectively testing algorithms, and it has been designed with flexibility to accommodate significant changes in development of new or modified system code. It is expected that the TCP will continue to evolve along with the ShakeAlert system, and the framework we describe here provides one example of how earthquake early warning systems can be evaluated

Beyond dyadic coupling: The method of multivariate Surrogate Synchrony (mv-SUSY)

Measuring interpersonal synchrony is a promising approach to assess the complexity of social interaction, which however has been mostly limited to dyads. In this study, we introduce multivariate Surrogate Synchrony (mv-SUSY) to extend the current set of computational methods. Methods: mv-SUSY was applied to eight datasets consisting of 10 time series each, all with n = 9600 observations. Datasets 1 to 5 consist of simulated time series with the following characteristics: white noise (dataset 1), non-stationarity with linear time trends (dataset 2), autocorrelation (dataset 3), oscillation (dataset 4), and multivariate correlation (dataset 5). Datasets 6 to 8 comprise empirical multivariate movement data of two individuals (datasets 6 and 7) and between members of a group discussion (dataset 8.) Results: As hypothesized, findings of mv-SUSY revealed absence of synchrony in datasets 1 to 4 and presence of synchrony in dataset 5. In the empirical datasets, mv-SUSY indicated significant movement synchrony. These results were predominantly replicated by two well-established dyadic synchrony approaches, Surrogate Synchrony (SUSY) and Surrogate Concordance (SUCO). Conclusions: The study applied and evaluated a novel synchrony approach, mv-SUSY. We demonstrated the feasibility and validity of estimating multivariate nonverbal synchrony within and between individuals by mv-SUSY

Inflammation-induced effector CD4+ T cell interstitial migration is alpha-v integrin dependent

Leukocytes must traverse inflamed tissues to effectively control local infection. Although motility in dense tissues appears to be integrin-independent actin-myosin based, during inflammation changes to the extracellular matrix (ECM) may necessitate distinct motility requirements. Indeed, we found that T cell interstitial motility was critically dependent on RGD-binding integrins in the inflamed dermis. Inflammation-induced deposition of fibronectin was functionally linked to increased αv integrin expression on effector CD4+ T cells. Using intravital multi-photon imaging, we found that CD4+ T cell motility was dependent on αv expression. Selective αv blockade or knockdown arrested TH1 motility in the inflamed tissue and attenuated local effector function. These data show a context-dependent specificity of lymphocyte movement in inflamed tissues that is essential for protective immunity

Racial or Ethnic and Socioeconomic Inequalities in Adherence to National Dietary Guidance in a Large Cohort of US Pregnant Women

BACKGROUND: The significance of periconceptional nutrition for optimizing offspring and maternal health and reducing social inequalities warrants greater understanding of diet quality among US women. OBJECTIVE: Our objective was to evaluate racial or ethnic and education inequalities in periconceptional diet quality and sources of energy and micronutrients. DESIGN: Cross-sectional analysis of data from the Nulliparous Pregnancy Outcomes Study: Monitoring Mothers-to-Be cohort. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Nulliparous women (N=7,511) were enrolled across eight US medical centers from 2010 to 2013. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: A semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire assessing usual dietary intake during the 3 months around conception was self-administered during the first trimester. Diet quality, measured using the Healthy Eating Index-2010 (HEI-2010), and sources of energy and micronutrients were the outcomes. STATISTICAL ANALYSES: Differences in diet quality were tested across maternal racial or ethnic and education groups using F tests associated with analysis of variance and χ2 tests. RESULTS: HEI-2010 score increased with higher education, but the increase among non-Hispanic black women was smaller than among non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics (interaction P value <0.0001). For all groups, average scores for HEI-2010 components were below recommendations. Top sources of energy were sugar-sweetened beverages, pasta dishes, and grain desserts, but sources varied by race or ethnicity and education. Approximately 34% of energy consumed was from empty calories (the sum of energy from added sugars, solid fats, and alcohol beyond moderate levels). The primary sources of iron, folate, and vitamin C were juices and enriched breads. CONCLUSIONS: Diet quality is suboptimal around conception, particularly among women who are non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, or who had less than a college degree. Diet quality could be improved by substituting intakes of refined grains and foods empty in calories with vegetables, peas and beans (legumes), seafood, and whole grains

Cluster M Mycobacteriophages Bongo, PegLeg, and Rey with Unusually Large Repertoires of tRNA Isotopes

Genomic analysis of a large set of phages infecting the common hostMycobacterium smegmatis mc2155 shows that they span considerable genetic diversity. There are more than 20 distinct types that lack nucleotide similarity with each other, and there is considerable diversity within most of the groups. Three newly isolated temperate mycobacteriophages, Bongo, PegLeg, and Rey, constitute a new group (cluster M), with the closely related phages Bongo and PegLeg forming subcluster M1 and the more distantly related Rey forming subcluster M2. The cluster M mycobacteriophages have siphoviral morphologies with unusually long tails, are homoimmune, and have larger than average genomes (80.2 to 83.7 kbp). They exhibit a variety of features not previously described in other mycobacteriophages, including noncanonical genome architectures and several unusual sets of conserved repeated sequences suggesting novel regulatory systems for both transcription and translation. In addition to containing transfer-messenger RNA and RtcB-like RNA ligase genes, their genomes encode 21 to 24 tRNA genes encompassing complete or nearly complete sets of isotypes. We predict that these tRNAs are used in late lytic growth, likely compensating for the degradation or inadequacy of host tRNAs. They may represent a complete set of tRNAs necessary for late lytic growth, especially when taken together with the apparent lack of codons in the same late genes that correspond to tRNAs that the genomes of the phages do not obviously encode