Inclusive Policies Advance Dramatically in the States: Immigrants' Access to Driver's Licenses, Higher Education, Workers' Rights, and Community Policing

As Congress debated federal immigration reform this year, states led the way by adopting policies designed to integrate immigrants more fully in their communities. In the wake of the 2012 elections, with Latino and Asian voters participating in record numbers,1 the 2013 state legislative sessions witnessed a significant increase in pro-immigrant activity. Issues that had been dormant or had moved in a restrictive direction for years, such as expanding access to driver's licenses, gained considerable traction, along with measures improving access to education and workers' rights for immigrants.This report summarizes the activity on immigrant issues that took place during the states' 2013 legislative sessions, as well as efforts to improve access to services for immigrant youth

Renewing the New Order?: Public History in Indonesia

After the fall of the Suharto regime in 1988, public debates over the nature of history proliferated. While focusing on a number of key national events, most notably the 1965 coup and the killing of over half-a-million people, these debates have raised critical issues over the role or potential role of public history in contemporary Indonesian society. Questions of historical authority are paramount as Indonesian historians, public intellectuals and politicians struggle with a deeply entrenched historical paradigm and narratives of the old ‘New Order’ which continues to inform history in schools, cultural institutions, the media, literature, personal narratives, public rituals and the academy. This paradigm was based on an unquestioning acceptance of official accounts of the past. The demise of the New Order has left a historiographical vacuum which individuals and groups from a broad range of perspectives are trying to fill. Some, like Professor Azumardi Aza, are seeking to straddle the divide between professional and public history. Memory has emerged as a key issue in public debates, attempts have been made at reconciliation between the left and the right, though these faltered, and turf wars have broken out between historians and novelists such as Pramoedya Anata Toer. Women continue to remain relegated to a 'macabre footnote' in Indonesian public history. History in Indonesia is at a crossroads. One road could lead to a more democratic form of public or people’s history; the other to a modified version of the New Order history

Genome-Wide Association with Select Biomarker Traits in the Framingham Heart Study

BACKGROUND: Systemic biomarkers provide insights into disease pathogenesis, diagnosis, and risk stratification. Many systemic biomarker concentrations are heritable phenotypes. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) provide mechanisms to investigate the genetic contributions to biomarker variability unconstrained by current knowledge of physiological relations. METHODS: We examined the association of Affymetrix 100K GeneChip single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to 22 systemic biomarker concentrations in 4 biological domains: inflammation/oxidative stress; natriuretic peptides; liver function; and vitamins. Related members of the Framingham Offspring cohort (n = 1012; mean age 59 ± 10 years, 51% women) had both phenotype and genotype data (minimum-maximum per phenotype n = 507–1008). We used Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE), Family Based Association Tests (FBAT) and variance components linkage to relate SNPs to multivariable-adjusted biomarker residuals. Autosomal SNPs (n = 70,987) meeting the following criteria were studied: minor allele frequency ≥ 10%, call rate ≥ 80% and Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium p ≥ 0.001. RESULTS: With GEE, 58 SNPs had p < 10-6: the top SNPs were rs2494250 (p = 1.00*10-14) and rs4128725 (p = 3.68*10-12) for monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP1), and rs2794520 (p = 2.83*10-8) and rs2808629 (p = 3.19*10-8) for C-reactive protein (CRP) averaged from 3 examinations (over about 20 years). With FBAT, 11 SNPs had p < 10-6: the top SNPs were the same for MCP1 (rs4128725, p = 3.28*10-8, and rs2494250, p = 3.55*10-8), and also included B-type natriuretic peptide (rs437021, p = 1.01*10-6) and Vitamin K percent undercarboxylated osteocalcin (rs2052028, p = 1.07*10-6). The peak LOD (logarithm of the odds) scores were for MCP1 (4.38, chromosome 1) and CRP (3.28, chromosome 1; previously described) concentrations; of note the 1.5 support interval included the MCP1 and CRP SNPs reported above (GEE model). Previous candidate SNP associations with circulating CRP concentrations were replicated at p < 0.05; the SNPs rs2794520 and rs2808629 are in linkage disequilibrium with previously reported SNPs. GEE, FBAT and linkage results are posted at . CONCLUSION: The Framingham GWAS represents a resource to describe potentially novel genetic influences on systemic biomarker variability. The newly described associations will need to be replicated in other studies.National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Framingham Heart Study (N01-HC25195); National Institutes of Health National Center for Research Resources Shared Instrumentation grant (1S10RR163736-01A1); National Institutes of Health (HL064753, HL076784, AG028321, HL71039, 2 K24HL04334, 1K23 HL083102); Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; American Diabetes Association Career Developement Award; National Center for Research Resources (GCRC M01-RR01066); US Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (58-1950-001, 58-1950-401); National Institute of Aging (AG14759

Current research into brain barriers and the delivery of therapeutics for neurological diseases: a report on CNS barrier congress London, UK, 2017.

This is a report on the CNS barrier congress held in London, UK, March 22-23rd 2017 and sponsored by Kisaco Research Ltd. The two 1-day sessions were chaired by John Greenwood and Margareta Hammarlund-Udenaes, respectively, and each session ended with a discussion led by the chair. Speakers consisted of invited academic researchers studying the brain barriers in relation to neurological diseases and industry researchers studying new methods to deliver therapeutics to treat neurological diseases. We include here brief reports from the speakers

Prenatal Medication Use And Autistic Behaviors In A South Korean Cohort

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is thought to result from a combination of genetic and environmental factors, yet a specific cause remains unknown. In this study, exposure and outcome data from a South Korean cohort (N=3,711) were analyzed to investigate the possibility of an environmental contribution to autism etiology. No significant association was observed between use of prenatal medications and autistic behaviors, as measured by Korean versions of both the Autism Spectrum Screening Questionnaire (ASSQ; OR 1.20, 95% CI 0.95–1.51) and the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS; OR 0.98, 95% CI 0.78–1.25). Similarly, no significant associations were observed when use of prenatal vitamins, folic acid, or iron supplements was examined. There was also no dose-response relationship observed between number of medications taken during pregnancy and increased autistic behaviors. No evidence for a role of prenatal medication use in autism etiology is suggested by the data in this study. Future investigations focusing on specific subgroups of medications in this population are warranted

Evanescent Wave Reduction Using a Segmented Wavemaker in a Two Dimensional Wave Tank

Evanescent waves are created by the wavemaking process during tank testing. They have long been a nuisance for engineers as they contaminate the wave field in the tank and result in additional inertial force experienced by a wavemaker. Evanescent waves are created by the mismatch between the motion of the wavemaker and the motion of the uid particles in a progressive wave. To avoid contamination of test results, often a considerable distance must be left between the wavemaker and the test area. This space requirement may be costly for small research groups or companies who wish to have a facility to perform some basic proof-of-concept tests in-house, but are restricted for space. The initial aim of this project was to develop a wavemaker which minimised this space requirement over a large range of frequencies. The exploration into the behaviour of evanescent waves from the point of view of the fundamentals of hydrodynamics has been very enlightening. It became clear with the discovery of an interference pattern between the evanescent waves, that this pattern can be optimised to effectively cancel out the evanescent wave fieeld. This interference pattern arises from a phase shift of � radians experienced by some of the evanescent waves, with respect to the others. The significance of this in hydrodynamics is that it explains the existence of negative added mass. The application for this knowledge far out reaches the topic of reducing the distortion in a wave tank. The ability to minimise the added mass of a wavemaker has a great deal of potential in both active absorbing wavemakers and wave energy conversion. For active absorbing wavemakers, the minimisation of added mass may be useful in the absorption of unwanted waves which can be particularly troublesome at high frequencies. The concept of designing the geometry of a wavemaker to simply match the motion of the uid particles has long been proposed; however, the difficulty with designing such a wavemaker is that the ideal geometry is frequency dependent. Hence, a design that eliminates the evanescent waves at one particular frequency will not be able to do so for other frequencies. An investigation into the design of a segmented wavemaker is presented here, as its geometry can easily be adjusted to suit different frequencies. The wavemaker theory for the multi-body problem of the segmented wavemaker is developed, and a new aspect of wavemaker theory that predicts a phase shift of � radians in some of the evanescent waves is presented for the first time. A hypothesis is put forward, and then investigated, proposing that this phase shift can be exploited to create an interference pattern that can effectively cancel out the evanescent waves. The hydrodynamics of the segmented wavemaker were constrained using the Newton-Euler equations of motion with Eliminated Constraints (NE-EC). This approach facilitated a comparison between wavemakers with multiple degrees of freedom and traditional wavemakers with a single degree of freedom. The lengths and strokes of each segment in the wavemaker are optimised to reduce the distortion caused by the evanescent waves using two approaches. Approach one follows the traditional ideas and optimises the lengths and strokes of the segments to best approximate the motion of the uid particles in a progressive wave. Approach two optimises the lengths and strokes of the segments in order to minimise the distance between the wavemaker and the testable area in the tank. Approach two exploits the phase shift in the evanescent waves by finding the optimal interference pattern that effectively cancels out the evanescent waves. A comparison between both approaches shows that effectively eliminating the distortion caused by the evanescent waves is much more achievable by optimising the interference pattern between the evanescent waves, rather than trying to approximate a progressive wave. The results for the segmented wavemakers optimised using approach two predicted that the distortion can be effectively eliminated for a wide range of frequencies using a segment wavemaker consisting of three aps. A sensitivity analysis indicates that the performance of the wavemaker is somewhat effected by errors in the segments strokes, but the overall performance is still better than what has been developed to date