The One Percent Solution: How Corporations are Remaking America One State at a Time

[Excerpt] In January 2015, Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Haslam, unveiled a proposal to expand his state’s Medicaid program to provide health insurance to two hundred thousand low-income residents. At the time, Haslam was at the peak of his power: he had just won reelection with 70 percent of the vote and had been named to head the Republican Governors Association. Haslam insisted that his plan was “not Obamacare”; indeed, he had gained concessions from the Obama administration allowing him to write conservative requirements into the program. His Republican colleagues—who controlled both houses of the legislature—supported his proposal, based partly on polling showing widespread voter approval. And yet none of this was enough. An advocacy group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), sent field organizers into the state, ran weeks of advertising, and staged demonstrations insisting that any Medicaid expansion whatsoever amounted to “a vote for Obamacare.” Republican caucus chair Glen Casada termed AFP’s campaign “politics of intimidation.” But it worked; the governor’s bill was defeated. Declaring victory, an AFP spokesman warned that “other governors [should] look at Tennessee as an example.” The Tennessee experience raises important questions about American politics and the forces that shape Americans’ economic lives. How could an outside advocacy group overturn the will of elected officials and their constituents? What led a corporate-backed group to undermine its Republican allies? Why would the Koch brothers, whose primary interests are in the oil industry, care enough about Medicaid to bankroll this type of campaign? And finally, if corporate lobbies have the power to do what they did in Tennessee, what else could they do? In what other ways might they be trying to rewrite the rules that govern our economy? In answering these questions, this book aims to show how America’s most powerful corporate lobbies are working to remake the country’s economy in ways that will affect all Americans profoundly—and yet are largely invisible to most of us. Understanding these forces’ legislative agenda is essential to comprehending America’s current political and economic trajectory. Because this agenda has been enacted in state legislatures rather 4han the U.S. Congress, it is state-level initiatives that form the subject of this book

Parallel, multi-stage processing of colors, faces and shapes in macaque inferior temporal cortex

Visual-object processing culminates in inferior temporal (IT) cortex. To assess the organization of IT, we measured fMRI responses in alert monkey to achromatic images (faces, fruit, bodies, places) and colored gratings. IT contained multiple color-biased regions, which were typically ventral to face patches and, remarkably, yoked to them, spaced regularly at four locations predicted by known anatomy. Color and face selectivity increased for more anterior regions, indicative of a broad hierarchical arrangement. Responses to non-face shapes were found across IT, but were stronger outside color-biased regions and face patches, consistent with multiple parallel streams. IT also contained multiple coarse eccentricity maps: face patches overlapped central representations; color-biased regions spanned mid-peripheral representations; and place-biased regions overlapped peripheral representations. These results suggest that IT comprises parallel, multi-stage processing networks subject to one organizing principle

Lack of Z-DNA Conformation in Mitomycin-Modified Polynucleotides Having Inverted Circular Dichroism

Poly(dG-dC)· poly(dG-dC) and Micrococcus lysodeikticus DNA were modified by exposure to reductively activated mitomycin C, an antitumor antibiotic. The resulting covalent drug-polynucleotide complexes displayed varying degrees of CD inversions, which are strikingly similar to the inverted spectrum observed with Z-DNA. The following criteria have been used to establish, however, that the inverted CD pattern seen in mitomycin C-polynucleotide complexes does not reflect a Z-DNA conformation. (i) The ethanol-induced transition of poly(dG-dC)· poly(dG-dC) from B to Z conformation is not facilitated but rather is inhibited by mitomycin C modification. This may be due to the presence of crosslinks. (ii) Radioimmunoassay indicated no competition for Z-DNA-specific antibody by any of the mitomycin C-modified polynucleotides. (iii) 31P NMR of the complexes yielded a single relatively narrow resonance, which is inconsistent with the dinucleotide repeat characteristic of Z-DNA. Alternative explanations for the inverted CD pattern include a drug-induced left-handed but non-Z conformational change or the superposition of an induced CD onto the CD of B-DNA due to drug-base electronic interactions. These results illustrate the need for caution in interpreting CD changes alone as an indication of Z-DNA conformation

Color-Biased Regions of the Ventral Visual Pathway Lie between Face- and Place-Selective Regions in Humans, as in Macaques

The existence of color-processing regions in the human ventral visual pathway (VVP) has long been known from patient and imaging studies, but their location in the cortex relative to other regions, their selectivity for color compared with other properties (shape and object category), and their relationship to color-processing regions found in nonhuman primates remain unclear. We addressed these questions by scanning 13 subjects with fMRI while they viewed two versions of movie clips (colored, achromatic) of five different object classes (faces, scenes, bodies, objects, scrambled objects). We identified regions in each subject that were selective for color, faces, places, and object shape, and measured responses within these regions to the 10 conditions in independently acquired data. We report two key findings. First, the three previously reported color-biased regions (located within a band running posterior–anterior along the VVP, present in most of our subjects) were sandwiched between face-selective cortex and place-selective cortex, forming parallel bands of face, color, and place selectivity that tracked the fusiform gyrus/collateral sulcus. Second, the posterior color-biased regions showed little or no selectivity for object shape or for particular stimulus categories and showed no interaction of color preference with stimulus category, suggesting that they code color independently of shape or stimulus category; moreover, the shape-biased lateral occipital region showed no significant color bias. These observations mirror results in macaque inferior temporal cortex (Lafer-Sousa and Conway, 2013), and taken together, these results suggest a homology in which the entire tripartite face/color/place system of primates migrated onto the ventral surface in humans over the course of evolution.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant EY13455)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant EY023322)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant 5T32GM007484-38)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (STC Award CCF-1231216)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1353571)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowshi

The challenge of new RBP editors

Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP)Universidade de São PauloUniversidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Departament of PsychiatryUNIFESPSciEL

Success in publication by graduate students in psychiatry in Brazil: an empirical evaluation of the relative influence of English proficiency and advisor expertise

Background: This study evaluates the success of graduate students in psychiatry in an emerging country, in terms of the quantity and quality of their publication productivity (given by the number of papers and impact factors of the journals in which they publish). We investigated to what extent student proficiency in English and the scientific capabilities of academic advisors predict that success.Methods: Our sample comprised 43 master's and doctoral students in psychiatry (n = 28 and n = 15, respectively) at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine, in São Paulo, Brazil. We collected information about their knowledge of English and the ways in which they wrote their articles to be submitted to periodicals published in English. Multiple regression analyses were carried out in order to investigate the influence English proficiency, h-index of supervisors and use of language editing assistance had on the number and impact of student publications.Results: Although 60% of students scored >= 80 (out of 100) on English tests given at admission to the graduate program, 93.09% of the sample used some form of external editing assistance to produce their papers in English. the variables number of publications and impact factor of journals were significantly related to each other (r = 0.550, p < 0.001). Multiple regression analysis revealed that the impact factor of periodicals where students published their articles as first authors correlated significantly not only with student proficiency in English at admission (p = 0.035), but also with the degree of language editing assistance (p = 0.050) and the h-index of the academic advisor (p = 0.050).Conclusions: Albeit relevant, knowledge of English was not the key factor for the publication success of the graduate students evaluated. Other variables (h-index of the advisor and third-party language editing assistance) appear to be also important predictors of success in publication.Univ São Paulo, Sch Med, Dept Psychiat, São Paulo, BrazilUniv São Paulo, Ctr Support Res Neurosci, NAPNA, São Paulo, BrazilUniv São Paulo, Inst Math & Stat, São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, UNIFESP, Lab Clin Neurosci, São Paulo, BrazilUniv São Paulo, Sch Philosophy Literature & Human Sci, Dept English, São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, UNIFESP, Lab Clin Neurosci, São Paulo, BrazilWeb of Scienc

The RBP's mission in the continuing medical education

Universidade de São Paulo Departamento de PsiquiatriaDuke University Departamento de Psicologia e NeurociênciaUniversidade Federal doRio de Janeiro Instituto dePsiquiatria Departamento de Psiquiatria e Medicina LegalUniversidade de São Paulo Faculdade de Medicina Instituto de PsiquiatriaUniversidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Departamento de PsiquiatriaUniversidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Departamento de PsiquiatriaUNIFESP, Depto. de PsiquiatriaSciEL

Comparative Study of the Standard Fluorescent Antibody to Membrane Antigen (FAMA) Assay and a Flow Cytometry-Adapted FAMA Assay To Assess Immunity to Varicella-Zoster Virus

A flow cytometry-adapted fluorescent antibody to membrane antigen (FAMA) assay to detect IgG antibodies against varicella-zoster virus (VZV) was developed and tested in 62 serum samples, showing 90.32% accuracy obtained from a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve with a 0.9125 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.829 to 1.00) area below the curve compared to the result with standard FAMA.Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Fed Univ São Paulo UNIFESP EPM, Div Pediat Infect Dis, BR-04040000 São Paulo, BrazilColumbia Univ, Dept Pediat, Coll Phys & Surg, New York, NY 10027 USAFed Univ São Paulo UNIFESP EPM, Div Pediat Infect Dis, BR-04040000 São Paulo, BrazilCAPES: 0108-08-1Web of Scienc