Leaving the Street In Brief

This issue of P/PV In Brief focuses on Lauren J. Kotloff's recent report, Leaving the Street: Young Fathers Move from Hustling to Legitimate Work. Based on an in-depth interview study of participants in P/PVs Fathers at Work initiative, the report provides a rare glimpse inside the lives of young urban men with criminal records, exploring how they got involved with hustling, their experiences in the labor market and their feelings about fatherhood.Leaving the Street In Brief describes the four distinct groups that emerged in P/PVs study (the Reluctant Hustlers, the Ambitious Workers, the Reluctant Workers and the Committed Hustlers) and presents early findings from the Fathers at Work evaluation. It also touches on the full report's recommendations for programs serving young fathers

A Dopamine-Acetylcholine Cascade: Simulating Learned and Lesion-Induced Behavior of Striatal Cholinergic Interneurons

The "teaching signal" that modulates reinforcement learning at cortico-striatal synapses may be a sequence composed of an adaptively scaled DA burst, a brief ACh burst, and a scaled ACh pause. Such an interpretation is consistent with recent data on cholinergic interneurons of the striatum are tonically active neurons (TANs) that respond with characteristic pauses to novel events and to appetitive and aversive conditioned stimuli. Fluctuations in acetylcholine release by TANs modulate performance- and learning- related dynamics in the striatum. Whereas tonic activity emerges from intrinsic properties of these neurons, glutamatergic inputs from thalamic centromedian-parafascicular nuclei, and dopaminergic inputs from midbrain are required for the generation of pause responses. No prior computational models encompass both intrinsic and synaptically-gated dynamics. We present a mathematical model that robustly accounts for behavior-related electrophysiological properties of TANs in terms of their intrinsic physiological properties and known afferents. In the model balanced intrinsic hyperpolarizing and depolarizing currents engender tonic firing, and glutamatergic inputs from thalamus (and cortex) both directly excite and indirectly inhibit TANs. If the latter inhibition, probably mediated by GABAergic NOS interneurons, exceeds a threshold, its effect is amplified by a KIR current to generate a prolongued pause. In the model, the intrinsic mechanisms and external inputs are both modulated by learning-dependent dopamine (DA) signals and our simulations revealed that many learning-dependent behaviors of TANs are explicable without recourse to learning-dependent changes in synapses onto TANs

A Michigan Record for \u3ci\u3eClytus Marginicollis\u3c/i\u3e (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae: Clytini)

Clytus marginicollis Castlenau and Gory is a small, rarely collected clytine cerambycid endemic to coniferous forests of Eastern North America (Knull 1943, Linsley 1964). Gosling (1973) did not mention any records for it in his survey of Michigan cerambycids. Knull (1943) reports that this species probably occurs in Ohio but he had seen no specimens to confirm its presence

Thinking of Home: The World War Two Letters of Gerald Koster

This paper covers the letters of Gerald Koster, who served aboard the USS New Jersey during World War Two. This paper covers his letters from the time of his enlistment in January 1943 through November 1943, and shows how his attitude towards the Navy, his parents, and his home changed over that period, as Koster became homesick and lost enthusiasm for Navy life

Sentiment Analysis on New York Times Articles Data

Sentiment Analysis on New York Times Coverage Data Departmental Affiliation: Data Science/ Political Science College of Arts and Sciences The extant political science literature examines media coverage of immigration and assesses the effect of that coverage on partisanship in the United States. Immigration is believed to be a unique factor that induces large- scale changes in partisanship based on race and ethnicity. The negative tone of media coverage pushes non-Latino Whites into the Republican Party, while Latinos trend toward the Democratic Party. The aim for this project is to look at New York time data in order to identify how much immigration is covered in newspaper outlets, specifically Latino immigration, and to determine the overall tone of these stories. In this research, we seek to determine individual articles take a positive, neutral or negative stance. We achieve this using a dictionary-based approach, meaning we look at individual words to assess if it has a positive, neutral or negative connotation. We train our data using publicly accessible sentiment dictionaries such as VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner). However, this task can be difficult because certain words can be dynamic and may pertain to a positive or negative sentiment in context of the article. In order to resolve this issue, we use reliability measures to ensure that the words of high frequencies are in the correct sphere of negative, neutral, and positive light. Information about the Author(s): Faculty Sponsor(s): Professor Gregg B. Johnson and Professor Karl Schmitt Student Contact: Gabriel Carvajal – [email protected]

Clay-kickers of Flanders Fields: Canadian Tunnellers at Messines Ridge 1916-1917

This article explores the Canadian tunnelling companies’ military mining organisation and accomplishments in underground galleries during the Great War. This comprehensive study explains the crucial role played by the Canadian engineers, in conjunction with British and Australian engineers, in the successful detonation of nineteen deep mines at Messines Ridge, Belgium on 7 June 1917. The tunnellers’ perseverance and skill were evident that morning when they slammed home plungers and threw switches igniting the largest planned explosion up to that time. However, daily hardships and dangers of underground warfare from the claustrophobic environment to the stress from the eavesdropping enemy led to disciplinary action including Field Punishment No. 1