Welcome to Europe

Bruegel Fellow Jakob von Weizsäcker argues that Europe needs more high-skilled migration and the debate on low-skilled migration should not be an excuse to slow this process down. Rather, the EU should use a couple of tools to encourage high-skilled migration: a skill-based points system with a â??Blue Card" granting access to its entire labour market and a â??Blue Diploma" for students graduating with a Masters degree (or equivalent) from selected universities to allow them access to the entire EU labour market. In order to manage migration from the new member states he recommends an â??External Minimum Wage".

The Relations Between Anxiety Symptoms and Friendships in Adolescence

Anxiety symptoms can often be experienced as a silent struggle in adolescence, as many anxious adolescents do not exhibit outward symptoms. Identifying adolescents who are struggling with subthreshold anxiety symptoms can be even more difficult. As adolescence is a time where friendships become primary sources for emotional support, youth who experience anxiety symptoms and associated distress may have trouble navigating close relationships with peers. The current study aims to investigate the relations between adolescents’ anxiety symptoms and their friendship functioning, as well as the impact of their anxiety symptoms on friends’ emotional adjustment. Data were taken from a larger project on adolescent friendships and emotional adjustment, approved by the University of Maine Institutional Review Board (IRB). Participants (N = 186) were nested within 93 same-gender friendship dyads and were between 13 and 19 years of age. Dyads’ emotional adjustment and friendship functioning were assessed concurrently and after 3 months. Self-report measures of anxiety symptoms, friendship quality, and depressive symptoms were gathered. Descriptive statistics, mean-level gender differences, and correlations among study variables were computed, and dyadic data analyses tested primary hypotheses of interest. Results indicated that anxiety symptoms were not associated with lower levels of positive friendship quality. Additionally, although friends were similar to one another in terms of anxiety symptoms, results did not support evidence of anxiety contagion over 3 months. Future research should test for anxiety contagion across a longer period of time (e.g., 1 year), and studies of adolescent anxiety should continue to control for depressive symptoms to account for the overlap in symptomatology between depressive and anxiety symptoms. This study contributes to the existing literature on the impact of adolescents’ internalizing symptoms on friendships and the emotional adjustment of friends

Welcome

Welcome speech given by Dean Feerick

BU icons collage: Welcome back posters

These posters were created to welcome students back to campus for Fall 2017

Computational Analysis of the Structural Importance of the Conserved Glycine Residues at Positions 31, 33, and 35 in the Chromophore Formation and Folding of Green Fluorescent Protein

Green fluorescent protein, initially cloned and expressed from the bioluminescent jellyfish, Aequorea victoria (avGFP), has a wide range of uses in cellular biology, one of which includes uses as a biological marker1. Variants of GFP exist, but some residues are highly conserved and necessary for appropriate chromophore formation. Some of these conserved residues are the glycine residues at positions 31, 33 and 35, though it they are not part of the tripeptide that forms the chromophore2 . The objective of this honors study and 3 related independent studies was to use computational methods to find out why the glycines at positions 31, 33, and 35 are so highly conserved in all fluorescent proteins and what role they play in chromophore formation, folding and stabilizing the protein. Precyclized immature structures (i.e. with no chromophore) have been used in our simulations because there is been evidence that conserved glycine residues play an important role in protein folding3 or chromophore formation, which occurs prior to cyclization. Although mutating the glycine at position 35 to a cysteine3 has been found to be somewhat fluorescent, we chose to make a less aggressive mutations, G31A, G33A, and G35A in order to study because alanine is the most structurally similar to glycine

Porch Culture: The Stoop of Entitlement

To the class of 2017: Welcome to Gettysburg. Welcome to the next four years of your life. Welcome to the school where you spend vast amounts of time at or trying to get into a Fraternity House. Welcome to the school plagued by porch culture. [excerpt

Modern celebrity and inspiration in South Africa: an examination of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans

The postapartheid condition of a majority of young people in South Africa is substantially similar to the apartheid conditions under which their parents lived. This results in a dominant narrative in the media and everyday talk circulating in South African that the youth are a ‘lost generation’ and also that they represent a significant danger and risk for the stability of our democracy. Against this backdrop The Mail and Guardian, one of the South Africa’s most influential newspapers has chosen to celebrate a small number of young people every year as inspirational and extraordinary in their achievements. This investigation into this representation of a significant - although small - group of young South Africans employed content analysis of the 2015 edition of 200 Young South Africans, interviews with profiled individuals across the years, and a focus group of readers. The study aimed to unpack the complexity of constructing certain young people as exemplary given the structural conditions that constrain and prevent a majority from attaining the education and mobility they need to make a difference in their own lives. The study found through the content analysis that the Mail&Guardian is setting up these young people as exemplary citizens whose actions should inspire other young people to similarly ‘make a difference’. Through the interviews the study found that those featured on the list found both that there was significant social capital in being valorised this way, but that this position was also a complex one to negotiate given the structural limitations of poverty and lack of education for those out of whom they had been chosen. The readers in the focus group did find inspiration in reading about their exemplary peers but they too were conscious of how small a group this was in comparison to the majority of young South Africans. In conclusion the study found that the narrative of hope, inspiration and making a difference is an important message in relation to a generalised hopelessness about South African youth but that it runs the risk of ignoring the significant structural constraints that young, poor, undereducated, unskilled young South Africans face