Forbearance as Redistribution: Enforcement Politics in Urban Latin America

Why do governments tolerate the violation of their own laws and regulations, and when do they enforce them? Conventional wisdom is that state weakness erodes enforcement, particularly in the developing world. In contrast, I highlight the understudied political costs of enforcement. Governments choose not to enforce state laws and regulations that the poor tend to violate, a behavior that I call forbearance, when it is in their electoral interest.Governmen

The behavioral and neural effects of emotion regulation on autobiographical memory retrieval

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth A. KensingerIndividuals' short- and long-term goals can influence the constructive nature of autobiographical memory recall. The overarching aim of this dissertation was to examine how emotion regulation goals in particular might modulate autobiographical recall at both a behavioral and neural level. In Chapter 1, a new behavioral task instructed individuals to cognitively reappraise the emotions associated with negative and positive events. Results revealed that such emotion regulation goals influence the emotional and other subjective experiences associated with recall, such that up-regulation instructions were linked to greater reported levels of emotional intensity, sensory detail, and recollection (e.g., reliving), and vice-versa for down-regulation instructions. In Chapter 2, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used as participants were instructed to decrease, increase, or maintain the emotions associated with negative autobiographical events. Decreasing emotional intensity primarily engaged neural activity in regions previously implicated in cognitive control (e.g., dorsal and ventral lateral prefrontal cortex), emotion generation and processing (e.g., amygdala, insula), and visual imagery (e.g., precuneus) during an early phase of recall as participants searched for and retrieved events. In contrast, increasing emotional intensity engaged similar regions as individuals prepared to recall negative events (i.e., before a memory cue was presented) and again as they later elaborated upon the details of the events they had recalled. In Chapter 3, individual differences in habitual use of cognitive reappraisal were measured and their relation to neural activity during autobiographical recall was examined. Results revealed that, even when not explicitly instructed to reappraise, habitual use of reappraisal was broadly associated with neural activity in cognitive control regions (e.g., dorsal and ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) as well as emotion processing regions (e.g., amygdala, insula) across memories that varied in their emotionality and specificity. Taken together, these results suggest that short- and long-term emotion regulation goals can influence the construction of autobiographical memories on both behavioral and neural levels.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Psychology

The 2006 NESCent Phyloinformatics Hackathon: A Field Report

In December, 2006, a group of 26 software developers from some of the most widely used life science programming toolkits and phylogenetic software projects converged on Durham, North Carolina, for a Phyloinformatics Hackathon, an intense five-day collaborative software coding event sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). The goal was to help researchers to integrate multiple phylogenetic software tools into automated workflows. Participants addressed deficiencies in interoperability between programs by implementing “glue code” and improving support for phylogenetic data exchange standards (particularly NEXUS) across the toolkits. The work was guided by use-cases compiled in advance by both developers and users, and the code was documented as it was developed. The resulting software is freely available for both users and developers through incorporation into the distributions of several widely-used open-source toolkits. We explain the motivation for the hackathon, how it was organized, and discuss some of the outcomes and lessons learned. We conclude that hackathons are an effective mode of solving problems in software interoperability and usability, and are underutilized in scientific software development

The 2006 NESCent Phyloinformatics Hackathon: A Field Report

In December, 2006, a group of 26 software developers from some of the most widely used life science programming toolkits and phylogenetic software projects converged on Durham, North Carolina, for a Phyloinformatics Hackathon, an intense five-day collaborative software coding event sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). The goal was to help researchers to integrate multiple phylogenetic software tools into automated workflows. Participants addressed deficiencies in interoperability between programs by implementing “glue code” and improving support for phylogenetic data exchange standards (particularly NEXUS) across the toolkits. The work was guided by use-cases compiled in advance by both developers and users, and the code was documented as it was developed. The resulting software is freely available for both users and developers through incorporation into the distributions of several widely-used open-source toolkits. We explain the motivation for the hackathon, how it was organized, and discuss some of the outcomes and lessons learned. We conclude that hackathons are an effective mode of solving problems in software interoperability and usability, and are underutilized in scientific software development

SARS-CoV-2 Omicron is an immune escape variant with an altered cell entry pathway

Vaccines based on the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 are a cornerstone of the public health response to COVID-19. The emergence of hypermutated, increasingly transmissible variants of concern (VOCs) threaten this strategy. Omicron (B.1.1.529), the fifth VOC to be described, harbours multiple amino acid mutations in spike, half of which lie within the receptor-binding domain. Here we demonstrate substantial evasion of neutralization by Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 variants in vitro using sera from individuals vaccinated with ChAdOx1, BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273. These data were mirrored by a substantial reduction in real-world vaccine effectiveness that was partially restored by booster vaccination. The Omicron variants BA.1 and BA.2 did not induce cell syncytia in vitro and favoured a TMPRSS2-independent endosomal entry pathway, these phenotypes mapping to distinct regions of the spike protein. Impaired cell fusion was determined by the receptor-binding domain, while endosomal entry mapped to the S2 domain. Such marked changes in antigenicity and replicative biology may underlie the rapid global spread and altered pathogenicity of the Omicron variant

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Replication data for: Forbearance as Redistribution: Enforcement Politics in Urban Latin America

Why do governments tolerate the violation of their own laws and regulations, and when do they enforce them? Conventional wisdom is that state weakness erodes enforcement, particularly in the developing world. In contrast, I highlight the understudied political costs of enforcement. Governments choose not to enforce state laws and regulations that the poor tend to violate, a behavior that I call forbearance, when it is in their electoral interest. I argue that two central factors shape enforcement decisions: first, the economic progressivity of welfare expenditures affects incentives for local politicians to enforce. When social policies are truncated or absent, forbearance emerges as a credible way for politicians to boost welfare informally and signal their distributive priorities. Second, political decentralization determines the electoral weight of poor voters. When elections occur at a local level and the poor constitute a plurality, politicians are more likely to forbear in line with district preferences. I develop the argument through a set of comparative case studies of enforcement against two legal violations--squatting and unlicensed street vending--in three Latin American capital cities since 1990. I draw on an original public opinion survey and experiment, in-depth interviews, administrative records, newspaper archives, and campaign platforms. Several empirical observations distinguish my theory from dominant alternatives centered on state weakness: 1) the poor support forbearance and candidates who advocate it, 2) politicians block enforcement on electoral grounds even after bureaucrats perform their roles, 3) enforcement choices vary with politicians' core constituencies, and 4) electoral rules generate predictable enforcement patterns. The contribution is to show how forbearance can function as an informal welf are policy, and how its use in turn alters the politics of tax-based redistribution in low and middle-income democracies. Scholars often assume that political divisions form between the Left that favors tax-based redistribution and the Right that resists it. My research instead suggests that electoral competition can center on informal welfare policies, particularly in contexts where formal benefits accrue to the middle class

Alisha Holland's Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

Replication Data for: Diminished Expectations: Redistributive Preferences in Truncated Welfare States

In Latin America, the relationship between income and support for redistribution is weak and variable despite the region’s extreme income inequality. This article shows that this condition is rooted in the truncated structure of many Latin American welfare states. Heavy spending on contributory social insurance for formal-sector workers, flat or regressive subsidies, and informal access barriers mean that social spending does far less for the poor in Latin America than in advanced industrial economies. Using public opinion data from across Latin America and original survey data from Colombia, the article demonstrates that income is less predictive of attitudes in the countries and social policy areas where the poor gain less from social expenditures. Social policy exclusion leads the poor to doubt that they will benefit from redistribution, thereby dampening their support for it. This article reverses an assumption in political economy models that welfare exclusion unleashes demands for greater redistribution. Instead, truncation reinforces skepticism that social policy helps the poor. Welfare state reforms to promote social inclusion are essential to strengthen redistributive coalitions