Advocacy coalitions involved in California's menu labeling policy debate: Exploring coalition structure, policy beliefs, resources, and strategies.

Advocacy coalitions often play an important role in the state health policymaking process, yet little is known about their structure, composition, and behavior. In 2008, California became the first state to enact a menu labeling law. Using the advocacy coalition framework, we examine different facets of the coalitions involved in California's menu labeling policy debate. We use a qualitative research approach to identify coalition members and explore their expressed beliefs and policy arguments, resources, and strategies by analyzing legislative documents (n = 87) and newspaper articles (n = 78) produced between 1999 and 2009. Between 2003 and 2008, six menu labeling bills were introduced in the state's legislature. We found the issue received increasing media attention during this period. We identified two advocacy coalitions involved in the debate-a public health (PH) coalition and an industry coalition. State organizations acted as coalition leaders and participated for a longer duration than elected officials. The structure and composition of each coalition varied. PH coalition leadership and membership notably increased compared to the industry coalition. The PH coalition, led by nonprofit PH and health organizations, promoted a clear and consistent message around informed decision making. The industry coalition, led by a state restaurant association, responded with cost and implementation arguments. Each coalition used various resources and strategies to advance desired outcomes. PH coalition leaders were particularly effective at using resources and employing advocacy strategies, which included engaging state legislators as coalition members, using public opinion polls and information, and leveraging media resources to garner support. Policy precedence and a local policy push emerged as important policymaking strategies. Areas for future research on the state health policymaking process are discussed

On cyclic numbers and an extension of Midy's theorem

In this note we consider fractions of the form 1/m and their floating-point representation in various arithmetic bases. For instance, what is 1/7 in base 2005? And, what about 1/4? We give a simple algorithm to answer these questions. In addition, we discuss an extension of Midy's theorem whose proof relies on elementary modular arithmetic.Comment: 6 pages, aimed at undergraduate student

Three-Dimensional Billiards with Time Machine

Self-collision of a non-relativistic classical point-like body, or particle, in the spacetime containing closed time-like curves (time-machine spacetime) is considered. A point-like body (particle) is an idealization of a small ideal elastic billiard ball. The known model of a time machine is used containing a wormhole leading to the past. If the body enters one of the mouths of the wormhole, it emerges from another mouth in an earlier time so that both the particle and its "incarnation" coexist during some time and may collide. Such self-collisions are considered in the case when the size of the body is much less than the radius of the mouth, and the latter is much less than the distance between the mouths. Three-dimensional configurations of trajectories with a self-collision are presented. Their dynamics is investigated in detail. Configurations corresponding to multiple wormhole traversals are discussed. It is shown that, for each world line describing self-collision of a particle, dynamically equivalent configurations exist in which the particle collides not with itself but with an identical particle having a closed trajectory (Jinnee of Time Machine).Comment: 20 pages (LATEX), 5 figures (EPS

Characterization of the transcriptome, nucleotide sequence polymorphism, and natural selection in the desert adapted mouse Peromyscus eremicus

As a direct result of intense heat and aridity, deserts are thought to be among the most harsh of environments, particularly for their mammalian inhabitants. Given that osmoregulation can be challenging for these animals, with failure resulting in death, strong selection should be observed on genes related to the maintenance of water and solute balance. One such animal, Peromyscus eremicus, is native to the desert regions of the southwest United States and may live its entire life without oral fluid intake. As a first step toward understanding the genetics that underlie this phenotype, we present a characterization of the P. eremicus transcriptome. We assay four tissues (kidney, liver, brain, testes) from a single individual and supplement this with population level renal transcriptome sequencing from 15 additional animals. We identified a set of transcripts undergoing both purifying and balancing selection based on estimates of Tajima’s D. In addition, we used the branch-site test to identify a transcript—Slc2a9, likely related to desert osmoregulation—undergoing enhanced selection in P. eremicus relative to a set of related non-desert rodents

Graph-theoretical conditions for inscribability and Delaunay realizability

We present new graph-theoretical conditions for inscribable polyhedra and Delaunay triangulations. We establish several sufficient conditions of the following general form: if a polyhedron has a sufficiently rich collection of Hamiltonian subgraphs, then it is inscribable. These results have several consequences:All 4-connected polyhedra are inscribable.All simplical polyhedra in which all vertex degrees are between 4 and 6, inclusive, are inscribable.All triangulations without chords or nonfacial triangles are realizable as Delaunay triangulations.We also strengthen some earlier results about matchings in inscribable polyhedra. Specifically, we show that any nonbipartite inscribable polyhedron has a perfect matching containing any specified edge, and that any bipartite inscribable polyhedron has a perfect matching containing any two specified disjoint edges. We give examples showing that these results are best possible