“A Stone of Hope”: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Its Impact on the Economic Status of Black Americans

The article offers the author\u27s insights regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the U.S. and its effect on African American\u27s economic status. Topics discussed by the author include the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), significance of Title VII in the improvement of African American\u27s experience in labor market, and segregation. Also mentioned are the earnings, unemployment, and education African American men

New Wine in an Old Bottle: How Minnesota\u27s Receivership Statute Can Promote Both Efficiency and Equity

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THE OTHER AMERICA: Inequality, Taxes, and the Very Rich

Effective tax rates are lower than statutory rates for wealthy people because they receive much income from capital, capital income receives preferential treatment, and recognition of capital income is often voluntary. I calculate taxes paid as a percentage of wealth using linked estate- income data. Single itemizers with wealth of at least $2 million in 2007 paid less than 3 percent of wealth in annual taxes, with the richest paying the smallest fraction. Changes enacted in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 favor those at the top. The estate tax remains one tool that may curb extreme wealth accumulation

Wiggle—Predicting Functionally Flexible Regions from Primary Sequence

The Wiggle series are support vector machine–based predictors that identify regions of functional flexibility using only protein sequence information. Functionally flexible regions are defined as regions that can adopt different conformational states and are assumed to be necessary for bioactivity. Many advances have been made in understanding the relationship between protein sequence and structure. This work contributes to those efforts by making strides to understand the relationship between protein sequence and flexibility. A coarse-grained protein dynamic modeling approach was used to generate the dataset required for support vector machine training. We define our regions of interest based on the participation of residues in correlated large-scale fluctuations. Even with this structure-based approach to computationally define regions of functional flexibility, predictors successfully extract sequence-flexibility relationships that have been experimentally confirmed to be functionally important. Thus, a sequence-based tool to identify flexible regions important for protein function has been created. The ability to identify functional flexibility using a sequence based approach complements structure-based definitions and will be especially useful for the large majority of proteins with unknown structures. The methodology offers promise to identify structural genomics targets amenable to crystallization and the possibility to engineer more flexible or rigid regions within proteins to modify their bioactivity

Wilkie Collins and nineteenth-century psychology : cultural significance and fictional form

This thesis considers the relationship between the novels of Wilkie Collins and nineteenth-century psychological methods and ideas. It explores the ways in which Collins extrapolates from these theories by appropriating them as means both of generating suspense and resolving tension, and shows how an investigation of these psychological ideas elucidates his fiction. The Introduction briefly reviews Collins's development as a sensation novelist in relationship to contemporary sensation fiction. Chapter One outlines the wide range of psychological ideas that have a direct bearing on Collins's work. It considers, firstly, how the meaning both of insanity and of social identity was shaped by the development of the asylum system and the precepts of moral management - precepts that encapsulated many of the aspirations of early Victorian liberalism. Secondly it considers mid- nineteenth-century debates on the workings of the mind: debates about how to understand identity, about how to analyse the workings of the consciousness, and about how to interpret the significance of aberrant states and unconscious mental processes. Thirdly it summarises how conceptions of evolution and heredity developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The analysis of the novels emphasises Collins's development of narrative strategies. It explores how he both assimilates and resists contemporary psychological perceptions in his manipulation of narrative perspective and time, and how the development of this narrative method links the conjuring with perception and cognition with the exploration of the subjective shaping of social identity. Moral management provides the overarching framework for Collins's stories and is usually the source of narrative resolution, but it is qualified and undermined. In Basil and The Woman in White it is a primary source of tension and suspense; in No Name it is both undermined and underpinned by juggling with contrasting notions of evolution. Armadale draws on contemporary theories of dreams to explore social and psychic inheritance and transmission; The Moonstone appropriates contrasting theories of the unconscious in a complex cognitive investigation. The final chapter briefly discusses a selection of the later novels, considering their distinctive features, and arguing that the growing dominance of theories of degeneration had an important bearing on Collins's method in his later work

Sexual selection, automata and ethics in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner's Undine and From Man to Man

This paper brings together two related areas of debate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first concerns how the courtship plot of the nineteenth-century novel responded to, and helped to shape, scientific ideas of sexual competition and selection. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot strikingly prefigures Darwin's later work on sexual selection, drawing from her own extensive knowledge of the wider debates within which evolutionary theory developed. Maggie Tulliver's characterisation allows Eliot to explore the ethical complexities raised by an increasingly powerful scientific naturalism, where biology is seen to be embedded within morality in newly specific ways. The second strand of the paper examines the extension of scientific method to human mind and motivation which constituted the new psychology. It argues that there are crucial continuities of long-established ethical and religious ideas within this increasingly naturalistic view of human mind and motivation. The contention that such ideas persist and are transformed, rather than simply jettisoned, is illustrated through the example of Thomas Henry Huxley's 1874 essay on automata. Turning finally to focus on Olive Schreiner's Undine (1929) and From Man to Man (1926), the paper explores the importance of these persistent ethical and religious ideas in two novels which remained unpublished during her lifetime. It argues that they produce both difficulty and opportunity for imagining love plots within the context of increasingly assertive biological and naturalistic accounts of human beings

Identifying allosteric fluctuation transitions between different protein conformational states as applied to Cyclin Dependent Kinase 2

BACKGROUND: The mechanisms underlying protein function and associated conformational change are dominated by a series of local entropy fluctuations affecting the global structure yet are mediated by only a few key residues. Transitional Dynamic Analysis (TDA) is a new method to detect these changes in local protein flexibility between different conformations arising from, for example, ligand binding. Additionally, Positional Impact Vertex for Entropy Transfer (PIVET) uses TDA to identify important residue contact changes that have a large impact on global fluctuation. We demonstrate the utility of these methods for Cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (CDK2), a system with crystal structures of this protein in multiple functionally relevant conformations and experimental data revealing the importance of local fluctuation changes for protein function. RESULTS: TDA and PIVET successfully identified select residues that are responsible for conformation specific regional fluctuation in the activation cycle of Cyclin Dependent Kinase 2 (CDK2). The detected local changes in protein flexibility have been experimentally confirmed to be essential for the regulation and function of the kinase. The methodologies also highlighted possible errors in previous molecular dynamic simulations that need to be resolved in order to understand this key player in cell cycle regulation. Finally, the use of entropy compensation as a possible allosteric mechanism for protein function is reported for CDK2. CONCLUSION: The methodologies embodied in TDA and PIVET provide a quick approach to identify local fluctuation change important for protein function and residue contacts that contributes to these changes. Further, these approaches can be used to check for possible errors in protein dynamic simulations and have the potential to facilitate a better understanding of the contribution of entropy to protein allostery and function