Bullying and Gender: The Social/Emotional, Psychological, and Physical Effects on Middle School Students in South Mississippi

Bullying is a great concern in schools today. When bullying occurs, it hinders school success and academic performance. During the late 1980s and 1990s, school violence was prevalent in middle school characterized by events such as the Columbine shooting. This forced both students and school personnel to deal with school shootings, gang activities and other violent acts. According to subsequent investigations, some of these incidents occurred because students were bullied and teased. This supports the maxim that students can only be successful academically in a safe and orderly environment. The first interest of this study was to assess the effects of bullying on middle school students in terms of the social/emotional impact, psychological impact, and the physical impact. Data collection took place during the 2009-10 school year; collected data were entered into Microsoft Excel and then imported into SPSS version 17.0. A repeated measures ANOVA and t-tests were used to determine the degree to which the independent variables (gender and grade level) mediated the dependent variables (social/emotional impact, psychological impact and physical impact). It was found that the social/emotional and psychological effects of bullying have a greater impact on middle school students than the physical effects of bullying, female participants expressed significantly stronger impact of bullying than the males and there was a fairly equal impact of bullying across grade levels for 7th and 8th grade students

Improving Conditions for Incarcerated Individuals

Whereas, in 2019, the United States’ incarceration rate was estimated to be 629 per 100,000 people, which is the highest rate globally and over 8% higher than the closest country; and Whereas, in Indiana, the total jail population has increased 526% from 1970 to 2015 and the total prison population has increased 224% from 1983 to 2018, with our incarceration rates being fourth highest nationally; and Whereas, in 2015, Indiana had the second highest rate of pretrial detainees in the nation at a rate of 272 per 100,000 people; and Whereas, since 2000, the rate of pretrial detainees has increased 72% among Indiana’s 48 rural counties, 43% in 21 small/medium counties, 40% in 22 suburban counties, and 268% in Marion county alone; and Whereas, in the United States, the rate of recidivism is 70% within 5 years of release with few resources to assist reentering individuals find housing, gain employment, or access social services; and Whereas, when connected with employment opportunities, financial planning services, stable housing, and physical and mental health services, rates of recidivism decrease significantly, over 60% amongst those who complete programs, among reentering individuals; and Whereas, incarcerated individuals have higher rates of mental illness than the general population, with approximately 14.5% of men and 31% of women in jails having at least one mental illness as compared to 3.2% and 4.9% respectively amongst the general population; and Whereas, nationally, the number of suicides has increased by 85% in state prisons, 61% in federal prisons, and 13% in local jails from 2001 to 2019, with suicide being the leading cause of death in jails; and Whereas, the risk of suicide in recently released individuals is nearly 6.8 times higher than that of the general population, with most occurring within 28 days of release; and Whereas, in a study of 80 jails by Scheyett et al., 68 reported having no mental health staff who provided care within the jail, 15 reported taking, on average, 5 days or longer to retrieve inmates’ medications and none were utilizing evidence-based screenings to assess for serious mental illnesses, highlighting a concerning disconnect between jail staff and mental health providers; and Whereas, re-entering individuals are unlikely to connect with primary care upon release and very rarely seek mental health services in the months following release; and Whereas, inarcerated individuals are often restricted from accessing rehabilitative social services such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Medicaid either through a lack of meeting eligibility requirements or personally held beliefs by incarcerated individuals surrounding eligibility and accessing resources; and Whereas, when provided assistance and access to expedited Medicaid enrollment, reentering individuals were more likely to access health services and receive prescriptions; and 263 Whereas, ISMA (RESOLUTION 15-31) advocates for improved health care of incarcerated individuals; therefore, be it RESOLVED, that ISMA support legislation that improves access to comprehensive physical and behavioral health care services for juveniles and adults throughout the incarceration process from intake to re-entry into the community; and be it further RESOLVED, that ISMA support legislation that removes barriers and increases access to social services and benefits apropos to the respective situations of incarcerated individuals and re-entering individuals, such as: (a) food subsidies; (b) healthcare, including Medicare and/or Medicaid; and (c) housing; and be it further RESOLVED, that ISMA work with relevant stakeholders to create discharge planning and programs that connect reentering individuals with primary care providers and medical homes within the community

Acknowledging Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities in Mass Incarceration

Whereas, the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any country in the world, where the U.S. comprises only 4% of the world’s population, yet is home to nearly 16% of all incarcerated people in the world; and Whereas, in Indiana, the total jail population increased by 526% between 1970 and 2015, while rates of pretrial detainees have increased by 72% in the state’s 48 rural counties, 43% in the state’s 21 small/medium counties, 40% in the state’s 22 suburban counties, and 268% in Marion County alone since 2000; and Whereas, in 2015 in Indiana, when including jail, prison, immigration detention, and juvenile facilities, the incarceration rate was 765 per 100,000 people, well above the rate of the United States as a whole, which was 665 per 100,000 people; and Whereas, Black residents make up 10% of Indiana’s population, but represent 24% of people in jail and 34% of people in prison; additionally, pretrial populations, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, more than doubled from 2002 to 2017; and Whereas, in 2019, Native people made up 2.1% of all federally incarcerated people, larger than their share of the total U.S. population, which was less than one percent; additionally, Native women are particularly overrepresented in the incarcerated population, making up 2.5% of women in prisons and jails and only 0.7% of the total U.S. female population; and Whereas, populations of color are more impacted by the use of money bail, where Black defendants often receive higher bail amounts, even when controlling for legal factors such as offense severity; and Whereas, Black and brown defendants are 10-25% more likely to be detained pretrial or to receive financial conditions of release; and Whereas, significant racial and ethnic disparities exist among policing, arrests, and incarceration rates, which further exacerbate disparate health outcomes for Black communities, including, but not limited to, Black individuals disproportionately being stopped by the police, experiencing use of force and repeated arrests, serving sentences of life and life without parole, being sent to solitary confinement, and receiving convictions that place them on death row; and Whereas, nearly one in three Black men will ever be imprisoned, and nearly half of Black women currently have a family member or extended family member who is in prison; and Whereas, ISMA (RESOLUTION 15-31) advocates for improved health care of incarcerated individuals; however, ISMA has no policy acknowledging the inequitable burden of incarceration and policing on minoritized individuals and communities of color; and Whereas, the AMA (H-65.954) recognizes police brutality as a manifestation of structural racism which disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; therefore, be it RESOLVED, that ISMA recognize that unjust and disproportionate racial and ethnic disparities exist in policing, sentencing, and mass incarceration among Black, indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) and have devastating impacts on BIPOC communities; and be it further, RESOLVED, that ISMA refer to the Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for study on what policies would be germane for ISMA to act on regarding racial and ethnic disparities in mass incarceration

The HERMIT in the machine: a plugin for the interactive transformation of GHC core language programs

The importance of reasoning about and refactoring programs is a central tenet of functional programming. Yet our compilers and development toolchains only provide rudimentary support for these tasks. This paper introduces a programmatic and compiler-centric interface that facilitates refactoring and equational reasoning. To develop our ideas, we have implemented HERMIT, a toolkit enabling informal but systematic transformation of Haskell programs from inside the Glasgow Haskell Compiler’s optimization pipeline. With HERMIT, users can experiment with optimizations and equational reasoning, while the tedious heavy lifting of performing the actual transformations is done for them. HERMIT provides a transformation API that can be used to build higher-level rewrite tools. One use-case is prototyping new optimizations as clients of this API before being committed to the GHC toolchain. We describe a HERMIT application - a read-eval-print shell for performing transformations using HERMIT. We also demonstrate using this shell to prototype an optimization on a specific example, and report our initial experiences and remaining challenges

JIT-Based cost analysis for dynamic program transformations

Tracing JIT compilation generates units of compilation that are easy to analyse and are known to execute frequently. The AJITPar project investigates whether the information in JIT traces can be used to dynamically transform programs for a specific parallel architecture. Hence a lightweight cost model is required for JIT traces. This paper presents the design and implementation of a system for extracting JIT trace information from the Pycket JIT compiler. We define three increasingly parametric cost models for Pycket traces. We determine the best weights for the cost model parameters using linear regression. We evaluate the effectiveness of the cost models for predicting the relative costs of transformed programs

Canagliflozin Inhibits Human Endothelial Cell Proliferation and Tube Formation

Recent clinical trials revealed that sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors significantly reduce cardiovascular events in type 2 diabetic patients, however, canagliflozin increased limb amputations, an effect not seen with other SGLT2 inhibitors. Since endothelial cell (EC) dysfunction promotes diabetes-associated vascular disease and limb ischemia, we hypothesized that canagliflozin, but not other SGLT2 inhibitors, impairs EC proliferation, migration, and angiogenesis. Treatment of human umbilical vein ECs (HUVECs) with clinically relevant concentrations of canagliflozin, but not empagliflozin or dapagliflozin, inhibited cell proliferation. In particular, 10 μM canagliflozin reduced EC proliferation by approximately 45%. The inhibition of EC growth by canagliflozin occurred in the absence of cell death and was associated with diminished DNA synthesis, cell cycle arrest, and a striking decrease in cyclin A expression. Restoration of cyclin A expression via adenoviral-mediated gene transfer partially rescued the proliferative response of HUVECs treated with canagliflozin. A high concentration of canagliflozin (50 μM) modestly inhibited HUVEC migration by 20%, but markedly attenuated their tube formation by 65% and EC sprouting from mouse aortas by 80%. A moderate 20% reduction in HUVEC migration was also observed with a high concentration of empagliflozin (50 μM), while neither empagliflozin nor dapagliflozin affected tube formation by HUVECs. The present study identified canagliflozin as a robust inhibitor of human EC proliferation and tube formation. The anti-proliferative action of canagliflozin occurs in the absence of cell death and is due, in part, to the blockade of cyclin A expression. Notably, these actions are not seen with empagliflozin or dapagliflozin. The ability of canagliflozin to exert these pleiotropic effects on ECs may contribute to the clinical actions of this drug

Identification of novel peptide motifs in the serpin maspin that affect vascular smooth muscle cell function

Maspin is a non-inhibitory member of the serpin family that affects cell behaviours related to migration and survival. We have previously shown that peptides of the isolated G α-helix (G-helix) domain of maspin show bioactivity. Migration, invasion, adhesion and proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) are important processes that contribute to the build-up of atherosclerotic plaques. Here we report the use of functional assays of these behaviours to investigate whether other maspin-derived peptides impact directly on VSMC; focusing on potential anti-atherogenic properties. We designed 18 new peptides from the structural moieties of maspin above ten amino acid residues in length and considered them beside the existing G-helix peptides. Of the novel peptides screened those with the sequences of maspin strand 4 and 5 of beta sheet B (S4B and S5B) reduced VSMC migration, invasion and proliferation, as well as increasing cell adhesion. A longer peptide combining these consecutive sequences showed a potentiation of responses, and a 7-mer contained all essential elements for functionality. This is the first time that these parts of maspin have been highlighted as having key roles affecting cell function. We present evidence for a mechanism whereby S4B and S5B act through ERK1/2 and AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) to influence VSMC responses