Evidence and absence in the archives: A study of the Irish Refugee Appeals Tribunal Archive to assess the state practice of determining asylum in Ireland

Creating borders and borderlands is a key role of the contemporary state (Mountz, 2010). This dissertation investigates the Irish state agencies that are part of the border complex and the ways that borders are enforced for those seeking asylum in Ireland. Specifically, this dissertation examines the Appeals Tribunal Archive (ATA), a digital archive of refugee and international protection appeal decisions granting or refusing asylum and refugee status to asylum seekers in Ireland. This archive contains rituals and practices of the Irish state as the Tribunal determines asylum and ‘processes’ asylum seekers through national borders. This project uses innovative mixed methods including digital qualitative analysis, geocomputation, web-scraping, knowledge exchange forums with those affected by the state asylum process and archival ethnography to carry out a ‘sustained engagement’ (Stoler, 2009) with the archive. This investigation, like similar investigations of state archives, reveals a landscape of clarity and shadows: some practices become clear, some remain hidden. For asylum seekers, the asylum process is murky, chaotic and disorienting. For the researcher, the asylum process also appears shadowed; rituals and practices become evident from investigating the archive’s form and content. This project works towards investigating the practices, knowledges, assumptions and ‘common sense’ of the Appeals Tribunal through the archive. In this dissertation I argue that acts and practices of bordering are central aspects of statecraft, enacted and performed by state agencies and state agents. This research into state practice opens space to question the judgements documented in the archive through, among other things, the deep analysis of decisions and the creation of publicly accessible records and reports of Tribunal practice. The evidence presented in this dissertation shows the double-sided nature of asylum determination in Ireland. Outwardly, asylum agencies work to maintain compliance with state and international asylum laws; inwardly, asylum agencies are restricting borders and movement in Ireland and are restricting the rights of asylum seekers and their claims to protections under law

Orange County homeless community : Orange County, North Carolina : an action-oriented community diagnosis : findings and next steps

From September 2005 to April 2006, a five-member team of graduate students from the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill conducted an Action-Oriented Community Assessment (AOCA) in Orange County, North Carolina of persons who are homeless in the county. An AOCA examines the quality of life, community capacity, and strengths and needs of a community. The purpose of this process is to include community members and service providers in identifying the needs and challenges of the community, as well as the strengths and resources, which may influence the development of effective interventions. Two preceptors affiliated with the county’s Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, Billie Guthrie, Housing Coordinator at OPC Area Program, and Stan Holt, Homeless Coordinator at Triangle United Way, guided and mentored the students throughout the entirety of the project. The students volunteered, attended committee meetings, reviewed secondary data, and conducted in-depth interviews with 32 community members, 16 of which have experienced or are experiencing homelessness. Additionally, the student team collaborated with J-Quad & Associates LLC, a consulting firm that had been hired to assist the community in composing the Ten-Year Plan. They transcribed and analyzed 12 focus groups conducted by J-Quad as well as the 32 interviews. This information was used to identify the community’s most common reoccurring themes. The students presented its findings at a community forum held on April 27, 2006, at A.L. Stanback Middle School in Hillsborough, North Carolina. For the forum, the student team worked to bring together homeless/formerly homeless community members, service providers, and other residents to address the how the community can work together to address homelessness in the most valuable way. The immediate action steps and long-term recommendations for the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness that were generated at the forum are listed below: Lack of affordable housing, combined with non-livable wages, creates a barrier to ending the cycle of homelessness. Action Steps: 1. Develop an incentive program for those in the private sector which will encourage them to create more affordable housing units. In exchange for funding a percentage of affordable units or giving money to an authority for affordable housing, businesses will be allowed to build more expensive units. 2. Generate a list of key business people and policy makers (aldermen, town council, John Edwards/Poverty Center) who should be invited to the meeting. 3. Invite those individuals to a meeting to propose the incentive program. 4. If adequate interest in the program is expressed at the meeting, contact the media to publicize the plan. Recommendations: 1. Increase the minimum wage. 2. Change zoning requirements to allow for more affordable housing units. 3. Form an authority to manage affordable housing units in the private sector. 4. Create more flexible eligibility criteria for affordable housing units and rental subsidies. 5. Secure more funding for cooperative housing models like Weaver Community Housing which generate their own income. 6. Revisit the definition of “affordable housing” in ordinances to consider those that live below 80% of the area median income. Inadequate access to essential resources creates a barrier for homeless persons to secure jobs. Action Steps: 1. Generate a list of telecommunications providers (Verizon, Cingular, etc) in the area. 2. Research potential options (used cell phones, prepaid cell phones, donation of minutes. 3. Approach these businesses and ask for donations. Also discuss what they are willing to contribute to the effort and what they may gain in return (good publicity etc.). People who are homeless do not have relevant skills training and employer support to become employed, remain employed, and plan for the future. Action Steps: 1. Seek out funding for educational expenses. 2. Work with Community Resource Court to clear criminal records. 3. Provide home business training resources. 4. Explore if it is possible to set aside a certain number of jobs for the homeless and look into developing an inter-departmental study of homelessness at UNC. Recommendations: 1. Develop resource manual of community services available (including self-employment training). 2. More computers with internet access at the shelters. 3. Job program for homeless that sets aside jobs for the homeless. Inadequate transportation services create a barrier to sustaining employment and accessing services. Action Steps: 1. Identify resources and create community resource guide for transportation in Orange County. 2. Help to obtain transportation through auctions held by the police departments in the state. Recommendations: 1. Subsidize shuttles vans for the shelters. 2. Access state cars through auctions to be assigned to the shelters. 3. Provide additional funding to shelters to allow money to be set aside for transportation. Stereotypes of homelessness create tension between homeless persons and the surrounding community. Action Steps: 1. Create action group that works to increase community awareness of the individual faces/stories of homelessness. The group will decide on the format of the message, and collaborate with various community groups (media, civic, church, university, restaurants) to help educate the community and encourage participation. 2. Each group member commit to volunteering and/or 1:1 time with people experiencing homelessness. Recommendations: 1. Educate the public on the individuality of homelessness. Community partnerships need to be strengthened to ensure successful service provision. Recommendations: 1. Compile a master list of providers and services provided specifically for homelessness issues. 2. Make the Orange Book more accessible and user friendly (change from pdf format to something more searchable). 3. Recommend creation of a “hub”, or one place to go for resources. Services are available, but only to those who are regularly using or know how to navigate the service delivery system. Therefore, many who are homeless “slip through the cracks.” Action Steps: 1. Create a bilingual pocket-sized resource guide for homeless persons, with a version with pictorial representations to accommodate those with lower literacy. Recommendations: 1. Increase outreach workers who can establish informative relationships with persons who are not connected to services. Use case managers or train those formally homeless, students, and community volunteers to do the outreach. Homeless individuals’ unique ways of achieving success are often limited by standardized eligibility requirements and delivery structures. Recommendations: 1. Create an advocacy program, incorporating volunteers, to support community members as they seek services. 2. Increased innovative/flexible funding, potentially through community fundraising, to provide specialized services not included in grants or federal funding. 3. Increase communication among service providers to increase knowledge of existing services, decrease work-related frustration, and facilitate supportive relationships. The lack of collaboration in discharge planning and a lack of appropriate facilities burdens service providers and limits success for the homeless population. Action Steps: 1. Have service providers who are using the housing first model or a model similar to the housing first model, document their outcomes both successes and failures and report back to other service providers possibly at a Community Initiative meeting. 2. Have service providers to document inappropriate discharges and send their concerns to their legislatures. Recommendations: 1. Have training for service providers about the housing first model. 2. Make more efforts to support Club Nova because it is a successful housing first model and it is facing hard times. 3. Discharge people into more stable and rehabilitative environments that shelters cannot always provide; however, there is a lack of these places. 4. Create more affordable and transitional housing for people to be discharged to. 5. The county needs to focus their resources on high risk individuals who consistently utilize institutions to help them become more stable and prevent them from returning to these institutions. More prevention strategies are needed that target families and individuals at risk of becoming homeless. Action Steps: 1. Speak to key players about raising the living wage. 2. Have the new Boys and Girls Club work with children in foster care to give them a positive environment to interact in and provide mentors. Recommendations: 1. Adjust the city and county’s living wage to be more livable. 2. Identify high risk individuals and get them comprehensive/wrap around services. Possibly create teams of church members and service providers to work together to help out individuals so that no one person or organization is not stretched too thin allowing them to pool their resources. 3. Create transitional housing for people who are being discharged from certain institutions who need more structure before trying to live on their own. 4. Ensure foster children stay connected to services as they “age out.” 5. Strengthen emergency services need to help people out with rent, utilities, car, etc. 6. Offer financial classes or counseling to people about how to budget their money. In addition to these action steps and recommendations, this document provides information gathered through secondary data sources, one-on-one interviews, community focus groups, and community observations by the student team. Ideas about homelessness and how the county can address it were varied in some respects, but many common viewpoints were identified. In a county with an abundant amount of resources, the team found that most of the tools needed to address the issue are present. However, it will require a united effort to properly use those tools and reduce homelessness in the county. This AOCA document is meant to serve as a catalyst to change within the community. It presents an overview of the project, overview of the problem, findings from primary and secondary data sources, the methodology and limitations of the data collecting process, an overview of the community forum, and conclusions and recommendations for next steps of action. It is the hope that the next steps of actions in this process will begin to eliminate the culture of reliance on the shelter system by those who are homeless. The student team presents this document as a resource and reference for the citizens of Orange County and hopes that it will serve as a supplement and compliment to the work already underway in addressing the issue of homelessness. The student team thanks the people of Orange County, North Carolina for all of their dedication and wishes them much success as they continue to strive to end homelessness in the county.Master of Public Healt

Activin/nodal signaling and NANOG orchestrate human embryonic stem cell fate decisions by controlling the H3K4me3 chromatin mark.

Stem cells can self-renew and differentiate into multiple cell types. These characteristics are maintained by the combination of specific signaling pathways and transcription factors that cooperate to establish a unique epigenetic state. Despite the broad interest of these mechanisms, the precise molecular controls by which extracellular signals organize epigenetic marks to confer multipotency remain to be uncovered. Here, we use human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to show that the Activin-SMAD2/3 signaling pathway cooperates with the core pluripotency factor NANOG to recruit the DPY30-COMPASS histone modifiers onto key developmental genes. Functional studies demonstrate the importance of these interactions for correct histone 3 Lys4 trimethylation and also self-renewal and differentiation. Finally, genetic studies in mice show that Dpy30 is also necessary to maintain pluripotency in the pregastrulation embryo, thereby confirming the existence of similar regulations in vivo during early embryonic development. Our results reveal the mechanisms by which extracellular factors coordinate chromatin status and cell fate decisions in hESCs.We thank Andrew Knights for the technical support and helpful discussion, and the Wellcome-Trust Sanger Institute Microarray and Next-Generation Sequencing facilities for the technical support. We also thank the Sanger Institute Mouse Genetics Projects for mouse production and genotyping. This work was supported by the European Research Council starting grant Relieve-IMDs and the Cambridge Hospitals National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre (L.V.), a British Heart Foundation Ph.D. Studentship (A.B.), a Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) long-term fellowship and EU Fp7 grant InnovaLIV (S.P.), EU Fp7 grant TissuGEN (S.M.), and Wellcome Trust grant 098051 (D.G.). A.B. conceived the research, performed and analyzed the experiments, and wrote the manuscript. P.M. computationally analyzed ChIP-seq data sets and performed statistical analyses. N.C.H., S.B., and R.A.P. provided technical support. A.G. performed embryo dissections and dysmorphology assessments. I.M. and D.B. performed teratoma assays. D.G. supervised the bioinformatics data analysis. S.P., S.M., and L.V. conceived the research and wrote the manuscript.This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/29/7/702.full

The Lyot Project Direct Imaging Survey of Substellar Companions: Statistical Analysis and Information from Nondetections

The Lyot project used an optimized Lyot coronagraph with Extreme Adaptive Optics at the 3.63m Advanced Electro-Optical System telescope (AEOS) to observe 86 stars from 2004 to 2007. In this paper we give an overview of the survey results and a statistical analysis of the observed nondetections around 58 of our targets to place constraints on the population of substellar companions to nearby stars. The observations did not detect any companion in the substellar regime. Since null results can be as important as detections, we analyzed each observation to determine the characteristics of the companions that can be ruled out. For this purpose we use a Monte Carlo approach to produce artificial companions, and determine their detectability by comparison with the sensitivity curve for each star. All the non-detection results are combined using a Bayesian approach and we provide upper limits on the population of giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs for this sample of stars. Our nondetections confirm the rarity of brown dwarfs around solar-like stars and we constrain the frequency of massive substellar companions (M>40Mjup) at orbital separation between and 10 and 50 AU to be <20%.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables. Published in the Astrophysical Journa

The SMAD2/3 interactome reveals that TGFβ controls m6A mRNA methylation in pluripotency.

The TGFβ pathway has essential roles in embryonic development, organ homeostasis, tissue repair and disease. These diverse effects are mediated through the intracellular effectors SMAD2 and SMAD3 (hereafter SMAD2/3), whose canonical function is to control the activity of target genes by interacting with transcriptional regulators. Therefore, a complete description of the factors that interact with SMAD2/3 in a given cell type would have broad implications for many areas of cell biology. Here we describe the interactome of SMAD2/3 in human pluripotent stem cells. This analysis reveals that SMAD2/3 is involved in multiple molecular processes in addition to its role in transcription. In particular, we identify a functional interaction with the METTL3-METTL14-WTAP complex, which mediates the conversion of adenosine to N6-methyladenosine (m6A) on RNA. We show that SMAD2/3 promotes binding of the m6A methyltransferase complex to a subset of transcripts involved in early cell fate decisions. This mechanism destabilizes specific SMAD2/3 transcriptional targets, including the pluripotency factor gene NANOG, priming them for rapid downregulation upon differentiation to enable timely exit from pluripotency. Collectively, these findings reveal the mechanism by which extracellular signalling can induce rapid cellular responses through regulation of the epitranscriptome. These aspects of TGFβ signalling could have far-reaching implications in many other cell types and in diseases such as cancer.We thank Cambridge Genomic Services for help in next generation sequencing. The work was 203 supported by the European Research Council starting grant “Relieve IMDs” (L.V., S.B., A.B., 204 P.M.); the Cambridge University Hospitals National Institute for Health Research Biomedical 205 Research Center (L.V., J.K., A.S.L.); the Wellcome Trust PhD program (A.O., L.Y.); a British 206 Heart Foundation PhD studentship (FS/11/77/39327 to A.B.); a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows 207 (16J08005 to S.N.); and a core support grant from the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research 208 Council to the Wellcome Trust – Medical Research Council Cambridge Stem Cell Institute

Postoperative Deterioration in Health Related Quality of Life as Predictor for Survival in Patients with Glioblastoma: A Prospective Study

BACKGROUND: Studies indicate that acquired deficits negatively affect patients' self-reported health related quality of life (HRQOL) and survival, but the impact of HRQOL deterioration after surgery on survival has not been explored. OBJECTIVE: Assess if change in HRQOL after surgery is a predictor for survival in patients with glioblastoma. METHODS: Sixty-one patients with glioblastoma were included. The majority of patients (n = 56, 91.8%) were operated using a neuronavigation system which utilizes 3D preoperative MRI and updated intraoperative 3D ultrasound volumes to guide resection. HRQOL was assessed using EuroQol 5D (EQ-5D), a generic instrument. HRQOL data were collected 1-3 days preoperatively and after 6 weeks. The mean change in EQ-5D index was -0.05 (95% CI -0.15-0.05) 6 weeks after surgery (p = 0.285). There were 30 patients (49.2%) reporting deterioration 6 weeks after surgery. In a Cox multivariate survival analysis we evaluated deterioration in HRQOL after surgery together with established risk factors (age, preoperative condition, radiotherapy, temozolomide and extent of resection). RESULTS: There were significant independent associations between survival and use of temozolomide (HR 0.30, p = 0.019), radiotherapy (HR 0.26, p = 0.030), and deterioration in HRQOL after surgery (HR 2.02, p = 0.045). Inclusion of surgically acquired deficits in the model did not alter the conclusion. CONCLUSION: Early deterioration in HRQOL after surgery is independently and markedly associated with impaired survival in patients with glioblastoma. Deterioration in patient reported HRQOL after surgery is a meaningful outcome in surgical neuro-oncology, as the measure reflects both the burden of symptoms and treatment hazards and is linked to overall survival

Metabolic sensing in AgRP neurons integrates homeostatic state with dopamine signalling in the striatum

Agouti-related peptide (AgRP) neurons increase motivation for food, however, whether metabolic sensing of homeostatic state in AgRP neurons potentiates motivation by interacting with dopamine reward systems is unexplored. As a model of impaired metabolic-sensing, we used the AgRP-specific deletion of carnitine acetyltransferase (Crat) in mice. We hypothesised that metabolic sensing in AgRP neurons is required to increase motivation for food reward by modulating accumbal or striatal dopamine release. Studies confirmed that Crat deletion in AgRP neurons (KO) impaired ex vivo glucose-sensing, as well as in vivo responses to peripheral glucose injection or repeated palatable food presentation and consumption. Impaired metabolic-sensing in AgPP neurons reduced acute dopamine release (seconds) to palatable food consumption and during operant responding, as assessed by GRAB-DA photometry in the nucleus accumbens, but not the dorsal striatum. Impaired metabolic-sensing in AgRP neurons suppressed radiolabelled 18F-fDOPA accumulation after ~30 min in the dorsal striatum but not the nucleus accumbens. Impaired metabolic sensing in AgRP neurons suppressed motivated operant responding for sucrose rewards during fasting. Thus, metabolic-sensing in AgRP neurons is required for the appropriate temporal integration and transmission of homeostatic hunger-sensing to dopamine signalling in the striatum