Work and the Disability Transition in 20th Century America

Using data from Union Army pensioners and from the National Health Interview Surveys, we estimate that work-disability among white males aged 45-64 was 3.5 times as high in the late 19th century than at the end of the 20th century, including a decline and flattening of the age-profile since 1970. We present a descriptive model of disability that can account for a) the secular decline in prevalence; b) changes in slope of the age-profile; and c) periods of increasing prevalence. The high level and relatively flat slope of the historical disability age-profile is consistent with the early onset of chronic conditions and with high mortality associated with a subset of those conditions. We show that many common conditions in the 19th century have been either eliminated, delayed to later ages, or rendered less disabling by treatment innovations and the transformation of the workplace. These improvements have swamped the effect of declining mortality, which put upward pressure on disability prevalence. Given the low rate of mortality prior to age 65, technological changes will likely induce further reductions in work-disability, though recent increases in the prevalence of asthma and obesity may eventually work against this trend.

What's Cooking in Your Food System? A Guide to Community Food Assessment

Learn about Community Food Assessments, a creative way to highlight food-related resources and needs, promote collaboration and community participation, and create lasting change. This Guide includes case studies of nine Community Food Assessments; tips for planning and organizing an assessment; guidance on research methods and strategies for promoting community participation; and ideas for translating an assessment into action for change

Underground Man: The Ever -Evolving Existentialist in the Fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

Existential philosophers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jean Paul Sartre sought answers concerning man’s placement and subsequent importance in the universe. From a Eurocentric perspective, western man, his being, position, and influence emanate from the center of thought and existence in the western hemisphere. Dostoevsky’s existential crisis exhibited in the protagonist from his Notes from Underground, and Sartre’s concepts of facticity which gives man a direct philosophical link to his freedom, are two popular viewpoints of contemporary existentialism. However, French West Indian Frantz Fanon, counters the European tenets of existential philosophy as it pertains to black people. The conclusions reached in Black Skin, White Masks open literary and philosophical pathways to Black Existentialism and Africana Critical Theory. The gulf or great divide between European existentialism and Africana Critical Theory seems mainly unchartered and apparent, especially in the subgenre of existential literature. This paper will attempt to bring forward and narrow the gap by analyzing the works of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, and their usage of existential anti-hero characterization within their novels. This thesis will examine the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and how his meaning of life experiences differ existentially from Fred Daniels, the protagonist in Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, the former being an heir to the Dostoevskian model, and the latter as the precursor to Fanon’s ideologies in the afro-centric views on existentialism. A defining of Africana Critical Theory and Black Existentialism will be given, including similarities and differences. The evolvement of existentialism through Ellis and Wright through their works from the philosophical viewpoints of Dostoevsky and Fanon will be explored

Viscous to Inertial Crossover in Liquid Drop Coalescence

Using an electrical method and high-speed imaging we probe drop coalescence down to 10 ns after the drops touch. By varying the liquid viscosity over two decades, we conclude that at sufficiently low approach velocity where deformation is not present, the drops coalesce with an unexpectedly late crossover time between a regime dominated by viscous and one dominated by inertial effects. We argue that the late crossover, not accounted for in the theory, can be explained by an appropriate choice of length-scales present in the flow geometry.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Novel Oncolytic Virotherapies for Cancer

Cancer is one of the world’s foremost causes of death, affecting over 15 million people. While traditional therapies offer some efficacy to patients novel treatments are needed to combat this epidemic. In recent years, novel immune- and combination-therapies have shown great strides in easing the cancer burden for some patients. One of these novel treatment modalities is oncolytic virotherapy, a form of immunotherapy which uses viruses with an inherent tumor specific tropism. Oncolytic virotherapy is an attractive option due to both its inherent immunotherapeutic potential as well as the ease by which it can be combined with other treatment modalities. Here, we studied both advantages using two tumor models which each pose a unique therapeutic challenge. First, we used a combination strategy including oncolytic Myxoma virus and traditional standard of care to treat glioblastoma multiforme. The results of this study showed that standard of care increased the spread of oncolytic virus both in vitro and ex vivo resulting in a synergistic therapeutic effect. Taken together these data suggests that this would be an effective combination for translation in vivo. Secondly, we sought to increase the spread of the oncolytic virus as a means to increase overall efficacy. By adding the fusion protein from a variety of other viruses into oncolytic myxoma virus we were able to produce a group of fusogenic constructs which induced syncytia formation during infection. Surprisingly, while these constructs looked promising in vitro, they displayed decreased efficacy in vivo negatively correlated to the viruses ability to form syncytia. These studies show the potential which myxoma has in synergizing with current therapeutic options, while also raising the question as to why some combinations may fail in vivo

Nuclear Transition: From Three Mile Island to Chernobyl

The regulation of the commercial nuclear power industry in the United States is experiencing a radical transformation caused by dramatic changes in nuclear power markets and politics. This Article addresses the economic and political displacement and realignment of nuclear regulation during the period of transition from the traditional model of regulation to the emerging post-industrial model. The transition dates from March 28, 1979, the date of the incident at Three Mile Island, to April 26, 1986, the date of the Chernobyl accident. Part II describes the nuclear market and the signs of fatigue. Part III discusses the political and regulatory responses to market failure. Part IV discusses the traditional, transitional, and post-industrial models of regulation

Nuclear Transition: From Three Mile Island to Chernobyl

The regulation of the commercial nuclear power industry in the United States is experiencing a radical transformation caused by dramatic changes in nuclear power markets and politics. This Article addresses the economic and political displacement and realignment of nuclear regulation during the period of transition from the traditional model of regulation to the emerging post-industrial model. The transition dates from March 28, 1979, the date of the incident at Three Mile Island, to April 26, 1986, the date of the Chernobyl accident. Part II describes the nuclear market and the signs of fatigue. Part III discusses the political and regulatory responses to market failure. Part IV discusses the traditional, transitional, and post-industrial models of regulation

Technical Note: A Time-Dependent I(sub 0) Correction for Solar Occultation Instruments

Solar occultation has proven to be a reliable technique for the measurement of atmospheric constituents in the stratosphere. NASA's Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiments (SAGE, SAGE II, and SAGE III) together have provided over 25 years of quality solar occultation data, a data record which has been an important resource for the scientific exploration of atmospheric composition and climate change. Herein, we describe an improvement to the processing of SAGE data that corrects for a previously uncorrected short-term timedependence in the calibration function. The variability relates to the apparent rotation of the scanning track with respect to the face of the sun due to the motion of the satellite. Correcting for this effect results in a decrease in the measurement noise in the Level 1 line-of-sight optical depth measurements of approximately 40% in the middle and upper stratospheric SAGE II and III where it has been applied. The technique is potentially useful for any scanning solar occultation instrument, and suggests further improvement for future occultation measurements if a full disk imaging system can be included