Washington's Working Women: Not Equal Yet

Women's earnings are essential to economic security for the majority of families in Washington State, where women comprise about half of all workers. But over the past two decades, forward progress for women in the workforce has largely stalled. Women continue to earn far less than men. And workplace standards remain mired in outdated assumptions that most workers are men and most families have a full-time caregiver at home. Our children, families, businesses, and communities all pay the price for our failure to step up to the public policy needs of today's working women

The Credit Cycle and the Business Cycle: New Findings Using the Loan Officer Opinion Survey

VAR analysis on a measure of bank lending standards collected by the Federal Reserve reveals that shocks to lending standards are significantly correlated with innovations in commercial loans of banks and in real output. Credit standards strongly dominate loan rates in explaining variation in business loans and output. Standards remain significant when we include various proxies for loan demand, suggesting that part of the standards fluctuations can be identified with changes in loan supply. Standards are also significant in structural equations of some categories of inventory investment, a GDP component closely associated with bank lending. The estimated impact of a moderate tightening of standards on inventory investment is of the same order of magnitude as the decline in inventory investment over the typical recession.Credit crunch; Credit rationing; Credit standards; Loan officer survey

Credit effects in the monetary mechanism

Paper for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entitled Financial Innovation and Monetary TransmissionCredit ; Monetary policy

Listening to loan officers: the impact of commercial credit standards on lending and output

Over most of the last thirty-three years, the Federal Reserve has polled a small number of bank loan officers about their moves to tighten or ease commercial credit standards. Although the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey uses a small sample and gathers only qualitative information, it proves to be a useful tool in predicting changes in commercial lending and output. The authors find a strong correlation between tighter credit standards and slower loan growth and output, even after controlling for credit demand and other predictors of lending and output. The analysis also shows that the loan officer reports can help predict narrower measures of business activity, including inventory investment and industrial production.Bank loans ; Business cycles ; Forecasting

Optimizing HIV PrEP Implementation in the Primary Care Setting

Despite compelling evidence behind the efficacy of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in preventing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) acquisition and its introduction in 2012, the prescription of PrEP has remained low (Silapaswan, Krakower, & Mayer, 2016). At the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center (API), an urban primary care clinic in San Francisco, suboptimal PrEP implementation was related to a lack of standardized practice and routine HIV risk screening for PrEP provision. A doctorate of nursing (DNP) project was implemented to initiate a standardized HIV risk screening protocol for identifying HIV risk and PrEP eligibility to increase PrEP implementation at API. The impact of this protocol demonstrated an increase in the PrEP implementation cascade, particularly in HIV risk identification, PrEP offer, and evaluation of at-risk patients for PrEP uptake (initiation). During implementation of the HIV risk screening protocol, however, inconsistent clinical staff compliance with the routine screening tool led to an inadequate increase in PrEP offer for patients who tested positive for a sexually transmitted infection (STI). This indicates a need for further reinforcement of standardized practice and clinical staff education on the importance of combining HIV risk screening and PrEP, with emphasis on the significant risk for HIV infection associated with positive STI, to effectively promote patient outcomes. Implications for further research include validation of the HIV PrEP screening tool used in the HIV risk screening protocol as a model for PrEP implementation in the primary care setting

Constructing Identity Through the Lens of Fashion: An Honors Thesis

Fashion is an artistic decision that every person makes every day. Even those who say they don’t care about clothing are still portraying something about themselves to the outside world with the stylistic choices they make. This creative Honors Thesis explores the impact of fashion on self-representation, accomplished through the design and construction of a capsule wardrobe line of clothing. Due to the project’s personal and introspective nature, the intended wearer is the artist, and therefore the pieces are specifically tailored to her, rather than the straight sized garments that are typically produced in the fashion industry. This line consists of multiple pieces, each addressing a particular event or situation, in which ostensible expectations for dress conflict with what the wearer feels most authentically represented in. Examples include a high fashion take on a winter coat, a pink version of a ladies business suit, and more. The project’s goal, through the artist’s experience and sharing of this work, is to encourage viewers to reconsider fashion and the ways it impacts each of us inside and out, including their own personal style, the ways they feel they must conform, and how they can use fashion to feel more authentic and confident in themselves

Hairpin RNA: a secondary structure of primary importance

Abstract.: An RNA hairpin is an essential secondary structure of RNA. It can guide RNA folding, determine interactions in a ribozyme, protect messenger RNA (mRNA) from degradation, serve as a recognition motif for RNA binding proteins or act as a substrate for enzymatic reactions. In this review, we have focused on cis-acting RNA hairpins in metazoa, which regulate histone gene expression, mRNA localization and translation. We also review evolution, mechanism of action and experimental use of trans-acting microRNAs, which are coded by short RNA hairpins. Finally, we discuss the existence and effects of long RNA hairpin in animals. We show that several proteins previously recognized to play a role in a specific RNA stem-loop function in cis were also linked to RNA silencing pathways where a different type of hairpin acts in trans. Such overlaps indicate that the relationship between certain mechanisms that recognize different types of RNA hairpins is closer than previously though

Influence of external information in the minority game

The influence of a fixed number of agents with the same fixed behavior on the dynamics of the minority game is studied. Alternatively, the system studied can be considered the minority game with a change in the comfort threshold away from half filling. Agents in the frustrated, non ergodic phase tend to overreact to the information provided by the fixed agents, leading not only to large fluctuations, but to deviations of the average occupancies from their optimal values. Agents which discount their impact on the market, or which use individual strategies reach equilibrium states, which, unlike in the absence of the external information provided by the fixed agents, do not give the highest payoff to the collective.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure