Disrupting the Path from Childhood Trauma to Juvenile Justice: An Upstream Health and Justice Approach

A groundbreaking public health study funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Kaiser Foundation found astoundingly high rates of childhood trauma, including experiences like abuse, neglect, parental substance abuse, mental illness, and incarceration. Hundreds of follow-up studies have revealed that multiple traumatic adverse childhood experiences (or “ACEs”) make it far more likely that a person will have poor mental health outcomes in adulthood, such as higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, and substance abuse. Interestingly, the original ACE Study examined a largely middle-class adult population living in San Diego, but subsequent follow-up studies have examined the prevalence of ACEs and its impact on mental health in other populations, including among people involved in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Unsurprisingly, individuals entangled in those systems are more likely to have experienced higher numbers of these traumatic events, despite a frequent lack of access to critical mental health treatment, including the treatment necessary to address past childhood trauma. The ACEs framework for understanding health and mental health outcomes resulting from childhood trauma has received a high level of attention recently following an in-depth, multi-part series on these issues by National Public Radio (NPR) and other media. Because the ACEs public health research shows us that events in childhood can cause “toxic stress” and have a lasting impact on the mental health of a child well into adulthood, this framework provides us with an opportunity to consider how to more effectively intervene to stop the pathway from ACEs to juvenile justice system involvement and address the related health, mental health, developmental, and legal needs of children and their families. Before a child becomes an adult facing a mental health crisis or incarceration, attorneys, doctors, and other professionals can collaborate to disrupt that fate. This Article argues for a more upstream approach to address mental health using a medical-legal collaboration, based on the experiences of the authors, a law professor and medical school professor who work together to try to improve outcomes for children who have experienced trauma and their families. In Part I, we begin by examining the groundbreaking ACE studies, exploring the toxic stress and health and mental health outcomes that are associated with high rates of ACEs in childhood. Next, in Part II, we analyze the research revealing high rates of trauma and ACEs among populations involved in the juvenile justice system. Finally, we conclude in Part III by arguing for a more upstream public health and justice approach. We examine a particular problem in the city of Albuquerque, the largest urban area in New Mexico: children who have a particular ACE right from birth in the form of substance abuse by a household member. These infants are born with prenatal drug exposure and many experience symptoms of withdrawal in their first weeks of life, often quickly followed by an accumulation of additional forms of early childhood trauma. We discuss an approach through which the authors work to address those issues and disrupt the path from that childhood trauma to poor outcomes and juvenile justice system involvement. This approach engages attorneys with doctors and other health and developmental professionals to address ACEs among young children ages zero to three and their siblings, parents, and other caregivers. We advocate for an early, holistic, multi-generational, multi-disciplinary public health and justice approach to address ACEs early and improve the trajectory for children who have experienced childhood trauma

Segmentation of X-ray CT and Ultrasonic Scans of Impacted Composite Structures for Damage State Interpretation and Model Generation

Composites are frequently used in aerospace structural applications due to their high strength to weight performance, but due to their layered structure they are vulnerable to transverse impacts. Impact damage in composite laminates often consists of highly interactive damage modes composed of delamination, matrix cracking, and fiber breakage. In order to ensure the safety of composite structures, a variety of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques are used to characterize impact damage. However, procedures for utilizing NDE to create and validate models of residual strength after impact are not yet established due to either limitations in the characterization of impact damage, as in the case of Ultrasonic pulse-echo scanning (UT), or due to the complexity of interpretation of the NDE technique, as in the case of X-ray computed tomography (CT). Improved quantification of damage from CT and UT characterization may lead to improved predictive capabilities for the prediction of structural performance after an impact event.This work presents a novel automatic damage segmentation procedure for CT scans of impacted composites that converts the complex 3D dataset into simplified damage visualizations and 2D damage maps for each composite layer. The results of this procedure were utilized to create and validate a modeling procedure to improve UT characterization of impact damage, and to validate and generate finite element models of impact damage and residual strength performance. The generated residual strength models were created with varying levels of damage modeling fidelity and it was found that the level of damage modeling needed for accurate failure prediction depends greatly on the structural geometry and the presence of major damage features. This NDE and modeling effort was supported by a series of impact and residual strength experiments for flat and stringer stiffened composite panels. The developed techniques proved capable of characterizing impact damage in a variety of structural configurations and establishing models that incorporate this damage at different levels of complexity

Where California Went Wrong with the Amazon Tax: Application of Due Process and Commerce Clause Jurisprudence to State Use Tax Collection Requirements Imposed on Out-of-State Internet Retailers

California recently enacted legislation that aims to collect revenue from a novel source: out-of-state internet retailers. The statute achieves this goal by imposing greater responsibilities for collection of use taxes on these retailers. While the State\u27s objective is laudable, the new law missed the mark from the start. The use tax collection law makes an exception for out-of-state online retailers that engage in their business through Google, Inc., an internet business having an obvious California nexus. This Note analyzes long-standing and recent case authority and legislative policy to provide an alternative that will better meet the State\u27s needs

The Role of the CXCR3 Signaling Axes in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma

Numerous cytokines promote pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) progression and suppress anti-tumor immune response leading to poor prognosis in PDAC patients. Despite this, many cytokines, have not been investigated in PDAC. Bioinformatic analyses of PDAC microarray and RNA-Seq datasets were used to identify cytokines overexpressed in PDAC, confirm the expression of cognate receptors, determine the association of cytokines with patient survival and define key underlying molecular associations. Bioinformatic findings were validated using immunohistochemical (IHC) staining, comparative cytokine qPCR-array in KrasLSL-G12D:TP53LSL-R172H:Pdx1-Cre (KPC) and KrasLSL-G12D:Pdx1-Cre (KC) PDAC models and multicolor immunofluorescence staining. Tail-vein injections of PDAC cells with/without CXCR3 inhibition were used to study altered metastatic potential in vivo and functional assays were conducted to demonstrate causal relationships between CXCR3 activation and metastatic properties of PDAC cells. CXCR3 ligands CXCL9 and 10 were consistently overexpressed in PDAC datasets. CXCR3 was expressed in the majority of PDAC samples according to RNA-Seq, microarray and IHC analysis. CXCR3 ligands CXCL4, 9 and 10 were associated with poor patient survival and were overexpressed in the aggressive KPC murine model compared to KC mice. CXCR3 was associated with increased overall survival in humans. Pathway analysis showed that CXCR3 is associated with T-cell-related genes while CXCL9/10 were associated with T-cell and immunosuppressive genes. CIBERSORT, gene set enrichment and immunofluorescence analysis supported these findings. With respect to metastasis, inhibition of CXCR3 suppressed the number of cancer cells in the lungs following tail vein injection. Cancer cells treated with activated platelets and/or CXCL4 demonstrated increased ability to survive low attachment conditions and fluid shear stress and to adhere to endothelium, suggesting pleotropic roles in the metastatic process. Overall, CXCR3 ligands are overexpressed in PDAC and are associated with poor survival likely related to alterations in immune cell infiltrate/activity and augmented metastatic potential

Judicial time Lords: media direction vs. judicial independence

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License, which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This license does not permit commercial exploitation or the creation of derivative works without specific permission

Improving SRAM FPGA Radiation Reliability Through Low-Level TMR Implementation

Mitigation techniques, such as TMR with repair, are used to reduce the negative effects of radiation on FPGAs deployed in space environments. While these techniques increase the robustness of the device, there is still room for improvement in the range of 100 to 1,000x. These improvements can be realized through the low-level implementation of the placement and routing on the device. This work has implemented a wide variety of techniques to realize these gains, achieving an overall improvement of 57,443x through fault-injection testing and an improvement of 350x in radiation testing

Understanding transport effects on dendrite formation near the anode-electrolyte interface of lithium metal batteries

In this dissertation, a meso-scale computational model, using the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) numerical method, is used to simulate the deposition process at the electrolyte/anode interface of a lithium metal battery. The SPH model simulates the physics at this interface by solving the governing equations for diffusion, migration, and potential distribution in a binary electrolyte and near a reactive, moving interface and dendrite surfaces. The model is implemented in the LAMMPs code base and includes the ability to model charge/discharge cycles. Using the SPH model, the effect of various structures in the electrolyte on mass transport and dendrite growth are investigated. The first goal is to understand the effects of local transport through battery separators on dendrite growth by explicitly representing commercial battery separator structures taken from SEM images. Using SPH, the geometrical parameters of the separator are characterized based on their effect on mass transport and dendrite growth. The findings from the simulations suggest that the tortuosity of the separator is a key property affecting transport. Additionally, despite the characterization of battery separators using bulk properties, the heterogeneity of the separators lead to vastly different local transport outcomes. Building upon these insights and in collaboration with experimental groups, the effect of the structure of novel coatings and electrolytes on the mass transport to the anode and subsequent dendrite morphology are investigated. The computational studies demonstrate the mechanisms by which these novel techniques improve the performance of lithium metal batteries such as reducing the pore size in carbon nanomembranes reduces dendrite length and increases deposition density; ionic liquid crystal supramolecular assemblies oriented perpendicular to the anode increase the uniformity of Li+ deposition at the anode; the effects of homogeneity of ionic conductivity of protective coatings on the anode to enable uniform Li+ deposition. Additionally, the model is used to explore how the local conditions in the electrolyte change during battery cycling. During standard charging, the Li+ concentrations at the anode create reaction rate limited conditions that lead to more uniform Li+ deposition. However, during “fast” charging, the local Li+ concentrations rapidly decrease leading to mass transport limited conditions which result in dendrite growth and lower battery performance

Survey of Chemistry II

This Grants Collection uses the grant-supported open wiki textbook Survey of Chemistry II from Middle Georgia State University: http://oer.galileo.usg.edu/chemistry-textbooks/1/ This Grants Collection for Survey of Chemistry II was created under a Round Two ALG Textbook Transformation Grant. Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process. Documents are in .pdf format, with a separate .docx (Word) version available for download. Each collection contains the following materials: Linked Syllabus Initial Proposal Final Reporthttps://oer.galileo.usg.edu/chemistry-collections/1001/thumbnail.jp

Changes in Twelve Homoeologous Genomic Regions in Soybean following Three Rounds of Polyploidy

With the advent of high-throughput sequencing, the availability of genomic sequence for comparative genomics is increasing exponentially. Numerous completed plant genome sequences enable characterization of patterns of the retention and evolution of genes within gene families due to multiple polyploidy events, gene loss and fractionation, and differential evolutionary pressures over time and across different gene families. In this report, we trace the changes that have occurred in 12 surviving homoeologous genomic regions from three rounds of polyploidy that contributed to the current Glycine max genome: a genome triplication before the origin of the rosids (;130 to 240 million years ago), a genome duplication early in the legumes (;58 million years ago), and a duplication in the Glycine lineage (;13 million years ago). Patterns of gene retention following the genome triplication event generally support predictions of the Gene Balance Hypothesis. Finally, we find that genes in networks with a high level of connectivity are more strongly conserved than those with low connectivity and that the enrichment of these highly connected genes in the 12 highly conserved homoeologous segments may in part explain their retention over more than 100 million years and repeated polyploidy events