New York\u27s 1199 in 1989: Rebuilding a Troubled Union

[Excerpt] 1199\u27s contract campaign of 1989 resulted in more than a contract victory for 50,000 hospital and nursing home workers. It marked the moment when 1199 reconstituted itself. The method and form that reconstitution took had everything to with the peculiar history of the union and a fundamentally destabilizing leadership crisis, with the racial and ethnic diversity of the people in the union and the different kinds of work they do, and with the industry they work in. Ironically, some of the techniques used to achieve the victory, developed to compensate for structural weaknesses, reinforced those weaknesses. The union\u27s continuing problem is to find ways of integrating its successes with its ordinary life

Evolution of the Southwest Indian Ridge from 55°45′E to 62°E : changes in plate-boundary geometry since 26 Ma

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 8 (2007): Q06022, doi:10.1029/2006GC001559.From 55°45′E to 58°45′E and from 60°30′E to 62°00′E, the ultraslow-spreading Southwest Indian Ridge (SWIR) consists of magmatic spreading segments separated by oblique amagmatic spreading segments, transform faults, and nontransform discontinuities. Off-axis magnetic and multibeam bathymetric data permit investigation of the evolution of this part of the SWIR. Individual magmatic segments show varying magnitudes and directions of asymmetric spreading, which requires that the shape of the plate boundary has changed significantly over time. In particular, since 26 Ma the Atlantis II transform fault grew by 90 km to reach 199 km, while a 45-km-long transform fault at 56°30′E shrank to become an 11 km offset nontransform discontinuity. Conversely, an oblique amagmatic segment at the center of a first-order spreading segment shows little change in orientation with time. These changes are consistent with the clockwise rotation of two ~450-km-wide first-order spreading segments between the Gallieni and Melville transform faults (52–60°E) to become more orthogonal to spreading. We suggest that suborthogonal first-order spreading segments reflect a stable configuration for mid-ocean ridges that maximizes upwelling rates in the asthenospheric mantle and results in a hotter and weaker ridge-axis that can more easily accommodate seafloor spreading.Funding for this work came from a JOI-Schlanger Fellowship to Baines and NSF grant 0352054 to Cheadle and John

Genome-wide Analyses Identify KIF5A as a Novel ALS Gene

To identify novel genes associated with ALS, we undertook two lines of investigation. We carried out a genome-wide association study comparing 20,806 ALS cases and 59,804 controls. Independently, we performed a rare variant burden analysis comparing 1,138 index familial ALS cases and 19,494 controls. Through both approaches, we identified kinesin family member 5A (KIF5A) as a novel gene associated with ALS. Interestingly, mutations predominantly in the N-terminal motor domain of KIF5A are causative for two neurodegenerative diseases: hereditary spastic paraplegia (SPG10) and Charcot-Marie-Tooth type 2 (CMT2). In contrast, ALS-associated mutations are primarily located at the C-terminal cargo-binding tail domain and patients harboring loss-of-function mutations displayed an extended survival relative to typical ALS cases. Taken together, these results broaden the phenotype spectrum resulting from mutations in KIF5A and strengthen the role of cytoskeletal defects in the pathogenesis of ALS.Peer reviewe

New York's 1199 in 1989: Rebuilding a Troubled Union

[Excerpt] 1199's contract campaign of 1989 resulted in more than a contract victory for 50,000 hospital and nursing home workers. It marked the moment when 1199 reconstituted itself. The method and form that reconstitution took had everything to with the peculiar history of the union and a fundamentally destabilizing leadership crisis, with the racial and ethnic diversity of the people in the union and the different kinds of work they do, and with the industry they work in. Ironically, some of the techniques used to achieve the victory, developed to compensate for structural weaknesses, reinforced those weaknesses. The union's continuing problem is to find ways of integrating its successes with its ordinary life.Issue_17____Article_10.pdf: 888 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Clinical-Genetic Associations in the Prospective Huntington at Risk Observational Study (PHAROS): Implications for Clinical Trials.

IMPORTANCE: Identifying measures that are associated with the cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG) expansion in individuals before diagnosis of Huntington disease (HD) has implications for designing clinical trials. OBJECTIVE: To identify the earliest features associated with the motor diagnosis of HD in the Prospective Huntington at Risk Observational Study (PHAROS). DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: A prospective, multicenter, longitudinal cohort study was conducted at 43 US and Canadian Huntington Study Group research sites from July 9, 1999, through December 17, 2009. Participants included 983 unaffected adults at risk for HD who had chosen to remain unaware of their mutation status. Baseline comparability between CAG expansion (≥37 repeats) and nonexpansion (\u3c37 \u3erepeats) groups was assessed. All participants and investigators were blinded to individual CAG analysis. A repeated-measures analysis adjusting for age and sex was used to assess the divergence of the linear trend between the expanded and nonexpanded groups. Data were analyzed from April 27, 2010, to September 3, 2013. EXPOSURE: Huntington disease mutation status in individuals with CAG expansion vs without CAG expansion. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Unified Huntington\u27s Disease Rating Scale motor (score range, 0-124; higher scores indicate greater impairment), cognitive (symbol digits modality is the total number of correct responses in 90 seconds; lower scores indicate greater impairment), behavioral (score range, 0-176; higher scores indicate greater behavioral symptoms), and functional (Total Functional Capacity score range, 0-13; lower scores indicate reduced functional ability) domains were assessed at baseline and every 9 months up to a maximum of 10 years. RESULTS: Among the 983 research participants at risk for HD in the longitudinal cohort, 345 (35.1%) carried the CAG expansion and 638 (64.9%) did not. The mean (SD) duration of follow-up was 5.8 (3.0) years. At baseline, participants with expansions had more impaired motor (3.0 [4.2] vs 1.9 [2.8]; P \u3c .001), cognitive (P \u3c .05 for all measures except Verbal Fluency, P = .52), and behavioral domain scores (9.4 [11.4] vs 6.5 [8.5]; P \u3c .001) but not significantly different measures of functional capacity (12.9 [0.3] vs 13.0 [0.2]; P = .23). With findings reported as mean slope (95% CI), in the longitudinal analyses, participants with CAG expansions showed significant worsening in motor (0.84 [0.73 to 0.95] vs 0.03 [-0.05 to 0.11]), cognitive (-0.54 [-0.67 to -0.40] vs 0.22 [0.12 to 0.32]), and functional (-0.08 [-0.09 to -0.06] vs -0.01 [-0.02 to 0]) measures compared with those without expansion (P \u3c .001 for all); behavioral domain scores did not diverge significantly between groups. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Using these prospectively accrued clinical data, relatively large treatment effects would be required to mount a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial involving premanifest HD individuals who carry the CAG expansion