Employment Benefits from California Climate Investments and Co-investments

From the launch of California Climate Investments in 2013 through 2016, the state appropriated about $2.2 billion to 29 programs aimed at reducing GHGs. Of these, 13 were transportation programs that received nearly$1.8 billion in California Climate Investments, including the High-Speed Rail Project, the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program, the Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program, the Clean Vehicle Rebate Project, and otherLow CarbonTransportation investments.How do these programs translate into jobs? Researchers at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation conducted the state’s largest study of the employment impacts of CCI transportation investments

Dietary n-3-polyunsaturated fatty acids and energy balance in overweight or moderately obese men and women: a randomized controlled trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Dietary n-3-polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3-PUFA) have been shown to reduce body weight and fat mass in rodents as well as in humans in one small short-term study. We conducted this controlled randomized dietary trial to test the hypothesis that n-3-PUFA lower body weight and fat mass by reducing appetite and <it>ad libitum </it>food intake and/or by increasing energy expenditure.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Twenty-six overweight or moderately obese (body mass index 28–33 kg/m²) men and women were included, and received either a diet rich in n-3-PUFA from both plant and marine sources or a control diet. Diets were administered in an isocaloric fashion for 2 weeks followed by 12 weeks of <it>ad libitum </it>intake. The n-3-PUFA and control diets were identical in all regards except for the fatty acid composition. All foods were provided to subjects, and leftovers were weighed back to assess actual food intake accurately for each day of the study. This design gave us 80% power to detect a difference in weight change between the n-3-PUFA and control diet groups of 2.25 kg at an α-error level of 5%.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Both groups lost similar amounts of weight when these diets were consumed <it>ad libitum </it>for 12 weeks [mean (SD): -3.5 (3.7) kg in the control group vs. -2.8 (3.7) kg in the n-3-PUFA group, F_(1,24)= 13.425, p = 0.001 for time effect; F_(1,24)= 0.385, p = 0.541 for time × group interaction]. Consistent with this finding, we also found no differences between the n-3-PUFA and control groups with regard to appetite as measured by visual analogue scale, <it>ad libitum </it>food intake, resting energy expenditure as measured by indirect calorimetry, diurnal plasma leptin concentrations, or fasting ghrelin concentrations.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results suggest that dietary n-3-PUFA do not play an important role in the regulation of food intake, energy expenditure, or body weight in humans.</p

The Grizzly, February 6, 2020

Ursinus Presents First Inclusion and Equity Awards • Abele Scholarship Receives 11 Million Dollar Donation • Remembering Campus Safety Officer Tony Salvo • Title IX Coordinator Departs From Ursinus • FIA President Reflects on Club\u27s History • CPD Guide to Externship Success • Opinion: A Dream Deferred? On MLK\u27s Legacy; Personification of Brands has Gone Too Far • Women\u27s Basketball Edged Out by Haverford • Mercadante Methodhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1934/thumbnail.jp

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A Rhode Island high school-university partnership: Urban students\u27 perceptions of college readiness

Nearly one third of U.S. students will fail to graduate from high school this year and another one-third will graduate without the skills needed to be successful after high school. These statistics are even more alarming for minority and low income students, with fewer than 10% of low income minority students going on to earn bachelors’ degrees (Sanford, 2006). Numerous studies and commissions such as the Secretary of Education\u27s Commission on the Future of Higher Education (U.S. Department of Education, 2006), the National Education Summit on High Schools (2005), and the National Association of Secondary School Principals’ (1996, 2004) Breaking Ranks reports point to the need for reforming the current high school delivery system. Chief among the recommendations of these studies is the alignment of expectations between high schools and institutions of higher education and opportunities for students to develop an understanding of the nature and expectations of college ensuring their “college readiness”. Such readiness is defined as being prepared for college level work without remediation (Conley, 2007b). In order to test these theories in a real world context (Yin, 2003), this case study examines a partnership between a Rhode Island urban high school and a 4 year institution of higher education and the impact of its Dual Enrollment Program on students’ perceptions of college readiness. The aims of the study are: (1) How does participation in high school–university partnership’s dual enrollment program affect urban high school students’ perceptions of college readiness?, and (2) What academic, organizational and personal supports do urban high school students need to become college ready? This study triangulates data from interviews with 17 students participating in the partnership’s Dual Enrollment program with survey data from a larger, statewide Dual Enrollment initiative, as well as a review of documents including the partnership agreement between the school district and the university, course syllabi for the two dual enrollment courses taken by the participating students, two interviews with program administrators and observation notes from four program site visits. The selected high school and its students reflect the characteristics of most U.S. urban high schools and this study provides an opportunity to validate the theories on college readiness presented in the literature. The results will inform the partnership and the larger statewide effort, and might be applicable to other urban high schools across the country through examination of the persons, places, times and events and where there is similarity or dissimilarity (Trochim, 2002; Patton, 2002)

ECON 603-001: Introduction to Economic Theory Summer 2023 Callahan

Syllabus - ECON 603 (online): Introduction to Economic Theory Summer 2023; Colleen Callahan</p

Purification, characterization and biological studies of Escherichia coli exoribonuclease BN

RNase BN is an E. coli exoribonuclease that was previously shown to be required for the maturation of certain T4 encoded tRNAs. In this study the gene encoding RNase BN, rbn, was mapped to 88 minutes on the E. coli chromosome and subsequently cloned. RNase BN was then overexpressed and purified to near homogeneity. The purified enzyme has a molecular weight of ~65 kDa. RNase BN has a number of unique properties compared to other known exoribonucleases in E. coli. The optimal conditions for activity include a pH of 6.5, the presence of Co 2+, and a monovalent cation. The enzyme is highly specific. It only processes tRNA molecules that contain an incorrect residue within the universal 3‘-CCA sequence. Other tRNA, RNA, and DNA molecules tested thus far are essentially inactive as substrates. tRNA molecules with substitutions within the -CCA sequence are not normally found in E. coli, however, so the role of RNase BN in uninfected cells remains to be determined.

The United States and GATT: A Relational Study. By Donald G. Beane. New York: Pergamon Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 296. $75.00.

The ultimate success of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), negotiated by 27 nations in 1947, would have been hard to predict at the outset, given its lack of enforcement tools and dependence on the United States for leadership. What explains the GATT s achievements in the areas of tariff reduction and trade expansion, as argued by Donald Beane, is the adoption of a more pragmatic rather than ideological approach to problem-solving, along with a growing reliance on multilateral negotiations as the dominant position of the United States eroded. Lurking behind the scenes was the long-running battle between the U.S. Congress and the president over the role each would play in trade policy.