Still in the fight: The struggle for community in the Upper Midwest for African American Civil War Veterans

The Civil War and Emancipation had a transformative effect on the nation as a whole but an even greater effect on the lives of African Americans. While historians have examined the effects of the Civil War and Emancipation on African Americans in the South in detail, few have explored the effects of such events on African Americans in the Upper Midwest. Also lacking in this historiography is how the military service of African Americans affected the lives of these veterans and the communities in the Upper Midwest they helped to form after the Civil War. Using the black community of Newton, Iowa after the Civil War as a case study, this thesis argues that African American veterans who settled in the Upper Midwest used the political capital of their service, kinship ties, and other social institutions to forge and maintain space for African American communities. African American Civil War veterans and other black citizens continued for decades after the war to remind their white neighbors of their earned space in the community. They viewed their emancipation and citizenship as rewards for their military service and loyalty to the nation and struggled to obtain the full rights of citizenship still denied them. They did this by using the few unconventional political tools at their disposal namely the political capital accrued through military service and kinship ties. The African American citizens of Newton, as a result, were able to create a prosperous and influential black community and secure many of the social rights reserved for full citizens in what was before the war a region of the country fearful of black immigration

Understanding The Negative Graduate Student Perceptions Of Required Statistics And Research Methods Courses: Implications For Programs And Faculty

The authors of this study endeavor to explore the negative opinions and perceptions of graduate students in business and social science programs, regarding their required statistics and research methods courses. The general sense of instructors of such courses is that students dread and resent having to take courses dealing with statistics and social research because they are both intellectually demanding and require students to call on mathematics skills. Students also seem to put a low value on such courses in terms of application to their own careers.  Clearly, the above-mentioned perceptions derive from intuitive knowledge and anecdotal statements by students. The authors of this study devised a research design to test the validity of the perceptions of negative attitudes among students in their graduate programs and to gain some understanding of the basis of the negativity

Teaching Chinese Students: Understanding Their Public Sector Paradigm

Teaching Chinese students in an American university can be both challenging and rewarding. Cultural and language differences can lead to some superficial confusion and interpretational problems. However, the vast differences in the ways Chinese students view the role of the public sector, as compared to the US, can mean that the instructors and students are looking at the same concepts from vastly different perspectives. Expectations regarding the role of government and the structure of authoritative organizations are so dissimilar as to prevent a commonality on which to base communication. The Chinese view and practice of public administration vary greatly from that of the United States. In China, centralized management and policy-making are the rule, where in the US, the separation of power and administration exist endemically. Because of these differences, one could posit that Chinese students, participating in a Masters of Public Administration program in the US, should come away with unique views of public management in the United States as well as how similar practices compare in China. A survey recently completed by the Department of Public Management at the University of New Haven found that often Chinese students come away from the MPA experience with confusion about, concerns for the need or efficiency of a decentralized government and still believe a highly centralized government is the best model. Reconciling these beliefs with the fundamentals of the discipline of Public Administration, as practiced in the United States, presents some serious challenges to instructors. The University of New Haven, Master of Public Administration program, has hosted a number of Chinese students over the past few years. At the completion of their time at UNH, students completed an essay discussing what they had learned from their courses and practical experiences in the program. This paper is a review of those responses and their implications for how Chinese students view US public administration. The authors also discuss possible explanations for the very different views on the role of the public sector and the possible ramifications for future public servants in China

Long-Term Consequences of Congestion Pricing: A Small Cordon in the Hand Is Worth Two in the Bush

We evaluate and compare the long-term economic effects of three cordon-based road pricing schemes applied to the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. To conduct this analysis, we employ a spatially disaggregated general equilibrium model of a regional economy that incorporates the decisions of residents, firms, and developers, integrated with a spatially disaggregated strategic transportation planning model that features mode, time period, and route choice. We find that all cordon pricing schemes increase welfare of the residents, as well as lead to GDP growth. At the optimum, the larger cordon and a double cordon lead to higher benefits than the small cordon encompassing downtown core. Nevertheless, the small cordon seems to be a safer bet because when the toll charge is set suboptimally, the net benefits from the small cordon compared to the optimum change negligibly, while the net benefits from the larger cordon decline sharply as the charge deviates from the optimal level.traffic congestion, cordon tolls, land use, welfare analysis, road pricing, general equilibrium, simulation, Washington DC

Distributional Consequences of Public Policies: An Example from the Management of Urban Vehicular Travel

This paper uses a spatially disaggregated computable general equilibrium model of a large US metropolitan area to compare two kinds of policies, “Live Near Your Work” and taxation of vehicular travel, that have been proposed to help further the aims of “smart growth.” Ordinarily, policy comparisons of this sort focus on the net benefits of the two policies; that is, the total monetized net welfare gains or losses to all citizens. While the aggregate net benefits are certainly important, in this analysis we also disaggregate these benefits along two important dimensions: income and location within the metropolitan area. The resulting identification of gainers and losers with these policies, though undoubtedly important to matters such as fairness and political feasibility, are rarely made. We find that these distributional effects are quite sensitive to the details of policy design

Distributional Consequences of Public Policies: An Example from the Management of Urban Vehicular Travel

This paper uses a spatially disaggregated computable general equilibrium model of a large US metropolitan area to compare two kinds of policies, “Live Near Your Work” and taxation of vehicular travel, that have been proposed to help further the aims of “smart growth.” Ordinarily, policy comparisons of this sort focus on the net benefits of the two policies; that is, the total monetized net welfare gains or losses to all citizens. While the aggregate net benefits are certainly important, in this analysis we also disaggregate these benefits along two important dimensions: income and location within the metropolitan area. The resulting identification of gainers and losers with these policies, though undoubtedly important to matters such as fairness and political feasibility, are rarely made. We find that these distributional effects are quite sensitive to the details of policy design

Information use in chronic illness care: The role of the electronic health record in bridging patient experience and healthcare contexts

Chronic health conditions typically manifest as pervasive and ongoing in daily life, in contrast to their curative and episodic mode of treatment in most healthcare settings. A growing sense of provider‐patient disconnect and calls for healthcare reform have emerged new chronic care models that advocate for a team approach to care that is heavily supported through the use of an electronic health record (EHR). This interdisciplinary research examines the use of the EHR in chronic illness care within a best‐practice environment to understand how provider practices frame patient experience. Drawing on data from 144 hours of observation and 49 interviews with healthcare providers at three VA primary care clinics, we examined information use in provider work and patient care. Findings indicate the EHR as a de facto representation of the patient and a ubiquitous force in shaping provider work and patient care. The organizational context and provider work practices as reified in the EHR privileged and elevated objective indicators of the patient's level of “control” while obscuring subjective information and patient narrative that could be useful in problem‐solving disease management. The pervasive use of objective information in patient care and communication framed patient experience in the healthcare context in ways that seemed abstracted from their lived experience with illness, contributing to providerpatient disconnects. Providers were stymied by not having enough information to support effective self‐management or a more complete picture of patients' everyday life experiences, but there was no clear pathway for capturing, retrieving, and using such information in patient care. We suggest that EHR design for chronic illness care should make patients' experiential information more readily available and enable patient input and patient‐provider co‐construction of information. More work is needed to further understand how everyday life experience is presented and received in patient encounters.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90165/1/14504801192_ftp.pd

How to report educational videos in robotic surgery: an international multidisciplinary consensus statement

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Myeloid-derived suppressor cells contribute to A2B adenosine receptor-induced VEGF production and angiogenesis in a mouse melanoma model

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is an angiogenic factor critically involved in tumor progression. Adenosine A2B receptor plays a pivotal role in promoting tumor growth. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) in the pro-angiogenic effects of A2B and to determine whether A2B blockade could enhance the effectiveness of anti-VEGF treatment. Mice treated with Bay60-6583, a selective A2B receptor agonist, showed enhanced tumor VEGF-A expression and vessel density. This effect was associated with accelerated tumor growth, which could be reversed with anti-VEGF treatment. Bay60-6583 increased the accumulation of tumor CD11b+Gr1+ cells. Depletion of MDSCs in mice significantly reduced A2B-induced VEGF production. However, A2B receptor stimulation did not directly regulate VEGF expression in isolated tumor myeloid cells. Mechanistically, Bay60-6583-treated melanoma tissues showed increased STAT3 activation. Inhibition of STAT3 significantly decreased the pro-tumor activity of Bay60-6583 and reduced tumor VEGF expression. Pharmacological blockade of A2B receptor with PSB1115 significantly reduced tumor growth by inhibiting tumor angiogenesis and increasing T cells numbers within the tumor microenvironment. These effects are, at least in part, dependent on impaired tumor accumulation of Gr1+ cells upon A2B receptor blockade. PSB1115 increased the effectiveness of anti-VEGF treatment

A Search for MeV to TeV Neutrinos from Fast Radio Bursts with IceCube

We present two searches for IceCube neutrino events coincident with 28 fast radio bursts (FRBs) and 1 repeating FRB. The first improves on a previous IceCube analysis - searching for spatial and temporal correlation of events with FRBs at energies greater than roughly 50 GeV - by increasing the effective area by an order of magnitude. The second is a search for temporal correlation of MeV neutrino events with FRBs. No significant correlation is found in either search; therefore, we set upper limits on the time-integrated neutrino flux emitted by FRBs for a range of emission timescales less than one day. These are the first limits on FRB neutrino emission at the MeV scale, and the limits set at higher energies are an order-of-magnitude improvement over those set by any neutrino telescope