Heir Property in the African American Community: From Promised Lands to Problem Lands

Abstract African American landowners have been reluctant to take advantage of intergenerational succession laws which provide for an orderly transfer of property from one generation to the next. This reluctance has led to a prevalence of heir property. Heir property is created when a person dies intestate. Heir property has created an impediment to wealth accumulation and has contributed to African American land loss in America. Partition actions are a byproduct of heir property which has operated to accelerate the loss of real property in the African American community. The Uniform Partition of Heir Property Act provides for procedural safeguards that would allow for cotenants of heir property to buy out other heirs and provide more discernable notices of partition actions. These factors will likely militate against the precipitous loss of African American lands due to partition lawsuits initiated because of heir property. Keywords: Heir Property, Partition, Land Loss, Interstate Successio

An Examination of Heir Property, the 1980 Emergency Land Fund Study, and Analysis of Factors that Influence African American Farmers\u27 Actions Related to Farmland

Abstract The study focused on heir property and analyzing African American farmers continuing in farming and dealing with clouded title. It specifically assessed the main issues raised by the 1980 Emergency Land Fund’s (ELF) study. It also surveyed a sample of African American farmers on heir property and related issues. It used descriptive statistics and logistic regression analysis to analyze the data. It found that 35% of respondents had a portion of their farms (50% or less) on heir property. This study reasonably confirms ELF’s findings on the percentage of African American-owned land held as heir property. Also, for farmers, being paid a claim under Pigford, filing a claim, and farm size had significant effects on continue farming (i.e., staying in farming). Continue farming had a significant effect on taking action to resolve clouded title. Being paid and size matters to continue farming, and continue farming matters to clearing clouded title. Keywords: Heir Property, Emergency Land Fund, Land Loss, African American Farmer

Spontaneous decompactification

Positive vacuum energy together with extra dimensions of space imply that our four-dimensional Universe is unstable, generically to decompactification of the extra dimensions. Either quantum tunneling or thermal fluctuations carry one past a barrier into the decompactifying regime. We give an overview of this process, and examine the subsequent expansion into the higher- dimensional geometry. This is governed by certain fixed-point solutions of the evolution equations, which are studied for both positive and negative spatial curvature. In the case where there is a higher-dimensional cosmological constant, we also outline a possible mechanism for compactification to a four-dimensional de Sitter cosmology.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures, harvmac. v2: refs added, minor notation change

LIMITS ON ANISOTROPY AND INHOMOGENEITY FROM THE COSMIC BACKGROUND RADIATION,

We consider directly the equations by which matter imposes anisotropies on freely propagating background radiation, leading to a new way of using anisotropy measurements to limit the deviations of the Universe from a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) geometry. This approach is complementary to the usual Sachs-Wolfe approach: the limits obtained are not as detailed, but they are more model-independent. We also give new results about combined matter-radiation perturbations in an almost-FRW universe, and a new exact solution of the linearised equations.Comment: 18 pages Latex

Dark Energy and Gravity

I review the problem of dark energy focusing on the cosmological constant as the candidate and discuss its implications for the nature of gravity. Part 1 briefly overviews the currently popular `concordance cosmology' and summarises the evidence for dark energy. It also provides the observational and theoretical arguments in favour of the cosmological constant as the candidate and emphasises why no other approach really solves the conceptual problems usually attributed to the cosmological constant. Part 2 describes some of the approaches to understand the nature of the cosmological constant and attempts to extract the key ingredients which must be present in any viable solution. I argue that (i)the cosmological constant problem cannot be satisfactorily solved until gravitational action is made invariant under the shift of the matter lagrangian by a constant and (ii) this cannot happen if the metric is the dynamical variable. Hence the cosmological constant problem essentially has to do with our (mis)understanding of the nature of gravity. Part 3 discusses an alternative perspective on gravity in which the action is explicitly invariant under the above transformation. Extremizing this action leads to an equation determining the background geometry which gives Einstein's theory at the lowest order with Lanczos-Lovelock type corrections. (Condensed abstract).Comment: Invited Review for a special Gen.Rel.Grav. issue on Dark Energy, edited by G.F.R.Ellis, R.Maartens and H.Nicolai; revtex; 22 pages; 2 figure

Plio‐Quaternary exhumation history of the central Nepalese Himalaya: 2. Thermokinematic and thermochronometer age prediction model

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95647/1/tect1875.pd

LRS Bianchi type I universes exhibiting Noether symmetry in the scalar-tensor Brans-Dicke theory

Following up on hints of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) data, we investigate locally rotational symmetric (LRS) Bianchi type I spacetimes with non-minimally coupled scalar fields. To single out potentially more interesting solutions, we search for Noether symmetry in this system. We then specialize to the Brans-Dicke (BD) field in such a way that the Lagrangian becomes degenerate (nontrivial) and solve the equations for Noether symmetry and the potential that allows it. Then we find the exact solutions of the equations of motion in terms of three parameters and an arbitrary function. We illustrate with families of examples designed to be generalizations of the well-known power-expansion, exponential expansion and Big Rip models in the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) framework. The solutions display surprising variation, a large subset of which features late-time acceleration as is usually ascribed to dark energy (phantom or quintensence), and is consistent with observational data.Comment: 25 pages, no figure, to appear in General Relativity and Gravitatio

Modelling Human Regulatory Variation in Mouse: Finding the Function in Genome-Wide Association Studies and Whole-Genome Sequencing

An increasing body of literature from genome-wide association studies and human whole-genome sequencing highlights the identification of large numbers of candidate regulatory variants of potential therapeutic interest in numerous diseases. Our relatively poor understanding of the functions of non-coding genomic sequence, and the slow and laborious process of experimental validation of the functional significance of human regulatory variants, limits our ability to fully benefit from this information in our efforts to comprehend human disease. Humanized mouse models (HuMMs), in which human genes are introduced into the mouse, suggest an approach to this problem. In the past, HuMMs have been used successfully to study human disease variants; e.g., the complex genetic condition arising from Down syndrome, common monogenic disorders such as Huntington disease and β-thalassemia, and cancer susceptibility genes such as BRCA1. In this commentary, we highlight a novel method for high-throughput single-copy site-specific generation of HuMMs entitled High-throughput Human Genes on the X Chromosome (HuGX). This method can be applied to most human genes for which a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) construct can be derived and a mouse-null allele exists. This strategy comprises (1) the use of recombineering technology to create a human variant–harbouring BAC, (2) knock-in of this BAC into the mouse genome using Hprt docking technology, and (3) allele comparison by interspecies complementation. We demonstrate the throughput of the HuGX method by generating a series of seven different alleles for the human NR2E1 gene at Hprt. In future challenges, we consider the current limitations of experimental approaches and call for a concerted effort by the genetics community, for both human and mouse, to solve the challenge of the functional analysis of human regulatory variation

Determinants of recovery from post-COVID-19 dyspnoea: analysis of UK prospective cohorts of hospitalised COVID-19 patients and community-based controls

Background The risk factors for recovery from COVID-19 dyspnoea are poorly understood. We investigated determinants of recovery from dyspnoea in adults with COVID-19 and compared these to determinants of recovery from non-COVID-19 dyspnoea. Methods We used data from two prospective cohort studies: PHOSP-COVID (patients hospitalised between March 2020 and April 2021 with COVID-19) and COVIDENCE UK (community cohort studied over the same time period). PHOSP-COVID data were collected during hospitalisation and at 5-month and 1-year follow-up visits. COVIDENCE UK data were obtained through baseline and monthly online questionnaires. Dyspnoea was measured in both cohorts with the Medical Research Council Dyspnoea Scale. We used multivariable logistic regression to identify determinants associated with a reduction in dyspnoea between 5-month and 1-year follow-up. Findings We included 990 PHOSP-COVID and 3309 COVIDENCE UK participants. We observed higher odds of improvement between 5-month and 1-year follow-up among PHOSP-COVID participants who were younger (odds ratio 1.02 per year, 95% CI 1.01–1.03), male (1.54, 1.16–2.04), neither obese nor severely obese (1.82, 1.06–3.13 and 4.19, 2.14–8.19, respectively), had no pre-existing anxiety or depression (1.56, 1.09–2.22) or cardiovascular disease (1.33, 1.00–1.79), and shorter hospital admission (1.01 per day, 1.00–1.02). Similar associations were found in those recovering from non-COVID-19 dyspnoea, excluding age (and length of hospital admission). Interpretation Factors associated with dyspnoea recovery at 1-year post-discharge among patients hospitalised with COVID-19 were similar to those among community controls without COVID-19. Funding PHOSP-COVID is supported by a grant from the MRC-UK Research and Innovation and the Department of Health and Social Care through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) rapid response panel to tackle COVID-19. The views expressed in the publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the National Health Service (NHS), the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. COVIDENCE UK is supported by the UK Research and Innovation, the National Institute for Health Research, and Barts Charity. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders