Association of teen mothers\u27 and grandmothers\u27 parenting capacities with child development: A study protocol.

Children born to teen mothers may experience less responsive and supportive parenting and are at heightened risk for a range of social, developmental, and health issues. There is literature to support the positive impact of grandmothers on teen parents and their children. However, what if the teen\u27s mother is also limited in her parenting capacities? How do parenting capacities across these two generations of mothers affect the developing child? In this ongoing study we are examining two important aspects of parenting capacities, attachment quality and executive functioning, in teen mothers (TM) and their biological, co- residing mothers or grandmothers (GM or GGM). Both are essential components of effective parenting, but little is known about their impact on young children\u27s development when raised by two generations of parents. In a cross- sectional, descriptive design, a convenience sample of 50 TM/GM dyads with children 1 to 3 years old is being recruited from two urban teen-tot clinics. Participants complete a paper-and-pencil measure of attachment quality and a computerized measure of multiple aspects of executive function (working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility). A standardized maternal report measure is used to assess child developmental status. The biggest challenges of the study thus far include recruitment and transience of the study population. Progress to date and experiences from recruitment and data collection are discussed, as well as successful strategies to address challenges

Building Healthy Social Media for All: Investigating How Different Cultures Seek and Process Health Information

poster abstractThe percentage of people accessing online health information in the U.S. has created a spike in knowledge that continues to impact personal health outcomes. Three events that have amplified interest in accessing such information have been: (1) Local/national programs promoting healthy life-styles and disease prevention, (2) The effects of increasing immigration to North America, and (3) The passing of the Affordable Care-Act. Aligning with these factors are health statistics that show African Americans with the highest mortality rate of any racial/ethnic group for all cancers combined—contributing to the lowest life expectancy of any ethnic group. Second, there are 55.2M Spanish speakers in the U.S., of which 20% (7.2M) say their level of English proficiency is fair-to-non-existent. This research is an investigation (in two-parts) into the role of cultural cognitive preferences in the design of online health social media and its potential for improving the health and well-being—with a focus on African-American and Latino populations. This study focuses on the former. Ten African Americans, ages 40 to 60, participated in phone open-ended interviews to identify their perception of the quality and availability of online health information. The interview consisted of 14 questions and lasted for approximately 15 minutes. Findings suggest that participants seek health information from a wide array of sources, with a preference for people as the source rather than online, e.g., physicians, health clinics, family and friends, co-workers, campus events, and church. While none of the interviewees answered yes to a question about whether they participated in online health networks, most did have knowledge of the dissemination of health information through social media, which most had experience using. Finally, the most mentioned factor regarding satisfaction with online health information was related to trust and verifying the sources, which most interviewees said they do through their personal physician

GbdR Regulates Pseudomonas aeruginosa plcH and pchP Transcription in Response to Choline Catabolites

Pseudomonas aeruginosa hemolytic phospholipase C, PlcH, can degrade phosphatidylcholine (PC) and sphingomyelin in eukaryotic cell membranes and extracellular PC in lung surfactant. Numerous studies implicate PlcH in P. aeruginosa virulence. The phosphorylcholine released by PlcH activity on phospholipids is hydrolyzed by a periplasmic phosphorylcholine phosphatase, PchP. Both plcH gene expression and PchP enzyme activity are positively regulated by phosphorylcholine degradation products, including glycine betaine. Here we report that the induction of plcH and pchP transcription by glycine betaine is mediated by GbdR, an AraC family transcription factor. Mutants that lack gbdR are unable to induce plcH and pchP in media containing glycine betaine or choline and in phosphatidylcholine-rich environments, such as lung surfactant or mouse lung lavage fluid. In T broth containing choline, the gbdR mutant exhibited a 95% reduction in PlcH activity. In electrophoretic mobility shift assays, a GbdR-maltose binding protein fusion bound specifically to both the plcH and pchP promoters. Promoter mapping, alignment of GbdR-regulated promoter sequences, and analysis of targeted promoter mutants that lack GbdR-dependent induction of transcription were used to identify a region necessary for GbdR-dependent transcriptional activation. GbdR also plays a significant role in plcH and pchP regulation within the mouse lung. Our studies suggest that GbdR is the primary regulator of plcH and pchP expression in PC-rich environments, such as the lung, and that pchP and other genes involved in phosphorylcholine catabolism are necessary to stimulate the GbdR-mediated positive feedback induction of plcH

"The daily grunt": middle class bias and vested interests in the 'Getting in Early' and 'Why Can't They Read?' reports.

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the UK and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s,such luminaries as Labov (1969) and Trudgill (1975) were at pains to point out to educationalists, with some success, that this 'deficit 'view of working-class children's communicative competence is not a helpful one. However, a close reading of recent think-tank reports and policy papers on language and literacy teaching in schools reveals that the linguistic deficit hypothesis has resurfaced and is likely to influence present-day educational policy and practice. In this paper I examine in detail the findings, claims and recommendations of the reports and I argue that they are biased, poorly researched and reflect the vested interests of certain specialist groups, such as speech and language therapists and companies who sell literacy materials to schools. I further argue that we need to, once again, inject the debate with the social dimensions of educational failure, and we need to move away from the pathologisation of working-class children's language patterns

The EDAM Project: Mining Atmospheric Aerosol Datasets

Data mining has been a very active area of research in the database, machine learning, and mathematical programming communities in recent years. EDAM (Exploratory Data Analysis and Management) is a joint project between researchers in Atmospheric Chemistry and Computer Science at Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison that aims to develop data mining techniques for advancing the state of the art in analyzing atmospheric aerosol datasets. There is a great need to better understand the sources, dynamics, and compositions of atmospheric aerosols. The traditional approach for particle measurement, which is the collection of bulk samples of particulates on filters, is not adequate for studying particle dynamics and real-time correlations. This has led to the development of a new generation of real-time instruments that provide continuous or semi-continuous streams of data about certain aerosol properties. However, these instruments have added a significant level of complexity to atmospheric aerosol data, and dramatically increased the amounts of data to be collected, managed, and analyzed. Our abilit y to integrate the data from all of these new and complex instruments now lags far behind our data-collection capabilities, and severely limits our ability to understand the data and act upon it in a timely manner. In this paper, we present an overview of the EDAM project. The goal of the project, which is in its early stages, is to develop novel data mining algorithms and approaches to managing and monitoring multiple complex data streams. An important objective is data quality assurance, and real-time data mining offers great potential. The approach that we take should also provide good techniques to deal with gas-phase and semi-volatile data. While atmospheric aerosol analysis is an important and challenging domain that motivates us with real problems and serves as a concrete test of our results, our objective is to develop techniques that have broader applicability, and to explore some fundamental challenges in data mining that are not specific to any given application domain

Emissions from Ethanol-Gasoline Blends: A Single Particle Perspective

Due to its agricultural origin and function as a fuel oxygenate, ethanol is being promoted as an alternative biomass-based fuel for use in spark ignition engines, with mandates for its use at state and regional levels. While it has been established that the addition of ethanol to a fuel reduces the particulate mass concentration in the exhaust, little attention has been paid to changes in the physicochemical properties of the emitted particles. In this work, a dynamometer-mounted GM Quad-4 spark ignition engine run without aftertreatment at 1,500 RPM and 100% load was used with four different fuel blends, containing 0, 20, 40 and 85 percent ethanol in gasoline. This allowed the effects of the fuel composition to be isolated from other effects. Instrumentation employed included two Aerosol Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometers covering different size ranges for analysis of single particle composition, an Aethalometer for black carbon, a Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer for particle size distributions, a Photoelectric Aerosol Sensor for particle-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) species and gravimetric filter measurements for particulate mass concentrations. It was found that, under the conditions investigated here, additional ethanol content in the fuel changes the particle size distribution, especially in the accumulation mode, and decreases the black carbon and total particulate mass concentrations. The molecular weight distribution of the PAHs was found to decrease with added ethanol. However, PAHs produced from higher ethanol-content fuels are associated with NO2 − (m/z—46) in the single-particle mass spectra, indicating the presence of nitro-PAHs. Compounds associated with the gasoline (e.g., sulfur-containing species) are diminished due to dilution as ethanol is added to the fuel relative to those associated with the lubricating oil (e.g., calcium, zinc, phosphate) in the single particle spectra. These changes have potential implications for the health effect impacts of particulate emissions from biofuel blends

Stability of Single Particle Tracers for Differentiating Between Heavy- and Light-Duty Vehicle Emissions

To determine the size and chemical composition of particles derived from on-road vehicle emissions, individual particles were sampledcontinuously with an aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometer (ATOFMS) at the Caldecott Tunnel in Northern California. In this tunnel, traffic is segregated, such that in theory only light duty vehicle emissions or a mix of heavy- (HDV) and light-duty vehicle (LDV) emissions can be sampled separately. Two studies were carried out, one in November 1997 anda secondin July 2000, time periods with average ambient temperatures of 10–15 and 26–32 1C, respectively, with the instrument operating at ambient outdoor temperatures. Analysis of the chemical composition of the particles sampled in these studies shows that sampling conditions can strongly impact the determination of suitable markers for identifying particles emitted from different vehicle types during ambient studies

Argon laser micro-irradiation of mitochondria in rat myocardial cells in tissue culture : III. Irradiation of multicellular groups

Single mitochondria of contracting myocardial cells were irradiated with an argon laser microbeam and the contractility changes of the cells were noted. Four series of irradiation experiments were conducted: (i) one cell of a two-cell group was killed, (ii) one cell of a multicell group was killed, (iii) one cell of a two-cell group was damaged, (iv) one cell of a multicell group was damaged. In series (i) and (ii) a majority of cells first fibrillated and then either returned to rhythmic contraction rate, or stopped contracting. In series (iii) and (iv) the individual contractility pattern following irradiation was quite variable, but by 30 min post irradiation a majority of the cells had returned to a rhythmic contraction rate. These studies demonstrate the feasibility of using the laser microbeam to investigate cell-cell interactions, and factors involved in regulating myocardial cell contractility.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/34060/1/0000338.pd