The Persistent Southern Disadvantage in Us Early Life Mortality, 1965‒2014

Background: Recent studies of US adult mortality demonstrate a growing disadvantage among southern states. Few studies have examined long-term trends and geographic patterns in US early life (ages 1 to 24) mortality, ages at which key risk factors and causes of death are quite different than among adults. Objective: This article examines trends and variations in early life mortality rates across US states and census divisions. We assess whether those variations have changed over a 50-year time period and which causes of death contribute to contemporary geographic disparities. Methods: We calculate all-cause and cause-specific death rates using death certificate data from the Multiple Cause of Death files, combining public-use files from 1965‒2004 and restricted data with state geographic identifiers from 2005‒2014. State population (denominator) data come from US decennial censuses or intercensal estimates. Results: Results demonstrate a persistent mortality disadvantage for young people (ages 1 to 24) living in southern states over the last 50 years, particularly those located in the East South Central and West South Central divisions. Motor vehicle accidents and homicide by firearm account for most of the contemporary southern disadvantage in US early life mortality. Contribution: Our results illustrate that US children and youth living in the southern United States have long suffered from higher levels of mortality than children and youth living in other parts of the country. Our findings also suggest the contemporary southern disadvantage in US early life mortality could potentially be reduced with state-level policies designed to prevent deaths involving motor vehicles and firearms

Longitudinal associations between specific types of emotional reactivity and psychological, physical health, and school adjustment

Using a multimethod, multiinformant longitudinal design, we examined associations between specific forms of positive and negative emotional reactivity at age 5, children’s effortful control (EC), emotion regulation, and social skills at age 7, and adolescent functioning across psychological, academic, and physical health domains at ages 15/16 (N = 383). We examined how distinct components of childhood emotional reactivity directly and indirectly predict domain-specific forms of adolescent adjustment, thereby identifying developmental pathways between specific types of emotional reactivity and adjustment above and beyond the propensity to express other forms of emotional reactivity. Age 5 high-intensity positivity was associated with lower age 7 EC and more adolescent risk-taking; age 5 low-intensity positivity was associated with better age 7 EC and adolescent cardiovascular health, providing evidence for the heterogeneity of positive emotional reactivity. Indirect effects indicated that children’s age 7 social skills partially explain several associations between age 5 fear and anger reactivity and adolescent adjustment. Moreover, age 5 anger reactivity, low-, and high-intensity positivity were associated with adolescent adjustment via age 7 EC. The findings from this interdisciplinary, long-term longitudinal study have significant implications for prevention and intervention work aiming to understand the role of emotional reactivity in the etiology of adjustment and psychopathology

Stoichiometry of C, N, P, and Si fluxes in a temperate-climate embayment

Dissolved C, N, P, and Si budgets for Tomales Bay, California, have been used to solve simultaneous stoichiometric equations which describe a plausible material balance for net organic matter reactions in the bay. Dissolved Si and P were both exported hydrographically. Dissolved C and fixed N were imported hydrographically. If we assume that C, N, P, and Si were supplied to the bay as organic detritus and remineralized at a rate required to balance dissolved Si and P exports, we can calculate reasonable rates of denitrification and CO2 gas evasion across the air-water interface. The system is thus interpreted to have been net heterotrophic at the time of our investigation.Fluxes attributed to individual components in the system (benthic respiration, water-column material turnover, biochemical transformations between fixed and gaseous N) were of sufficient magnitude to account for the system-wide net fluxes, although too noisy to allow piecewise derivation of net system fluxes. Denitrification and limitation of primary production by dissolved fixed N in aquatic ecosystems may be symptoms of other system-scale constraints on net C metabolism, rather than themselves being system-level controls of net C metabolism

Natural preconditioning and iterative methods for saddle point systems

The solution of quadratic or locally quadratic extremum problems subject to linear(ized) constraints gives rise to linear systems in saddle point form. This is true whether in the continuous or the discrete setting, so saddle point systems arising from the discretization of partial differential equation problems, such as those describing electromagnetic problems or incompressible flow, lead to equations with this structure, as do, for example, interior point methods and the sequential quadratic programming approach to nonlinear optimization. This survey concerns iterative solution methods for these problems and, in particular, shows how the problem formulation leads to natural preconditioners which guarantee a fast rate of convergence of the relevant iterative methods. These preconditioners are related to the original extremum problem and their effectiveness---in terms of rapidity of convergence---is established here via a proof of general bounds on the eigenvalues of the preconditioned saddle point matrix on which iteration convergence depends

Childhood self-regulation as a mechanism through which early overcontrolling parenting is associated with adjustment in preadolescence

We examined longitudinal associations across an 8-year time span between overcontrolling parenting during toddlerhood, self-regulation during early childhood, and social, emotional, and academic adjustment in preadolescence (N = 422). Overcontrolling parenting, emotion regulation (ER), and inhibitory control (IC) were observed in the laboratory; preadolescent adjustment was teacher-reported and child self-reported. Results from path analysis indicated that overcontrolling parenting at age 2 was associated negatively with ER and IC at age 5, which, in turn, were associated with more child-reported emotional and school problems, fewer teacher-reported social skills, and less teacher-reported academic productivity at age 10. These effects held even when controlling for prior levels of adjustment at age 5, suggesting that ER and IC in early childhood may be associated with increases and decreases in social, emotional, and academic functioning from childhood to preadolescence. Finally, indirect effects from overcontrolling parenting at age 2 to preadolescent outcomes at age 10 were significant, both through IC and ER at age 5. These results support the notion that parenting during toddlerhood is associated with child adjustment into adolescence through its relation with early developing self-regulatory skills

Women and Illegal Activities: Gender Differences and Women's Willingness to Comply Over Time

In recent years the topics of illegal activities such as corruption or tax evasion have attracted a great deal of attention. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of compliance. The aim of this paper is to investigate empirically whether women are more willing to be compliant than men and whether we observe (among women and in general) differences in attitudes among similar age groups in different time periods (cohort effect) or changing attitudes of the same cohorts over time (age effect) using data from eight Western European countries from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey that span the period from 1981 to 1999. The results reveal higher willingness to comply among women and an age rather than a cohort effect. Working Paper 06-5

Observation and control of shock waves in individual nanoplasmas

In a novel experiment that images the momentum distribution of individual, isolated 100-nm-scale plasmas, we make the first experimental observation of shock waves in nanoplasmas. We demonstrate that the introduction of a heating pulse prior to the main laser pulse increases the intensity of the shock wave, producing a strong burst of quasi-monochromatic ions with an energy spread of less than 15%. Numerical hydrodynamic calculations confirm the appearance of accelerating shock waves, and provide a mechanism for the generation and control of these shock waves. This observation of distinct shock waves in dense plasmas enables the control, study, and exploitation of nanoscale shock phenomena with tabletop-scale lasers.Comment: 8 pages of manuscript, 9 pages of supplemental information, total 17 page