Constrained Behavior: Understanding the Entrenchment of Legislative Procedure in American State Constitutional Law

Political analysts have suggested that policy power will begin to shift from the federal government to state governments as gridlock in Congress persists. Therefore, understanding the policymaking process at the state level is more important than ever. Vitally missing from our understanding of policymaking in the states is the role of constitutional provisions. Many state constitutions contain directives that severely limit the ability of the legislature to act. Some of these directives are procedural while others are more substantive. This is relevant because constitutional rules are more difficult for members to alter than chamber rules. In this paper we present a quantitative measure of constitutional restrictiveness and explore the variation in this measure across the fifty state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. We discover that constitutional restrictiveness is largely explained by the historical era in which the most recent constitution has been passed

The A20 Protein Interacts with the Epstein–Barr Virus Latent Membrane Protein 1 (LMP1) and Alters the LMP1/TRAF1/TRADD Complex

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) latent membrane protein 1 (LMP1) interacts with the tumor necrosis factor receptor (TNFR)-associated factor (TRAF) molecules, which are important for LMP1-mediated signaling. Two domains of LMP1 can independently activate NF-kB, carboxyl-terminal activating region 1 (CTAR1) and CTAR2. The activation of NF-kB by CTAR1 occurs through direct interaction of LMP1 with the TRAF molecules, whereas CTAR2 interacts with the TNFR-associated death domain protein (TRADD) to activate NF-kB and the c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK). A20, which is induced by LMP1 through NF-kB, can block NF-kB activation from both domains of LMP1 and inhibit JNK activation from CTAR2. A20 also has been shown to associate with TRAF1 and TRAF2. In this study, an interaction between LMP1 and A20 was detected that was increased by TRAF2 overexpression. A20 did not affect the association of TRAF1 with TRAF2 but did displace TRAF1 from the LMP1 complex. The interaction of LMP1 and TRADD was decreased in the presence of A20, and the LMP1-A20 association was decreased by TRADD, suggesting that A20 and TRADD both interact with LMP1 and may compete for binding. These data indicate that A20 alters the interactions between LMP1 and the TRAF molecules and TRADD, affecting the activation of NF-kB, JNK, and perhaps other TRAF-mediated signaling events

Working in a Cage: The Evolution of Constitutional Restrictiveness in U.S. State Legislatures

The U.S. states have been characterized as “laboratories of democracy” for their ability to formulate public policies aimed at solving some of the most pressing public policy issues. The study of both public policy and legislative politics in the states has been quite robust. However, vitally missing from our understanding of policymaking and the legislative process in the states is the role of constitutional provisions. Many state constitutions contain directives that severely limit the ability of the legislature to act. Some of these directives are procedural while others are more substantive. This is relevant because constitutional rules are more difficult for members to alter than chamber rules and should lead us to question whether or not reform is needed. In previous research (Martorano Miller, Hamm and Hedlund 2009; 2010; 2011; 2014a; 2014b) we developed a quantitative measure of constitutional restrictiveness and explored current variation in this measure across the fifty state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. In this paper, we seek to expand upon our previous research by assessing provisions found in each state’s constitution in terms of the historical context surrounding the constitution’s adoption. We find that this “setting” has a significant impact on the constitutional provisions regarding the legislature’s powers restrictions and mandates. These features in turn create the “constraints” (a type of “cage”) limiting the legislature

Myocarditis, disseminated infection, and early viral persistence following experimental coxsackievirus B infection of cynomolgus monkeys.

Coxsackievirus B (CVB) infection is a common cause of acute viral myocarditis. The clinical presentation of myocarditis caused by this enterovirus is highly variable, ranging from mildly symptoms to complete hemodynamic collapse. These variations in initial symptoms and in the immediate and long term outcomes of this disease have impeded development of effective treatment strategies. Nine cynomolgus monkeys were inoculated with myocarditic strains of CVB. Virological studies performed up to 28 days post-inoculation demonstrated the development of neutralizing antibody in all animals, and the presence of CVB in plasma. High dose intravenous inoculation (n = 2) resulted in severe disseminated disease, while low dose intravenous (n = 6) or oral infection (1 animal) resulted in clinically unapparent infection. Transient, minor, echocardiographic abnormalities were noted in several animals, but no animals displayed signs of significant acute cardiac failure. Although viremia rapidly resolved, signs of myocardial inflammation and injury were observed in all animals at the time of necropsy, and CVB was detected in postmortem myocardial specimens up to 28 days PI. This non-human primate system replicates many features of illness in acute coxsackievirus myocarditis and demonstrates that myocardial involvement may be common in enteroviral infection; it may provide a model system for testing of treatment strategies for enteroviral infections and acute coxsackievirus myocarditis

NMFS / Interagency Working Group Evaluation of CITES Criteria and Guidelines.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: At present, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) criteria used to assess whether a population qualifies for inclusion in the CITES Appendices relate to (A) size of the population, (B) area of distribution of the population, and (C) declines in the size of the population. Numeric guidelines are provided as indicators of a small population (less than 5,000 individuals), a small subpopulation (less than 500 individuals), a restricted area of distribution for a population (less than 10,000 km2), a restricted area of distribution for a subpopula-tion (less than 500 km2), a high rate of decline (a decrease of 50% or more in total within 5 years or two generations whichever is longer or, for a small wild population, a decline of 20% or more in total within ten years or three generations whichever is longer), large fluctuations (population size or area of distribution varies widely, rapidly and frequently, with a variation greater than one order of magnitude), and a short-term fluctuation (one of two years or less). The Working Group discussed several broad issues of relevance to the CITES criteria and guidelines. These included the importance of the historical extent of decline versus the recent rate of decline; the utility and validity of incorporating relative population productivity into decline criteria; the utility of absolute numbers for defining small populations or small areas; the appropriateness of generation times as time frames for examining declines; the importance of the magnitude and frequency of fluctuations as factors affecting risk of extinction; and the overall utility of numeric thresh-olds or guidelines

Sticky Legacies: Persistence of State Constitutional Provisions

In this paper, we assess the evolution of 32 state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution over a 100+ year time period (1776-1907). We construct an original sectionlevel dataset containing the text of every section within a constitution for every year between the adoption of the state’s first constitution and 1907. We classify each section by topic and compare the content of each new constitution as well as the impact of amendments. With a subset of these data, we analyze the extent to which sections were added, deleted, modified and remained the same over time using a novel approach that relies on an edit distance measure to quantify the similarity between sections of two constitutional documents. We are also able to empirically evaluate the level of similarity of modified sections as new constitutions were adopted or alterations were made to an existing constitution. Finally, we determine which topic areas were subjected to the largest amount of change. We demonstrate that it is possible to systematically assess a large corpus of constitutional documents to test theories of institutional change, provide empirical support to existing qualitative accounts, and create operationalizations of concepts such as “stickiness” that are comparable across states and over time

Spectral signatures of photosynthesis I: Review of Earth organisms

Why do plants reflect in the green and have a 'red edge' in the red, and should extrasolar photosynthesis be the same? We provide: 1) a brief review of how photosynthesis works; 2) an overview of the diversity of photosynthetic organisms, their light harvesting systems, and environmental ranges; 3) a synthesis of photosynthetic surface spectral signatures; 4) evolutionary rationales for photosynthetic surface reflectance spectra with regard to utilization of photon energy and the planetary light environment. Given the surface incident photon flux density spectrum and resonance transfer in light harvesting, we propose some rules with regard to where photosynthetic pigments will peak in absorbance: a) the wavelength of peak incident photon flux; b) the longest available wavelength for core antenna or reaction center pigments; and c) the shortest wavelengths within an atmospheric window for accessory pigments. That plants absorb less green light may not be an inefficient legacy of evolutionary history, but may actually satisfy the above criteria.Comment: 69 pages, 7 figures, forthcoming in Astrobiology March 200

Prefrontal oscillations modulate the propagation of neuronal activity required for working memory

[EN] Cognition involves using attended information, maintained in working memory (WM), to guide action. During a cognitive task, a correct response requires flexible, selective gating so that only the appropriate information flows from WM to downstream effectors that carry out the response. In this work, we used biophysically-detailed modeling to explore the hypothesis that network oscillations in prefrontal cortex (PFC), leveraging local inhibition, can independently gate responses to items in WM. The key role of local inhibition was to control the period between spike bursts in the outputs, and to produce an oscillatory response no matter whether the WM item was maintained in an asynchronous or oscillatory state. We found that the WM item that induced an oscillatory population response in the PFC output layer with the shortest period between spike bursts was most reliably propagated. The network resonant frequency (i.e., the input frequency that produces the largest response) of the output layer can be flexibly tuned by varying the excitability of deep layer principal cells. Our model suggests that experimentally-observed modulation of PFC beta-frequency (15-30 Hz) and gamma -frequency (30-80 Hz) oscillations could leverage network resonance and local inhibition to govern the flexible routing of signals in service to cognitive processes like gating outputs from working memory and the selection of rule-based actions. Importantly, we show for the first time that nonspecific changes in deep layer excitability can tune the output gate's resonant frequency, enabling the specific selection of signals encoded by populations in asynchronous or fast oscillatory states. More generally, this represents a dynamic mechanism by which adjusting network excitability can govern the propagation of asynchronous and oscillatory signals throughout neocortex.This work was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office under award number ARO W911NF-12-R-0012-02 to N. K., the U.S. Office of Naval Research under award number ONR MURI N00014-16-1-2832 to M. H. and E. M., the National Institute of Mental Health under award number NIMH R37MH087027 to E. M., and The MIT Picower Institute Faculty Innovation Fund to E. M. We would like to acknowledge Joachim Hass and Michelle McCarthy for early discussions of our modeling results, as well as Andre Bastos and Mikael Lundqvist for discussions relating our modeling work to their experiments.Sherfey, J.; Ardid-Ramírez, JS.; Miller, EK.; Hasselmo, ME.; Kopell, NJ. (2020). Prefrontal oscillations modulate the propagation of neuronal activity required for working memory. 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Mechanisms of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in Corticostriatal Circuits 1: Computational Analysis. Cerebral Cortex, 22(3), 509-526. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhr114FRANK, M. J., LOUGHRY, B., & O’REILLY, R. C. (2001). Interactions between frontal cortex and basal ganglia in working memory: A computational model. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 1(2), 137-160. doi:10.3758/cabn.1.2.137Hasselmo, M. E., & Stern, C. E. (2018). A network model of behavioural performance in a rule learning task. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1744), 20170275. doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0275Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997). Long Short-Term Memory. Neural Computation, 9(8), 1735-1780. doi:10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735Kaski, S., & Kohonen, T. (1994). Winner-take-all networks for physiological models of competitive learning. Neural Networks, 7(6-7), 973-984. doi:10.1016/s0893-6080(05)80154-6Kerns, J. G., Cohen, J. 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Experiential education and outreach based on nearshore monitoring of the Elwha River restoration project

Nearshore monitoring of benthic habitats and the coastal environment following the Elwha River Restoration project has engaged students and citizens with coastal science and management issues. In the post-dam-removal period, the lessons learned will continue to be disseminated via a UW undergraduate course and an interactive digital map, both designed to engage students and communities in restoration science. The research-focused course developed at the UW Friday Harbor Labs has allowed us to engage diverse undergraduate students (and graduate teaching assistants) in the research process. The course integrates interdisciplinary lectures and workshops on data analysis and laboratory methods, with the research process; from proposal to oceanographic data collection to analysis to publication. The course provides opportunities for student creativity and leadership. Outcome tracking indicates that these undergraduate (and post-bac) students are generally attending graduate school at a high rate, and launching careers in education, coastal management, and other STEM fields. To engage a broader segment of the community and to support decision-making about large-scale coastal restoration projects, we have developed an interactive digital map that will be available on-line, and will also be piloted as a physical interpretive display at the Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, WA. The interactive digital map is designed to effectively tell the story of the Elwha restoration in the coastal environment through the compilation and display of multiple data sets, some of which have never before been publicly available. Ultimately, the result of long-term monitoring of the Elwha nearshore system will provide a better understanding of the effects of restoration activities, such as dam removal on benthic habitats, and this knowledge will be passed to future managers and citizens through educational and outreach activities that captivate and inspire a broad audience

Exchangeable zinc pool size at birth in Pakistani small for gestational age and appropriate for gestational age infants do not differ but are lower than in US infants

Objectives: Small for gestational age (SGA) infants are more susceptible to infectious morbidity and growth faltering compared to their appropriate for gestational age (AGA) counterparts. Zinc supplementation of SGA infants may be beneficial but the underlying susceptibility to zinc deficiency of SGA infants has not been examined.Methods: In a community-based, observational, longitudinal study in a peri-urban settlement of Karachi, Pakistan, we compared the size of the exchangeable zinc pools (EZPs) in term SGA and AGA infants at birth and at 6 months of age, hypothesizing that the EZP would be lower in the SGA group. To measure EZP size, a zinc stable isotope was intravenously administered within 48 hours of birth (n = 17 and 22) at 6 months (n = 11 and 14) in SGA and AGA infants, respectively. Isotopic enrichment in urine was used to determine EZP.Results: No significant difference was detected in the mean (±standard deviation) EZP between SGA and AGA infants at birth, with values of 9.8 ± 3.5 and 10.1 ± 4.1 mg/kg, respectively (P = 0.86), or at 6 months. Longitudinal EZP measurements demonstrated a significant decline in EZP relative to body weight in both groups at 6 months (P \u3c 0.001). Mean EZP (adjusted for body weight) size at birth for the combined Pakistani groups was significantly lower than AGA infants at birth in the United States (P = 0.017).Conclusions: These results did not support a difference in zinc endowment between SGA and AGA Pakistani infants. They, however, do suggest lower in utero zinc transfer to the fetus in a setting where poor maternal nutritional status may confer a high susceptibility to postnatal zinc deficiency