Race, Property, and Citizenship

The racial wealth gap is stunning. The net worth of an average white family is nearly ten times greater than that of an African-American family. A 2017 Report finds that, for African-Americans, today’s economy is an extractive one; if existing trends continue, the median African-American family will have a net worth of zero by the middle of the twenty-first century. This article examines these trends in terms of the relationship between race, property, and citizenship. American democracy has long celebrated economic independence as a desired element of citizenship, forging reciprocal bonds between state efforts to promote and protect property ownership and property owners’ greater investment in community and political stability. African-American have long been excluded from these benefits and, in the process, have never fully enjoyed the benefits of American citizenship. The result creates increased vulnerability, not just to white supremacy, but to economic exploitation. In the modern era, this predation has made home ownership, higher education loans, and marriage—the traditional pathways into middle class status—dramatically riskier for African-Americans than for whites. This article shows how the African-American community’s lack of political clout contributes to the lack of regulation and enforcement that allows racially motivated predators to act with impunity, undermining the rule of law and perpetuating racial subordination

The Price of Exit

The price of exit influences the terms of intimate relationships—and constitutes an important factor in distinguishing committed from contingent relationships. With or without legal recognition of the relationship itself, the dissolution of an intimate relationship requires disentangling any joint assets, determining who stays and who leaves a joint residence, and arranging the terms of continuing involvement with any children. Marriage establishes bright-line rules for these determinations and a formal legal process for administering them. Unmarried relationships involve different default terms and no automatic legal process for resolving the terms of exit. The terms of exit, however, may frame relationship choices. This Article will argue that, inside or outside of marriage, the critical choice couples make is between committed relationships, with a high degree of financial and emotional interdependence, and contingent relationships, in which the parties keep their identities, assets, and arrangements separate. Committed relationships inevitably entail high exit costs as the practicalities of splitting shared assets or determining the new terms for emotionally charged relationships such as childrearing can exact a high toll. Contingent relationships in contrast are easier to end precisely because of their contingent nature; couples often see each determination, whether about how to share rent or who picks the child up after school, as a separate transaction. Perceptions about the price of exit often shape the nature relationship choices and while today’s relationships exist on a continuum between those which are so interdependent that the parties effectively function as one, and so independent that an intimate couple may have no greater entanglements than college roommates, the distinctions between committed and contingent relationships often fall on the fault lines of class, race, and gender. The typical unmarried relationship in reported decisions is a committed one, in which the parties have substantial assets and a degree of interdependence that makes existing law appear inequitable. These relationships differ, however, from the more numerous but less visible contingent relationships in which the parties have relatively few assets and a less equal and less intertwined assumption of relationship responsibilities. This Article, prepared for a symposium on nonmarriage, explores the price of exit as an analytical factor. By examining how the cost of exit influences family decision-making, the Article remakes understandings about the law that governs nonmarriage. Expectations about exit profoundly influence decision-making concerning partnering, regardless of socioeconomic class, yet expectations often differ by socioeconomic class. The legal frameworks applicable to conventional married families presume interdependence and shared parenting, which reflect terms that the couples would presumably choose themselves. These terms, however, are ill-suited to many nonmarital families. Accordingly, the Article concludes that conflicting norms, particularly in the communities in which cohabitation is most common, complicates the imposition of uniform rules that presume dependency—or the obligations associated with it

Three-Dimensional Molecular Modeling of Bovine Caseins

Three-dimensional (3 -D) structures derived from X-ray crystallography are important in elucidating structure- function relationships for many proteins. However, not all food proteins can be crystallized. The casei ns of bovine milk are one class of non-crysta11izable proteins (a, 1-, K-, and /3-). The complete primary and partial secondary structures of these proteins are known, but homologous proteins of known crystallographic structure cannot be found. Therefore , sequence based predictions of secondary structure were made and adjusted to conform with data from Raman and Fourier-transformed infra- red spectroscopy. With this information, 3-D structures for these caseins were built using the Sybyl molecular modeling programs. The K-casein structure contained two anti-parallel P-sheets which are predominately hydrophobic. The a,1-casein structure also contained a hydrophobic domain composed of .B-sheets as well as a hydrophilic domain ; these two are connected by a segment of ex- helix . Both the K- and a,1-caseins represent unrefined models in that they have been manipulated to remove unrealistic bonds but have not been energy-mini mized . Nevertheless the models account for the tendency of these caseins to associate. The .B-casein model appears to follow a divergent structural pattern. When subjected to energy minimization, it yielded a loosely packed structure with an ax.ial ratio of 2 to I, a hydrophobic C-terminal domain , and a hydrophilic N-terminal end. All three casein structures showed good agreement with literature concerning their global biochemical and physico-chemical properties

Cortisol relates to executive functioning for children attending Head Start preschool

Background: Approximately 15 million children in the United States grow up in poverty circumstances (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2018), as 24% of all children under the age of 6 live in households with income levels classified as below the federal poverty guideline (Jiang et al., 2016). Recent research has highlighted the impact of early childhood poverty circumstances on physiological systems that respond to stress (Lupien et al., 2001), with implications for typical development in the prefrontal cortex (Hair et al., 2015) and related executive functioning (Blair & Raver, 2016). Method: The present study investigated relations among various components of teacher-reported executive functioning (BRIEF; Gioia et al., 2000) and total cortisol output of 318 young children (ages 3-5 years) across a preschool day. Salivary cortisol was sampled in duplicate at 4 times across 2 days in the beginning of the school year, resulting in a total of 16 samples per child. Results and Implications: We hypothesized that higher cortisol levels, likely attributable to poverty-stress (Blair et al., 2011) across the preschool day would relate to greater difficulties in teacher-reported EF, controlling for child age, sex, and family income. A multiple regression model that aligned with this hypothesis predicted BRIEF, General Composite Score with statistical significance. Moreover, child salivary cortisol across the preschool day predicted teacher-reported executive functioning for each domain score of the BRIEF. Implications concern understanding the impact of stress on executive functioning in the preschool classroom and promoting positive outcomes for children facing poverty risk

Hydro-PE: gridded datasets of historical and future Penman-Monteith potential evaporation for the United Kingdom

We present two new potential evaporation datasets for the United Kingdom: a historical dataset, Hydro-PE HadUKGrid, which is derived from the HadUK-Grid gridded observed meteorology (1969&ndash;2021); and a future dataset, Hydro-PE UKCP18 RCM, which is derived from UKCP18 regional climate projections (1980&ndash;2080). Both datasets are suitable for hydrological modelling, and provide Penman-Monteith potential evapotranspiration parameterised for short grass, with and without a correction for interception on days with rainfall. The potential evapotranspiration calculations have been formulated to closely follow the methodology of the existing Meteorological Office Rainfall and Evaporation Calculation System (MORECS) potential evapotranspiration, which has historically been widely used by hydrological modellers in the United Kingdom. The two datasets have been created using the same methodology, to allow seamless modelling from past to future. Hydro-PE HadUK-Grid shows good agreement with MORECS in much of the United Kingdom, although Hydro-PE HadUK Grid is higher in the mountainous regions of Scotland and Wales. This is due to differences in the underlying meteorology, in particular the wind speed, which are themselves due to the different spatial scales of the data. Hydro-PE HadUK-Grid can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5285/9275ab7e-6e93-42bc-8e72-59c98d409deb (Brown et al., 2022) and Hydro-PE UKCP18 RCM can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5285/eb5d9dc4-13bb-44c7-9bf8-c5980fcf52a4 (Robinson et al., 2021).</p

Incidence of necrotising enterocolitis before and after introducing routine prophylactic Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium probiotics

Objective: To compare rates of necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), late-onset sepsis, and mortality in 5-year epochs before and after implementation of routine daily multistrain probiotics administration in high-risk neonates. Design: Single-centre retrospective observational study over the 10-year period from 1 January 2008 to 31 December 2017. Setting: Level 3 neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, UK. Patients: Preterm neonates at high risk of NEC: Admitted to NICU within 3 days of birth at <32 weeks' gestation or at 32-36 weeks' gestation and of birth weight <1500 g. Intervention: Prior to 1 January 2013 probiotics were not used. Thereafter, dual-species Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium bifidum combination probiotics were routinely administered daily to high-risk neonates; from April 2016 triple-species probiotics (L.acidophilus,B.bifidum, and B.longum subspecies infantis) were used. Main outcome measures: Incidence of NEC (modified Bell's stage 2a or greater), late-onset sepsis, and mortality. Results: Rates of NEC fell from 7.5% (35/469 neonates) in the pre-implementation epoch to 3.1% (16/513 neonates) in the routine probiotics epoch (adjusted sub-hazard ratio=0.44, 95% CI 0.23 to 0.85, p=0.014). The more than halving of NEC rates after probiotics introduction was independent of any measured covariates, including breast milk feeding rates. Cases of late-onset sepsis fell from 106/469 (22.6%) to 59/513 (11.5%) (p<0.0001), and there was no episode of sepsis due to Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium. All-cause mortality also fell in the routine probiotics epoch, from 67/469 (14.3%) to 47/513 (9.2%), although this was not statistically significant after multivariable adjustment (adjusted sub-hazard ratio=0.74, 95% CI 0.49 to 1.12, p=0.155). Conclusions: Administration of multispecies Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium probiotics has been associated with a significantly decreased risk of NEC and late-onset sepsis in our neonatal unit, and no safety issues. Our data are consistent with routine use of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium combination probiotics having a beneficial effect on NEC prevention in very preterm neonates