Embracing the Next Generation of Interpreters: A Call to Action for the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf

The founding members of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) felt strongly about recruiting, training, and confirming the competence of interpreters. As a result, for over 50 years RID has been the national leader for the profession of ASL-English interpreting. At the same time, the next generation of American Sign Language (ASL)-English interpreters continue to face challenges pertaining to pre-service education, practicum experiences, and professional support after graduation as they enter the field. This article describes these challenges and offers suggested recommendations toward proactive organizational investment in this next generation of interpreters that will improve the quality of services provided to stakeholders and empower a stronger network of new professionals connected to and engaged in the preservation and furtherance of RID’s vital legacy

Short-term change in growth of uterine leiomyoma: tumor growth spurts

To describe the short-term changes in growth of uterine leiomyomata (fibroids)

Mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services. Urban ecosystems

Action 5 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 requires member states to Map and Assess the state of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES). This report provides guidance for mapping and assessment of urban ecosystems. The MAES urban pilot is a collaboration between the European Commission, the European Environment Agency, volunteering Member States and cities, and stakeholders. Its ultimate goal is to deliver a knowledge base for policy and management of urban ecosystems by analysing urban green infrastructure, condition of urban ecosystems and ecosystem services. This report presents guidance for mapping urban ecosystems and includes an indicator framework to assess the condition of urban ecosystems and urban ecosystem services. The scientific framework of mapping and assessment is designed to support in particular urban planning policy and policy on green infrastructure at urban, metropolitan and regional scales. The results are based on the following different sources of information: a literature survey of 54 scientific articles, an online-survey (on urban ecosystems, related policies and planning instruments and with participation of 42 cities), ten case studies (Portugal: Cascais, Oeiras, Lisbon; Italy: Padua, Trento, Rome; The Netherlands: Utrecht; Poland: Poznań; Spain: Barcelona; Norway: Oslo), and a two-day expert workshop. The case studies constituted the core of the MAES urban pilot. They provided real examples and applications of how mapping and assessment can be organized to support policy; on top, they provided the necessary expertise to select a set of final indicators for condition and ecosystem services. Urban ecosystems or cities are defined here as socio-ecological systems which are composed of green infrastructure and built infrastructure. Urban green infrastructure (GI) is understood in this report as the multi-functional network of urban green spaces situated within the boundary of the urban ecosystem. Urban green spaces are the structural components of urban GI. This study has shown that there is a large scope for urban ecosystem assessments. Firstly, urban policies increasingly use urban green infrastructure and nature-based solutions in their planning process. Secondly, an increasing amount of data at multiple spatial scales is becoming available to support these policies, to provide a baseline, and to compare or benchmark cities with respect to the extent and management of the urban ecosystem. Concrete examples are given on how to delineate urban ecosystems, how to choose an appropriate spatial scale, and how to map urban ecosystems based on a combination of national or European datasets (including Urban Atlas) and locally collected information (e.g., location of trees). Also examples of typologies for urban green spaces are presented. This report presents an indicator framework which is composed of indicators to assess for urban ecosystem condition and for urban ecosystem services. These are the result of a rigorous selection process and ensure consistent mapping and assessment across Europe. The MAES urban pilot will continue with work on the interface between research and policy. The framework presented in this report needs to be tested and validated across Europe, e.g. on its applicability at city scale, on how far the methodology for measuring ecosystem condition and ecosystem service delivery in urban areas can be used to assess urban green infrastructure and nature-based solutions

A large scale hearing loss screen reveals an extensive unexplored genetic landscape for auditory dysfunction

The developmental and physiological complexity of the auditory system is likely reflected in the underlying set of genes involved in auditory function. In humans, over 150 non-syndromic loci have been identified, and there are more than 400 human genetic syndromes with a hearing loss component. Over 100 non-syndromic hearing loss genes have been identified in mouse and human, but we remain ignorant of the full extent of the genetic landscape involved in auditory dysfunction. As part of the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium, we undertook a hearing loss screen in a cohort of 3006 mouse knockout strains. In total, we identify 67 candidate hearing loss genes. We detect known hearing loss genes, but the vast majority, 52, of the candidate genes were novel. Our analysis reveals a large and unexplored genetic landscape involved with auditory function

The Fourteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment

The fourth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) has been in operation since July 2014. This paper describes the second data release from this phase, and the fourteenth from SDSS overall (making this, Data Release Fourteen or DR14). This release makes public data taken by SDSS-IV in its first two years of operation (July 2014-2016). Like all previous SDSS releases, DR14 is cumulative, including the most recent reductions and calibrations of all data taken by SDSS since the first phase began operations in 2000. New in DR14 is the first public release of data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS); the first data from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory (APO) Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE-2), including stellar parameter estimates from an innovative data driven machine learning algorithm known as "The Cannon"; and almost twice as many data cubes from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey as were in the previous release (N = 2812 in total). This paper describes the location and format of the publicly available data from SDSS-IV surveys. We provide references to the important technical papers describing how these data have been taken (both targeting and observation details) and processed for scientific use. The SDSS website (www.sdss.org) has been updated for this release, and provides links to data downloads, as well as tutorials and examples of data use. SDSS-IV is planning to continue to collect astronomical data until 2020, and will be followed by SDSS-V.Comment: SDSS-IV collaboration alphabetical author data release paper. DR14 happened on 31st July 2017. 19 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by ApJS on 28th Nov 2017 (this is the "post-print" and "post-proofs" version; minor corrections only from v1, and most of errors found in proofs corrected

Biochemical evidence for an alternate pathway in N-linked glycoprotein biosynthesis

Asparagine-linked glycosylation is a complex protein modification conserved among all three domains of life. Herein we report the in vitro analysis of N-linked glycosylation from the methanogenic archaeon Methanococcus voltae. Using a suite of synthetic and semisynthetic substrates, we show that AglK initiates N-linked glycosylation in M. voltae through the formation of α-linked dolichyl monophosphate N-acetylglucosamine, which contrasts with the polyprenyl diphosphate intermediates that feature in both eukaryotes and bacteria. Notably, AglK has high sequence homology to dolichyl phosphate β-glucosyltransferases, including Alg5 in eukaryotes, suggesting a common evolutionary origin. The combined action of the first two enzymes, AglK and AglC, afforded an α-linked dolichyl monophosphate glycan that serves as a competent substrate for the archaeal oligosaccharyl transferase AglB. These studies provide what is to our knowledge the first biochemical evidence revealing that, despite the apparent similarity of the overall pathways, there are actually two general strategies to achieve N-linked glycoproteins across the domains of life.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant GM039334

Explaining Institutional Change: Why Elected Politicians Implement Direct Democracy

In existing models of direct democratic institutions, the median voter benefits, but representative politicians are harmed since their policy choices can be overridden. This is a puzzle, since representative politicians were instrumental in creating these institutions. I build a model of direct democracy that explains why a representative might benefit from tying his or her own hands in this way. The key features are (1) that voters are uncertain about their representative's preferences; (2) that direct and representative elections are complementary ways for voters to control outcomes. The model shows that some politicians benefit from the introduction of direct democracy, since they are more likely to survive representative elections: direct democracy credibly prevents politicians from realising extreme outcomes. Historical evidence from the introduction of the initiative, referendum and recall in America broadly supports the theory, which also explains two empirical results that have puzzled scholars: legislators are trusted less, but reelected more, in US states with direct democracy. I conclude by discussing the potential for incomplete information and signaling models to improve our understanding of institutional change more generally

Metabolic Reconstruction for Metagenomic Data and Its Application to the Human Microbiome

Microbial communities carry out the majority of the biochemical activity on the planet, and they play integral roles in processes including metabolism and immune homeostasis in the human microbiome. Shotgun sequencing of such communities' metagenomes provides information complementary to organismal abundances from taxonomic markers, but the resulting data typically comprise short reads from hundreds of different organisms and are at best challenging to assemble comparably to single-organism genomes. Here, we describe an alternative approach to infer the functional and metabolic potential of a microbial community metagenome. We determined the gene families and pathways present or absent within a community, as well as their relative abundances, directly from short sequence reads. We validated this methodology using a collection of synthetic metagenomes, recovering the presence and abundance both of large pathways and of small functional modules with high accuracy. We subsequently applied this method, HUMAnN, to the microbial communities of 649 metagenomes drawn from seven primary body sites on 102 individuals as part of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP). This provided a means to compare functional diversity and organismal ecology in the human microbiome, and we determined a core of 24 ubiquitously present modules. Core pathways were often implemented by different enzyme families within different body sites, and 168 functional modules and 196 metabolic pathways varied in metagenomic abundance specifically to one or more niches within the microbiome. These included glycosaminoglycan degradation in the gut, as well as phosphate and amino acid transport linked to host phenotype (vaginal pH) in the posterior fornix. An implementation of our methodology is available at http://huttenhower.sph.harvard.edu/human​n. This provides a means to accurately and efficiently characterize microbial metabolic pathways and functional modules directly from high-throughput sequencing reads, enabling the determination of community roles in the HMP cohort and in future metagenomic studies.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (U54HG004968