Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting the Research on Campaign Spending and Citizen Initiatives

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail. We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004. We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have strong, statistically significant, and countervailing effects. We confirm this finding by looking at time series data from early polling on a subset of these measures. Both analyses show that spending in favor of citizen initiatives substantially increases their chances of passage, just as opposition spending decreases this likelihood

Ancillary Therapy and Supportive Care of Chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease: National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Project on Criteria for Clinical Trials in Chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease: V. Ancillary Therapy and Supportive Care Working Group Report

AbstractThe Ancillary Therapy and Supportive Care Working Group had 3 goals: (1) to establish guidelines for ancillary therapy and supportive care in chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), including treatment for symptoms and recommendations for patient education, preventive measures, and appropriate follow-up; (2) to provide guidelines for the prevention and management of infections and other common complications of treatment for chronic GVHD; and (3) to highlight the areas with the greatest need for clinical research. The definition of “ancillary therapy and supportive care” embraces the most frequent immunosuppressive or anti-inflammatory interventions used with topical intent and any other interventions directed at organ-specific control of symptoms or complications resulting from GVHD and its therapy. Also included in the definition are educational, preventive, and psychosocial interventions with this same objective. Recommendations are organized according to the strength and quality of evidence supporting them and cover the most commonly involved organs, including the skin, mouth, female genital tract, eyes, gastrointestinal tract, and lungs. Recommendations are provided for prevention of infections, osteoporosis, and steroid myopathy and management of neurocognitive and psychosocial adverse effects related to chronic GVHD. Optimal care of patients with chronic GVHD often requires a multidisciplinary approach

Greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural food production to supply Indian diets: Implications for climate change mitigation

Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally. The growing global population is putting pressure on agricultural production systems that aim to secure food production while minimising GHG emissions. In this study, the GHG emissions associated with the production of major food commodities in India are calculated using the Cool Farm Tool. GHG emissions, based on farm management for major crops (including cereals like wheat and rice, pulses, potatoes, fruits and vegetables) and livestock-based products (milk, eggs, chicken and mutton meat), are quantified and compared. Livestock and rice production were found to be the main sources of GHG emissions in Indian agriculture with a country average of 5.65 kg CO2eq kg-1 rice, 45.54 kg CO2eq kg-1 mutton meat and 2.4 kg CO2eq kg-1 milk. Production of cereals (except rice), fruits and vegetables in India emits comparatively less GHGs with <1 kg CO2eq kg-1 product. These findings suggest that a shift towards dietary patterns with greater consumption of animal source foods could greatly increase GHG emissions from Indian agriculture. A range of mitigation options are available that could reduce emissions from current levels and may be compatible with increased future food production and consumption demands in India

Learning a Prior on Regulatory Potential from eQTL Data

Genome-wide RNA expression data provide a detailed view of an organism's biological state; hence, a dataset measuring expression variation between genetically diverse individuals (eQTL data) may provide important insights into the genetics of complex traits. However, with data from a relatively small number of individuals, it is difficult to distinguish true causal polymorphisms from the large number of possibilities. The problem is particularly challenging in populations with significant linkage disequilibrium, where traits are often linked to large chromosomal regions containing many genes. Here, we present a novel method, Lirnet, that automatically learns a regulatory potential for each sequence polymorphism, estimating how likely it is to have a significant effect on gene expression. This regulatory potential is defined in terms of “regulatory features”—including the function of the gene and the conservation, type, and position of genetic polymorphisms—that are available for any organism. The extent to which the different features influence the regulatory potential is learned automatically, making Lirnet readily applicable to different datasets, organisms, and feature sets. We apply Lirnet both to the human HapMap eQTL dataset and to a yeast eQTL dataset and provide statistical and biological results demonstrating that Lirnet produces significantly better regulatory programs than other recent approaches. We demonstrate in the yeast data that Lirnet can correctly suggest a specific causal sequence variation within a large, linked chromosomal region. In one example, Lirnet uncovered a novel, experimentally validated connection between Puf3—a sequence-specific RNA binding protein—and P-bodies—cytoplasmic structures that regulate translation and RNA stability—as well as the particular causative polymorphism, a SNP in Mkt1, that induces the variation in the pathway

The Role of the Multiple Banded Antigen of Ureaplasma parvum in Intra-Amniotic Infection: Major Virulence Factor or Decoy?

The multiple banded antigen (MBA) is a predicted virulence factor of Ureaplasma species. Antigenic variation of the MBA is a potential mechanism by which ureaplasmas avoid immune recognition and cause chronic infections of the upper genital tract of pregnant women. We tested whether the MBA is involved in the pathogenesis of intra-amniotic infection and chorioamnionitis by injecting virulent or avirulent-derived ureaplasma clones (expressing single MBA variants) into the amniotic fluid of pregnant sheep. At 55 days of gestation pregnant ewes (n = 20) received intra-amniotic injections of virulent-derived or avirulent-derived U. parvum serovar 6 strains (2×104 CFU), or 10B medium (n = 5). Amniotic fluid was collected every two weeks post-infection and fetal tissues were collected at the time of surgical delivery of the fetus (140 days of gestation). Whilst chronic colonisation was established in the amniotic fluid of animals infected with avirulent-derived and virulent-derived ureaplasmas, the severity of chorioamnionitis and fetal inflammation was not different between these groups (p>0.05). MBA size variants (32–170 kDa) were generated in vivo in amniotic fluid samples from both the avirulent and virulent groups, whereas in vitro antibody selection experiments led to the emergence of MBA-negative escape variants in both strains. Anti-ureaplasma IgG antibodies were detected in the maternal serum of animals from the avirulent (40%) and virulent (55%) groups, and these antibodies correlated with increased IL-1β, IL-6 and IL-8 expression in chorioamnion tissue (p<0.05). We demonstrate that ureaplasmas are capable of MBA phase variation in vitro; however, ureaplasmas undergo MBA size variation in vivo, to potentially prevent eradication by the immune response. Size variation of the MBA did not correlate with the severity of chorioamnionitis. Nonetheless, the correlation between a maternal humoral response and the expression of chorioamnion cytokines is a novel finding. This host response may be important in the pathogenesis of inflammation-mediated adverse pregnancy outcomes

Investigation of the splitting of quark and gluon jets

The splitting processes in identified quark and gluon jets are investigated using longitudinal and transverse observables. The jets are selected from symmetric three-jet events measured in Z decays with the Delphi detector in 1991-1994. Gluon jets are identified using heavy quark anti-tagging. Scaling violations in identified gluon jets are observed for the first time. The scale energy dependence of the gluon fragmentation function is found to be about two times larger than for the corresponding quark jets, consistent with the QCD expectation TeX . The primary splitting of gluons and quarks into subjets agrees with fragmentation models and, for specific regions of the jet resolution TeX , with NLLA calculations. The maximum of the ratio of the primary subjet splittings in quark and gluon jets is TeX . Due to non-perturbative effects, the data are below the expectation at small TeX . The transition from the perturbative to the non-perturbative domain appears at smaller TeX for quark jets than for gluon jets. Combined with the observed behaviour of the higher rank splittings, this explains the relatively small multiplicity ratio between gluon and quark jets