Child Care in the Postwelfare Reform Era: Analysis and Strategies for Advocates

Adequate child care is essential to enable poor women to support their families with work outside the home. In 1994 the U.S. General Accounting Office found that offering a child care subsidy to poor mothers increased the likelihood by 15 percent that the mothers would work. An Illinois study found that 20 percent of parents who left public assistance for work returned to assistance because of child care problems. In Minnesota a study found that lack of child care caused 14 percent of parents awaiting child care subsidies to leave their jobs and rely on public assistance. These studies confirm what advocates know: Poor parents, like other parents, cannot work without child care. The goal of this article is to assist advocates in helping their clients access quality child care and assuring that they do not lose needed public assistance when child care is unavailable

Non-orientable link cobordisms and torsion order in Floer homologies

We use unoriented versions of instanton and knot Floer homology to prove inequalities involving the Euler characteristic and the number of local maxima appearing in unorientable cobordisms, which mirror results of a recent paper by Juhasz, Miller, and Zemke concerning orientable cobordisms. Most of the subtlety in our argument lies in the fact that maps for non-orientable cobordisms require more complicated decorations than their orientable counterparts. We introduce unoriented versions of the band unknotting number and the refined cobordism distance and apply our results to give bounds on these based on the torsion orders of the Floer homologies. Finally, we show that the difference between the unoriented refined cobordism distance of a knot K from the unknot and the non-orientable slice genus of K can be arbitrarily large

Computational approaches to Poisson traces associated to finite subgroups of Sp(2n,C)

We reduce the computation of Poisson traces on quotients of symplectic vector spaces by finite subgroups of symplectic automorphisms to a finite one, by proving several results which bound the degrees of such traces as well as the dimension in each degree. This applies more generally to traces on all polynomial functions which are invariant under invariant Hamiltonian flow. We implement these approaches by computer together with direct computation for infinite families of groups, focusing on complex reflection and abelian subgroups of GL(2,C) < Sp(4,C), Coxeter groups of rank <= 3 and A_4, B_4=C_4, and D_4, and subgroups of SL(2,C).Comment: 37 pages, 6 figure

Psychosocial work characteristics of personal care and service occupations: a process for developing meaningful measures for a multiethnic workforce

Background and objectives: Despite their rapid increase in number, workers in personal care and service occupations are underrepresented in research on psychosocial work characteristics and occupational health. Some of the research challenges stem from the high proportion of immigrants in these occupations. Language barriers, low literacy, and cultural differences as well as their nontraditional work setting (i.e., providing service for one person in his/her home) make generic questionnaire measures inadequate for capturing salient aspects of personal care and service work. This study presents strategies for (1) identifying psychosocial work characteristics of home care workers that may affect their occupational safety and health and (2) creating survey measures that overcome barriers posed by language, low literacy, and cultural differences. Design and results: We pursued these aims in four phases: (Phase 1) Six focus groups to identify the psychosocial work characteristics affecting the home care workers' occupational safety and health; (Phase 2) Selection of questionnaire items (i.e., questions or statements to assess the target construct) and first round of cognitive interviews (n = 30) to refine the items in an iterative process; (Phase 3) Item revision and second round of cognitive interviews (n = 11); (Phase 4) Quantitative pilot test to ensure the scales' reliability and validity across three language groups (English, Spanish, and Chinese; total n = 404). Analysis of the data from each phase informed the nature of subsequent phases. This iterative process ensured that survey measures not only met the reliability and validity criteria across groups, but were also meaningful to home care workers. Conclusion: This complex process is necessary when conducting research with nontraditional and multilingual worker populations.Peer Reviewe

The identification and neurochemical characterization of central neurons that target parasympathetic preganglionic neurons involved in the regulation of choroidal blood flow in the rat eye using pseudorabies virus, immunolabeling and conventional pathway tracing methods

The choroidal blood vessels of the eye provide the main vascular support to the outer retina. These blood vessels are under parasympathetic vasodilatory control via input from the pterygopalatine ganglion (PPG), which in turn receives its preganglionic input from the superior salivatory nucleus (SSN) of the hindbrain. The present study characterized the central neurons projecting to the SSN neurons innervating choroidal PPG neurons, using pathway tracing and immunolabeling. In the initial set of studies, minute injections of the Bartha strain of the retrograde transneuronal tracer pseudorabies virus (PRV) were made into choroid in rats in which the superior cervical ganglia had been excised (to prevent labeling of sympathetic circuitry). Diverse neuronal populations beyond the choroidal part of ipsilateral SSN showed transneuronal labeling, which notably included the parvocellular part of the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN), the periaqueductal gray, the raphe magnus (RaM), the B3 region of the pons, A5, the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS), the rostral ventrolateral medulla (RVLM), and the intermediate reticular nucleus of the medulla. The PRV+ neurons were located in the parts of these cell groups that are responsive to systemic blood pressure signals and involved in systemic blood pressure regulation by the sympathetic nervous system. In a second set of studies using PRV labeling, conventional pathway tracing, and immunolabeling, we found that PVN neurons projecting to SSN tended to be oxytocinergic and glutamatergic, RaM neurons projecting to SSN were serotonergic, and NTS neurons projecting to SSN were glutamatergic. Our results suggest that blood pressure and volume signals that drive sympathetic constriction of the systemic vasculature may also drive parasympathetic vasodilation of the choroidal vasculature, and may thereby contribute to choroidal baroregulation during low blood pressure

Database resources of the National Center for Biotechnology Information

In addition to maintaining the GenBank® nucleic acid sequence database, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides analysis and retrieval resources for the data in GenBank and other biological data made available through the NCBI web site. NCBI resources include Entrez, the Entrez Programming Utilities, MyNCBI, PubMed, PubMed Central, Entrez Gene, the NCBI Taxonomy Browser, BLAST, BLAST Link (BLink), Electronic PCR, OrfFinder, Spidey, Splign, Reference Sequence, UniGene, HomoloGene, ProtEST, dbMHC, dbSNP, Cancer Chromosomes, Entrez Genomes and related tools, the Map Viewer, Model Maker, Evidence Viewer, Trace Archive, Sequence Read Archive, Retroviral Genotyping Tools, HIV-1/Human Protein Interaction Database, Gene Expression Omnibus, Entrez Probe, GENSAT, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals, the Molecular Modeling Database, the Conserved Domain Database, the Conserved Domain Architecture Retrieval Tool, Biosystems, Peptidome, Protein Clusters and the PubChem suite of small molecule databases. Augmenting many of the web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. All these resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov