Managing the Regulatory State: The Experience of the Bush Administration

This Article traces the history of Presidential management of the regulatory state up to the administration of President George W. Bush. It focuses on the latter\u27s implementation of smarter regulation, an approach to regulation based on unfunded mandates on the private sector implemented through the Office of Management and Budget, an organization within the Executive Office of the President. It finds cost-benefit analysis an essential, yet often neglected, tool for implementing efficient and effective regulations. It concludes the policies promoted under President Bush\u27s OMB have effectively cut costs by streamlining the rule-making process and discouraging adopting new federal rules, but cautions there is still a sea of overlapping regulations and conflict over turf among agencies causing the administrative state to steadily rise in cost

Aging, Emotion, Attention, and Binding in the Taboo Stroop Task: Data and Theories.

How does aging impact relations between emotion, memory, and attention? To address this question, young and older adults named the font colors of taboo and neutral words, some of which recurred in the same font color or screen location throughout two color-naming experiments. The results indicated longer color-naming response times (RTs) for taboo than neutral base-words (taboo Stroop interference); better incidental recognition of colors and locations consistently associated with taboo versus neutral words (taboo context-memory enhancement); and greater speed-up in color-naming RTs with repetition of color-consistent than color-inconsistent taboo words, but no analogous speed-up with repetition of location-consistent or location-inconsistent taboo words (the consistency type by repetition interaction for taboo words). All three phenomena remained constant with aging, consistent with the transmission deficit hypothesis and binding theory, where familiar emotional words trigger age-invariant reactions for prioritizing the binding of contextual features to the source of emotion. Binding theory also accurately predicted the interaction between consistency type and repetition for taboo words. However, one or more aspects of these phenomena failed to support the inhibition deficit hypothesis, resource capacity theory, or socio-emotional selectivity theory. We conclude that binding theory warrants further test in a range of paradigms, and that relations between aging and emotion, memory, and attention may depend on whether the task and stimuli trigger fast-reaction, involuntary binding processes, as in the taboo Stroop paradigm

STEM Inqueery: How Communion and Femininity Affects LGBTQ Individuals’ Belonging in STEM that Affects Their Motivation to Pursue STEM

Despite the growth in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in the United States, only 60% of STEM majors complete their degrees. Although STEM is stereotyped as a cis (same gender as birth), straight male, agentic (self-focused), and not communal (other-oriented) field, the inclusion of communion in STEM boosts STEM motivation. Since LGBTQ students highly value communion and LGB(T)Q students are less likely than non-LGB(T)Q students to stay in STEM, we explored whether LGBTQ individuals’ desire for communal opportunities or feminine gender expression shapes their belonging or expectations for success in STEM which in turn affects their (future) motivation to pursue STEM. We collected data from 204 participants (125 non-LGBTQ women, 79 LGBTQ individuals) at University of North Florida. For LGBTQ individuals, their feminine gender expression negatively affected their belonging in STEM, which positively affected their (future) motivation to pursue STEM. While for non-LGBTQ women and LGBTQ individuals, perceived communal opportunities within STEM positively affected expectations for success in STEM, and subsequently positively affected their (future) motivation to pursue STEM. In conclusion, feminine expression was only a factor for LGBTQ individuals, not non-LGBTQ women, and only with the belonging path; communal opportunities was only predictive for the expectations for success path. We are going to explore this model in our second study. Audio Playe

A meta-analytic review of play therapy with emphasis on outcomes measures

A meta-analysis of 100 studies of outcomes of play therapy interventions was conducted to determine overall effect of intervention. Different from the Bratton, Ray, Rhine, and Jones (2005), but more consistent with the Lin and Bratton (2015), findings, there was a significant moderate effect for play therapy interventions across all outcomes (d = .44). When 4 studies with aberrantly large effects were removed, this effect was d = .36. These moderate effects are consistent with other meta-analyses that find lower effect sizes for nonbehavioral interventions. Overall study quality was poor with no studies meeting the criteria of randomized control trials. Research on play therapy interventions also does not use diagnostic criteria as part of study inclusion, thus preventing play therapy interventions from being considered as empirically supported treatments. Meta-analytic findings differed by type of measure used, with measures of family functioning/relationships finding larger results than other types of measures. There was not strong consistency in measures used across the studies, with only a few measures being used across more than 1 or 2 studies. Of the more frequently used measures, the Measurement of Empathy in Adult Child Interaction (MEACI) resulted in much larger effects than other measures used, and should be further evaluated in terms of appropriate interpretation and use. Effect sizes also differed based on the reporting source, with teachers tending to rate lower impacts of treatment than other reporters

STEM Inqueery: How Belonging in STEM Might Differ Depending on LGBTQ Identities and Identity Openness

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) studies have investigated gender (women versus men; Kim et al., 2018), race (Latinx and Black; Unfried et al., 2015), and culture differences (Asian versus American; Brown et al., 2018); however, few studies have looked at the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community (Stout & Wright, 2016). STEM has been stereotyped as a cis (same gender as birth) straight male field (Miller et al., 2020); STEM is viewed as an agentic (self-focused, achievement-oriented) field and lacking communal (other-oriented) opportunities (Diekman et al., 2010). When communal opportunities are integrated into fields that are stereotyped as being noncommunal, STEM interest is boosted (Brown et al., 2018). This raises the question: what happens to LGBTQ individuals in STEM? LGBTQ individuals may feel less open or out about their LGBTQ identity in a STEM field when it is more male-dominated (Yoder & Mattheis, 2016). Further, LGBQ students are less likely to stay in STEM compared to non-LGBQ students (Hughes, 2018); transgender students presenting feminine within STEM are not respected as much by their peers compared to other students (Kersey, 2018). This study will explore whether LGBTQ individuals’ desire for communal opportunities within STEM careers shapes their motivation to pursue STEM, their expectations for success in STEM, and their feelings of belonging in STEM. We hypothesize that LGBTQ individuals with low-openness about their LGBTQ identity will have less motivation, expectations for success, and feelings of belonging in STEM than LGBTQ individuals with high-openness and non-LGBTQ individuals

Defining the appropriate waiting time between multiple-breath nitrogen washout measurements

Research lette

Metabolomics in the Analysis of Inflammatory Diseases

Most infections and traumatic injuries are cleared or repaired relatively rapidly and metabolic homoeostasis is soon restored. However, there is a broad range of inflammatory diseases which involve chronic activation of the immune system and, as a result, chronic persistent inflammation. We have been studying the metabolic consequences of chronic inflammatory diseases with the aim of identifying metabolic fingerprints which may provide clues about why the localised tissue disease persists

The combinatorics of neurite self-avoidance

During neural development in Drosophila, the ability of neurite branches to recognize whether they are from the same or different neurons depends crucially on the molecule Dscam1. In particular, this recognition depends on the stochastic acquisition of a unique combination of Dscam1 isoforms out of a large set of possible isoforms. To properly interpret these findings, it is crucial to understand the combinatorics involved, which has previously been attempted only using stochastic simulations for some specific parameter combinations. Here we present closed-form solutions for the general case. These reveal the relationships among the key variables and how these constrain possible biological scenarios

Engineering a catabolic pathway in plants for the degradation of 1,2-dichloroethane

Plants are increasingly being employed to clean up environmental pollutants such as heavy metals; however, a major limitation of phytoremediation is the inability of plants to mineralize most organic pollutants. A key component of organic pollutants is halogenated aliphatic compounds that include 1,2-dichloroethane (1,2-DCA). Although plants lack the enzymatic activity required to metabolize this compound, two bacterial enzymes, haloalkane dehalogenase (DhlA) and haloacid dehalogenase (DhlB) from the bacterium Xanthobacter autotrophicus GJ10, have the ability to dehalogenate a range of halogenated aliphatics, including 1,2-DCA. We have engineered the dhlA and dhlB genes into tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum ‘Xanthi’) plants and used 1,2-DCA as a model substrate to demonstrate the ability of the transgenic tobacco to remediate a range of halogenated, aliphatic hydrocarbons. DhlA converts 1,2-DCA to 2-chloroethanol, which is then metabolized to the phytotoxic 2-chloroacetaldehyde, then chloroacetic acid, by endogenous plant alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase activities, respectively. Chloroacetic acid is dehalogenated by DhlB to produce the glyoxylate cycle intermediate glycolate. Plants expressing only DhlA produced phytotoxic levels of chlorinated intermediates and died, while plants expressing DhlA together with DhlB thrived at levels of 1,2-DCA that were toxic to DhlA-expressing plants. This represents a significant advance in the development of a low-cost phytoremediation approach toward the clean-up of halogenated organic pollutants from contaminated soil and groundwater

Inhibitors of SARS-CoV entry--identification using an internally-controlled dual envelope pseudovirion assay.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) emerged as the causal agent of an endemic atypical pneumonia, infecting thousands of people worldwide. Although a number of promising potential vaccines and therapeutic agents for SARS-CoV have been described, no effective antiviral drug against SARS-CoV is currently available. The intricate, sequential nature of the viral entry process provides multiple valid targets for drug development. Here, we describe a rapid and safe cell-based high-throughput screening system, dual envelope pseudovirion (DEP) assay, for specifically screening inhibitors of viral entry. The assay system employs a novel dual envelope strategy, using lentiviral pseudovirions as targets whose entry is driven by the SARS-CoV Spike glycoprotein. A second, unrelated viral envelope is used as an internal control to reduce the number of false positives. As an example of the power of this assay a class of inhibitors is reported with the potential to inhibit SARS-CoV at two steps of the replication cycle, viral entry and particle assembly. This assay system can be easily adapted to screen entry inhibitors against other viruses with the careful selection of matching partner virus envelopes