Damaged Goods: A resource depletion model of addictive consumption

Economic research on the consumption of harmful goods focuses principally on the addictive nature of consumption rather than its impacts on health, despite medical research showing that consumers primarily consider health effects when making decisions about addictive behaviour. In this paper, the standard rational addiction model is recast in terms of a resource depletion problem, where the resource in question is a depletable stock of health, and the time horizon is finite. Analysis of the prototype health depletion model finds two types of consumption path, one that is compatible with the results from rational addiction and one that is not. Several extensions to the prototype model are explored.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

COVID and Its Impact on Athletics

Dr. Harris gives a perspective of the global COVID-19 pandemic from his position as a faculty member and coach of the Harding women\u27s soccer team

HB 828: TANF Eligibility; Drug-Related Felonies

House Bill 828 (HB828) was proposed in 2016 to remove the ban on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) for individuals with felony-related drug convictions who are otherwise eligible to receive benefits. The TANF program is designed to help low income families achieve self-sufficiency. States receive block grants to design and operate programs that accomplish one of the purposes of the TANF program: 1) Provide assistance to needy families so children can be cared for in their own homes; 2) Reduce the dependency of parents by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage; 3) Prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; 4) Encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Section 401). With nearly 700,000 people released from state and federal prison each year, access to TANF benefits is particularly critical for helping formerly incarcerated individuals transitioning back to their home communities. Significant disparities in convictions and incarceration coupled with variations in state population between Whites and Nonwhites translate into a disproportionate impact of the felony drug ban (The Sentencing Project, 2015). Virginia is one of 14 states with a full ban on TANF benefits for individuals with felony-related drug convictions. Adoption of HB828 proposes to eliminate this lifetime ban and provide an opportunity for low income families to meet their basic needs during the period in which they are in most need

Parsing the Effects of Physical Microenvironmental Cues on Stem Cell Adhesion and Lineage Specification

Tissue engineering is a broad field geared toward improving or replacing biological material and comprises an immense collection of biological nuances to consider before strategies for clinical applications can be fully realized. Physical and biochemical signals are responsible for making up a cell\u27s microenvironment to guide morphology and function through cell-extracellular matrix signaling, cell-cell signaling, and soluble signaling. In particular, a deeper understanding of these cell-extra cellular matrix factors guiding stem cell adhesion, spreading, and differentiation is crucial to harnessing the potential to develop tissue for regenerative purposes. Mounting evidence suggests that physical cues are a key to understanding the potential of stem cells and significant efforts have been made to begin to parse the effects of cell-matrix interactions, yet little is known about the interplay in guiding cell signaling. The work presented here focuses on utilizing novel methods and materials to deconstruct individual cell-matrix interactions and gain a deeper understanding of the cooperative signaling behaviors for mesenchymal and embryonic stem cells. Micropatterning studies utilizing dip pen nanolithography showed that physical signals in the microenvironment are vital to regulating mesenchymal stem cell adhesion. Matrix elasticity, ligand density, and adhesion topography were individually altered to observe single cell adhesion and spreading with matrix elasticity proving to regulate the adhesion and spreading of the cells. Photolithography based studies detailing cell spreading and matrix elasticity showed that when confining single cells into different geometric shapes and sizes on a matrix of tunable elasticity, cell shape and size ultimately became responsible for stem cell lineage commitment over matrix elasticity. Signaling pathway inhibition experiments utilizing nocodazole and Y-27632 suggested that RhoA is a key regulator of cell response to the cooperative effect of these tunable substrate variables. Embryonic stem cells were then micropatterned on novel UV/ozone modified polystyrene to detail and observe the physical effects on single embryonic stem cells. Micropatterned cells were able to be cultured for up to 48 hours on patterns while forming stress fibers and focal adhesions similar to somatic cells, thereby demonstrating their responsiveness to extracellular matrix cues while maintaining expression of pluripotency transcription factor Oct4. The results from this work validate the immense importance of physical signaling and the effects on mesenchymal and embryonic stem cells. By understanding the effects of physical signaling in conjunction with biochemical signaling in controlling cell spreading and lineage commitment, tissue engineering is able to draw one step closer to potential applications for repairing and replacing biological function

“Doctor Faustus” and the Colossus of Rhodes

Editing Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" continues to pose a formidable difficulty for modern scholars