Health Insurance Coverage among Youth and Young Adults with Work Limitations

This paper explores health insurance coverage trends for youth (age 15-18) and young adults (age 19-29) with work limitations using data from the Current Population Survey. In 2000 those in the young work-limited population were substantially more likely to have insurance coverage than their counterparts in the not work-limited population. They were much more likely to have public coverage and much less likely to have only private coverage. Insurance coverage for this population increased substantially between 1989 and 2000, in contrast to a decline for the not work-limited population. We discuss the probable contributions of policy reforms and the decline in employment of people with work limitations to these trends

Trends in Outcomes for Young People with Disabilities: Are We Making Progress?

This paper uses the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1981-2000 to compare long term trends in socio-economic outcomes for youth (aged 15-21) and young adults (aged 22-29) with work limitations to those for youth and young adults without work limitations. We focus on the years 1988 and 1999: years that roughly correspond to the peaks of successive business cycles. We find that prevalence of work limitations declined for males but increased for females, mostly accounted for by growth for African American females. Despite a substantial reduction in the educational attainment gap between young adults with and without disabilities, gaps in employment, earnings, dependency on public programs and poverty widened substantially. These trends could be due to factors that determine whether individuals report themselves to be work-limited, factors that affect individual outcomes regardless of self-reported work limitation status, or both sets of factors

The Acetate Negative Survey

Beginning in the early 1970s curators, librarians, and archivists in charge of collections containing historical photographic negatives began to notice that certain portions of their collections were beginning to display serious deterioration. The damage observed typically included badly distorted negatives showing severe shrinkage. Also, because of the base shrinkage, the various layers of the film laminate were becoming separated, making the negative unprintable. The smell of acetic acid accompanied this phenomenon. Because these negatives had been manufactured relatively recently, it was obvious that these negatives were not on cellulose nitrate base and that they were in fact safety negatives. At this point in the discovery of the problem, most of the affected negatives seemed to date from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Some of the early evaluations of the problem considered these negatives to be isolated examples of degraded cellulose diacetate film base which had become unstable due to extreme temperature and humidity conditions. Since that time, more historical negative files have found their way into various repositories. Many of these collections suffer similar problems and the total number of degraded negatives is increasing. The once small pockets of degraded negatives are getting larger, and the dates of origin are no longer limited to a few years. Many collections with safety negatives dating from 1925‑1955 are finding these problems in their files. To make matters worse, very little information about these negatives is available to these caretakers in the literature with which they are familiar. What little mention there is in curatorial or preservation sources is essentially accurate in that it stresses the need for the isolation and duplication of what have been called diacetate negatives. But these sources lack consistency in terminology, a reasonable explanation of the problem, or a true idea of its scope. Much of this information is simply not available. The film manufacturers, who genuinely had not been aware that the situation had become so widespread, responded that the problem is chemical degradation of the film base due, primarily, to improper storage. Although accurate, this seems to place the blame on mismanagement by the repositories themselves. At the same time, exaggerated stories about the situation are being traded between anxious curators and a folklore about these negatives is beginning to emerge. It is the purpose of this project to begin the process of defining the problem in such a way that a firm groundwork will be laid for future work. While much of the tone of this report and its recommendations will be directed towards those who work directly with these collections, it is hoped that it will be also useful for those who will continue the technical work that still needs to be done to more fully understand the problem. This report combines a distillation of the existing technical knowledge and practical observation. It represents a very conscious effort to state accurately what we know, what we do not know, and what we can reasonably do about the present situation

Genomics for Weed Science

Numerous genomic-based studies have provided insight to the physiological and evolutionary processes involved in developmental and environmental processes of model plants such as arabidopsis and rice. However, far fewer efforts have been attempted to use genomic resources to study physiological and evolutionary processes of weedy plants. Genomics-based tools such as extensive EST databases and microarrays have been developed for a limited number of weedy species, although application of information and resources developed for model plants and crops are possible and have been exploited. These tools have just begun to provide insights into the response of these weeds to herbivore and pathogen attack, survival of extreme environmental conditions, and interaction with crops. The potential of these tools to illuminate mechanisms controlling the traits that allow weeds to invade novel habitats, survive extreme environments, and that make weeds difficult to eradicate have potential for both improving crops and developing novel methods to control weeds

Improving the locality of the overlap Dirac operator via approximate solutions of the Ginsparg-Wilson relation

We determine the free field hypercubic Dirac operator which is optimally close to satisfying the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. Inserting this operator into the overlap formula, we show that the analytic locality bound on the resulting overlap Dirac operator is substantially stronger than in the standard case. This improvement generally persists in gauge backgrounds when the plaquette variables are all close to unity.Comment: 3 pages, contributed to Proceedings of Lattice2003(chiral

Structure and stereochemistry of the base excision repair glycosylase MutY reveal a mechanism similar to retaining glycosidases.

MutY adenine glycosylases prevent DNA mutations by excising adenine from promutagenic 8-oxo-7,8-dihydroguanine (OG):A mismatches. Here, we describe structural features of the MutY active site bound to an azaribose transition state analog which indicate a catalytic role for Tyr126 and approach of the water nucleophile on the same side as the departing adenine base. The idea that Tyr126 participates in catalysis, recently predicted by modeling calculations, is strongly supported by mutagenesis and by seeing close contact between the hydroxyl group of this residue and the azaribose moiety of the transition state analog. NMR analysis of MutY methanolysis products corroborates a mechanism for adenine removal with retention of stereochemistry. Based on these results, we propose a revised mechanism for MutY that involves two nucleophilic displacement steps akin to the mechanisms accepted for 'retaining' O-glycosidases. This new-for-MutY yet familiar mechanism may also be operative in related base excision repair glycosylases and provides a critical framework for analysis of human MutY (MUTYH) variants associated with inherited colorectal cancer

Fisheye transformation enhances deep-learning-based single-cell phenotyping by including cellular microenvironment

Incorporating information about the surroundings can have a significant impact on successfully determining the class of an object. This is of particular interest when determining the phenotypes of cells, for example, in the context of high-throughput screens. We hypothesized that an ideal approach would consider the fully featured view of the cell of interest, include its neighboring microenvironment, and give lesser weight to cells that are far from the cell of interest. To satisfy these criteria, we present an approach with a transformation similar to those characteristic of fisheye cameras. Using this transformation with proper settings, we could significantly increase the accuracy of single-cell phenotyping, both in the case of cell culture and tissue -based microscopy images, and we present improved results on a dataset containing images of wild animals.Peer reviewe

Microarray Analysis of Late-season Velvetleaf (Abutilon theophrasti) Effect on Corn

Microarray analysis was used to identify changes in gene expression in corn leaves collected from plants at the V11–14 growth stage that resulted from competition with velvetleaf. The plants were grown in field plots under adequate N (addition of 220 kg N ha1) and irrigation to minimize N and water stress. Consequently, only differences resulting from competition for micronutrients, light, and perhaps allelopathic stress were anticipated. Genes involved in carbon and nitrogen utilization, photosynthesis, growth and development, oxidative stress, signal transduction, responses to auxin and ethylene, and zinc transport were repressed in corn growing in competition with velvetleaf. Very few genes were induced because of competition with velvetleaf, and those that were provided little indication of the physiological response of corn. No differences were observed in genes responsive to water stress or sequestering/transporting micronutrients other than zinc, indicating that these stresses were not a major component of velvetleaf competition with corn at the developmental stage tested