Archiving Appalachia

Led by the staff of the Archives of Appalachia, this roundtable discussion will focus on how archival collections can capture and perpetuate the creative, dynamic force of Appalachia. The participants, along with Amy Collins, Director of the Archives of Appalachia, will briefly remark on the development and use of archival collections, media in the archives, and measures taken to ensure that collections reflect the diversity of the region’s history and culture. The audience will be encouraged to share their perspectives on archival research, thereby creating dialogue about archival access and use, as well as archiving digital scholarship, and the potential for growing Appalachian collections. The intent of this discussion is to prompt ASA members to think about how archival research can contribute to their work on Appalachia and to consider the benefits of placing their own documents, photographs, books, and media in archival repositories. After the session, attendees will have the opportunity to tour the Archives and talk with staff

Drought and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, 2012–2016: Environmental Review and Lessons

This paper reviews environmental management and the use of science in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta during California’s 2012–2016 drought. The review is based on available reports and data, and guided by discussions with 27 agency staff, stake-holders, and researchers. Key management actions for the drought are discussed relative to four major drought water management priorities stated by water managers: support public health and safety, control saltwater intrusion, preserve cold water in Shasta Reservoir, and maintain minimum protections for endangered species. Despite some success in streamlining communication through interagency task forces, conflicting management mandates sometimes led to confusion about priorities and actions during the drought (i.e., water delivery, the environment, etc.). This report highlights several lessons and offers suggestions to improve management for future droughts. Recommendations include use of pre-drought warnings, timely drought declarations, improved transparency and useful documentation, better scientific preparation, development of a Delta drought management plan (including preparing for salinity barriers), and improved water accounting. Finally, better environmental outcomes occur when resources are applied to improving habitat and bolstering populations of native species during inter-drought periods, well before stressful conditions occur.

2nd Annual Computer & Technology Law Institute

Materials from the 2nd Annual Computer & Technology Law Institute held by UK/CLE in March 2000

The 2MASS Redshift Survey - Description and Data Release

We present the results of the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS), a ten-year project to map the full three-dimensional distribution of galaxies in the nearby Universe. The 2 Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) was completed in 2003 and its final data products, including an extended source catalog (XSC), are available on-line. The 2MASS XSC contains nearly a million galaxies with Ks <= 13.5 mag and is essentially complete and mostly unaffected by interstellar extinction and stellar confusion down to a galactic latitude of |b|=5 deg for bright galaxies. Near-infrared wavelengths are sensitive to the old stellar populations that dominate galaxy masses, making 2MASS an excellent starting point to study the distribution of matter in the nearby Universe. We selected a sample of 44,599 2MASS galaxies with Ks =5 deg (>= 8 deg towards the Galactic bulge) as the input catalog for our survey. We obtained spectroscopic observations for 11,000 galaxies and used previously-obtained velocities for the remainder of the sample to generate a redshift catalog that is 97.6% complete to well-defined limits and covers 91% of the sky. This provides an unprecedented census of galaxy (baryonic mass) concentrations within 300 Mpc. Earlier versions of our survey have been used in a number of publications that have studied the bulk motion of the Local Group, mapped the density and peculiar velocity fields out to 50 Mpc, detected galaxy groups, and estimated the values of several cosmological parameters. Additionally, we present morphological types for a nearly-complete sub-sample of 20,860 galaxies with Ks = 10 deg.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The 2MRS catalogs and a version of the paper with higher-resolution figures can be found at http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/2mrs

The developmental and evolutionary roles of isoforms of regulator of G protein signalling 3 in neuronal differentiation

Fundamental to the complexity of the nervous system is the precise regulation in space and time of the production, maturation, and migration of neurons in the developing embryo. This is eloquently seen in the forming cranial sensory ganglia (CSG) of the peripheral nervous system. Placodes, which are transient pseudostratified neuroepithelia in the surface ectoderm of the embryo, are responsible for generating most of the neurons of the CSG. Placodal progenitors commit to the neuronal fate and delaminate from the epithelium as immature, multipolar neuroblasts. These neuroblasts reside in a staging area immediately outside the placode. Differentiation of the neuroblasts is intimately coupled to their adoption of a bipolar morphology and migration away from the staging area to the future site of the CSG. Thus the forming CSG is a highly tractable model to anatomically separate the three phases of a neuroblast’s lifetime: from neuroepithelial progenitor (in the placode), to immature neuroblast (in the staging area), to mature neuron (in the migratory stream). In this thesis, I used the forming CSG as a model to investigate the role of Regulator of G protein Signalling 3 (RGS3) in neuroblast commitment and differentiation. Promoters within introns of the RGS3 locus generate isoforms in which N-terminal sequences are sequentially truncated, but C-terminal sequences are preserved. Intriguingly, I found that expression of these isoforms in the forming CSG is temporally co-linear with their genomic orientation: longer isoforms are exclusively expressed in the progenitor placode; a medium isoform is expressed exclusively in the neuroblast staging area; and the shortest isoforms are expressed in the neuronal migratory stream. Furthermore, through loss- and gain-of-function experiments, I demonstrated that each of these isoforms plays a specific role in the differentiation state in which it is expressed: placode-expressed isoforms negatively regulate neurogenesis; the neuroblast-expressed isoform negatively regulates differentiation; and the neuron-expressed isoforms negatively regulate neuronal migration. The negative regulatory role which all isoforms play in different cell-biological contexts is intriguing in light of the fact that they all share a C-terminal RGS domain, which canonically negatively regulates G protein signalling. Through domain mutation and deletion, I showed that the RGS and N-terminal domains are important for the function of each isoform. Thus temporally co-linear expression within the RGS3 locus generates later-expressed isoforms which lack the regulatory N-terminal domains of the earlier-expressed isoforms, giving them new license to perform different biochemical functions. Lastly, I investigated the conservation and evolution of RGS3 and its isoforms. RGS3 was found to be present in all extant metazoans, and results from this thesis implicate it as the founding member of the R4 subfamily of RGS proteins. Furthermore, in the early vertebrate lineage, a critical domain was lost. This is intriguing in light of the fact that placodes in their stereotypic forms also emerged early in the vertebrate lineage. Ectopic overexpression of the full-length invertebrate RGS3 protein prevented pseudostratification of the vertebrate placode, suggesting that the domain loss in the early vertebrate lineage was important for the evolution of pseudostratified placodes and the expansion of the vertebrate nervous system. In summary, the work in this thesis has uncovered a previously unseen model of transcriptional regulation of a single locus: intragenic temporal co-linearity. Furthermore, the demonstrated functions of this regulation have profound implications on the generation and differentiation of vertebrate neurons, as well as the evolution of the vertebrate nervous system.</p

Book Reviews and Scientist-Practitioner Currency: A Critical Lever

In this newsletter article, the authors discuss the possible reasons for the undervaluation of book reviews. Some of the valuable contributions of the book review process for the reviewers of books, for the consumers of those reviews, and for the vitality of I-O psychology as a profession are explored. It is noted that the reason the authors argue that book reviews are undervalued is that their important contributions are not fully appreciated. In particular, critical, well-informed reviews may establish broadly understood and accepted criteria for evaluating science and practice, which they believe to be important to the development of a profession and its member