Rethinking Bail Reform

The issue of pretrial detention is part of a larger, national conversation on criminal justice reform. However, no single issue permeates the landscape of criminal justice like the treatment of pretrial defendants. The policies and practices around pretrial detention have contributed to the country’s mass incarceration numbers; created a crisis for local jail management; generated unsustainable budgets; and raised important questions about race, class, and the constitutional implications of incarcerating people because they are too poor to pay a money bond. Legal scholars have written about the issue, highlighting the inequities and constitutional difficulties with such a system. Much of the discussion has surrounded solutions involving the implementation of and reliance on evidence-based practices to determine pretrial detention, rather than solutions involving reliance on money. These evidence-based practices usually take the form of pretrial assessment tools and pretrial supervision systems. Because the politics involved in criminal justice reform often paralyze reform attempts, the method by which these practices are implemented is often litigation. However, due to procedural impediments in federal court and the political realities of state courts, litigation often results in incomplete remedies that do not fully address, rectify, or prevent the range of harms inflicted by the money bail system

A very public cull – The anatomy of an online issue public

This is the final version. Available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordGeographers and other social scientists have for some time been interested in how scientific and environmental controversies emerge and become public or collective issues. Social media are now key platforms through which these issues are publically raised and through which groups or publics can organise themselves. As media that generate data and traces of networking activity, these platforms also provide an opportunity for scholars to study the character and constitution of those groupings. In this paper we lay out a method for studying these ‘issue publics’: emergent groupings involved in publicising an issue. We focus on the controversy surrounding the state-sanctioned cull of wild badgers in England as a contested means of disease management in cattle. We analyse two overlapping groupings to demonstrate how online issue publics function in a variety of ways – from the ‘echo chambers’ of online sharing of information, to the marshalling of agreements on strategies for action, to more dialogic patterns of debate. We demonstrate the ways in which digital media platforms are themselves performative in the formation of issue publics and that, while this creates issues, we should not retreat into debates around the ‘proper object’ of research but rather engage with the productive complications of mapping social media data into knowledge (Whatmore, 2009). In turn, we argue that online issue publics are not homogeneous and that the lines of heterogeneity are neither simple or to be expected and merit study as a means to understand the suite of processes and novel contexts involved in the emergence of a public.This project was funded by ESRC ‘Transforming Social Science’ Fund – ESRC-ES/L003112/1

Infiltration/cure modeling of resin transfer molded composite materials using advanced fiber architectures

A model was developed which can be used to simulate infiltration and cure of textile composites by resin transfer molding. Fabric preforms were resin infiltrated and cured using model generated optimized one-step infiltration/cure protocols. Frequency dependent electromagnetic sensing (FDEMS) was used to monitor in situ resin infiltration and cure during processing. FDEMS measurements of infiltration time, resin viscosity, and resin degree of cure agreed well with values predicted by the simulation model. Textile composites fabricated using a one-step infiltration/cure procedure were uniformly resin impregnated and void free. Fiber volume fraction measurements by the resin digestion method compared well with values predicted using the model

Development and use of lentiviral vectors pseudotyped with influenza B haemagglutinins: application to vaccine immunogenicity, mAb potency and sero-surveillance studies

Influenza B viruses cause respiratory disease epidemics in human populations and are included in seasonal influenza vaccines. Serological methods are employed to evaluate vaccine immunogenicity prior to licensure. However, the haemagglutination inhibition assay, which represents the gold standard for assessing the immunogenicity of influenza vaccines, has been shown to be relatively insensitive for the detection of antibodies against influenza B viruses. Furthermore, this assay, and the serial radial haemolysis assay are not able to detect stalk-directed cross-reactive antibodies. For these reasons there is a need to develop new assays that can overcome these limitations. The use of replication-defective viruses, such as lentiviral vectors pseudotyped with influenza A haemagglutinins, in microneutralization assays is a safe and sensitive alternative to study antibody responses elicited by natural infection or vaccination. We have produced Influenza B haemagglutinin-pseudotypes using plasmid-directed transfection. To activate influenza B haemagglutinin, we have explored the use of proteases by adding relevant encoding plasmids to the transfection mixture. When tested for their ability to transduce target cells, the newly produced influenza B pseudotypes exhibit tropism for different cell lines. Subsequently the pseudotypes were evaluated as surrogate antigens in microneutralization assays using reference sera, monoclonal antibodies, human sera collected during a vaccine immunogenicity study and surveillance sera from seals. The influenza B pseudotype virus neutralization assay was found to effectively detect neutralizing and cross-reactive responses despite lack of significant correlation with the haemagglutinin inhibition assay

T. gondii RP Promoters & Knockdown Reveal Molecular Pathways Associated with Proliferation and Cell-Cycle Arrest

Molecular pathways regulating rapid proliferation and persistence are fundamental for pathogens but are not elucidated fully in Toxoplasma gondii. Promoters of T. gondii ribosomal proteins (RPs) were analyzed by EMSAs and ChIP. One RP promoter domain, known to bind an Apetela 2, bound to nuclear extract proteins. Promoter domains appeared to associate with histone acetyl transferases. To study effects of a RP gene's regulation in T. gondii, mutant parasites (Δrps13) were engineered with integration of tetracycline repressor (TetR) response elements in a critical location in the rps13 promoter and transfection of a yellow fluorescent-tetracycline repressor (YFP-TetR). This permitted conditional knockdown of rps13 expression in a tightly regulated manner. Δrps13 parasites were studied in the presence (+ATc) or absence of anhydrotetracycline (-ATc) in culture. -ATc, transcription of the rps13 gene and expression of RPS13 protein were markedly diminished, with concomitant cessation of parasite replication. Study of Δrps13 expressing Myc-tagged RPL22, -ATc, showed RPL22 diminished but at a slower rate. Quantitation of RNA showed diminution of 18S RNA. Depletion of RPS13 caused arrest of parasites in the G1 cell cycle phase, thereby stopping parasite proliferation. Transcriptional differences ±ATc implicate molecules likely to function in regulation of these processes. In vitro, -ATc, Δrps13 persists for months and the proliferation phenotype can be rescued with ATc. In vivo, however, Δrps13 could only be rescued when ATc was given simultaneously and not at any time after 1 week, even when L-NAME and ATc were administered. Immunization with Δrps13 parasites protects mice completely against subsequent challenge with wildtype clonal Type 1 parasites, and robustly protects mice against wildtype clonal Type 2 parasites. Our results demonstrate that G1 arrest by ribosomal protein depletion is associated with persistence of T. gondii in a model system in vitro and immunization with Δrps13 protects mice against subsequent challenge with wildtype parasites

Southern Hemisphere controls on ITCZ variability in southwest Madagascar over the past 117,000 years

Migration of the inter-tropical convergence zone, driven by changes in seasonal insolation and high northern latitude temperatures, is the primary control on tropical rainfall on geologic timescales. We test this paradigm using the timing of growth of stalagmites from southwest Madagascar to infer the timing of expansion of the ITCZ to the south at its southern limit. Over the past 117 ky, speleothems grew in the study area primarily when two conditions are met: summer insolation greater than the mean and relatively high Southern Hemisphere temperatures as indicted by maxima in Antarctic ice core oxygen isotope ratios. We observe little influence of Northern Hemisphere, millennial scale temperature variability on the pluvial periods. Further, we observe periods during which the ITCZ simultaneously expands or contracts in both hemispheres. Because Antarctic isotope maxima are periods of increased atmospheric CO2, our results have implications for how tropical rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere might respond to global warming

Multiple Deeply Divergent Denisovan Ancestries in Papuans

Genome sequences are known for two archaic hominins—Neanderthals and Denisovans—which interbred with anatomically modern humans as they dispersed out of Africa. We identified high-confidence archaic haplotypes in 161 new genomes spanning 14 island groups in Island Southeast Asia and New Guinea and found large stretches of DNA that are inconsistent with a single introgressing Denisovan origin. Instead, modern Papuans carry hundreds of gene variants from two deeply divergent Denisovan lineages that separated over 350 thousand years ago. Spatial and temporal structure among these lineages suggest that introgression from one of these Denisovan groups predominantly took place east of the Wallace line and continued until near the end of the Pleistocene. A third Denisovan lineage occurs in modern East Asians. This regional mosaic suggests considerable complexity in archaic contact, with modern humans interbreeding with multiple Denisovan groups that were geographically isolated from each other over deep evolutionary time

‘Sons of athelings given to the earth’: Infant Mortality within Anglo-Saxon Mortuary Geography

FOR 20 OR MORE YEARS early Anglo-Saxon archaeologists have believed children are underrepresented in the cemetery evidence. They conclude that excavation misses small bones, that previous attitudes to reporting overlook the very young, or that infants and children were buried elsewhere. This is all well and good, but we must be careful of oversimplifying compound social and cultural responses to childhood and infant mortality. Previous approaches have offered methodological quandaries in the face of this under-representation. However, proportionally more infants were placed in large cemeteries and sometimes in specific zones. This trend is statistically significant and is therefore unlikely to result entirely from preservation or excavation problems. Early medieval cemeteries were part of regional mortuary geographies and provided places to stage events that promoted social cohesion across kinship systems extending over tribal territories. This paper argues that patterns in early Anglo-Saxon infant burial were the result of female mobility. Many women probably travelled locally to marry in a union which reinforced existing social networks. For an expectant mother, however, the safest place to give birth was with experience women in her maternal home. Infant identities were affected by personal and legal association with their mother’s parental kindred, so when an infant died in childbirth or months and years later, it was their mother’s identity which dictated burial location. As a result, cemeteries central to tribal identities became places to bury the sons and daughters of a regional tribal aristocracy

Antecedent Hypoglycemia Impairs Autonomic Cardiovascular Function: Implications for Rigorous Glycemic Control

OBJECTIVE— Glycemic control decreases the incidence and progression of diabetic complications but increases the incidence of hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia can impair hormonal and autonomic responses to subsequent hypoglycemia. Intensive glycemic control may increase mortality in individuals with type 2 diabetes at high risk for cardiovascular complications. We tested the hypothesis that prior exposure to hypoglycemia leads to impaired cardiovascular autonomic function