Final Evaluation of LA DOOR: Proposition 47 Grant Program

The Los Angeles Diversion, Outreach, and Opportunities for Recovery program (LA DOOR) was designed by the Los Angeles City Attorney\u27s Office (LACA) to provide a comprehensive, health-focused, preventative approach that proactively engages individuals at elevated risk of returning to LACA on a new misdemeanor offense related to substance use, mental illness, or homelessness. LA DOOR was funded through the grant program of Proposition 47. Programs funded through Proposition 47 are intended to serve individuals with a history of criminal justice involvement and mental health issues or substance use disorders and to offer mental health services, substance use disorder treatment, and diversion programs for justice-involved individuals. Grant-funded projects such as LA DOOR are required to be evaluated to understand how they are being implemented and whether they are achieving their intended outcomes. The formal evaluation of the program is being conducted by the RAND Corporation and its subcontractor, KH Consulting Group. This final evaluation summarizes the authors\u27 findings from a process and outcome evaluation of Cohort 1 of LA DOOR, which provided services from July 2018 to March 2021. Interested stakeholders of this research include LACA, the California Board of State and Community Corrections, the City of Los Angeles, and other jurisdictions that provide supportive services to criminal justice populations or might be interested in implementing a similar program

Implementation and Outcome Evaluation of LA DOOR: A Proposition 47-Funded Program in Los Angeles: Cohort 2 Final Evaluation Report

The Los Angeles Diversion, Outreach, and Opportunities for Recovery (LA DOOR) program is designed by the Los Angeles City Attorney\u27s Office (LACA) to provide a comprehensive, health-focused, preventative approach that proactively engages individuals at elevated risk of returning to LACA on a new misdemeanor offense. In this study, the authors document the findings of a process and outcome evaluation of Cohort 2 of the LA DOOR program

Urban Voids After the Pandemic. A New Chance for Greenway

Our proposal deals with the meaning of urban voids in the post-COVID-19 period to suggest new understandings of how urban green corridors can positively affect design for healthier and more sustainable cities. According to Secchi (1986), planning through the void involves a profound revision of the way we think about the city, reversing the points of interest, proposing as polarities the spaces that do not usually emerge. The void thus becomes an opportunity, a chance to improve the structure of our urban landscape (Lopez-Pineiro, 2020). A city is a powerful place, always in motion and transformation. It has an artificial spirit full of surprises and vague limits. It is the scene of remarkable transformations that in their wildness are partially ungovernable by the designers themselves. The desire to control them leaves a series of abandoned and unfinished spaces, “holes” that live from their discontinuity with the surroundings (Labriola, 2021). During a period of crisis, like the one that we are still living with COVID-19 (Fabris et al, 2020), it is common to re-think our cities to create better places for the community. After the long period of forced distance that we lived, an evolution of public space is recommended. During the pandemic, the emptiness of our cities permitted Nature to re-appropriate its spaces. Following this trend and thinking about a new kind of public space where Nature and its inside processes are the protagonists, it is possible to intervene in our cities. The porosity of the urban fabric in towns without humans, blocked at home by the never-ending lockdowns, became a new green corridor that revealed the presence of wildlife (both fauna and flora) as part of a forgotten urban layer that turned visible again. The preservation of this new asset should be possible. The spaces to allow this change can be the abandoned and empty areas present in the contemporary city’s sick body that we can finally heal. The so-called wastelands, voids, or terrain vague, have a significant value independent from the environment in which they are inserted, showing a relationship with the contemporary city extraneous to its rhythms. For this reason, they are the perfect place for experimentation in terms of greenways, a possible starting point to re-think how green can be part of the urban texture and how to conceive public and open spaces after the nowadays crisis. The paper considers the Metropolitan City of Milan as a remarkable case study to understand the pivotal role played by urban voids in the formation of greenways and their capacity of reshaping the environmental, aesthetic and healthy dimensions of urban landscapes

Transient plasma cell dyscrasia in COVID-19 patients linked to IL-6 triggering

An unusual clonal gammopathy was reported in COVID-19 patient but whether this anomaly is related or not to the disease has not yet been clarified. To this aim, we selected a cohort of 35 COVID-19 patients swab positive and investigated serological levels of IL-6, immune response to major viral antigens and electrophoretic profile. Elevated levels of IL-6 were accompanied by a significative humoral response to viral Spike protein, revealing an altered electrophoretic profile in the gamma region. We can conclude that elevated levels of IL-6 triggers humoral response inducing a transient plasma cell dyscrasia in severe COVID-19 patients

Byzantine wall paintings from San Marco d’Alunzio, Sicily: non-invasive diagnostics and microanalytical investigation of pigments and plasters

A diagnostic investigation was carried out on twelfth century Byzantine wall paintings preserved in the Museum of Byzantine and Norman Culture and Figurative Arts of San Marco d’Alunzio (Messina, Italy) on the occasion of recent restoration works. First, the wall paintings were analyzed using portable X-Ray Fluorescence (p-XRF) and Fiber Optics Reflectance Spectroscopy (FORS) to obtain a non-invasive preliminary identification of the original palette. Then, five fragments were sampled for a micro-stratigraphy study using Digital Optical Microscope (DOM), Polarizing Optical Microscope (POM), and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) combined with Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometry (EDS) to characterize the mortars and the blue and black pigments non unequivocally identified through non-invasive techniques. The palette included mainly earthen pigments like red and yellow ochres, green earth, and more valuable lapis lazuli blue applied on a bone black layer; while the analysis of mortars found on the different apses showed the same manufacturing technique and constitutive materials: lime-based binder with the addition of quartz, and rare calcareous lithic fragments as aggregate. The obtained results shed light on the pictorial technique used for the wall paintings and allowed us to compare the Sicilian pictorial cycle with the coeval Byzantine wall paintings preserved in Sardinia and Southern Italy

Heregulin inhibits proliferation via ERKs and phosphatidyl-inositol 3-kinase activation but regulates urokinase plasminogen activator independently of these pathways in metastatic mammary tumor cells

Heregulin (HRG) and type I receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) expression was investigated in the highly invasive and metastatic LM3 cell line, our previously described model of metastasis for mammary cancer (Bal de Kier Joffe et al. [1986] Invasion Metastasis 6:302-12; Urtreger et al. [1997] Int J Oncol 11:489-96). Although LM3 cells do not express HRG, they exhibit high levels of ErbB-2 and ErbB-3 as well as moderate expression of ErbB-4. Addition of exogenous HRGβ1 resulted in inhibition of both proliferation and migration of LM3 cells. HRGβ1 was also able to decrease the activity of urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA) and matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9), 2 key enzymes in the invasion and metastatic cascade. HRGβ1 treatment of LM3 cells induced tyrosine phosphorylation of ErbB-2, ErbB-3 and ErbB-4 as well as the formation of ErbB-2/ErbB-3 and ErbB-2/ErbB-4 heterodimers. Assessment of the signaling pathways involved in HRGβ1 action indicated that the addition of HRGβ1 to LM3 cells resulted in activation of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI-3K) and in strong induction of the association of the p85 subunit of PI-3K with ErbB-3. HRGβ1 also caused the rapid activation of ERKI/ERK2 and Stat3 and Stat5 (signal transducers and activators of transcription [STAT]). This is the first demonstration of the ability of HRGβ1 to activate STATs in mammary tumor cells. Blockage of PI-3K activity with its chemical inhibitor wortmannin, or of MEKI/ERKs activity with PD98059, resulted in suppression of the ability of HRGβ1 to inhibit LM3 cell growth. Notwithstanding the suppression of these 2 signaling pathways, HRGβ1 still proved capable of inhibiting uPA activity. Therefore, our results provide evidence that signaling pathways involved in HRGβ1-induced proliferation appear to be distinct from those involved in HRGβ1 regulation of uPA, a protease that plays a pivotal role in invasion and metastasis. © 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.Fil:Puricelli, L. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.Fil:Labriola, L. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.Fil:Salatino, M. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.Fil:Balañá, M.E. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.Fil:Pignataro, O.P. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.Fil:Charreau, E.H. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.Fil:Elizalde, P.V. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina