Meeting the Needs of Pregnant and Parenting Adolescents through Home Visiting

Pregnant and parenting adolescents* face the dual challenge of raising a child while navigating their own path to adulthood. Many encounter barriers related to child care, housing, and health care that can limit their job and educational opportunities. Some experience judgment and bias at home and in the community. Despite these setbacks, some adolescents view parenthood as a positive life event that bolsters their sense of responsibility and stability.** Many home visiting models support first-time parents or parents with complex needs. The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program identifies women under 21 as a priority service group. More can be done, however, to offer age-appropriate, engaging, and respectful home visiting services for adolescents.This Innovation Roundup Brief highlights home visiting models, affiliates, and initiatives serving young parents' needs:Teen Parent Connection: A Healthy Families America AffiliateFamily SpiritNurse-Family PartnershipShow Me Strong Families (SMSF): A Parents as Teachers InitiativeIt concludes with key service delivery features for consideration by other programs

Increasing Equitable Food Access Within Food Deserts in Urban Areas: A Case Study of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area

Title from PDF of title page, viewed February 9, 2023Thesis advisor: Jejung LeeVItaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 59-62)Thesis (M.S.)--Department of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2022There has been growing interest in the factors that contribute to poor health outcomes, particularly in areas where health disparities are pronounced. The locations of food deserts, or unhealthy food environments, correspond to areas with the highest proportions of minority residents, populations suffering from higher rates of many chronic conditions, including obesity and diabetes. As well, food deserts tend to be located in areas with higher rates of poverty throughout the United States. This study seeks to enhance our understanding of the role of the neighborhood environment on residents’ food access by studying the effects of a local Urban Farming Network on the local food buying system. Growing food in urban areas could solve a multitude of problems. This study was developed to evaluate whether the inclusion of an Urban Farming Network to a food desert will increase residents’ access to healthy food. This case study included an analysis of survey and focus group as well as a spatial analysis focusing on the local urban farms in the Kansas City Metropolitan area. Spatial statistics were run on the locations of the local urban farms in an effort to determine significant clustering. This study approaches the issue of food deserts with a focus on the socioeconomic dynamic of the urban area as well as a spatial analysis to show the potential of a microtransportation food delivery system from local growers to consumers. With the analysis of the local farms in the Kansas City Metropolitan area, there were shown to be gaps in where food can be purchased and where the addition of an urban farm could help to resolve the issue.Introduction -- Literature review -- Methodology -- Results and discussion -- Conclusio

Solitary waves and supersonic reaction front in metastable solids

Motivated by an increasing number of remarkable experimental observations on the role of pressure and shear stress in solid reactions, explosions and detonations, we present a simple toy model that embodies nonlinear elasticity and dispersion as well as chemical or phase transformation. This generalization of the Toda Lattice provides an effective model for the description of the organization during an abrupt transformation in a solid. One of the challenges is to capture both the equilibrium degrees of freedom as well as to quantify the possible role of out-of-equilibrium perturbations. In the Toda Lattice, we verify that the particle velocities converge in distribution towards the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, thus allowing us to define a bona-fide temperature. In addition, the balance between nonlinearity and wave dispersion may create solitary waves that act as energy traps. In the presence of reactive chemistry, we show that the trapping of the released chemical energy in solitary waves that are excited by an initial perturbation provides a positive feedback that enhances the reaction rate and leads to supersonic explosion front propagation. These modes of rupture observed in our model may provide a first-order description of ultrafast reactions of heterogeneous mixtures under mechanical loading

Perceptions of Business Computer Application Curriculum Needs for Public,Undergraduate Education Institutions in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Occupational and Adult Educatio

Toward Pay Equity: A Case Study of Washington DCs Wage Boost for Early Childhood Educators

This short report presents findings from interviews—with key informants, including DC early childhood education leaders, advocates, and implementation partners; parents and legal guardians of young children enrolled in licensed DC child care facilities; and child care center directors and home and expanded home providers—on the nation's first early childhood educator wage supplement with dedicated public funding

Kinetics and thermodynamics of carbon segregation and graphene growth on Ru(0001)

We measure the concentration of carbon adatoms on the Ru(0001) surface that are in equilibrium with C atoms in the crystal's bulk by monitoring the electron reflectivity of the surface while imaging. During cooling from high temperature, C atoms segregate to the Ru surface, causing graphene islands to nucleate. Using low-energy electron microscopy (LEEM), we measure the growth rate of individual graphene islands and, simultaneously, the local concentration of C adatoms on the surface. We find that graphene growth is fed by the supersaturated, two-dimensional gas of C adatoms rather than by direct exchange between the bulk C and the graphene. At long times, the rate at which C diffuses from the bulk to the surface controls the graphene growth rate. The competition among C in three states - dissolved in Ru, as an adatom, and in graphene - is quantified and discussed. The adatom segregation enthalpy determined by applying the simple Langmuir-McLean model to the temperature-dependent equilibrium concentration seriously disagrees with the value calculated from first-principles. This discrepancy suggests that the assumption in the model of non-interacting C is not valid

Recombinase-based conditional and reversible gene regulation via XTR alleles

Synthetic biological tools that enable precise regulation of gene function within in vivo systems have enormous potential to discern gene function in diverse physiological settings. Here we report the development and characterization of a synthetic gene switch that, when targeted in the mouse germline, enables conditional inactivation, reports gene expression and allows inducible restoration of the targeted gene. Gene inactivation and reporter expression is achieved through Cre-mediated stable inversion of an integrated gene-trap reporter, whereas inducible gene restoration is afforded by Flp-dependent deletion of the inverted gene trap. We validate our approach by targeting the p53 and Rb genes and establishing cell line and in vivo cancer model systems, to study the impact of p53 or Rb inactivation and restoration. We term this allele system XTR, to denote each of the allelic states and the associated expression patterns of the targeted gene: eXpressed (XTR), Trapped (TR) and Restored (R)

What’s Sex (Composition) Got to Do with It? The Importance of Sex Composition of Gangs for Female and Male Members’ Offending and Victimization

Sex composition of groups has been theorized in organizational sociology and found in prior work to structure female and male members’ behaviors and experiences. Peer group and gang literature similarly finds that the sex gap in offending varies across groups of differing sex ratios. Drawing on this and other research linking gang membership, offending, and victimization, we examine whether sex composition of gangs is linked to sex differences in offending in this sample, further assess whether sex composition similarly structures females’ and males’ victimization experiences, and if so, why. Self-report data from gang members in a multi-site, longitudinal study of 3,820 youths are employed. Results support previous findings about variations in member delinquency by both sex and sex composition of the gang and also indicate parallel variations in members’ victimization. These results are further considered within the context of facilitating effects such as gender dynamics, gang characteristics, and normative orientation

Conformational Altered p53 as an Early Marker of Oxidative Stress in Alzheimer's Disease

In order to study oxidative stress in peripheral cells of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, immortalized lymphocytes derived from two peculiar cohorts of patients, referring to early onset AD (EOSAD) and subjects harboured AD related mutation (ADmut), were used. Oxidative stress was evaluated measuring i) the typical oxidative markers, such as HNE Michel adducts, 3 Nitro-Tyrosine residues and protein carbonyl on protein extracts, ii) and the antioxidant capacity, following the enzymatic kinetic of superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and glutathione reductase (GRD). We found that the signs of oxidative stress, measured as oxidative marker levels, were evident only in ADmut but not in EOSAD patients. However, oxidative imbalance in EOSAD as well as ADmut lymphocytes was underlined by a reduced SOD activity and GRD activity in both pathological groups in comparison with cells derived from healthy subjects. Furthermore, a redox modulated p53 protein was found conformational altered in both EOSAD and ADmut B lymphocytes in comparison with control cells. This conformational altered p53 isoform, named “unfolded p53”, was recognized by the use of two specific conformational anti-p53 antibodies. Immunoprecipitation experiments, performed with the monoclonal antibodies PAb1620 (that recognizes p53wt) and PAb240 (that is direct towards unfolded p53), and followed by the immunoblotting with anti-4-hydroxynonenal (HNE) and anti- 3-nitrotyrosine (3NT) antibodies, showed a preferential increase of nitrated tyrosine residues in unfolded p53 isoform comparing to p53 wt protein, in both ADmut and EOSAD. In addition, a correlation between unfolded p53 and SOD activity was further found. Thus this study suggests that ROS/RNS contributed to change of p53 tertiary structure and that unfolded p53 can be considered as an early marker of oxidative imbalance in these patients