Buffalo Child Care Means Business: Full Study Report

[Excerpt] Buffalo Child Care Means Business presents the economic and business case for making Buffalo\u27s children the focus of economic development. The 2006 survey of 117 businesses located in downtown Buffalo, New York, documents the business sector\u27s present and projected reliance upon high quality child care services as a necessary component to optimum workplace recruitment, productivity and stability. This promising study highlights research specific to the Buffalo region measuring the cost the community bears as a result of low quality child care and early education. It draws upon nationally recognized economic development strategies to offer recommendations for a strategic child care plan integral to the City of Buffalo\u27s overall strategic initiatives to strengthen downtown\u27s attractiveness to successful enterprises. The early development needs of Buffalo\u27s children must be front and center if the potential economic power of broadly successful education is to be realized. With business, government, education and child care leaders at the table, Buffalo\u27s economic renaissance can be built on individual and social foundations that last a lifetime

Interaction between Yeast Cdc6 Protein and B-Type Cyclin/Cdc28 Kinases

During purification of recombinant Cdc6 expressed in yeast, we found that Cdc6 interacts with the critical cell cycle, cyclin-dependent protein kinase Cdc28. Cdc6 and Cdc28 can be coimmunoprecipitated from extracts, Cdc6 is retained on the Cdc28-binding matrix p13-agarose, and Cdc28 is retained on an affinity column charged with bacterially produced Cdc6. Cdc6, which is a phosphoprotein in vivo, contains five Cdc28 consensus sites and is a substrate of the Cdc28 kinase in vitro. Cdc6 also inhibits Cdc28 histone H1 kinase activity. Strikingly, Cdc6 interacts preferentially with B-type cyclin/Cdc28 complexes and not Cln/Cdc28 in log-phase cells. However, Cdc6 does not associate with Cdc28 when cells are blocked at the restrictive temperature in a cdc34 mutant, a point in the cell cycle when the B-type cyclin/Cdc28 inhibitor p40Sic1 accumulates and purified p40Sic1 inhibits the Cdc6/Cdc28 interaction. Deletion of the Cdc28 interaction domain from Cdc6 yields a protein that cannot support growth. However, when overproduced, the mutant protein can support growth. Furthermore, whereas overproduction of wild-type Cdc6 leads to growth inhibition and bud hyperpolarization, overproduction of the mutant protein supports growth at normal rates with normal morphology. Thus, the interaction may have a role in the essential function of Cdc6 in initiation and in restraining mitosis until replication is complete

Social Network Limits Language Complexity

Natural languages vary widely in the degree to which they make use of nested compositional structure in their grammars. It has long been noted by linguists that the languages historically spoken in small communities develop much deeper levels of compositional embedding than those spoken by larger groups. Recently, this observation has been confirmed by a robust statistical analysis of the World Atlas of Language Structures. In order to examine this connection mechanistically, we propose an agent\u2010based model that accounts for key cultural evolutionary features of language transfer and language change. We identify transitivity as a physical parameter of social networks critical for the evolution of compositional structure and the hierarchical patterning of scale\u2010free distributions as inhibitory

Artificial Gauge Field and Quantum Spin Hall States in a Conventional Two-dimensional Electron Gas

Based on the Born-Oppemheimer approximation, we divide total electron Hamiltonian in a spinorbit coupled system into slow orbital motion and fast interband transition process. We find that the fast motion induces a gauge field on slow orbital motion, perpendicular to electron momentum, inducing a topological phase. From this general designing principle, we present a theory for generating artificial gauge field and topological phase in a conventional two-dimensional electron gas embedded in parabolically graded GaAs/In$_{x}$Ga$_{1-x}$As/GaAs quantum wells with antidot lattices. By tuning the etching depth and period of antidot lattices, the band folding caused by superimposed potential leads to formation of minibands and band inversions between the neighboring subbands. The intersubband spin-orbit interaction opens considerably large nontrivial minigaps and leads to many pairs of helical edge states in these gaps.Comment: 9 pages and 4 figure

Guided Assembly of Nanostructures via Elastic Interactions

A solid solution can spontaneously separate into phases that self-assemble into patterns. This process can be guided via external fields to form ordered micro- and nanostructures. In this paper, we demonstrate that notions of interaction energies provide powerful insights into the coupling of these fields with the properties of the alloy. A phase-field model is developed that incorporates chemical, interfacial, and elastic energies, including heterogeneous elastic properties, and couples naturally to externally imposed mechanical fields. Aggregation in bulk and in thin films under patterned external load is investigated. The kinetics and morphology of phase separation are shown to depend significantly on elastic properties of the system, which include elastic heterogeneity and the misfit or transformation strain. Eshelby-type asymptotic estimates for interaction energies are shown to be very useful in understanding and predicting the trends observed from the simulations