Serial, Season Three: From Feeling to Structure

From the start, host and reporter Sarah Koenig presents the 2018 season of Serial as a corrective to the universe-in-a-grain-of-sand approach typical of earlier seasons and much of the work of This American Life, from which Serial spun off. In a thematic departure, Koenig sets out to tell the story of structures, rather than merely structure a story. The first character is a “cluster of concrete towers” in downtown Cleveland, called the Justice Center, a name we’ll quickly come to understand as ironic, if not Orwellian. Host Sarah Koenig describes the structure as “hideous but practical”. Koenig and company have built each episode to function like steps along a path, to provide a spatial sense of the Justice Center and a conceptual sense of the social universe in which its denizens reside. In addition to meticulous structuring, Koenig needs all her charm, all her storytelling prowess, and all the wry humour she can wring from the cases she investigates, because the story of the Cleveland Justice Center is an American horror story. It is a damning indictment of the toxic stew of white supremacy, class divides, a punitive philosophy of corrections, and bureaucratic malfeasance that makes it nearly impossible for justice to be served. In a set of several stories about individual cases that occasionally overlap, spill over into different episodes, and circle back through coincidences and thematic unities only to fracture again, Koenig and her colleague Emmanuel Dzotsi evoke a world of cascading injustices

Grading on a curve: When having good peers is not good

Student access to education levels, tracks or majors is usually determined by their previous performance, measured either by internal exams, designed and graded by teachers in school, or external exams, designed and graded by central authorities. We say teachers grade on a curve whenever having better peers harms the evaluation obtained by a given student. We use rich administrative records from public schools in Catalonia to provide evidence that teachers indeed grade on a curve, leading to negative peer effects. This puts forth a source of distortion that may arise in any system that uses internal grades to compare students across schools and classes. We find suggestive evidence that school choice is impacted only the year when internal grades matter for future prospects

Centerscope

Centerscope, formerly Scope, was published by the Boston University Medical Center "to communicate the concern of the Medical Center for the development and maintenance of improved health care in contemporary society.

Maturity and school outcomes in an inflexible system : evidence from Catalonia

The existence of a rigid cutoff date which determines when children start primary school creates a large heterogeneity in students' level of maturity within the classroom. We use rich administrative data of the universe of public schools in Catalonia to show that: (1) relatively younger children do significantly worse both in tests administered at the school level and at the regional level, and they experience greater retention. (2) These effects are homogeneous across SES and significant across the whole distribution of performance. (3) Younger children in our data exhibit higher dropout rates and choose the academic track in secondary school less often. (4) Younger children are more frequently diagnosed with learning disorders

What is a stake without high-stakes exams? Students’ evaluation and admission to college at the time of Covid-19

The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 inhibited face-to-face education and constrained exam taking. In many countries worldwide, high-stakes exams happening at the end of the school year determine college admissions. This paper investigates the impact of using historical data of school and high-stakes exams results to train a model to predict high-stakes exams given the available data in the Spring. The most transparent and accurate model turns out to be a linear regression model with high school GPA as the main predictor. Further analysis of the predictions reflect how high-stakes exams relate to GPA in high school for different subgroups in the population. Predicted scores slightly advantage females and low SES individuals, who perform relatively worse in high-stakes exams than in high school. Our preferred model accounts for about 50% of the out-of-sample variation in the high-stakes exam. On average, the student rank using predicted scores differs from the actual rank by almost 17 percentiles. This suggests that either high-stakes exams capture individual skills that are not measured by high school grades or that high-stakes exams are a noisy measure of the same skill

School Quality Beyond Test Scores: the Role of Schools in Shaping Educational Outcomes

I study how schools impact student performance and educational attainment throughout secondary education, and show that school quality cannot be easily captured by any type of rankings because students with differing characteristics and abilities benefit from different school inputs. To do so, I estimate a dynamic structural model of cognitive skills accumulation and schooling decision using rich administrative data from middle schools in Barcelona. I then simulate the outcomes that each student would have achieved in every school in the sample. Notably, the school environment has a crucial impact on the educational attainment of students from less advantaged family background and low-ability students who are at greater risk of leaving school. Moreover, the schools that would yield the highest final test scores for these students – provided they do not drop out – are not the ones that would maximize their likelihood of graduating and enrolling in further education. The results suggest that evaluating and comparing schools using only standardized assessments is insufficient for serving the needs of disadvantaged students, who require schools that enhance educational attainment rather than just test scores

Misperceptions of unemployment and individual labor market outcomes

We analyze the impact of misperceptions of the unemployment rate on individual wages, using the European Social Survey. We follow a threefold strategy to tackle potential endogeneity problems, as the model includes the following: controls for worker’s ability, the regional unemployment rate, and country fixed effects. We estimate interval regression models. When subjective perceptions overstate the country unemployment rate, a one percentage point gap between the perceived and the actual rates reduces wages by 0.4 to 0.7 %. We discuss a potential mechanism. A pessimistic view of the labor market leads to concern over own employment prospects, lowering perceived bargaining power and reservation wages.Cardoso acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness (grant ECO2012-38460 and the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D SEV-2011-0075) and the Generalitat de Catalunya, grant 2014-SGR-1414. Loviglio acknowledges the support of La Caixa Foundation.Peer reviewe

Genomic rearrangements and diseases

Copy number variations (CNVs) are major contributors of genomic imbalances disorders. On the short arm of chromosome 16, CNVs of the distal 220 kb BP2-BP3 region show mirror effect on BMI and head size, and association with autism and schizophrenia, as previously reported for the proximal 600 kb BP4-BP5 deletion and duplication. These two CNVs-prone regions at 16p11.2 are also reciprocally engaged in complex chromatin looping, successfully confirmed by 4C-seq, FISH, Hi-C and concomitant expression changes, and are chromatin interactors of other loci linked to autism and/or mirror phenotypes of BMI and head circumference, for example the 2p15 cytoband. Zebrafish modeling of the BP2-BP3 duplication revealed that the overexpression of the linker for activation of T cells (LAT) induces a reduction in dividing cells in the brain and number of post-mitotic neurons in the anterior forebrain, and of intertectal axonal tracts, resulting in microcephaly, and suggested this gene as major contributor in the BP2-BP3 CNVs neurodevelopmental phenotypes. KCTD13, MVP, and MAPK3, three genes mapping within the BP4-BP5 locus and major driver and modifiers, respectively, of the head circumference phenotype linked to that region, and LAT act in additive manner to increase the severity of the microcephaly phenotype, supporting the presence of genetic interaction, in addition to proximity in 3D nuclear space, between these two loci. Smith-Magenis syndrome (SMS) is a developmental disability/multiple congenital anomaly disorder resulting from deletion at 17p11.2 that includes the RAI1 gene or a nucleotide variant in that gene. We investigated a cohort of 15 individuals with a clinical suspicion of SMS, who showed negative deletion and mutational analysis in RAI1. Potentially deleterious variants were identified in eight of these subjects using WES in KMT2D, ZEB2, MAP2K2, GLDC, CASK, MECP2, KDM5C and POGZ. Analyses of coexpression, biomedical text mining, transcriptome profiling of Rai1-/- mice and chromosome contacts suggest that these genes and RAI1 are part of the same disease network. Our 4C-seq results from 16p11.2 and 17p11.2 studies indicate that chromosomal contacts' maps can be exploited to uncover functionally and clinically related genes. These findings also encourage the integration of the results obtained from various genomic approaches to unravel complex disorders and CNVs. Abstract (French) « Structure du génôme et pathologies» La variation du nombre de copies (en anglais, Copy Number Variation, CNV) est un des contributeurs principaux à la pathogenèse des syndromes génétiques rares, mais aussi des maladies multifactorielles fréquentes. Sur le bras court du chromosome 16, les CNVs de la région distale BP2-BP3 de longueur 220 kb conduisent à un effet miroir entre sous- poids et obésité sévère, et micro- et macrocéphalies, et ils sont aussi associés avec l'autisme et la schizophrénie. Des phénotypes similaires ont été observés précédemment sur la même bande chromosomique (16p11.2) pour des délétions et duplications proximales dans la région BP4-BP5 (600 kb). Ces régions BP2-BP3 et BP4- BP5 présentent des contacts chromatiniens réciproques, confirmés avec succès par différentes techniques (4C-seq, FISH, co-régulation dans l'expression des gènes, et des données Hi-C). Elles décrivent aussi des interactions au niveau de la chromatine avec d'autres loci liés à l'autisme et/ou aux phénotypes miroir de l'IMC (Indice de Masse Corporelle) et de la circonférence de la tête, par exemple avec la bande chromosomique 2p15. La modélisation de la duplication de la région BP2-BP3 dans le poisson-zèbre a révélé que la surexpression du gene LAT (en anglais, Linker for Activation of T-cells) diminue la prolifération des cellules dans le cerveau et des neurones post-mitotiques dans le cerveau antérieur et le nombre des axones entre les tecta optiques, au début du développement embryonaire. Dans les stades suivants du développement, nous observons une microcéphalie des poissons. Tous ces éléments indiquent que ce gène est le contributeur essentiel des phénotypes neuro-développementaux des CNVs de la région BP2-BP3. KCTD13, MVP et MAPK3 sont situés dans la région BP4-BP5 et, sont, respectivement, un gène principal et deux gènes modificateurs des anomalies de la taille de la tête liée à cette région. Ces trois gènes et LAT augmentent ensemble de manière additive la gravité de la microcéphalie, en soutenant la présence d'une interaction, pas seulement dans l'espace 3D nucléaire, mais aussi génétique entre les deux loci. Le syndrome de Smith-Magenis (SMS) se caractérise par un retard mental, des dysmorphies, des troubles du comportement et du sommeil très sévères, dues à une microdélétion dans la bande 17p11.2 du chromosome 17, qui comprend le gène RAI1 ou une mutation de ce gène. Nous avons étudié une cohorte de quinze personnes avec un diagnostic de SMS, mais n'ayant pas de délétion ou mutation du gène RAI1. Par le séquençage de l'exome, des mutations potentiellement délétères ont été identifiées chez huit de ces sujets dans les gènes KMT2D, ZEB2, MAP2K2, GLDC, CASK, MECP2, KDM5C et POGZ. Les analyses de la co-expression des gènes, des données de text mining, du profilage du transcriptome des souris Rai1-/- et des contacts chromatiniens font penser que ces gènes et RAI1 font partie du même « disease network ». Les résultats de 4C-seq obtenus par les études des bandes 16p11.2 et 17p11.2 indiquent que les contacts chromosomiques peuvent être exploitées pour découvrir des gènes liés d'un point de vue fonctionnel et clinique. Ces résultats encouragent également l'intégration des données obtenues à partir de différentes approches génomiques pour démêler des troubles complexes et les larges CNVs

Does Oxidative Stress Play a Role in the Pathogenesis of Urticarias

Radical oxygen species (ROS) modulate various cellular processes and are involved in physiologic and pathologic conditions, including inflammation. There is growing evidence that supports the existence of an abnormal redox status in some chronic inflammatory skin diseases, including contact dermatitis, atopic dermatitis and psoriasis. This review introduces some general aspects on the role of oxidative stress in cutaneous inflammation, with special emphasis on urticarias, summarizing recent novel findings derived from the study of physical urticarias and chronic idiopathic urticaria