Whose Money, Whose Time? A Nonparametric Approach to Modeling Time Spent on Housework

We argue that earlier quantitative research on the relationship between heterosexual partners’ earnings and time spent on housework has two basic flaws. First, it has focused on the effects of women’s shares of couples’ total earnings on their housework, and has not considered the simpler possibility of an association between women’s absolute earnings and housework. Consequently it has relied on unsupported theoretical restrictions in the modeling. We adopt a flexible, nonparametric approach that does not impose the polynomial specifications on the data that characterize the two dominant models of the relationship between earnings and housework, the “economic exchange” and “gender display” hypotheses. Our nonparametric model allows the relationships among earnings shares, earnings, and time spent on housework to emerge from the data. A second problem with earlier studies is that they have tended to draw uniform inferences across the range of data, including regions where the data are sparse. This has led to interpretations of parametric curves that are driven by these thinly populated regions, and that may not be robust across the data. By contrast, our study explicitly assesses the reliability of results obtained in such regions. Our results provide support for an alternative model that emphasizes the importance of partners’ own earnings for their housework, especially in the case of women. Women’s own earnings are negatively associated with their housework hours, independently of their partners’ earnings and their shares of couples’ total earnings, which do not matter.housework, household economics, nonparametric regression, bargaining, gender

Measuring Corporate Environmental Justice Performance

Measures of corporate environmental justice performance can be a valuable tool in efforts to promote corporate social responsibility and to document systematic patterns of environmental injustice. This paper develops such a measure based on the extent to which toxic air emissions from industrial facilities disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minorities and low-income people. Applying the measure to 100 major corporate air polluters in the United States, we find wide variation in the extent of disproportional exposures. In a number of cases, minorities bear more than half of the total human health impacts from the firm's industrial air pollution.Corporate social responsibility; corporate environmental performance; environmental justice; air pollution

Separate and Unequal: The Effect of Unequal Access to Employment-Based Health Insurance on Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual People

Employers' standard practice of including legal spouses in health insurance is likely to place people in unmarried couples at a significant disadvantage for obtaining coverage. Data from married and unmarried couples in the Current Population Survey confirm that people with unmarried partners are two to three times more likely to lack health insurance than are people in married couples, even after controlling for factors that influence coverage. A requirement to provide the same benefits for partners as are provided to spouses would reduce the proportion of uninsured people in same-sex couples and different-sex couples by as much as 50%. We find no evidence of adverse selection. We predict that a typical employer offering domestic partner coverage will see a small increase in enrollment, ranging from 0.1% to 0.3% for same-sex partners and 1.3% to 2.1% for different-sex unmarried partners.health, health insurance, benefits, employment benefits, health disparities, domestic partners, minorities, discrimination, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, gay, lesbian, marriage, same-sex couples

Hit-and-run lymphomagenesis by the Bcl6 Oncogene

Editorials: Cell Cycle FeaturesPeer Reviewe

Randomized Efficacy Trial of a Micronutrient-Fortified Beverage in Primary School Children in Tanzania.

Dietary supplements providing physiologic amounts of several micronutrients simultaneously have not been thoroughly tested for combating micronutrient deficiencies. We determined whether a beverage fortified with 10 micronutrients at physiologic doses influenced the iron and vitamin A status and growth of rural children (aged 6-11 y) attending primary schools. In this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled efficacy trial, children were assigned to receive the fortified beverage or an unfortified beverage at school for 6 mo. There were nonsignificant differences at baseline between children in the fortified and nonfortified groups in iron status, serum retinol, and anthropometry. At the 6-mo follow-up, among children with anemia (hemoglobin < 110 g/L), there was a significantly larger increase in hemoglobin concentration in the fortified group than in the nonfortified group (9.2 and 0.2 g/L, respectively). Of those who were anemic at baseline, 69.4% in the nonfortified group and 55.1% in the fortified group remained anemic at follow-up (RR: 0.79), a cure rate of 21%. The prevalence of children with low serum retinol concentrations (< 200 microg/L) dropped significantly from 21.4% to 11.3% in the fortified group compared with a nonsignificant change (20.6% to 19.7%) in the nonfortified group. At follow-up, mean incremental changes in weight (1.79 compared with 1.24 kg), height (3.2 compared with 2.6 cm), and BMI (0.88 compared with 0.53) were significantly higher in the fortified group than in the nonfortified group. The fortified beverage significantly improved hematologic and anthropometric measurements and significantly lowered the overall prevalence of anemia and vitamin A deficiency

Post-hospital medical respite care and hospital readmission of homeless persons

Medical respite programs offer medical, nursing, and other care as well as accommodation for homeless persons discharged from acute hospital stays. They represent a community-based adaptation of urban health systems to the specific needs of homeless persons. This article examines whether post-hospital discharge to a homeless medical respite program was associated with a reduced chance of 90-day readmission compared to other disposition options. Adjusting for imbalances in patient characteristics using propensity scores, respite patients were the only group that was significantly less likely to be readmitted within 90 days compared to those released to Own Care. Respite programs merit attention as a potentially efficacious service for homeless persons leaving the hospital

Pharmacologic reductions of total tau levels; implications for the role of microtubule dynamics in regulating tau expression

The microtubule-associated protein tau (MAPT) is a pathological component of several neurodegenerative diseases and clinical dementias. Here, we have investigated the effects of a series of commercially available FDA-approved compounds and natural products on total tau protein levels using a cell-based approach that allows for the rapid and efficient measurement of changes in protein expression. RESULTS: The compounds that reduced tau largely fell within 3 functional categories with the largest percentage being microtubule regulators. Several of these candidates were validated in both a human neuroglioma and a human neuroblastoma cell line. While these drugs lead to a rapid reduction in tau protein levels, a selective decrease in MAPT mRNA expression was also observed. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that the identified compounds that reduce tau levels may act either through direct effects on the MAPT promoter itself or by altering a feedback transcriptional mechanism regulating MAPT transcription. This is particularly interesting in light of recent evidence suggesting that MAPT 5' UTR mutations in late-onset PD and PSP cases alter the expression of tau mRNA. In fact, one of the compounds we identified, rotenone, has been used extensively to model PD in rodents. These observations may provide key insights into the mechanism of tau turnover within the neuron while also providing the first evidence that selectively reducing tau protein levels may be possible using compounds that are FDA-approved for other uses

Active Learning Pipeline for Brain Mapping in a High Performance Computing Environment

This paper describes a scalable active learning pipeline prototype for large-scale brain mapping that leverages high performance computing power. It enables high-throughput evaluation of algorithm results, which, after human review, are used for iterative machine learning model training. Image processing and machine learning are performed in a batch layer. Benchmark testing of image processing using pMATLAB shows that a 100$\times$ increase in throughput (10,000%) can be achieved while total processing time only increases by 9% on Xeon-G6 CPUs and by 22% on Xeon-E5 CPUs, indicating robust scalability. The images and algorithm results are provided through a serving layer to a browser-based user interface for interactive review. This pipeline has the potential to greatly reduce the manual annotation burden and improve the overall performance of machine learning-based brain mapping.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, submitted to IEEE HPEC 2020 proceeding

Hospital Costs Related to Early Extubation after Infant Cardiac Surgery

Background The Pediatric Heart Network Collaborative Learning Study (PHN CLS) increased early extubation rates after infant Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) and coarctation (CoA) repair across participating sites by implementing a clinical practice guideline (CPG). The impact of the CPG on hospital costs has not been studied. Methods PHN CLS clinical data were linked to cost data from Children’s Hospital Association by matching on indirect identifiers. Hospital costs were evaluated across active and control sites in the pre- and post-CPG periods using generalized linear mixed effects models. A difference-in-difference approach was used to assess whether changes in cost observed in active sites were beyond secular trends in control sites. Results Data were successfully linked on 410/428 (96%) of eligible patients from 4 active and 4 control sites. Mean adjusted cost/case for TOF repair was significantly reduced in the post-CPG period at active sites ($42,833 vs.$56,304, p<0.01) and unchanged at control sites ($47,007 vs.$46,476, p=0.91), with an overall cost reduction of 27% in active vs. control sites (p=0.03). Specific categories of cost reduced in the TOF cohort included clinical (-66%, p<0.01), pharmacy (-46%, p=0.04), lab (-44%, p<0.01), and imaging (-32%, p<0.01). There was no change in costs for CoA repair at active or control sites. Conclusions The early extubation CPG was associated with a reduction in hospital costs for infants undergoing repair of TOF, but not CoA repair. This CPG represents an opportunity to both optimize clinical outcome and reduce costs for certain infant cardiac surgeries

Logopenic and nonfluent variants of primary progressive aphasia are differentiated by acoustic measures of speech production

Differentiation of logopenic (lvPPA) and nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia is important yet remains challenging since it hinges on expert based evaluation of speech and language production. In this study acoustic measures of speech in conjunction with voxel-based morphometry were used to determine the success of the measures as an adjunct to diagnosis and to explore the neural basis of apraxia of speech in nfvPPA. Forty-one patients (21 lvPPA, 20 nfvPPA) were recruited from a consecutive sample with suspected frontotemporal dementia. Patients were diagnosed using the current gold-standard of expert perceptual judgment, based on presence/absence of particular speech features during speaking tasks. Seventeen healthy age-matched adults served as controls. MRI scans were available for 11 control and 37 PPA cases; 23 of the PPA cases underwent amyloid ligand PET imaging. Measures, corresponding to perceptual features of apraxia of speech, were periods of silence during reading and relative vowel duration and intensity in polysyllable word repetition. Discriminant function analyses revealed that a measure of relative vowel duration differentiated nfvPPA cases from both control and lvPPA cases (r2 = 0.47) with 88% agreement with expert judgment of presence of apraxia of speech in nfvPPA cases. VBM analysis showed that relative vowel duration covaried with grey matter intensity in areas critical for speech motor planning and programming: precentral gyrus, supplementary motor area and inferior frontal gyrus bilaterally, only affected in the nfvPPA group. This bilateral involvement of frontal speech networks in nfvPPA potentially affects access to compensatory mechanisms involving right hemisphere homologues. Measures of silences during reading also discriminated the PPA and control groups, but did not increase predictive accuracy. Findings suggest that a measure of relative vowel duration from of a polysyllable word repetition task may be sufficient for detecting most cases of apraxia of speech and distinguishing between nfvPPA and lvPPA