Managing Budgets During Fiscal Stress: Lessons for Local Government Officials

Like many local governments across the nation, cities and counties in California were impacted heavily by recent economic problems. This report examines what happened to local California government revenues during this period, which services have been adjusted, how employee benefits have been treated, and what innovations have been introduced. The report is based on both a web-based survey of 245 California city government officials and face-to-face interviews with chief financial officers in most of the state’s major cities (Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Riverside, Pasadena and Los Angeles). The authors write, “There has always been much interest in the state with 12 percent of the nation’s population. The experiences of California provide lessons for local governments across the nation as they seek to manage the continuing aftershocks of the Great Recession.” The report concludes with recommendations for local governments across the nation. These include: Identify and address structural deficits in a finely grained manner, leaving no major budget category unexamined. Foster citizen engagement to encourage widespread dissemination of fiscal information in order to enhance the legitimacy of public policy choices. Improve the state/local relationship to reduce episodic, convulsive impacts on local public finance

Integration of molecular profiles in a longitudinal wellness profiling cohort

An important aspect of precision medicine is to probe the stability in molecular profiles among healthy individuals over time. Here, we sample a longitudinal wellness cohort with 100 healthy individuals and analyze blood molecular profiles including proteomics, transcriptomics, lipidomics, metabolomics, autoantibodies and immune cell profiling, complemented with gut microbiota composition and routine clinical chemistry. Overall, our results show high variation between individuals across different molecular readouts, while the intra-individual baseline variation is low. The analyses show that each individual has a unique and stable plasma protein profile throughout the study period and that many individuals also show distinct profiles with regards to the other omics datasets, with strong underlying connections between the blood proteome and the clinical chemistry parameters. In conclusion, the results support an individual-based definition of health and show that comprehensive omics profiling in a longitudinal manner is a path forward for precision medicine

Defending goverment: why big goverment works/ Neiman

xi, 221 hal.: tab.; 21 cm