Landscapes of luxury in the rural US depend on the recruitment of low-wage and often undocumented Latino workers

The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic growth in low-wage Latino and Latina immigrants, both documented and undocumented, finding employment and settling permanently in the United States. This process represents a key example of how globalization is transforming the U.S. economy and society. Of particular interest to scholars has been the diversification of Latino immigrant destinations, as a growing number of communities with no recent history of immigrant presence have witnessed rapid growth in immigrant residents. In new research, Lise Nelson, Laurie Trautman, and Peter B. Nelson argue that rural gentrification represents an important but overlooked ‘pull factor’ in the expansion of new Latino immigrant destinations in the rural United States. Their research reveals the process through which employers’ recruited workers to these geographically isolated locales, and how the gentrification boom witnessed in these places is supported by highly flexible immigrant labor regimes

Service Industries and Employment Growth in the Nonmetro South: A Geographical Perspective

Service employment has grown rapidly in the nonmetro South in recent years, accounting for 87 percent of overall job growth in the 1985-1995 time period. This pace has been sustained in nonmetro areas that are adjacent to metro areas, as well as in more remote nonmetro areas that are not adjacent to metro areas. Retail, health, and producer services account for the largest share of service employment growth. In contrast to the United States as a whole, which experienced declines in manufacturing employment, the nonmetro South has had increases in manufacturing employment. This growth of manufacturing has stimulated the local service sector through multiplier relationships associated with the expenditure of income earned in manufacturing. Within the nonmetro South there has been more rapid growth east of the Mississippi River than in regions west of it. The role of services in southern nonmetro job growth must be recognized in economic development programs. Field-based research is needed to document whether job growth in services in the nonmetro South has been stimulated by growing levels of interregional trade in these services, as has been documented in other regions of the United States. There is also a need to document relationships between the growth of nonearnings income and services employment growth in the nonmetro South

Vetoes for Inspiral Triggers in LIGO Data

Presented is a summary of studies by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's Inspiral Analysis Group on the development of possible vetoes to be used in evaluation of data from the first two LIGO science data runs. Numerous environmental monitor signals and interferometer control channels have been analyzed in order to characterize the interferometers' performance. The results of studies on selected data segments are provided in this paper. The vetoes used in the compact binary inspiral analyses of LIGO's S1 and S2 science data runs are presented and discussed.Comment: Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravity for the GWDAW-8 proceeding

Recent results of the STAR high-energy polarized proton-proton program at RHIC at BNL

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is carrying out a spin physics program colliding transverse or longitudinal polarized proton beams at $\sqrt{s}=200-500$GeV to gain a deeper insight into the spin structure and dynamics of the proton. These studies provide fundamental tests of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). One of the main objectives of the STAR spin physics program is the determination of the polarized gluon distribution function through a measurement of the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry, $A_{LL}$, for various processes. Recent results will be shown on the measurement of $A_{LL}$ for inclusive jet production, neutral pion production and charged pion production at $\sqrt{s}=200$GeV. In addition to these measurements involving longitudinal polarized proton beams, the STAR collaboration has performed several important measurements employing transverse polarized proton beams. New results on the measurement of the transverse single-spin asymmetry, $A_{N}$, for forward neutral pion production and the first measurement of $A_{N}$ for mid-rapidity di-jet production will be discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Invited talk given at the 17th International Spin Physics Symposium (SPIN 2006), October 2006, Kyoto, Japa

Proteomic analysis of heart failure hospitalization among patients with chronic kidney disease: The Heart and Soul Study.

BACKGROUND:Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) are at increased risk for heart failure (HF). We aimed to investigate differences in proteins associated with HF hospitalizations among patients with and without CKD in the Heart and Soul Study. METHODS AND RESULTS:We measured 1068 unique plasma proteins from baseline samples of 974 participants in The Heart and Soul Study who were followed for HF hospitalization over a median of 7 years. We sequentially applied forest regression and Cox survival analyses to select prognostic proteins. Among participants with CKD, four proteins were associated with HF at Bonferroni-level significance (p<2.5x10(-4)): Angiopoietin-2 (HR[95%CI] 1.45[1.33, 1.59]), Spondin-1 (HR[95%CI] 1.13 [1.06, 1.20]), tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase type 5 (HR[95%CI] 0.65[0.53, 0.78]) and neurogenis locus notch homolog protein 1 (NOTCH1) (HR[95%CI] 0.67[0.55, 0.80]). These associations persisted at p<0.01 after adjustment for age, estimated glomerular filtration and history of HF. CKD was a significant interaction term in the associations of NOTCH1 and Spondin-1 with HF. Pathway analysis showed a trend for higher representation of the Cardiac Hypertrophy and Complement/Coagulation pathways among proteins prognostic of HF in the CKD sub-group. CONCLUSIONS:These results suggest that markers of heart failure differ between patients with and without CKD. Further research is needed to validate novel markers in cohorts of patients with CKD and adjudicated HF events

First Results from Photon Multiplicity Detector at RHIC

We present the first measurement of multiplicity and pseudorapidity distributions of photons in the pseudorapidity region 2.3 < eta < 3.7 for different centralities in Au + Au collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 62.4 GeV. The pseudorapidity distribution of photons, dominated by neutral pion decays, has been compared to those of identified charged pions, photons, and inclusive charged particles from heavy ion and nucleon-nucleon collisions at various energies. Scaling of photon yield with number of participating nucleons and limiting fragmentation scenario for inclusive photon production has been studied.Comment: Talk given at 5th International Conference on Physics and Astrophysics of Quark Gluon Plasma (February 8 - 12, 2005); 4 pages and 6 figure

Properties of particle production at large transverse momentum in Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at RHIC

We present the incident energy and system size dependence of the pT spectra for charged pions, protons, and anti-protons using Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at Sqrt(sNN) = 62.4 and 200 GeV in STAR experiment at RHIC. Through these measurements in the pT range of 0.2 < pT < 10 GeV/c we conduct a systematic study of the beam energy, system size and particle species dependence of nuclear modification factors and address specific predictions from the quark coalescence models regarding the beam energy dependence of baryon enhancement in the intermediate pT (2 < pT < 6 GeV/c) region.Comment: Talk given at 19th International Conference on Ultra-relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions: Quark Matter 2006 (QM 2006), Shanghai, China, 14-20 Nov. 200

Undulation instability in a bilayer lipid membrane due to electric field interaction with lipid dipoles

Bilayer lipid membranes [BLMs] are an essential component of all biological systems, forming a functional barrier for cells and organelles from the surrounding environment. The lipid molecules that form membranes contain both permanent and induced dipoles, and an electric field can induce the formation of pores when the transverse field is sufficiently strong (electroporation). Here, a phenomenological free energy is constructed to model the response of a BLM to a transverse static electric field. The model contains a continuum description of the membrane dipoles and a coupling between the headgroup dipoles and the membrane tilt. The membrane is found to become unstable through buckling modes, which are weakly coupled to thickness fluctuations in the membrane. The thickness fluctuations, along with the increase in interfacial area produced by membrane buckling, increase the probability of localized membrane breakdown, which may lead to pore formation. The instability is found to depend strongly on the strength of the coupling between the dipolar headgroups and the membrane tilt as well as the degree of dipolar ordering in the membrane.Comment: 29 pages 8 fig

Social Psychological Studies of Latin American Cultures with Particular Reference to Brazil

This paper presents an English language translation of a book chapter that was originally published in Portuguese. It is reproduced here in full, by kind permission of the editors and publishers, in order to make it available to English language speakers. The paper first addresses ways of defining culture and the development of measures of cultural variation. Contrasts between the collectivism that defines East Asian culture and the collectivism of Latin America are then identified. Topics addressed include values, self-construal, life satisfaction, emotion, honour culture, social influence and the phenomenon of jeitinho. Although the text leads toward a consideration of research into Brazilian culture, it does so by way of discussing the distinctiveness of Latin American cultures more broadly. Details of comparative studies that have sampled further Latin American cultures have been added at the end.