“To destroy in whole or in part”: Remembering Our Past to Secure Our Future

This essay proposes that the history of California includes the intended destruction and decimation of native cultures, including their forced removal, illegal land acquisition, slavery, separation of families, and outright murder enacted by the private citizenry and governmental agencies during European contact can be defined as genocide as outlined by the United Nations Geneva Convention, 1948. The lasting legacy of contact on aboriginal lifeways and tradition, as well as the recent resurgence of native traditions and culture is addressed to suggest that the health and healing of native communities lies in reconciling the past to make passage into the future

Leonard Wood: Forgotten Greatness

Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism, by Jack McCallu

Little Siberia, Star of the North: Prisons, Crisis, and Development in Rural New York, 1968–1994

This is a study of how prisons became a common sense solution to economic and social decline in northern New York in the 1980s, about how prisons became synonymous with development in rural counties in the long wake of New York City’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. The United States imprisons more people per capita than any other nation-state on earth. The number of U.S. prisoners has increased nearly six fold since 1970 and there are now over 2.25 million people incarcerated across the country. Accompanying and encouraging this rise in the prison population was an expansion of the prisons themselves, with many states building new correctional facilities in depressed rural areas or deindustrializing small towns. New York State, emerging from the economic crisis of the mid-70s and shifting its development priorities from urban renewal to carceral expansion, presided over a vast prison infrastructure build-up in rural areas and deindustrializing small towns from the 1980s to 2000. The increase in the prison population over the past 40 years involved a concomitant broadening and deepening of prison capacity: one of the most expansive and expensive infrastructural projects in the history of a state that has led the country in massive public works. Thirty-eight new prisons were built in New York in the period between 1983 and 2000, despite the electorate’s rejection, in a referendum in 1981, of a bond issue meant to fund new prison construction. To bypass the voters of the state, in order to continue to expand carceral infrastructure, then-Governor Mario Cuomo and the New York State Legislature funded new prison construction in the 80s and 90s through the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), a public corporation created by Nelson Rockefeller in 1968 to build low income urban housing. The story of how New York expanded the state prison system is then also the story of how financial technologies and governmental and quasi-governmental (or shadow-governmental) institutions transformed and were transformed by the economic and social crises of the 60s, 70s and 80s

Effect of Pre-Emergence Herbicides on Western Pecan Seedlings and Control of Annual Weeds

Horticultur

HIV silencing and inducibility are heterogeneous and are affected by factors intrinsic to the virus

Transcriptionally silent HIV proviruses form the major obstacle to eradicating HIV. Many studies of HIV latency have focused on the cellular mechanisms that maintain silencing of proviral DNA. Here we show that viral sequence variation affecting replicative ability leads to variable rates of silencing and ability to reactivate. We studied naturally occurring and engineered polymorphisms in a recently identified exonic splice enhancer (ESEtat) that regulates tat mRNA splicing and constructed viruses with increased (M1), reduced (M2) or completely absent (ERK) binding of splicing factors essential for optimal production of tat mRNA resulting in a corresponding change in Tat activity. The mutations affected viral replication, with M1 having wild type kinetics, M2 exhibiting reduced kinetics and with replication completely abrogated in ERK. Using single round GFP expressing viruses to study proviral gene expression, we observed progressively greater rates of silencing relating to the degree of ESEtat disruption, with WT at 53%, M2 at 69% and ERK at 94%. By stimulating infected cells with each of the latency reversal agents PMA, panobinostat and JQ1, we observed that the dose required to achieve 50% of the maximum signal was lowest in WT, intermediate in M2 and highest in ERK, indicating a progressively higher threshold for reactivation. These results suggest that the ability of silent proviruses to reactivate from latency is variable and that minor differences in the viral sequence can alter the proportion of silenced viruses as well as the threshold required to induce silenced viruses to reactivate and express.HPM is supported by the Medical Research Council, UK (MR/N02043X/1) and the Academy of Medical Sciences (UK). NJN is supported by the British Infection Association and the Medical Research Council (MR/M003515/1). This work was supported by the Evelyn Trust and the Cambridge Clinical Academic Reserve. Work in the laboratory is supported by the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre and the MRC

Blockchain Application Within a Multi-Sensor Satellite Architecture

With the thrust towards multi-sensor satellite architectures for earth and space exploration, such as constellations and swarms, new technologies are required to enable the transition to this future capability. One of the areas of interest is establishing secure, efficient and prioritized data and command communication pathways among ground and space-based sources for such systems. This paper presents early research results on the potential role, capabilities and value of blockchain usage within constellation and swarm satellite architectures. It demonstrates the use of blockchain's smart contract and distributed ledger capabilities for secure and prioritized multi-sensor satellite collaborative data exchanges, as well as the logging and tracking of command and control events. Adapting and utilizing this emerging technology will aid in addressing technology gaps expected from future constellation flight architectures, such as managing collective computational operations (correlation), dynamic and autonomous observation planning, time-critical events, and provenance tied to ground and space-based autonomous operations and control recordkeeping. In this scenario blockchain is applied in encrypted command transmittal to multiple, yet specific, entities enabling acknowledgement transmittals, performance scalability, and automatic event-based triggering

Potential for using through-boring to improve groundline treatment of Australian wood species: A preliminary study

An aging electricity distribution system and reduced availability of naturally durable tropical hardwoods in Australia will combine in the next decade to produce a major shortage of poles. One approach to mitigating this shortage is to utilize lower durability species and improve the penetration of preservatives into the refractory heartwood by introducing additional pretreatment processes. A potential method for improving preservative penetration in the critical ground-line zone is throughboring. This process, in which holes are drilled through the pole perpendicular to the grain in the ground-line zone, is widely used in the western United States for treatment of Douglas-fir and may be suitable for many Australian wood species. The potential for improving heartwood penetration in eucalypts with alkaline-copper-quaternary (ACQ) compound was assessed on heartwood specimens from four species (Eucalyptus cloeziana F.Muell., E. grandis W.Hill ex Maiden, E. obliqua L’Her. and E. pellita F.Muell.) and Lophostemon confertus (R.Br.) Peter G.Wilson & J.T.Waterh). Longitudinal ACQ penetration was extremely shallow in L. confertus and only slightly better in E. cloeziana. Longitudinal penetration was good in both E. obliqua and E. pellita, although there was some variation in treatment results with length of pressure period. The results suggest that through-boring might be a reasonable approach for achieving heartwood penetration in some Eucalyptus species, although further studies are required to assess additional treatment schedules and to determine the effects of the process on flexural properties of the poles

No evidence of ongoing evolution in replication competent latent HIV-1 in a patient followed up for two years.

The persistence of infected T cells harbouring intact HIV proviruses is the barrier to the eradication of HIV. This reservoir is stable over long periods of time despite antiretroviral therapy. There has been controversy on whether low level viral replication is occurring at sanctuary sites periodically reseeding infected cells into the latent reservoir to account its durability. To study viral evolution in a physiologically relevant population of latent viruses, we repeatedly performed virus outgrowth assays on a stably treated HIV positive patient over two years and sequenced the reactivated latent viruses. We sought evidence of increasing sequence pairwise distances with time as evidence of ongoing viral replication. 64 reactivatable latent viral sequences were obtained over 103 weeks. We did not observe an increase in genetic distance of the sequences with the time elapsed between sampling. No evolution could be discerned in these reactivatable latent viruses. Thus, in this patient, the contribution of low-level replication to the maintenance of the latent reservoir detectable in the blood compartment is limited