America Under the Gun: A 50-State Analysis of Gun Violence and its Link to Weak State Gun Laws

n the aftermath of mass shootings and other gun-related tragedies, there is often a surge of interest on the part of community leaders, social-science researchers, and elected officials to root out the causes of gun violence in an effort to prevent such tragedies from occurring again. Any study into the causes of gun violence is necessarily complicated, however, as there are innumerable factors that contribute to the nature and prevalence of gun-related violence in any community.Despite this complex web of factors that influence the rate of gun violence, this report finds a clear link between high levels of gun violence and weak state gun laws. Across the key indicators of gun violence that we analyzed, the 10 states with the weakest gun laws collectively have an aggregate level of gun violence that is more than twice as high—104 percent higher, in fact—than the 10 states with the strongest gun laws.The data analyzed in this report relate to the following 10 indicators of gun violence:1. Overall firearm deaths in 20102. Overall firearm deaths from 2001 through 20103. Firearm homicides in 20104. Firearm suicides in 20105. Firearm homicides among women from 2001 through 20106. Firearm deaths among children ages to 17, from 2001 through 20107. Law-enforcement agents feloniously killed with a firearm from 2002 through 20118. Aggravated assaults with a firearm in 20119. Crime-gun export rates in 200910. Percentage of crime guns with a short "time to crime" in 2009Using these data, we rank each state according to the rate of each indicator of gun violence and create an overall ranking of the states across all 10 indicators, resulting in an overall state ranking for the prevalence of gun violence. Finally, we compare this overall state gun-violence ranking with a Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence ranking of states based on the strength of their gun laws.Our analysis determined that the following are the 10 states, by rank, that suffer the highest levels of gun violence:1. Louisiana2. Alaska3. Alabama4. Arizona5. Mississippi6. South Carolina7. New Mexico8. Missouri9. Arkansas10. GeorgiaThe Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence analysis shows that eight of these states are among the 25 states with the weakest gun laws.While the strength of a state's gun laws is just one factor in the prevalence of gun-related violence in the state and cannot alone account for gun violence, there is a clear link between weak gun laws and high levels of gun violence across the United States

The Manila-Chattanooga Express: A collection of stories (Original writing)

This collection of eleven short stories explores relationships within an American family living in the Philippines. The father, called Uncle Chick throughout, is a central figure and many of the events and characters are defined by his presence or through their interactions with him. The most critical event in this family\u27s history is the onset of World War II. The father fought in the Philippines during the war and became a guerilla leader and decorated war hero. Although the war is seldom brought into the stories directly, with the exception of War Stories , it is never far from the emotional heart of the collection. As family members deal with the deaths of friends, nephews, sons, parents and grandparents the shadow of the war informs their experiences with a kind of metaphorical quality, as if life itself were a kind of war, and death an opportunity for revelation

‘Everybody’s Favourite Fascist’: an examination of the figure of José Antonio Primo de Rivera within the historiography of Spanish fascism

As the founder and leader of the Falange Española (Spanish Phalanx), José Antonio Primo de Rivera has been almost universally held by historians specialising in fascist studies as the only important figure of Spanish fascism. Primo de Rivera’s movement, a paramilitary organisation that publicly endorsed the toppling of the democratic Spanish Republic, was noted for its inflammatory rhetoric and violent actions. Yet, Primo de Rivera has recently been described by eminent American historian of fascism Stanley Payne as ‘everybody’s favourite fascist’. This thesis argues that historians of twentieth century Spanish politics have overwhelmingly idealised Primo de Rivera in a manner incongruent with the long-standing mainstream academic hostility towards fascism. He has been depoliticised and reified into an upstanding ‘gentleman’, yet still understood as the only ‘important’ fascist in Spanish history. His violent rhetoric has been classed as ‘poetic’, and his violent actions as heroic in spite of their alignment with traditional understandings of fascism. This image has been reinforced by the centrality of Francisco Franco, long-held by most mainstream historians to be non-fascist in character, to acrimonious historical polemic over the nature and legacy of Spanish fascism. This thesis demonstrates that the confused and misleading nature of this historical assessment of Primo de Rivera has not been adequately addressed by historians. With Primo de Rivera upheld as an aberration from ‘normal’ fascism, deeper critical inquiry into the role fascism played during the Second Spanish Republic, and subsequent Franco dictatorship, has been unnecessarily stymied.Thesis (MPhil) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 201

Statistical Information Retrieval

Industrial Engineerin

The Line of Dichotomy: Standpoints and Meaning in Anne Truitt\u27s Art

Some of Anne Truitt’s formal strategies—such as using the separate faces of the work to force the viewer to engage in it sequentially—build or depend on real or literal facts of the “situation” of the artwork. If this is the case, how do such works escape being reducible to their objecthood, their literal properties of size and shape? And how do they produce effects that are not mere experience or mere affective response? The answer I offer is that they depend on conventions and interpretation. Much of my analysis focuses on the ways Truitt makes her intentions visible through form, and specifically the way she develops the formal device of a standpoint—the suggestion of a position a viewer might inhabit to better grasp the meaning of the work. My interpretive approach involves a combination of close observation, conventional analysis, and a consideration of historical and biographical context, but my main focus is the work itself. I want to be careful not to suggest that intentions are linear, fixed, or always known. By intention, I mean to describe the messy process by which an author, first working from an intuition gets a work into a fixed form

Automated SNP detection from a large collection of white spruce expressed sequences: contributing factors and approaches for the categorization of SNPs

BACKGROUND: High-throughput genotyping technologies represent a highly efficient way to accelerate genetic mapping and enable association studies. As a first step toward this goal, we aimed to develop a resource of candidate Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP) in white spruce (Picea glauca [Moench] Voss), a softwood tree of major economic importance. RESULTS: A white spruce SNP resource encompassing 12,264 SNPs was constructed from a set of 6,459 contigs derived from Expressed Sequence Tags (EST) and by using the bayesian-based statistical software PolyBayes. Several parameters influencing the SNP prediction were analysed including the a priori expected polymorphism, the probability score (P(SNP)), and the contig depth and length. SNP detection in 3' and 5' reads from the same clones revealed a level of inconsistency between overlapping sequences as low as 1%. A subset of 245 predicted SNPs were verified through the independent resequencing of genomic DNA of a genotype also used to prepare cDNA libraries. The validation rate reached a maximum of 85% for SNPs predicted with either P(SNP )≥ 0.95 or ≥ 0.99. A total of 9,310 SNPs were detected by using P(SNP )≥ 0.95 as a criterion. The SNPs were distributed among 3,590 contigs encompassing an array of broad functional categories, with an overall frequency of 1 SNP per 700 nucleotide sites. Experimental and statistical approaches were used to evaluate the proportion of paralogous SNPs, with estimates in the range of 8 to 12%. The 3,789 coding SNPs identified through coding region annotation and ORF prediction, were distributed into 39% nonsynonymous and 61% synonymous substitutions. Overall, there were 0.9 SNP per 1,000 nonsynonymous sites and 5.2 SNPs per 1,000 synonymous sites, for a genome-wide nonsynonymous to synonymous substitution rate ratio (Ka/Ks) of 0.17. CONCLUSION: We integrated the SNP data in the ForestTreeDB database along with functional annotations to provide a tool facilitating the choice of candidate genes for mapping purposes or association studies

Development and evaluation of a diagnostic cytokine-release assay for Mycobacterium suricattae infection in meerkats (Suricata suricatta)

CITATION: Clarke, C., et al. 2017. Development and evaluation of a diagnostic cytokine-release assay for mycobacterium suricattae infection in meerkats (Suricata suricatta). BMC Veterinary Research, 13:2, doi:10.1186/s12917-016-0927-x.The original publication is available at http://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.comBackground: Sensitive diagnostic tools are necessary for the detection of Mycobacterium suricattae infection in meerkats (Suricata suricatta) in order to more clearly understand the epidemiology of tuberculosis and the ecological consequences of the disease in this species. We therefore aimed to develop a cytokine release assay to measure antigen-specific cell-mediated immune responses of meerkats. Results: Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) were evaluated for the detection of interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) and IFN-γ inducible protein 10 (IP-10) in meerkat plasma. An IP-10 ELISA was selected to measure the release of this cytokine in whole blood in response to Bovigam® PC-HP Stimulating Antigen, a commercial peptide pool of M. bovis antigens. Using this protocol, captive meerkats with no known M. suricattae exposure (n = 10) were tested and results were used to define a diagnostic cut off value (mean plus 2 standard deviations). This IP-10 release assay (IPRA) was then evaluated in free-living meerkats with known M. suricattae exposure, categorized as having either a low, moderate or high risk of infection with this pathogen. In each category, respectively, 24.7%, 27.3% and 82.4% of animals tested IPRA-positive. The odds of an animal testing positive was 14.0 times greater for animals with a high risk of M. suricattae infection compared to animals with a low risk. Conclusion: These results support the use of this assay as a measure of M. suricattae exposure in meerkat populations. Ongoing longitudinal studies aim to evaluate the value of the IPRA as a diagnostic test of M. suricattae infection in individual animals.http://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-016-0927-xPublisher's versio

Hyperpycnal wave-modified turbidites of the Pennsylvanian Minturn Formation, north-central Colorado

The Pennsylvanian Minturn Formation in north-central Colorado exhibits a complex stratigraphic architecture of fan-delta deposits that developed in association with high topographic relief in a tectonically active setting. The formation records a wide range of environments including alluvial fan, fluvial, deltaic, and open marine settings. This field trip will examine outcrops of a remarkable ~20 to 35-m-thick, unconformity-bound unit with turbidite-like beds that presumably developed within the lower reaches of incised valleys. This unit consists of dark green shale and graded sandstone beds with tool marks produced by abundant plant material. The sandstone event beds contain evidence for strong unidirectional flows and the variable influence of storm-generated waves. Proximal deposits contain beds with evidence for wave-dominated combined flows, including well developed, large-scale hummocky cross-stratification. Distal sections contain beds with reverse-to-normal grading and vertical successions of sedimentary structures that indicate long-lived waxing-to-waning unidirectional flows in conjunction with storm waves. We interpret these beds as a record of deposition from hyperpycnal flows, i.e., turbidity currents generated directly from highly concentrated river plumes, which waxed and waned in response to the rising and falling flood hydrograph. The focus of this trip will be the hydrodynamic interpretation of these different bed types, including their spatial and stratigraphic distribution

Widespread variation in transcript abundance within and across developmental stages of Trypanosoma brucei

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Trypanosoma brucei</it>, the causative agent of African sleeping sickness, undergoes a complex developmental cycle that takes place in mammalian and insect hosts and is accompanied by changes in metabolism and cellular morphology. While differences in mRNA expression have been described for many genes, genome-wide expression analyses have been largely lacking. Trypanosomatids represent a unique case in eukaryotes in that they transcribe protein-coding genes as large polycistronic units, and rarely regulate gene expression at the level of transcription initiation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we present a comprehensive analysis of mRNA expression in several stages of parasite development. Utilizing microarrays that have multiple copies of multiple probes for each gene, we were able to demonstrate with a high degree of statistical confidence that approximately one-fourth of genes show differences in mRNA expression levels in the stages examined. These include complex patterns of gene expression within gene families, including the large family of variant surface glycoproteins (VSGs) and their relatives, where we have identified a number of constitutively expressed family members. Furthermore, we were able to assess the relative abundance of all transcripts in each stage, identifying the genes that are either weakly or highly expressed. Very few genes show no evidence of expression.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Despite the lack of gene regulation at the level of transcription initiation, our results reveal extensive regulation of mRNA abundance associated with different life cycle and growth stages. In addition, analysis of variant surface glycoprotein gene expression reveals a more complex picture than previously thought. These data provide a valuable resource to the community of researchers studying this lethal agent.</p