Housing outcomes: an assessment of long-term trends

This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 2, " Affordability of housing for young and poor families." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The authors examine trends in housing outcomes by income group. Orr and Peach indicate that there has been a substantial improvement in the physical adequacy of the housing stock over the past few decades, particularly for households in the lowest income quintile. Neighborhood quality for all income groups has also improved, although sharp differences in quality continue to exist across the groups. In one important respect, however, lower income households are worse off than before - housing costs now absorb a larger share of their income.Housing ; Housing - Finance

Decreased Cognitive/CNS Function in Young Adults at Risk for Hypertension: Effects of Sleep Deprivation

Hypertension has been linked to impaired cognitive/CNS function, and some of these changes may precede development of frank essential hypertension. The stress and fatigue of sleep deprivation may exacerbate these cognitive changes in young adults at risk. We hypothesize that individuals at risk for hypertension will show significant declines in cognitive function during a night of sleep deprivation. Fifty-one young adults were recruited for 28-hour total sleep deprivation studies. Hypertension risk was assessed by mildly elevated resting blood pressure and by family history of hypertension. A series of cognitive memory tasks was given at four test sessions across the sleep deprivation period. Although initially comparable in cognitive performance, persons at risk showed larger declines across the night for several indices of working memory, including code substitution, category, and order recall. These results suggest that cognitive/CNS changes may parallel or precede blood pressure dysregulation in the early stages of hypertension development. The role of CNS changes in the etiology of essential hypertension is discussed

MANIPULATING IMPLEMENT WEIGHT DURING WARMUP TO IMPROVE SHOT PUT PERFORMANCE

The purpose of this study was to evaluate kinematics and kinetics of the shot put when participants warmup using standard, overweight, or underweight implements. Ten collegiate shot putters warmed up using regulation, heavy, or light implements then completed six maximal effort competition throws. Whole body kinematics and ground reaction forces were recorded on each throw. Consistent with the literature, throw distance was significantly further after warming up with the heavy implement (p = .002). However, there were no differences in critical kinematic factors or ground reaction forces between conditions. While using overweight implements during warmup improves shot put performance, the mechanism by which this occurs is not through altering the critical factors or forces produced during the throw

Hot DQ White Dwarfs: Something Different

We present a detailed analysis of all the known Hot DQ white dwarfs in the Fourth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) recently found to have carbon dominated atmospheres. Our spectroscopic and photometric analysis reveals that these objects all have effective temperatures between ~18,000 and 24,000 K. The surface composition is found to be completely dominated by carbon, as revealed by the absence of Hbeta and HeI 4471 lines (or determination of trace amount in a few cases). We find that the surface gravity of all objects but one seems to be ''normal'' and around log g = 8.0 while one is likely near log g = 9.0. The presence of a weak magnetic field is directly detected by spectropolarimetry in one object and is suspected in two others. We propose that these strange stars could be cooled down versions of the weird PG1159 star H1504+65 and form a new family of hydrogen and helium deficient objects following the post-AGB phase. Finally, we present the results of full nonadiabatic calculations dedicated specifically to each of the Hot DQ that show that only SDSS J142625.70+575218.4 is expected to exhibit luminosity variations. This result is in excellent agreement with recent observations by Montgomery et al. who find that J142625.70+575218.4 is the only pulsator among 6 Hot DQ white dwarfs surveyed in February 2008.Comment: 33 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Practical Application of Outcomes Based Pricing Models in Scotland

Based on consultation with the expert advisory group, the objective of this report is to make recommendations on the next steps necessary to understand the practical application of an Outcomes Based Pricing (OBP) scheme in Scotland

Development and assessment of a bone scanning device to enhance restraint performance

The objective of the BOSCOS (BOne Scanning for Occupant Safety) project was the development of a system that can make an assessment of the bone characteristics of each vehicle occupant in order to estimate their skeletal strengths. The seatbelt and airbag characteristics can then be adjusted to deliver optimum levels of protection specifically for each occupant. A system introduced into every vehicle has the capacity to save lives and reduce injury levels across the whole spectrum of vehicle occupants. This paper describes the contributions from academic and industrial partners to this UK Department for Transport funded project.Commercial pressure focuses restraint design on meeting legal requirements for vehicle approval, but legal requirements use dummies which do not represent the range of car occupant shapes, sizes, and driving positions. A person with lower skeletal characteristics may not be able to withstand the current fixed levels of restraint without sustaining injuries. Conversely, a person with greater skeletal characteristics may be capable of withstanding greater levels of restraint.Possible technologies that are available have been assessed for their suitability for an in-vehicle monitoring system. Accident studies have been conducted to create a baseline of statistics in terms of casualties and their injuries. Initial bone scanning studies have utilised different types of equipment and a new prototype scanner has been developed for use in a vehicle environment using ultrasound technology.Computer based occupant mathematical modelling has been used to establish the potential gains from a working system and also the requirements needed of the restraint systems toachieve these gains. In addition, bone scanning has been conducted, to determine a method to read across from scan values to skeletal condition to provide data for the optimisation of the restraint system

BOSCOS - development and benefits of a Bone Scanning System

The objective of the BOSCOS (BOne SCanning for Occupant Safety) project was the development of a system that can make an assessment of the bone characteristics of each vehicle occupant in order to estimate their skeletal strengths. The seatbelt and airbag characteristics can then be adjusted to deliver optimum levels of protection specifically for each occupant. A system introduced into every vehicle has the capacity to save lives and reduce injury levels across the whole spectrum of vehicle occupants. This paper describes the contributions from academic and industrial partners to this UK Department for Transport funded project

Transmembrane helix dynamics of bacterial chemoreceptors supports a piston model of signalling.

Transmembrane α-helices play a key role in many receptors, transmitting a signal from one side to the other of the lipid bilayer membrane. Bacterial chemoreceptors are one of the best studied such systems, with a wealth of biophysical and mutational data indicating a key role for the TM2 helix in signalling. In particular, aromatic (Trp and Tyr) and basic (Arg) residues help to lock α-helices into a membrane. Mutants in TM2 of E. coli Tar and related chemoreceptors involving these residues implicate changes in helix location and/or orientation in signalling. We have investigated the detailed structural basis of this via high throughput coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CG-MD) of Tar TM2 and its mutants in lipid bilayers. We focus on the position (shift) and orientation (tilt, rotation) of TM2 relative to the bilayer and how these are perturbed in mutants relative to the wildtype. The simulations reveal a clear correlation between small (ca. 1.5 Å) shift in position of TM2 along the bilayer normal and downstream changes in signalling activity. Weaker correlations are seen with helix tilt, and little/none between signalling and helix twist. This analysis of relatively subtle changes was only possible because the high throughput simulation method allowed us to run large (n = 100) ensembles for substantial numbers of different helix sequences, amounting to ca. 2000 simulations in total. Overall, this analysis supports a swinging-piston model of transmembrane signalling by Tar and related chemoreceptors