Estimated Percentage of Females Who Will Become Teen Mothers: Differences Across States

An estimated 18 percent of females nationwide will become teen mothers, according to this Child Trends research brief. The brief also finds that states vary widely in the estimated percentage of females who will have a baby before the age of 20, ranging from 8% in New Hampshire to 30% in Mississippi. Additional findings: --The 2006 estimated percentage of females who will have a teen birth is slightly higher than the 2005 estimate of 17 percent, which reflects a recent increase in the teen birth rate between 2005 and 2006. --For the nation, the estimated percentage of females becoming teen mothers declined from 25 percent in 1991 to 17 percent in 2005, reflecting a drop in teen birth rates during this period. --25 percent or more of females were estimated to become teen mothers in 9 states, concentrated primarily in the South and Southwest. In contrast, in only three states - New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts - were less than 10 percent of females estimated to become teen mothers. --State-level rankings on the likelihood of becoming a teen mother mirror traditional state rankings based on teen birth rates, but are not identical due to differences in the age-specific birth rates and the population distribution within each state

Viral Jihad: A Genealogy of al-Qaeda and ISIS\u27 Propaganda

For the past twenty years, the United States has been at war. Yet, while invocations of war often evoke images of soldiers on the battlefield, the war the U.S. has been fighting looks far different. In the past two decades, the U.S. has attempted to curb the impact of terrorist organizations’ media usage. This paper explores the genealogy of that media battle through a case study of al-Qaeda and ISIS’ media apparatuses. It argues that, often overlooked, is the role that media plays as a foundational element in both groups’ organizational structures. Moreover, this paper will demonstrate how ISIS has expounded on the success of al-Qaeda’s media strategy, thereby creating an online caliphate. Ultimately, this paper will conclude that new strategies and ways of thinking about the war on terror will need to be developed in for the U.S. to effectively combat both al-Qaeda and ISIS’ media

Liver failure occurring as a component of exertional heatstroke.

An unusual case of an exertional heatstroke in a healthy 25-year-old man is presented. Initially, the patient was deeply comatose and developed severe rhabdomyolysis and massive hepatic necrosis. Subsequently, he received a liver transplant with remarkable improvement in his mental status, although the rhabdomyolysis continued. The patient died 41 days after the transplant due to a complicating infection. Providing that infections can be effectively controlled, liver transplants might be a promising therapeutic alternative for the few patients who survive the initial neurological consequences of this unusual event

A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY OF PROGRAM IMPLEMENTATION AMONG A GROUP OF HIGH ACHIEVING COALITIONS IN THE DRUG-FREE COMMUNITIES SUPPORT PROGRAM

Substance abuse is a pervasive public health problem that affects all people and communities, regardless of socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity. Substance abuse can particularly devastate youth, as it correlates with many negative health outcomes including damage to the developing brain, dependence, delinquency, decreased academic potential, DUIs, and death. A potential solution to address these problems is the development and implementation of community coalitions. At the federal level, The Office of National Drug Control Policy's (ONDCP) Drug-Free Communities (DFC) Support Program does this through distributing competitive grants to eligible community coalitions that organize to prevent youth substance abuse. This descriptive study examines the degree of agreement between activities of 12 high achieving DFC coalitions to determine best practices. The analysis of the similarities and differences between the program implementation activities determined that 6 activities were universally present among high achieving coalitions, 10 activities has high agreement, and 33 activities to have low agreement among the coalitions. This paper aims to increase the knowledge about high achieving DFCs to help inform policies and practices for communities to reduce youth substance use

A Handheld Fine-Grained RFID Localization System with Complex-Controlled Polarization

There is much interest in fine-grained RFID localization systems. Existing systems for accurate localization typically require infrastructure, either in the form of extensive reference tags or many antennas (e.g., antenna arrays) to localize RFID tags within their radio range. Yet, there remains a need for fine-grained RFID localization solutions that are in a compact, portable, mobile form, that can be held by users as they walk around areas to map them, such as in retail stores, warehouses, or manufacturing plants. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of POLAR, a portable handheld system for fine-grained RFID localization. Our design introduces two key innovations that enable robust, accurate, and real-time localization of RFID tags. The first is complex-controlled polarization (CCP), a mechanism for localizing RFIDs at all orientations through software-controlled polarization of two linearly polarized antennas. The second is joint tag discovery and localization (JTDL), a method for simultaneously localizing and reading tags with zero-overhead regardless of tag orientation. Building on these two techniques, we develop an end-to-end handheld system that addresses a number of practical challenges in self-interference, efficient inventorying, and self-localization. Our evaluation demonstrates that POLAR achieves a median accuracy of a few centimeters in each of the x/y/z dimensions in practical indoor environments

Book Reviews

THE IMPEACHMENT AND TRIAL OF ANDREW JOHNSON. By Michael Les Benedict. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1973. Pp. x, 212. $6.95. 1973 LEGAL MEDICINE ANNUAL. Edited by Cyril H. Wecht. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1973. Pp. xv, 522.$19.25. CASE HISTORIES IN CONSTRUCTION LAW-A GUIDE FOR ARCHITECTS, ENGINEERS, CONTRACTORS, BUILDERS. By William Jabine. Boston: Cahners Books, 1973. Pp. vi, 233. $12.50. COURTS ON TRIAL-MYTH AND REALITY IN AMERICAN JUSTICE. By Jerome Frank. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Pp. xii, 441.$15.00 cloth. ($3.45 paperback)

Effect of anticomplement agent K-76 COOH in hamster-to-rat and guinea pig- to-rat xenotransplantation

In normal rats, the xenobiotic K76 inhibited the C5 and probably the C2 and C3 steps of complement and effectively depressed classical complement pathway activity, alternative complement pathway activity, and the C3 complement component during and well beyond the drug's 3-hr half-life. It was tested alone and with intramuscular tacrolimus (TAC) and/or intragastric cyclophosphamide (CP) in rat recipients of heterotopic hearts from guinea pig (discordant) and hamster (concordant) donors. Single prevascularization doses of 100 and 200 mg/kg increased the median survival time of guinea pig hearts from 0.17 hr in untreated controls to 1.7 hr and 10.2 hr, respectively; with repeated injections of the 200-mg dose every 9-12 hr, graft survival time was increased to 18.1 hr. Pretreatment of guinea pig heart recipients for 10 days with TAC and CP, with or without perioperative splenectomy or infusion of donor bone marrow, further increased median graft survival time to 24 hr. Among the guinea pig recipients, the majority of treated animals died with a beating heart from respiratory failure that was ascribed to anaphylatoxins. Hamster heart survival also was increased with monotherapy using 200 mg/kg b.i.d.i.v. K76 (limited by protocol to 6 days), but only from 3 to 4 days. Survival was prolonged to 7 days with the addition to K76 of intragastric CP at 5 mg/kg per day begun 1 day before operation (to a limit of 9 days); it was prolonged to 4.5 days with the addition of intramuscular TAC at 2 mg/kg per day beginning on the day of transplantation and continued indefinitely. In contrast to the limited efficacy of the single drugs, or any two drugs in combination, the three drugs together (K76, CP, and TAC) in the same dose schedules increased median graft survival time to 61 days. Antihamster antibodies rapidly increased during the first 5 days after transplantation, and plateaued at an abnormal level in animals with long graft survival times without immediate humoral rejection. However, rejection could not be reliably prevented, and was present even in most of the xenografts recovered from most of the animals dying (usually from infection) with a beating heart. Thus, although effective complement inhibition with K76 was achieved in both guinea pig- and hamster-to-rat heart transplant models, the results suggest that effective interruption of the complement cascade will have a limited role, if any, in the induction of xenograft acceptance

Tacrolimus pretreatment attenuates preexisting xenospecific immunity and abrogates hyperacute rejection in a presensitized hamster to rat liver transplant model

In the hamster to rat liver transplant model, we determined the efficacy of tacrolimus in attenuating natural xenospecific humoral immunity and in abrogating the hyperacute liver rejection that is produced by presensitizing the Lewis rat recipient. Hamster livers, transplanted orthotopically into naive rats (controls), were rejected with animal death after 6.4±0.5 (SD) days. The infusion on (day -6) of 1.5 x 107 hamster hepatocytes, or of 1.5 x 108 nonparenchymal cells (NPC), resulted in hyperacute rejection and death in ≤1.9 days. However, when the rats were pretreated with 1 mg/kg/day tacrolimus from days -6 to -1, survival of non-presensitized animals was prolonged to 25±20 days and that of recipients presensitized with hamster hepatocytes to 36±16 days or with NPC to 32±1.7 days. The tacrolimus pretreatment significantly reduced the hamster-specific complement-dependent cytotoxic antibodies response directed to liver NPC but not to lymph node cell targets. These observations suggest that the prolongation of survival by appropriately timed treatment with this T cell directed drug model is caused by the inhibition of humoral as well as cellular xenograft rejection