Utilizing data-driven technology tools for community-led solutions to vacant properties and urban blight

As a city that has lost more than 1/3 of its population over the past 6 decades, some Baltimore neighborhoods suffer from a disproportionate number of vacant and abandoned properties, mired in issues of unclear ownership and “under-water” lien burdens. Cloudy legal and financial restrictions cause properties to cycle through a speculative system that strips them of all equity, and causes them to move out of reach for redevelopment. Evidence suggests that existing processes for addressing these issues, such as tax lien sales and foreclosures, can actually play a role in increasing vacancy rates and amplify neighborhood disinvestment (Dewar, Seymour, and Druță, 2015). Policies aimed at real property tax reform and foreclosure prevention can improve conditions, yet communities, non-profits, and city agencies in Baltimore lacked a unified data system to guide their reform and outreach efforts. One challenge is that property data are housed at various agencies, each using its own system of data storage and dissemination, making it difficult to use different datasets for a single property. The Baltimore City Open Land Data (BOLD) web application arose out of the need to streamline the data gathering process by integrating various datasets for easier use by stakeholders working to stabilize their communities, preserve homeownership, and break the cycle of vacant properties. This presentation will give an overview how BOLD was designed, a short demonstration of the application, and show how it can be used to further research the impact of tax sales and foreclosures in Baltimore City

Radiation Induced Xerostomia: Current Concepts and Future Trends

Radiation induced xerostomia is a persistent clinical presentation that affects the quality of life in head and neck cancer patients even with the best of the intensity modulated radiotherapy protocols. Comprehensive review of the anatomic, histologic, developmental and neuronal entities of salivary glands from a regenerative perspective, ensuing radiation is taken. It also evaluates the systemic and glandular radiation responses that form the early and late clinical changes. From these, the article submits probable strategies; based on the current knowledge and future challenges involved, in reversing radiation induced xerostomia. Further, it elaborates on the status of radioprotectors and mitigators including the recently reported biologic and chemical derivatives and proposes the rationale of using combination radioprotector therapy in radiation injuries. A brief of palliative regimes, alternate treatment modes and technologic advancements in radiotherapy are also explained. Salivary gland histologic components, which need to be protected in the emerging radiotherapy protocols and can be targeted in different salivary gland regeneration therapies is highlighted. The paper contributes to an improved understanding in radiation induced xerostomia and deliberates on novel mechanisms towards enhancing quality of life in head and neck cancer radiotherapy patients

Akt promotes Endocardial-Mesenchyme Transition

Endothelial to mesenchyme transition (EndMT) can be observed during the formation of endocardial cushions from the endocardium, the endothelial lining of the atrioventricular canal (AVC), of the developing heart at embryonic day 9.5 (E9.5). Many regulators of the process have been identified; however, the mechanisms driving the initial commitment decision of endothelial cells to EndMT have been difficult to separate from processes required for mesenchymal proliferation and migration. We have several lines of evidence that suggest a central role for Akt signaling in committing endothelial cells to enter EndMT. Akt1 mRNA was restricted to the endocardium of endocardial cushions while they were forming. The PI3K/Akt signaling pathway is necessary for mesenchyme outgrowth, as sprouting was inhibited in AVC explant cultures treated with the PI3K inhibitor LY294002. Furthermore, endothelial marker, VE-cadherin, was downregulated and mesenchyme markers, N-cadherin and Snail, were induced in response to expression of a constitutively active form of Akt1 (myrAkt1) in endothelial cells. Finally, we isolated the function of Akt1 signaling in the commitment to the transition using a transgenic model where myrAkt1 was pulsed only in endocardial cells and turned off after EndMT initiation. In this way, we determined that increased Akt signaling in the endocardium drives EndMT and discounted its other functions in cushion mesenchymal cells

Efficacy of β-lactam/β-lactamase inhibitors to treat extended-spectrum beta-lactamase-producing Enterobacterales bacteremia secondary to urinary tract infection in kidney transplant recipients (INCREMENT-SOT Project)

REIPI/INCREMENT-SOT Group.[Background] Whether active therapy with β-lactam/β-lactamase inhibitors (BLBLI) is as affective as carbapenems for extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Enterobacterales (ESBL-E) bloodstream infection (BSI) secondary to urinary tract infection (UTI) in kidney transplant recipients (KTRs) remains unclear.[Methods] We retrospectively evaluated 306 KTR admitted to 30 centers from January 2014 to October 2016. Therapeutic failure (lack of cure or clinical improvement and/or death from any cause) at days 7 and 30 from ESBL-E BSI onset was the primary and secondary study outcomes, respectively.[Results] Therapeutic failure at days 7 and 30 occurred in 8.2% (25/306) and 13.4% (41/306) of patients. Hospital-acquired BSI (adjusted OR [aOR]: 4.10; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.50-11.20) and Pitt score (aOR: 1.47; 95% CI: 1.21-1.77) were independently associated with therapeutic failure at day 7. Age-adjusted Charlson Index (aOR: 1.25; 95% CI: 1.05-1.48), Pitt score (aOR: 1.72; 95% CI: 1.35-2.17), and lymphocyte count ≤500 cells/μL at presentation (aOR: 3.16; 95% CI: 1.42-7.06) predicted therapeutic failure at day 30. Carbapenem monotherapy (68.6%, primarily meropenem) was the most frequent active therapy, followed by BLBLI monotherapy (10.8%, mostly piperacillin-tazobactam). Propensity score (PS)-adjusted models revealed no significant impact of the choice of active therapy (carbapenem-containing vs any other regimen, BLBLI- vs carbapenem-based monotherapy) within the first 72 hours on any of the study outcomes.[Conclusions] Our data suggest that active therapy based on BLBLI may be as effective as carbapenem-containing regimens for ESBL-E BSI secondary to UTI in the specific population of KTR. Potential residual confounding and unpowered sample size cannot be excluded (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02852902).This work was supported by: (1) Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2013-2016 and Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII), Subdirección General de Redes y Centros de Investigación Cooperativa, Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Spanish Network for Research in Infectious Diseases [RD16/0016/0001, RD16/0016/0002, REIPI RD16/0016/0008; RD16/0016/00010], co-financed by European Development Regional Fund “A way to achieve Europe”, Operative Program Intelligent Growth 2014-2020; (2) European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious diseases Study Group for Infections in Compromised Hosts (ESGICH, grant to J.M.A.); (3) Sociedad Andaluza de Trasplante de Órgano Sólido (SATOT, grant to L.M.M.); (4) Research project PI16/01631 integrated into the Plan Estatal de I+D+I 2013-2016 and co-financed by the ISCIII-Subdirección General de Evaluación y Fomento de la Investigación and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER); (5) M.F.R. holds a research contract “Miguel Servet” (CP 18/00073) from ISCIII, Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades. The work was also supported by the following European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious diseases (ESCMID) study groups: Infections in Compromised Hosts (ESGICH), Bloodstream Infections and Sepsis (ESGBIS) and Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance (ESGARS).Peer reviewe

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The urban transition in post -Soviet Russia: Adjustments to the planning process in different urban contexts.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union heralded what many authors refer to as the end of central planning. Since 1991, local officials and residents alike are revisiting fundamental issues with respect to planning, plans, and planners themselves. The analysis in this dissertation shows that the perceptions at the local level towards these fundamental issues vary for different types of post-Soviet cities: province capitals, Soviet-era company towns and pre-revolutionary (1917) towns. The variation across cities reflects the planning response to unique urban transitions within each city-type in the face of political, economic and demographic change. In this dissertation, I analyze one aspect of the urban transition, namely population movement via the migration system. The patterns and determinants of internal migration for each type of city are distinct from other city-types as well as from those experienced before the dissolution. This dissertation examines the relationship between post-Soviet urban change and adjustments to the planning process. First, I test using the rank-size method the initial hypothesis that variation in city-size would increase in post-Soviet Russia to converge towards distributions found in market economies. I conclude that increasing unevenness in city-size depends on the nature of variation that existed prior to the dissolution as well as geographic location. From this analysis, the Irkutsk oblast represents a case study for regions experiencing increasing variation. Second, I compare patterns of migration in the later phase of the transition (1997--1999) using vital registration (propiska) data from the Irkutsk oblast with migration in the early phase (1991--1994) using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS). Third, I employ multinomial logistic regression models to distinguish among migration destinations over time. My results demonstrate that the migration system shifts from one based on structural centrality during the Soviet period to one based on spatial centrality during the later stage of the Russian transition. Finally, interviews of local practitioners in Irkutsk reveal that adjustments to the planning process at the local level differ precisely because of post-Soviet demographic processes specific to each city-type: consensus-building in capital cities, de-Sovietization in company towns, and shedding of centralized control in pre-revolutionary towns.Ph.D.GeographyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSlavic literatureSocial SciencesUrban planningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123407/2/3079464.pd

Book Review: The Rise of the Network Society

Book review: Castells, Manuel (1996). The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc. 556 pages, bibliography 51 pages, index 23 pages.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60263/1/book2s99.pd

An Exploratory Look at Indian Millennials’ Media Perceptions

Poster presented at Winter 2015 American Marketing Association’s Marketing Educators Conference Working Paper Serie