Washington: Round 1 - State-Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.The state of Washington is expanding its Medicaid program and operating its own health insurance marketplace, as authorized by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The state legislature made the decision to run an insurance exchange in 2011, ahead of the June 2012 Supreme Court decision on the ACA's constitutionality, and well in advance of the 2012 presidential election. On July 1, 2013, Governor Jay Inslee signed the state's biennial budget, which authorized Medicaid expansion. Thus began the formal action signaling Washington State's intent to fully implement the ACA

The visual aspects of shopping centers in the Boston metropolitan area

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of City and Regional Planning, 1954.Includes bibliographical references (leaves [69]).by Stuart William Stein, Robert David Katz.M.C.P

Impulsive Start of a Symmetric Airfoil at High Angle of Attack

The fluid dynamic phenomena following the impulsive start of a NACA 0015 airfoil were studied by using a time accurate solution of the incompressible laminar Navier-Stokes equations. Angle of attack was set at 10 deg to simulate steady-state poststall conditions at a Reynolds number of 1.2 x 10(exp 4). The calculation revealed that large initial lift values can be obtained, immediately following the impulsive start, when a trapped vortex develops above the airfoil. Before the buildup of this trapped vortex and immediately after the airfoil was set into motion, the fluid is attached to the airfoil's surface and flows around the trailing edge, demonstrating the delay in the buildup of the classical Kutta condition. The transient of this effect is quite short and is followed by an attached How event that leads to the trapped vortex that has a longer duration. The just described initial phenomenon eventually transits into a fully developed separated flow pattern identifiable by an alternating, periodic vortex shedding

Destabilization of cortical dendrites and spines by BDNF

Particle-mediated gene transfer and two-photon microscopy were used to monitor the behavior of dendrites of individual cortical pyramidal neurons coexpressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). While the dendrites and spines of neurons expressing GFP alone grew modestly over 24-48 hr, coexpressing BDNF elicited dramatic sprouting of basal dendrites, accompanied by a regression of dendritic spines. Compared to GFP-transfected controls, the newly formed dendrites and spines were highly unstable. Experiments utilizing Trk receptor bodies, K252a, and overexpression of nerve growth factor (NGF) demonstrated that these effects were mediated by secreted BDNF interacting with extracellular TrkB receptors. Thus, BDNF induces structural instability in dendrites and spines, which, when restricted to particular portions of a dendritic arbor, may help translate activity patterns into specific morphological changes

BOSS-LDG: A Novel Computational Framework that Brings Together Blue Waters, Open Science Grid, Shifter and the LIGO Data Grid to Accelerate Gravitational Wave Discovery

We present a novel computational framework that connects Blue Waters, the NSF-supported, leadership-class supercomputer operated by NCSA, to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Data Grid via Open Science Grid technology. To enable this computational infrastructure, we configured, for the first time, a LIGO Data Grid Tier-1 Center that can submit heterogeneous LIGO workflows using Open Science Grid facilities. In order to enable a seamless connection between the LIGO Data Grid and Blue Waters via Open Science Grid, we utilize Shifter to containerize LIGO's workflow software. This work represents the first time Open Science Grid, Shifter, and Blue Waters are unified to tackle a scientific problem and, in particular, it is the first time a framework of this nature is used in the context of large scale gravitational wave data analysis. This new framework has been used in the last several weeks of LIGO's second discovery campaign to run the most computationally demanding gravitational wave search workflows on Blue Waters, and accelerate discovery in the emergent field of gravitational wave astrophysics. We discuss the implications of this novel framework for a wider ecosystem of Higher Performance Computing users.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures. Accepted as a Full Research Paper to the 13th IEEE International Conference on eScienc