Can Congress Regulate Firearms?: Printz v. United States and the Intersection of the Commerce Clause, the Tenth Amendment, and the Second Amendment

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Printz v. United States restricted congressional legislative authority by striking down the interim provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. The decision followed United States v. Lopez, in which the Court struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act. In both cases, the Court restricted the congressional Commerce Power and renewed the strength of the Tenth Amendment in protecting states\u27 rights from federal intrusion. Because both cases involved statutes regulating firearms, however, they also raised important questions regarding the Second Amendment. Following the Lopez decision, some commentators argued that both the Tenth and Second Amendments restrict Congress\u27ability to regulate firearms. Now, after Printz, commentators are likely to argue again that the Court has placed a further significant restriction on federal firearms regulation. This Note argues that, while Printz raised important questions about the Commerce Power, the Tenth Amendment, and the Second Amendment, Congress\u27 authority to regulate firearms remains substantially intact. The Note demonstrates this by examining the Printz case in the context of the Court\u27s developing Tenth Amendment/Commerce Clause jurisprudence and its longstanding Second Amendment jurisprudence. The Note also proposes that the Supreme Court should reaffirm clearly its states\u27 rights interpretation of the Second Amendment to settle the debate over Congress\u27 authority to regulate firearms

Guide Me in Analysis: A Framework for Guidance Designers

Guidance is an emerging topic in the field of visual analytics. Guidance can support users in pursuing their analytical goals more efficiently and help in making the analysis successful. However, it is not clear how guidance approaches should be designed and what specific factors should be considered for effective support. In this paper, we approach this problem from the perspective of guidance designers. We present a framework comprising requirements and a set of specific phases designers should go through when designing guidance for visual analytics. We relate this process with a set of quality criteria we aim to support with our framework, that are necessary for obtaining a suitable and effective guidance solution. To demonstrate the practical usability of our methodology, we apply our framework to the design of guidance in three analysis scenarios and a design walk-through session. Moreover, we list the emerging challenges and report how the framework can be used to design guidance solutions that mitigate these issues

Microglia and neuroinflammation: a pathological perspective

Microglia make up the innate immune system of the central nervous system and are key cellular mediators of neuroinflammatory processes. Their role in central nervous system diseases, including infections, is discussed in terms of a participation in both acute and chronic neuroinflammatory responses. Specific reference is made also to their involvement in Alzheimer's disease where microglial cell activation is thought to be critically important in the neurodegenerative process

Antimicrobial susceptibility of Gram-positive bacteria isolated from European medical centres: results of the Daptomycin Surveillance Programme (2002-2004)

The antimicrobial susceptibility patterns of 9322 contemporary (2002-2004) Gram-positive bacterial isolates collected from 31 medical centres in 14 countries in Europe were evaluated by broth microdilution methods according to CLSI guidelines. the isolates collected comprised Staphylococcus aureus (4842 isolates), coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS; 1942 isolates), Enterococcus faecalis (1147 isolates), Enterococcus faecium (391 isolates), beta-haemolytic streptococci (660 isolates) and viridans group streptococci (340 isolates). the organisms were tested against daptomycin and more than 20 comparator agents in Mueller-Hinton broth, supplemented with calcium to 50 mg/L when testing daptomycin. Overall, methicillin (oxacillin) resistance rates were 26.7% and 77.0% for S. aureus (MRSA) and CoNS, respectively, and the vancomycin resistance rate among enterococci was 6.1%. MRSA rates varied from 0.6% in Sweden to 40.2-43.0% in Belgium, Greece, Ireland, the UK and Israel, and VRE rates varied from 0% in Switzerland to 21.2% in Ireland. More than 99.9% of isolates tested were considered susceptible to daptomycin according to breakpoints established by the United States Food and Drug Administration and the CLSI. Daptomycin was active against all Gram-positive species, with the highest MIC being 2, 8, 0.5 and 2 mg/L for staphylococci, enterococci, beta-haemolytic streptococci and viridans group streptococci, respectively. Daptomycin activity was not influenced adversely by resistance to other agents among staphylococci or enterococci. This novel lipopeptide (daptomycin) appears to be an excellent alternative therapeutic option for serious infections caused by multidrug-resistant Gram-positive organisms isolated in Europe.JMI Labs Inc, N Liberty, IA 52317 USAUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, BrazilTufts Univ, Sch Med, Boston, MA 02111 USAUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, BrazilWeb of Scienc

Four Futures For Occupational Safety and Health

Rapid changes to the nature of work have challenged the capacity of existing occupational safety and health (OSH) systems to ensure safe and productive workplaces. An effective response will require an expanded focus that includes new tools for anticipating and preparing for an uncertain future. Researchers at the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) have adopted the practice of strategic foresight to structure inquiry into how the future will impact OSH. Rooted in futures studies and strategic management, foresight creates well-researched and informed future scenarios that help organizations better prepare for potential challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. This paper summarizes the inaugural NIOSH strategic foresight project, which sought to promote institutional capacity in applied foresight while exploring the future of OSH research and practice activities. With multidisciplinary teams of subject matter experts at NIOSH, we undertook extensive exploration and information synthesis to inform the development of four alternative future scenarios for OSH. We describe the methods we developed to craft these futures and discuss their implications for OSH, including strategic responses that can serve as the basis for an action-oriented roadmap toward a preferred future

Leveraging Strategic Foresight to advance Worker Safety, Health, and Well-Being

Attending to the ever-expanding list of factors impacting work, the workplace, and the workforce will require innovative methods and approaches for occupational safety and health (OSH) research and practice. This paper explores strategic foresight as a tool that can enhance OSH capacity to anticipate, and even shape, the future as it pertains to work. Equal parts science and art, strategic foresight includes the development and analysis of plausible alternative futures as inputs to strategic plans and actions. Here, we review several published foresight approaches and examples of work-related futures scenarios. We also present a working foresight framework tailored for OSH and offer recommendations for next steps to incorporate strategic foresight into research and practice in order to advance worker safety, health, and well-being

Novel biocatalysts by identification and design

Enzymes produced from bacteria and eukaryotic organisms are presently being used for a large variety of different biotechnological applications. The rapidly increasing demand for enzymes which are active towards novel and often non-natural substrates has triggered the development of novel molecular biological methods of enzyme isolation and design. The metagenome approach is a cultivation-independent method which allows the direct cloning and expression of environmental DNA thereby providing access to a wealth of so-far unknown biocatalysts. Additionally, newly identified or existing biocatalysts can be further optimized by different methods of directed evolution. Here, the principle of the metagenome approach is outlined and a strategy is presented for the optimization of a bacterial lipase using a combination of rational design and directed evolution.

Interactions between nascent proteins and the ribosome surface inhibit co-translational folding

Most proteins begin to fold during biosynthesis on the ribosome. It has been suggested that interactions between the emerging polypeptide and the ribosome surface might allow the ribosome itself to modulate co-translational folding. Here we combine protein engineering and NMR spectroscopy to characterize a series of interactions between the ribosome surface and unfolded nascent chains of the immunoglobulin-like FLN5 filamin domain. The strongest interactions are found for a C-terminal segment that is essential for folding, and we demonstrate quantitative agreement between the strength of this interaction and the energetics of the co-translational folding process itself. Mutations in this region that reduce the extent of binding result in a shift in the co-translational folding equilibrium towards the native state. Our results therefore demonstrate that a competition between folding and binding provides a simple, dynamic mechanism for the modulation of co-translational folding by the ribosome

Feynman integrals for non-smooth and rapidly growing potentials

The Feynman integral for the Schrödinger propagator is constructed as a generalized function of white noise, for a linear space of potentials spanned by finite signed measures of bounded support and Laplace transforms of such measures, i.e., locally singular as well as rapidly growing at infinity. Remarkably, all these propagators admit a perturbation expansion