Reforming the Regulation of Community

The regulatory framework for financial institutions in the United States imposes significant costs on community banks without providing benefits to consumers or the economy that justify those costs. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act builds on decades of “one-size-fits-all” regulation of financial institutions, an ill-conceived regulatory strategy that puts community banks at a competitive disadvantage as compared with their larger, more complex competitors. The imposition of regulatory burdens on community banks without attendant benefits ultimately harms both consumers and the economy by (1) forcing community banks to consolidate or go out of business, furthering the concentration of assets in a small number of megafinancial institutions; and (2) encouraging standardization of financial products, leaving millions of vulnerable borrowers without meaningful access to credit. Neither of these outcomes will protect consumers, the financial system, or the recovery of the American economy. Instead, radical reform of the existing regulatory structure is necessary to ensure the future of community banks

Differences in Auditory Distraction between Adults and Children: A Duplex-mechanism Approach

Differences in the impact of irrelevant sound on recall performance in children (aged 7–9 years old; N = 89) compared to adults (aged 18–22 years old; N = 89) were examined. Tasks that required serial rehearsal (serial and probed-order recall tasks) were contrasted with one that did not (the missing-item task) in the presence of irrelevant sound that was either steady-state (a repeated speech token), changing-state (two alternating speech tokens) and, for the first time with a child sample, could also contain a deviant token (a male-voice token embedded in a sequence otherwise spoken in a female voice). Participants either completed tasks in which the to-be-remembered list-length was adjusted to individual digit span or was fixed at one item greater than the average span we observed for the age-group. The disruptive effects of irrelevant sound did not vary across the two methods of determining list-length. We found that tasks encouraging serial rehearsal were especially affected by changing-state sequences for both age-groups (i.e., the changing-state effect) and there were no group differences in relation to this effect. In contrast, disruption by a deviant sound—generally assumed to be the result of attentional diversion—was evident among children in all three tasks while adults were less susceptible to this effect. This pattern of results suggests that developmental differences in distraction are due to differences in attentional control rather than serial rehearsal efficiency

Distraction in Verbal Short-Term Memory: Insights from Developmental Differences

The contribution of two mechanisms of auditory distraction in verbal serial short-term memory—interference with the serial rehearsal processes used to support short-term recall and general attentional diversion—was investigated by exploiting differences in auditory distraction in children and adults. Experiment 1 showed that serial rehearsal plays a role in children’s as well as adults’ distractibility: Auditory distraction from irrelevant speech was greater for both children and adults as the burden on rehearsal increased. This pattern was particularly pronounced in children, suggesting that underdeveloped rehearsal skill in this population may increase their distractibility. Experiment 2 showed that both groups were more susceptible to changing- than steady-state speech when the task involved serial rehearsal—indicating that both groups suffer interference-by-process—but that children, but not adults, were also susceptible to any sort of sound (steady or changing) in a task thought to be devoid of serial rehearsal. The overall pattern of results suggests that children’s increased susceptibility to auditory distraction during verbal short-term memory performance is due to a greater susceptibility to attentional diversion; in this view, under-developed rehearsal-skill increases children’s distractibility by exacerbating their under-developed attentional control rather than by increasing interference-by-process

A Health Systems Approach to Integrated Community Case Management of Childhood Illness: Methods and Tools

Integrated community case management (iCCM) of childhood illness is an increasingly popular strategy to expand life-saving health services to underserved communities. However, community health approaches vary widely across countries and do not always distribute resources evenly across local health systems. We present a harmonized framework, developed through interagency consultation and review, which supports the design of CCM by using a systems approach. To verify that the framework produces results, we also suggest a list of complementary indicators, including nine global metrics, and a menu of 39 country-specific measures. When used by program managers and evaluators, we propose that the framework and indicators can facilitate the design, implementation, and evaluation of community case management

Synchronous seasonality in the gut microbiota of wild mouse populations

The gut microbiome performs many important functions in mammalian hosts, with community composition shaping its functional role. However, the factors that drive individual microbiota variation in wild animals and to what extent these are predictable or idiosyncratic across populations remains poorly understood. Here, we use a multi-population dataset from a common rodent species (the wood mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus), to test whether a consistent “core” gut microbiota is identifiable in this species, and to what extent the predictors of microbiota variation are consistent across populations. Between 2014 and 2018 we used capture-mark-recapture and 16S rRNA profiling to intensively monitor two wild wood mouse populations and their gut microbiota, as well as characterising the microbiota from a laboratory-housed colony of the same species. Although the microbiota was broadly similar at high taxonomic levels, the two wild populations did not share a single bacterial amplicon sequence variant (ASV), despite being only 50km apart. Meanwhile, the laboratory-housed colony shared many ASVs with one of the wild populations from which it is thought to have been founded decades ago. Despite not sharing any ASVs, the two wild populations shared a phylogenetically more similar microbiota than either did with the colony, and the factors predicting compositional variation in each wild population were remarkably similar. We identified a strong and consistent pattern of seasonal microbiota restructuring that occurred at both sites, in all years, and within individual mice. While the microbiota was highly individualised, some seasonal convergence occurred in late winter/early spring. These findings reveal highly repeatable seasonal gut microbiota dynamics in multiple populations of this species, despite different taxa being involved. This provides a platform for future work to understand the drivers and functional implications of such predictable seasonal microbiome restructuring, including whether it might provide the host with adaptive seasonal phenotypic plasticity

Chronic Wasting Disease Prions in Elk Antler Velvet

Residue 226 of cervid prion proteins may be a determinant of CWD pathogenesis

The Astropy Problem

The Astropy Project (http://astropy.org) is, in its own words, "a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages." For five years this project has been managed, written, and operated as a grassroots, self-organized, almost entirely volunteer effort while the software is used by the majority of the astronomical community. Despite this, the project has always been and remains to this day effectively unfunded. Further, contributors receive little or no formal recognition for creating and supporting what is now critical software. This paper explores the problem in detail, outlines possible solutions to correct this, and presents a few suggestions on how to address the sustainability of general purpose astronomical software

Objectively assessed physical activity and subsequent health service use of UK adults aged 70 and over: A four to five year follow up study

Objectives: To examine the associations between volume and intensity of older peoples' physical activity, with their subsequent health service usage over the following four to five years. Study Design: A prospective cohort design using baseline participant characteristics, objectively assessed physical activity and lower limb function provided by Project OPAL (Older People and Active Living). OPAL-PLUS provided data on numbers of primary care consultations, prescriptions, unplanned hospital admissions, and secondary care referrals, extracted from medical records for up to five years following the baseline OPAL data collection. Participants and Data Collection: OPAL participants were a diverse sample of 240 older adults with a mean age of 78 years. They were recruited from 12 General Practitioner surgeries from low, middle, and high areas of deprivation in a city in the West of England. Primary care consultations, secondary care referrals, unplanned hospital admissions, number of prescriptions and new disease diagnoses were assessed for 213 (104 females) of the original 240 OPAL participants who had either consented to participate in OPAL-PLUS or already died during the follow-up period. Results: In regression modelling, adjusted for socio-economic variables, existing disease, weight status, minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) per day predicted subsequent numbers of prescriptions. Steps taken per day and MVPA also predicted unplanned hospital admissions, although the strength of the effect was reduced when further adjustment was made for lower limb function. Conclusions: Community-based programs are needed which are successful in engaging older adults in their late 70s and 80s in more walking, MVPA and activity that helps them avoid loss of physical function. There is a potential for cost savings to health services through reduced reliance on prescriptions and fewer unplanned hospital admissions. © 2014 Simmonds et al

Quality of chronic disease care in general practice: the development and validation of a provider interview tool

BACKGROUND: This article describes the development and psychometric evaluation of an interview instrument to assess provider-reported quality of general practice care for patients with diabetes, cardiovascular disease and asthma – the Australian General Practice Clinical Care Interview (GPCCI). METHODS: We administered the GPCCI to 28 general practitioners (family physicians) in 10 general practices. We conducted an item analysis and assessed the internal consistency of the instrument. We next assessed the quality of care recorded in the medical records of 462 of the general practitioners' patients with Type 2 diabetes, ischaemic heart disease/hypertension and/or moderate to severe asthma. This was then compared with results of the GPCCI for each general practice. RESULTS: Good internal consistency was found for the overall GPCCI (Cronbach's alpha = 0.75). As far as the separate sub-scales were concerned, diabetes had good internal consistency (0.76) but the internal consistency of the heart disease and asthma subscales was not strong (0.49 and 0.16 respectively). There was high inter-rater reliability of the adjusted scores of data extracted from patients' medical notes for each of the three conditions. Correlations of the overall GPCCI and patients' medical notes audit, combined across the three conditions and aggregated to practice level, showed that a strong relationship (r = 0.84, p = 0.003) existed between the two indices of clinical care. CONCLUSION: This study suggests that the GPCCI has good internal consistency and concurrent validity with patients' medical records in Australian general practice and warrants further evaluation of its properties, validity and utility