A Note About the Cover Art

Give Us Opportunities, 2016 Artist: Tee Digital Print Performing Statistics is a cultural organizing project that uses art to model, imagine, and advocate for alternatives to youth incarceration. Every summer, the project creates art with a group of teens in the Richmond Juvenile Detention Center’s post-dispositional program about their experiences navigating the justice system and their vision for a world without youth prisons. The artwork is then produced in a number of ways in order to reach decision-makers in the education, law enforcement, and juvenile justice systems. The project’s ethos looks to young people impacted by the juvenile justice system as experts society should listen to when considering policies that most impact them. Give Us Opportunities was created in the summer of 2016 and speaks to the kinds of investments young people would like to see to keep them out of the system. Jobs, credible messenger mentors, culturally competent after-school programming, more supportive educational environments, and stable housing are just a few examples of the kinds of investments that come up regularly in the project’s programming. In 2020, Performing Statistics will premier No Kids in Prison, a national touring exhibition that will amplify youth justice movements across the country and weave a national narrative of youth stories, dreams, and demands. More information about the project can be found at www.performingstatistics.org. The cover art is used with permission from ART 180

Going to Hell in a HHS Notice: The Contraceptive Mandate\u27s Next Impermissible Burden on Religious Freedom

The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that eligible religious organizations submit a notice objecting to providing their employees contraceptive coverage if they religiously object to contraception or abortifacients is as simple as filing a piece of paper. But to a collection of Catholic petitioners, complying with this requirement gives rise to “scandal” and causes them to “materially cooperate” with sin. Filing a piece of paper may seem far outside any exercise of religion, but these groups sincerely believe that the one page notice burdens their religious beliefs. Zubik v. Burwell, like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, presents a conflict between the ACA and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a statute that gives religious groups a shield and a sword against federal laws and regulations that interfere with their free exercise of religion. In Hobby Lobby the Supreme Court held that RFRA prohibits the Government from forcing certain closely-held, religious corporations to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees. Here, the author argues that the Court should extend Hobby Lobby and hold that the accommodation impermissibly burdens these religious groups’ beliefs under the demanding RFRA statute

Unprotected and Unpersuaded: The FCC\u27s Flawed Merger Review Procedures

In CBS Corporation v. FCC, the D.C. Circuit struck down the Federal Communication Commission’s rules for protecting confidential information that it collects during certain merger proceedings. In response, the Commission released a new order, pursuant to the Charter, Time Warner, and Bright House merger proceeding, for protecting confidential information. This iBrief analyzes the policy and legal implications of the Order, arguing that the Order is unlawful because it violates the Trade Secrets Act and notice-and-comment rulemaking requirements

The Effects of BACE and Its Targets on Age-related Seizures in \u3cem\u3eDrosophila\u3c/em\u3e

The presence of Beta-Amyloid (Aβ) containing plaques in the brain is one of the histological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s Disease. β-secretase (BACE) is the enzyme responsible for producing this Aβ cleavage product and has also been shown to affect myelination and general neuronal activity. Observations from geriatric medicine suggest that there may be an increase in seizure activity associated with Alzheimer’s Disease. Preliminary data suggests that both over- and under-expression of BACE contributes to mechanically stimulated seizures in Drosophila. In vertebrates, seizure activity has been correlated with many factors including Neuregulin production and Na+ Pump activity. Both of these proteins have also been shown to require BACE activity for proper function. However, their roles in BACE related seizures remains unknown. Here we are following up on this preliminary study and exploring the roles of Vein (the Drosophila homolog of Neuregulin) and Numb (a negative regulator of the Notch Pathway). We have confirmed that any perturbation in dBACE (Drosophila BACE) levels causes a significant increase in age related seizures, suggesting that that BACE levels must be tightly regulated. In addition an increase of Vein levels also cause a dramatic increase in seizure amounts and duration suggesting that BACE, at least in part, is acting through this signaling pathway. Understanding which BACE related signaling pathways are responsible for age related seizure activity can lead to new treatments which will hopefully slow the progression of Alzheimer’s and other related neurodegenerative diseases

Free boundary regularity for a multiphase shape optimization problem

In this paper we prove a $C^{1,\alpha}$ regularity result in dimension two for almost-minimizers of the constrained one-phase Alt-Caffarelli and the two-phase Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman functionals for an energy with variable coefficients. As a consequence, we deduce the complete regularity of solutions of a multiphase shape optimization problem for the first eigenvalue of the Dirichlet-Laplacian up to the fixed boundary. One of the main ingredient is a new application of the epiperimetric-inequality of Spolaor-Velichkov [CPAM, 2018] up to the boundary. While the framework that leads to this application is valid in every dimension, the epiperimetric inequality is known only in dimension two, thus the restriction on the dimension

Existence and Regularity of Optimal Shapes for Elliptic Operators with Drift

This paper is devoted to the study of shape optimization problems for the first eigenvalue of the elliptic operator with drift L = --$\Delta$+V (x)\cdot \nabla with Dirichlet boundary conditions, where V is a bounded vector field. In the first instance, we prove the existence of a principal eigenvalue $\lambda$\_1($\Omega$, V) for a bounded quasi-open set $\Omega$ which enjoys similar properties to the case of open sets. Then, given m > 0 and $\tau$ $\ge$ 0, we show that the minimum of the following non-variational problem min $\lambda$\_1($\Omega$, V) : $\Omega$ $\subset$ D quasi-open, |$\Omega$| $\le$ m, |V|\_{\infty} $\le$ $\tau$. is achieved, where the box D $\subset$ R^d is a bounded open set. The existence when V is fixed, as well as when V varies among all the vector fields which are the gradient of a Lipschitz function, are also proved. The second interest and main result of this paper is the regularity of the optimal shape $\Omega$ * solving the minimization problem min $\lambda$\_1($\Omega$, $\Phi$) : $\Omega$ $\subset$ D quasi-open, |$\Omega$| $\le$ m , where $\Phi$ is a given Lipschitz function on D. We prove that the topological boundary $\partial$$\Omega$ * is composed of a regular part which is locally the graph of a C ^{1,$\alpha$} function and a singular part which is empty if d < d * , discrete if d = d * and of locally finite H^{d--d *} Hausdorff measure if d > d * , where d * $\in$ {5, 6, 7} is the smallest dimension at which there exists a global solution to the one-phase free boundary problem with singularities. Moreover, if D is smooth, we prove that, for each x $\in$ $\partial$$\Omega$ * $\cap$ $\partial$D, $\partial$$\Omega$ * is C^{ 1,$\alpha$} in a neighborhood of x, for some $\alpha$ $\le$ 1 /2. This last result is optimal in the sense that C ^{1,1/2} is the best regularity that one can expect

A comparison using APPL and PVM for a parallel implementation of an unstructured grid generation program

Efforts to parallelize the VGRIDSG unstructured surface grid generation program are described. The inherent parallel nature of the grid generation algorithm used in VGRIDSG was exploited on a cluster of Silicon Graphics IRIS 4D workstations using the message passing libraries Application Portable Parallel Library (APPL) and Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). Comparisons of speed up are presented for generating the surface grid of a unit cube and a Mach 3.0 High Speed Civil Transport. It was concluded that for this application, both APPL and PVM give approximately the same performance, however, APPL is easier to use

CplexA: a Mathematica package to study macromolecular-assembly control of gene expression

Summary: Macromolecular assembly vertebrates essential cellular processes, such as gene regulation and signal transduction. A major challenge for conventional computational methods to study these processes is tackling the exponential increase of the number of configurational states with the number of components. CplexA is a Mathematica package that uses functional programming to efficiently compute probabilities and average properties over such exponentially large number of states from the energetics of the interactions. The package is particularly suited to study gene expression at complex promoters controlled by multiple, local and distal, DNA binding sites for transcription factors. Availability: CplexA is freely available together with documentation at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cplexa/.Comment: 28 pages. Includes Mathematica, Matlab, and Python implementation tutorials. Software can be downloaded at http://cplexa.sourceforge.net