Poverty in the Aftermath of Katrina: Reimagining Citizen Leadership in t he Context of Federalism

It is a cruel irony that a lead singer with the name Katrina and a back-up band called the Waves performed a pop song in the 1980s with bright lyrics and happy beat. Many years later, a natural disaster bearing the same name, backed by a surge of seawater, consumed the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, America and the rest of the world witnessed the desperate side of the world\u27s wealthiest nation. Many people, who had neither time nor resources to escape the storm\u27s surge, and the destruction that followed, became first-hand witnesses to America\u27s failure to adequately address its poverty problem. The world was shocked to see Americans displaced and immobilized. Chilling reports of the disintegration of the community with rampant plundering and lawlessness punctuated media broadcasts. The ravages of death and deprivation were graphically depicted even as relief providers scrambled to address the massive needs of the displaced and injured. The failed infrastructure and lack of services to help the unfortunates who remained behind to weather the storm resurrected the national debate on poverty-who is responsible for giving willing Americans the tools to remove themselves from poverty to become contributing members of society

Growing garden roses

The rose has been called the “Queen of Flowers,”- and its universal popularity is clearly shown by the fact that people attempt to grow roses in all parts of this and other countries. Roses are among the oldest of cultivated flowers and the frequent references to them in the Bible and other ancient writings testify to the prominent part they have played in the history of mankind. Although the rigorous and rather changeable climate of certain sections of the United States offers some handicaps to rose growing, it is possible to select certain types of roses which can be grown easily in any location where other sun-loving garden flowers are successful. The wise gardener is careful to study the particular situation in question before selecting varieties and types for planting. For the average home garden in Iowa, the following classes of roses will be found most suitable

Is Your Garden Plus or Minus?

The home garden has come to stay. In every well planned home it is as much a part of the equipment as the kitchen or the dining room. It is an outdoor supply room. However, many people think this supply room cannot be improved upon. This is a mistake and the person who believes that his or her garden is the acme of perfection will soon be traveling in a garden rut. Too often home vegetable plots are laid out year after year m precisely the same fashion, the same kind of vegetables in the same place. It has become a habit to do it this way. If rotation is good for farm crops why shouldn\u27t it be valuable for vegetable crops? Gardeners need to get out of the old rut and make the vegetable yield plus instead of minus, not only in quantity but also in quality

Planting the Back Yard Forty Your Garden - A Place of Utility and Beauty

Popular slogans as Eat more vegetables, Vegetables for Vitamines have recently swept the country, and for a purpose. We have been too much of a meat-eating race and food specialists tell us that vegetables are the most logical food elements to balance our somewhat one-sided ration. In order to eat more vegetables we must grow more vegetables. Most amateur vegetable growers will admit that quantity and quality of vegetables produced is the primary object of the home garden, although here and there we find some ultra-enthusiasts who garden for the fun of it. It is the purpose of this article to emphasize the importance of the home garden as a source of these vegetables and also to suggest ways and means of adding beauty and pleasure to what ordinarily is considered a place of utility

Modern Women and Floriculture - Flower Growing is Interesting to Homemakers, But May Also Serve as a Profession

Floriculture is best defined as the art and science of growing flowers and ornamental plants. Demands for in· formation on this subject come from two distinct groups of people. One group is professional and includes greenhouse men, wholesale and retail florists, seeds· men, nurserymen and bulb growers. The other group is largely composed of amateur flower lovers and home gardeners

Dynamic Variation in Sexual Contact Rates in a Cohort of HIV-Negative Gay Men

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission models that include variability in sexual behavior over time have shown increased incidence, prevalence, and acute-state transmission rates for a given population risk profile. This raises the question of whether dynamic variation in individual sexual behavior is a real phenomenon that can be observed and measured. To study this dynamic variation, we developed a model incorporating heterogeneity in both between-person and within-person sexual contact patterns. Using novel methodology that we call iterated filtering for longitudinal data, we fitted this model by maximum likelihood to longitudinal survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Collaborative HIV Seroincidence Study (1992–1995). We found evidence for individual heterogeneity in sexual behavior over time. We simulated an epidemic process and found that inclusion of empirically measured levels of dynamic variation in individual-level sexual behavior brought the theoretical predictions of HIV incidence into closer alignment with reality given the measured per-act probabilities of transmission. The methods developed here provide a framework for quantifying variation in sexual behaviors that helps in understanding the HIV epidemic among gay men

Phylodynamic analysis of ebola virus in the 2014 sierra leone epidemic.

BACKGROUND: The Ebola virus (EBOV) epidemic in Western Africa is the largest in recorded history and control efforts have so far failed to stem the rapid growth in the number of infections. Mathematical models serve a key role in estimating epidemic growth rates and the reproduction number (R0) from surveillance data and, recently, molecular sequence data. Phylodynamic analysis of existing EBOV time-stamped sequence data may provide independent estimates of the unobserved number of infections, reveal recent epidemiological history, and provide insight into selective pressures acting upon viral genes. METHODS: We fit a series mathematical models of infectious disease dynamics to phylogenies estimated from 78 whole EBOV genomes collected from distinct patients in May and June of 2014 in Sierra Leone, and perform evolutionary analysis on these genomes combined with closely related EBOV genomes from previous outbreaks. Two analyses are conducted with values of the latent period that have been used in recent modelling efforts. We also examined the EBOV sequences for evidence of possible episodic adaptive molecular evolution during the 2014 outbreak. RESULTS: We find evidence for adaptive evolution affecting L and GP protein coding regions of the EBOV genome, which is unlikely to bias molecular clock and phylodynamic analyses. We estimate R0=2.40 (95% HPD:1.54-3.87 ) if the mean latent period is 5.3 days, and R0=3.81, (95% HPD:2.47-6.3) if the mean latent period is 12.7 days. The estimated coefficient of variation (CV) of the number of transmissions per infected host is very high, and a large proportion of infections yield no transmissions. CONCLUSIONS: Estimates of R0 are sensitive to the unknown latent infectious period which can not be reliably estimated from genetic data alone. EBOV phylogenies show significant evidence for superspreading and extreme variance in the number of transmissions per infected individual during the early epidemic in Sierra Leone

Modeling the growth and decline of pathogen effective population size provides insight into epidemic dynamics and drivers of antimicrobial resistance

Nonparametric population genetic modeling provides a simple and flexible approach for studying demographic history and epidemic dynamics using pathogen sequence data. Existing Bayesian approaches are premised on stochastic processes with stationary increments which may provide an unrealistic prior for epidemic histories which feature extended period of exponential growth or decline. We show that nonparametric models defined in terms of the growth rate of the effective population size can provide a more realistic prior for epidemic history. We propose a nonparametric autoregressive model on the growth rate as a prior for effective population size, which corresponds to the dynamics expected under many epidemic situations. We demonstrate the use of this model within a Bayesian phylodynamic inference framework. Our method correctly reconstructs trends of epidemic growth and decline from pathogen genealogies even when genealogical data are sparse and conventional skyline estimators erroneously predict stable population size. We also propose a regression approach for relating growth rates of pathogen effective population size and time-varying variables that may impact the replicative fitness of a pathogen. The model is applied to real data from rabies virus and Staphylococcus aureus epidemics. We find a close correspondence between the estimated growth rates of a lineage of methicillin-resistant S. aureus and population-level prescription rates of β -lactam antibiotics. The new models are implemented in an open source R package called skygrowth which is available at https://github.com/mrc-ide/skygrowth

A Mott-like State of Molecules

We prepare a quantum state where each site of an optical lattice is occupied by exactly one molecule. This is the same quantum state as in a Mott insulator of molecules in the limit of negligible tunneling. Unlike previous Mott insulators, our system consists of molecules which can collide inelastically. In the absence of the optical lattice these collisions would lead to fast loss of the molecules from the sample. To prepare the state, we start from a Mott insulator of atomic 87Rb with a central region, where each lattice site is occupied by exactly two atoms. We then associate molecules using a Feshbach resonance. Remaining atoms can be removed using blast light. Our method does not rely on the molecule-molecule interaction properties and is therefore applicable to many systems.Comment: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Atomic Physics (ICAP 2006), edited by C. Roos, H. Haffner, and R. Blatt, AIP Conference Proceedings, Melville, 2006, Vol. 869, pp. 278-28