Disability Costs and Equivalence Scales in the Older Population in Great Britain

We use a standard of living (SoL) approach to estimate older people's disability costs, using data on 8000 individuals from the U.K. Family Resources Survey. We extend previous research in two ways. First, by allowing for a more flexible relationship between SoL and income, the structure of the estimated disability cost and equivalence scale is not dictated by a restrictive functional form assumption. Second, we allow for the latent nature of disability and SoL, addressing measurement error in the disability and SoL indicators in surveys. We find that disability costs are strongly related to severity of disability, and vary with income in absolute and proportionate terms. Older people above the median disability level require an extra �99 per week (2007 prices) on average to reach the SoL of an otherwise similar person at the median. Costs faced by older people in the highest decile of disability average �180

Exclusionary employment in Britain’s broken labour market

There is growing evidence of the problematic nature of the UK’s ‘flexible labour market’ with rising levels of in-work poverty and insecurity. Yet successive Governments have stressed that paid work is the route to inclusion, focussing attention on the divide between employed and unemployed. Past efforts to measure social exclusion have tended to make the same distinction. The aim of this paper is to apply Levitas et al’s (2007) framework to assess levels of exclusionary employment, i.e. exclusion arising directly from an individual’s labour market situation. Using data from the Poverty and Social Exclusion UK survey, results show that one in three adults in paid work is in poverty, or in insecure or poor quality employment. One third of this group have not seen any progression in their labour market situation in the last five years. The policy focus needs to shift from ‘Broken Britain’ to Britain’s broken labour market

Innate immune activating ligand SUMOylation affects tumor cell recognition by NK cells

Natural Killer cells are innate lymphocytes involved in tumor immunosurveillance. They express activating receptors able to recognize self-molecules poorly expressed on healthy cells but up-regulated upon stress conditions, including transformation. Regulation of ligand expression in tumor cells mainly relays on transcriptional mechanisms, while the involvement of ubiquitin or ubiquitin-like modifiers remains largely unexplored. Here, we focused on the SUMO pathway and demonstrated that the ligand of DNAM1 activating receptor, PVR, undergoes SUMOylation in multiple myeloma. Concurrently, we found that PVR is preferentially located in intracellular compartments in human multiple myeloma cell lines and malignant plasma cells and that inhibition of the SUMO pathway promotes its translocation to the cell surface, increasing tumor cell susceptibility to NK cell-mediated cytolysis. Our findings provide the first evidence of an innate immune activating ligand regulated by SUMOylation, and confer to this modification a novel role in impairing recognition and killing of tumor cells.Natural Killer cells are innate lymphocytes involved in tumor immunosurveillance. They express activating receptors able to recognize self-molecules poorly expressed on healthy cells but up-regulated upon stress conditions, including transformation. Regulation of ligand expression in tumor cells mainly relays on transcriptional mechanisms, while the involvement of ubiquitin or ubiquitin-like modifiers remains largely unexplored. Here, we focused on the SUMO pathway and demonstrated that the ligand of DNAM1 activating receptor, PVR, undergoes SUMOylation in multiple myeloma. Concurrently, we found that PVR is preferentially located in intracellular compartments in human multiple myeloma cell lines and malignant plasma cells and that inhibition of the SUMO pathway promotes its translocation to the cell surface, increasing tumor cell susceptibility to NK cell-mediated cytolysis. Our findings provide the first evidence of an innate immune activating ligand regulated by SUMOylation, and confer to this modification a novel role in impairing recognition and killing of tumor cells

Global phylogeography and evolution of chelonid fibropapilloma-associated herpesvirus

A global phylogeny for chelonid fibropapilloma-associated herpesvirus (CFPHV), the most likely aetiological agent of fibropapillomatosis (FP) in sea turtles, was inferred, using dated sequences, through Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis and used to estimate the virus evolutionary rate independent of the evolution of the host, and to resolve the phylogenetic positions of new haplotypes from Puerto Rico and the Gulf of Guinea. Four phylogeographical groups were identified: eastern Pacific, western Atlantic/eastern Caribbean, mid-west Pacific and Atlantic. The latter comprises the Gulf of Guinea and Puerto Rico, suggesting recent virus gene flow between these two regions. One virus haplotype from Florida remained elusive, representing either an independent lineage sharing a common ancestor with all other identified virus variants or an Atlantic representative of the lineage giving rise to the eastern Pacific group. The virus evolutionary rate ranged from 1.62x10(-4) to 2.22x10(-4) substitutions per site per year, which is much faster than what is expected for a herpesvirus. The mean time for the most recent common ancestor of the modern virus variants was estimated at 192.90-429.71 years ago, which, although more recent than previous estimates, still supports an interpretation that the global FP pandemic is not the result of a recent acquisition of a virulence mutation(s). The phylogeographical pattern obtained seems partially to reflect sea turtle movements, whereas altered environments appear to be implicated in current FP outbreaks and in the modern evolutionary history of CFPHV.DNER-PR; US NMFS (NMFS-NOAA) [NA08NMF4720436]; US-Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS); Sociedad Chelonia; WIDECAST; US Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA); Lisbon Oceanarium, Portugal; Interdisciplinary Research Center for Animal Health of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the Technical University of Lisbon (FMV/TUL)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Quantum Zeno Effect and Light-Dark Periods for a Single Atom

The quantum Zeno effect (QZE) predicts a slow-down of the time development of a system under rapidly repeated ideal measurements, and experimentally this was tested for an ensemble of atoms using short laser pulses for non-selective state measurements. Here we consider such pulses for selective measurements on a single system. Each probe pulse will cause a burst of fluorescence or no fluorescence. If the probe pulses were strictly ideal measurements, the QZE would predict periods of fluorescence bursts alternating with periods of no fluorescence (light and dark periods) which would become longer and longer with increasing frequency of the measurements. The non-ideal character of the measurements is taken into account by incorporating the laser pulses in the interaction, and this is used to determine the corrections to the ideal case. In the limit, when the time between the laser pulses goes to zero, no freezing occurs but instead we show convergence to the familiar macroscopic light and dark periods of the continuously driven Dehmelt system. An experiment of this type should be feasible for a single atom or ion in a trapComment: 16 pages, LaTeX, a4.sty; to appear in J. Phys.

Moral Argument and the Justification of Policy:New Labour’s Case for Welfare Reform

This article proposes a framework for exploring how politicians use moral arguments to win support for their policies. It proceeds from the premise that the formulation of such arguments is mediated by three factors that constitute a general context of justification - ‘ideology,’ ‘argumentation’ and ‘hegemonic competition.’ For analytical purposes, the framework reconstructs the process of justification as one in which argumentative strategies are selected, modified and utilised in the light of these factors. The framework is applied to New Labour’s case for the New Deals and Flexible New Deal. The analysis reveals that these initiatives and the moral arguments used to promote them are broadly consistent with New Labour’s ideology; the arguments are appropriate to the policies; and that New Labour succeeded in setting the agenda on welfare reform

Moduli stabilization with positive vacuum energy

We study the effect of anomalous U(1) gauge groups in string theory compactification with fluxes. We find that, in a gauge invariant formulation, consistent AdS vacua appear breaking spontaneously supergravity. Non vanishing D-terms from the anomalous symmetry act as an uplifting potential and could allow for de Sitter vacua. However, we show that in this case the gravitino is generically (but not always) much heavier than the electroweak scale. We show that alternative uplifting scheme based on corrections to the Kahler potential can be compatible with a gravitino mass in the TeV range.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur

Embryonic Exposure to Domoic Acid Increases the Susceptibility of Zebrafish Larvae to the Chemical Convulsant Pentylenetetrazole

BACKGROUND: Domoic acid (DA) is a neurotoxin produced by diatoms of the genus Pseudonitzschia that targets the limbic system to induce tonic–clonic seizures and memory impairment. In utero DA exposure of mice leads to a reduction in seizure threshold to subsequent DA exposures in mid-postnatal life, and similar studies have shown neurotoxic effects in rats that were delayed until adolescence. OBJECTIVE: We used in ovo microinjection of zebrafish (Danio rerio) to characterize the effect of embryonic exposure of DA on seizure-inducing agents later in life as an alternative species model to screen environmental contaminants that might induce a fetal-originating adult disease. METHODS: Embryos were microinjected within hours of fertilization to DA concentrations ranging from 0.12 to 1.26 ng/mg egg weight. Seven days later, the larval animals were characterized for sensitivity to the chemical convulsant pentylenetetrazole (PTZ), an agent that is well-defined in laboratory rodents and, more recently, in zebrafish. RESULTS: In ovo DA exposure, most significantly at 0.4 ng/mg, reduces the latency time until first PTZ seizure in larval fish and increases the severity of seizures as determined by seizure stage and movement parameters. The interaction between in ovo DA exposure and PTZ caused seizure behaviors to individually asymptomatic doses of PTZ (1.0 and 1.25 mM) and DA (0.13 and 0.22 ng/mg). CONCLUSION: These studies demonstrate that in ovo exposure to DA reduces the threshold to chemically induced seizures in larval fish and increases the severity of seizure behavior in a manner that is consistent with in utero studies of laboratory rodents

Exploring the dynamics of compliance with community penalties

In this paper, we examine how compliance with community penalties has been theorized hitherto and seek to develop a new dynamic model of compliance with community penalties. This new model is developed by exploring some of the interfaces between existing criminological and socio-legal work on compliance. The first part of the paper examines the possible definitions and dimensions of compliance with community supervision. Secondly, we examine existing work on explanations of compliance with community penalties, supplementing this by drawing on recent socio-legal scholarship on private individuals’ compliance with tax regimes. In the third part of the paper, we propose a dynamic model of compliance, based on the integration of these two related analyses. Finally, we consider some of the implications of our model for policy and practice concerning community penalties, suggesting the need to move beyond approaches which, we argue, suffer from compliance myopia; that is, a short-sighted and narrowly focused view of the issues