Youth Engagement—Engaging for a Change: Changing for Engagement

This paper documents the incentives for, processes of, and outcomes from our multi-year community-based research project on youth engagement. In line with the theme of the 15th Annual Conference of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium (ESC)—Engaging for Change: Changing for Engagement—this paper illustrates our project in terms of the conference’s three sub-themes: (1) Why engage?, (2) How do we engage?, and (3) What impacts are we having? Contextualized within these sub-themes, the paper describes opportunities and challenges of youth engagement from youth and professional perspectives by highlighting insights of our youth leaders and community partners, along with some reflective remarks by our university researchers. The paper provides tangible descriptions and illustrations for the significance of “strategic engagement” (Speer & Christens, 2013) by focusing on the use of “strategic youth and partner engagement.” Importantly, this strategic engagement centerpieces the voices and talents of our youth leaders, supported by our community agency partners, along with a background role of university researchers

Vacuum Effects and Compressional Properties of Nuclear Matter in Cutoff Field Theory

Including the vacuum effects, the compressional properties of nuclear matter are studied in the cutoff field theory. Under the Hartree approximation, the low-energy effective Lagrangian is derived in the framework of the renormalization group methods. The coefficients are determined in a way where the physical results hardly depend on the value of the cutoff which is conveniently introduced into the theory. It is shown that, to reproduce the empirical data of the nucleus incompressibility, the compressibility of the nuclear matter is favorable to be 250$\sim$350MeV.Comment: PACS numbers, 21.65.+

Insights on Inspirational Education for “High-Risk” Youth Informed by Participatory Action Research (PAR) on Youth Engagement: Short Communication

This short communication provides our insights into how or in what ways educators can more effectively support aspiration of at-risk/high-risk youth toward meaningful education. These are informed by the key learnings from our ongoing youth engagement research. Those insights emphasize the importance of meaningful engagement of youth through building a positive relationship with youth from a strengths-based perspective to mobilize youth’s talents into our collaborative engagement efforts in order to effectively support “high-risk” youth and aspire their educational pathways. Conceptually, our work aligns with the paradigms of positive youth development (PYD) and social justice youth development (SJYD). Practically, our research project represents an “anti-oppressive practice” in itself because the project engages youth as important contributors to a social/system change, especially, the role of our youth leaders in our team as a conduit for mobilizing youth views and actions on social justice issues (e.g., oppression, marginalization, social exclusion/inclusion, human rights, empowerment)

Malt1-Induced Cleavage of Regnase-1 in CD4+ Helper T Cells Regulates Immune Activation

SummaryRegnase-1 (also known as Zc3h12a and MCPIP1) is an RNase that destabilizes a set of mRNAs, including Il6 and Il12b, through cleavage of their 3′ UTRs. Although Regnase-1 inactivation leads to development of an autoimmune disease characterized by T cell activation and hyperimmunoglobulinemia in mice, the mechanism of Regnase-1-mediated immune regulation has remained unclear. We show that Regnase-1 is essential for preventing aberrant effector CD4+ T cell generation cell autonomously. Moreover, in T cells, Regnase-1 regulates the mRNAs of a set of genes, including c-Rel, Ox40, and Il2, through cleavage of their 3′ UTRs. Interestingly, T cell receptor (TCR) stimulation leads to cleavage of Regnase-1 at R111 by Malt1/paracaspase, freeing T cells from Regnase-1-mediated suppression. Furthermore, Malt1 protease activity is critical for controlling the mRNA stability of T cell effector genes. Collectively, these results indicate that dynamic control of Regnase-1 expression in T cells is critical for controlling T cell activation

Two Cases of High Tibial Osteotomy in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis Treated with Biologic Disease-modifying Anti-rheumatic Drugs

High tibial osteotomy (HTO) procedure is generally contraindicated in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients because synovial inflammation may exacerbate joint damage post-surgery. The natural course of joint destruction in RA changed dramatically with new treatment strategies and the introduction of biologic disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (bDMARDs). We report the cases of two RA patients who underwent HTO and whose disease activities were well controlled by bDMARDs. Despite their short follow-up periods, they showed acceptable objective and subjective clinical results. We believe that the combination of bDMARDs and HTO can be indicated for selected RA patients before total knee arthroplasty