Is Student Loan Debt Discouraging Homeownership among Young Adults?

Amid concern that rising student loan debt has social and economic consequences for young adults, many suggest that student loan debt is leading young adults to forgo home buying. However, there is little empirical evidence on this topic. In this study, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to estimate associations of student loan debt with homeownership, mortgage amount, and home equity. We use a variety of methodological techniques and test several model specifications. While we find a negative association between debt and homeownership in some models, the association is substantively modest in size and is entirely driven by the debtor-nondebtor comparison; we find no association between debt amount and homeownership among debtors. Overall, we find limited evidence that student loan debt is responsible for declining young adult homeownership. Instead, indicators for the recession and transition to adulthood markers have a stronger association with homeownership

Table of Contents and Prologue

Editorial board, table of contents, and a prologue from the editor

Contributors

Biographical information on contributors to volume 40, and a list of benefactors and donor

Wildbook: Crowdsourcing, computer vision, and data science for conservation

Photographs, taken by field scientists, tourists, automated cameras, and incidental photographers, are the most abundant source of data on wildlife today. Wildbook is an autonomous computational system that starts from massive collections of images and, by detecting various species of animals and identifying individuals, combined with sophisticated data management, turns them into high resolution information database, enabling scientific inquiry, conservation, and citizen science. We have built Wildbooks for whales (flukebook.org), sharks (whaleshark.org), two species of zebras (Grevy's and plains), and several others. In January 2016, Wildbook enabled the first ever full species (the endangered Grevy's zebra) census using photographs taken by ordinary citizens in Kenya. The resulting numbers are now the official species census used by IUCN Red List: http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/7950/0. In 2016, Wildbook partnered up with WWF to build Wildbook for Sea Turtles, Internet of Turtles (IoT), as well as systems for seals and lynx. Most recently, we have demonstrated that we can now use publicly available social media images to count and track wild animals. In this paper we present and discuss both the impact and challenges that the use of crowdsourced images can have on wildlife conservation.Comment: Presented at the Data For Good Exchange 201

Viral RNA at two stages of reovirus infection is required for the induction of necroptosis

Necroptosis, a regulated form of necrotic cell death, requires the activation of the RIP3 kinase. Here, we identify that infection of host cells with reovirus can result in necroptosis. We find that necroptosis requires sensing of the genomic RNA within incoming virus particles via cytoplasmic RNA sensors to produce type I interferon (IFN). While these events that occur prior to the de novo synthesis of viral RNA are required for the induction of necroptosis, they are not sufficient. The induction of necroptosis also requires late stages of reovirus infection. Specifically, efficient synthesis of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) within infected cells is required for necroptosis. These data indicate that viral RNA interfaces with host components at two different stages of infection to induce necroptosis. This work provides new molecular details about events in the viral replication cycle that contribute to the induction of necroptosis following infection with an RNA virus. IMPORTANCE An appreciation of how cell death pathways are regulated following viral infection may reveal strategies to limit tissue destruction and prevent the onset of disease. Cell death following virus infection can occur by apoptosis or a regulated form of necrosis known as necroptosis. Apoptotic cells are typically disposed of without activating the immune system. In contrast, necroptotic cells alert the immune system, resulting in inflammation and tissue damage. While apoptosis following virus infection has been extensively investigated, how necroptosis is unleashed following virus infection is understood for only a small group of viruses. Here, using mammalian reovirus, we highlight the molecular mechanism by which infection with a dsRNA virus results in necroptosis

An exact arithmetic toolbox for a consistent and reproducible structural analysis of metabolic network models

Constraint-based models are currently the only methodology that allows the study of metabolism at the whole-genome scale. Flux balance analysis is commonly used to analyse constraint-based models. Curiously, the results of this analysis vary with the software being run, a situation that we show can be remedied by using exact rather than floating-point arithmetic. Here we introduce MONGOOSE, a toolbox for analysing the structure of constraint-based metabolic models in exact arithmetic. We apply MONGOOSE to the analysis of 98 existing metabolic network models and find that the biomass reaction is surprisingly blocked (unable to sustain non-zero flux) in nearly half of them. We propose a principled approach for unblocking these reactions and extend it to the problems of identifying essential and synthetic lethal reactions and minimal media. Our structural insights enable a systematic study of constraint-based metabolic models, yielding a deeper understanding of their possibilities and limitations.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant GM108348)Howard Hughes Medical Institut

Multicoil2: predicting coiled coils and their oligomerization States from sequence in the twilight zone

The alpha-helical coiled coil can adopt a variety of topologies, among the most common of which are parallel and antiparallel dimers and trimers. We present Multicoil2, an algorithm that predicts both the location and oligomerization state (two versus three helices) of coiled coils in protein sequences. Multicoil2 combines the pairwise correlations of the previous Multicoil method with the flexibility of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) in a Markov Random Field (MRF). The resulting algorithm integrates sequence features, including pairwise interactions, through multinomial logistic regression to devise an optimized scoring function for distinguishing dimer, trimer and non-coiled-coil oligomerization states; this scoring function is used to produce Markov Random Field potentials that incorporate pairwise correlations localized in sequence. Multicoil2 significantly improves both coiled-coil detection and dimer versus trimer state prediction over the original Multicoil algorithm retrained on a newly-constructed database of coiled-coil sequences. The new database, comprised of 2,105 sequences containing 124,088 residues, includes reliable structural annotations based on experimental data in the literature. Notably, the enhanced performance of Multicoil2 is evident when tested in stringent leave-family-out cross-validation on the new database, reflecting expected performance on challenging new prediction targets that have minimal sequence similarity to known coiled-coil families. The Multicoil2 program and training database are available for download from http://multicoil2.csail.mit.edu.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant 1R01GM081871)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant MCB-0347203)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0821391

Analysis of lead levels in deciduous teeth from children in Clark County, Nevada.

Background: Elevated blood lead levels (EBLL) are declining in the United States, although some population subgroups continue to exhibit significant health disparities. A childhood lead poisoning prevention program was recently started in Nevada, and many efforts have been made to support this program and increase the screening rates. Methods: To expand the potential pool of children screened for EBLLs, a pilot study was performed to evaluate lead concentrations in extracted deciduous teeth using Graphic Furnace Atomic Absorption Spectrometry (GFAAS), Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS), and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) analysis. Results: Lead concentrations as determined by GFAAS and ICP-MS were found to be within normal ranges (0.585 ppm ± 0.022) and were similar to previous studies. Hispanic patients exhibited higher lead levels (0.580 ppm ± 0.032) than Black (0.478 ppm ± 0.051) patients, and were significantly higher than White (0.275 ppm ± 0.035) patients (p \u3c 0.05). Analysis of a small number of matched saliva samples, however, found no evidence for acute lead poisoning. Although limited by a small initial sample size (n=22), this pilot study provides evidence that teeth can be effectively used to reveal lead exposure in pediatric dentistry patients