From “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” to “Trauma”: Adverse Childhood Experiences and Hip Hop’s Prescription

Over the past two decades, research focused on the causes and the lasting impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, has been changing the way researchers, healthcare providers, and advocates approach areas like mental health, risky behaviors, and chronic disease. Numerous studies have produced and solidified results that present three undeniable truths: (1) the vast majority of Americans have experienced some form of trauma in their childhood, (2) people with low income or educational attainment and people of color experience increased instances of childhood trauma and adversity, and (3) the more childhood trauma an individual experiences, the higher the risk that he or she will be exposed to “multiple risk factors for several of the leading causes of death in adults.” The causal link between childhood trauma and negative health outcomes has been shown to be so severe that Dr. Robert Block, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, notably stated, “Adverse Childhood Experiences are the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today.” Childhood trauma and adversity has shaped the music, careers, and lives of many of hip-hop’s brightest stars. The lasting impact of traumatic childhood experiences has propelled some artists to international stardom, as listeners around the globe are able to connect with them through the honest and raw lyrics and musical styles born out of, and in spite of, such adversity. What can hip-hop, a proud and storied genre that is no stranger to taking on taboo topics, and its artists, many of whom are the products of communities teeming with adversity, tell us about Adverse Childhood Experiences? How can lawmakers, mental healthcare providers, and community activists work to address and curtail the prevalence and negative impact of childhood trauma through the framework provided to them by hip-hop artists and messages? Messages that dictate action by courageously challenging the complacent status quo, beginning with efforts that spread awareness and education, and building on the work of those in the field that have come before? What would laws and policies developed through a hip hop framework look like? This article seeks to answer these questions and to encourage immediate action in combating the epidemic of childhood trauma

La finalité-harmonie

Ruyer démontre qu’une finalité-harmonie œuvre dans la formation des êtres physiques. Cette finalité contredit le mécanisme, et se distingue de la finalité-intention qui est la finalité parlée. Cette dernière est seconde et dépend d’une illusion d’un sujet de l’activité, posé devant celle-ci, illusion inévitable pour la raison pragmatique d’une mise en scène de l’activité. Contre Hume, Ruyer montre que les êtres s’organisent en effet, mais en tant qu’ils sont des subjectivités, des « domaines absolus » constamment actifs, prenant forme selon des types, des essences ou des thèmes, selon un dynamisme harmonique dont l’analogue est donné dans la formation d’une improvisation musicale ou dans la création d’un tableau.Ruyer demonstrates that a harmony-finality [finalité-harmonie] is at work in the formation of physical beings. This finality contradicts mechanisms, and distinguishes itself from the intention-finality [finalité-intention], which is only a way of speaking about finality. The latter is secondary and depends on an illusion of a subject of activity, which is set in front of it. This illusion is inevitable for the pragmatic reason that the activity is staged [mise en scène]. Against Hume, Ruyer shows that beings are indeed organizing, but insofar as they are subjectivities—constantly active “absolute domains” that take form according to types, essences or themes, in accordance with a harmonious dynamism, analogous to the formation of a musical improvisation or the creation of a painting

The Cretaceous of the Swiss Jura Mountains: an improved lithostratigraphic scheme

In the course of the HARMOS project of the Swiss Geological Survey, the lithostratigraphic subdivisions of the Cretaceous sedimentary rocks outcropping in the Swiss Jura Mountains were revisited. New formation names are proposed where only inadequate facies terms existed so far. As in some cases outcrop conditions in the Swiss Jura do not allow for logging complete sections to characterise the formations, type localities in neighbouring France have been chosen. The following formations (Fm.) are defined to describe the Cretaceous lithological units (from bottom to top): Goldberg Fm., Pierre-Châtel Fm., Vions Fm., Chambotte Fm., Vuache Fm., Grand Essert Fm., Gorges de l’Orbe Fm., Vallorbe Fm., Perte du Rhône Fm., Narlay Fm. Dating of the formations is based on biostratigraphy (ammonites, echinids, dasycladalean algae, foraminifera, calpionellids, dinocysts, nannofossils). The fossils indicate Berriasian through to Coniacian ages. The lithostratigraphic units describe the general evolution from a shallow, peritidal platform to deeper-water shelf environments, then the installation of a carbonate platform, and finally the drowning of this platform followed by the predominance of pelagic conditions. The common lateral and vertical changes in facies and sedimentation rates as well as numerous hiatuses within the formations testify to a complex interplay of tectonics, climate, and sea level that controlled the Swiss Jura realm during the Cretaceous

National Pride of the Filipino Youth

The main purpose of this study was to know how proud the youth are of being a Filipino. Socio-demographic characteristics also play a role in determining the national pride of Filipino youth. The level of pride similarly varied among domain-specific aspects. We used a structured survey questionnaire adopted and modified from the International Social Survey Programme from their National Identity study. For this study, a four-stage sampling was observed to get the sample. Sports was the top source of the Filipino youth's national pride, among the 12 domain-specific aspects. However, Politics and Democracy got the lowest level of national pride. Differences among sexes significantly varied in the aspect of Sports, Economy and Social Security, and Environment. Pride in Arts and Literature, Sports, Armed Forces, and History differ among religions. The difference in Educational Attainment affects the level of national pride of the youth in the aspect of Fair and Equal Treatment in All Groups. Moreover, the socio-demographic characteristics play a role in determining the national pride of the Filipino youth. The study used quantitative research approach, specifically descriptive. A self-administered survey was distributed to 400 randomly selected youth respondents of 15-29 years old in the National Capital Region, Philippines

Meek Mill’s Trauma: Brutal Policing as an Adverse Childhood Experience

Meek Mill’s life and career have been punctuated by trauma, from his childhood lived on the streets of Philadelphia, through his rise to fame and eventual arrival as one of hip hop’s household names. his 2018 track Trauma, Meek Mill describes, in revealing prose, just how the traumatic experiences he endured personally impacted and harmed him. He also embodies a role as narrator in describing the same traumas and harms that impact the daily lives of countless similarly situated young Black people in the United States. As a child, Mill’s lived experience was one of pervasive poverty and fear, as the world surrounding him consisted of large-scale poverty, addiction, crime, violence, and death. As a young man—at just 19 years of age—he was beaten by police, wrongfully arrested and incarcerated, and ultimately convicted of crimes that he did not commit, becoming another statistic as a young Black man swallowed by the American criminal justice system. Meek’s story, lyrics and contributions to hip hop illuminate the Black experience with law enforcement. His personal involvements provide a powerful narrative for exactly how a racially biased criminal justice system perpetrates a trauma that extends far greater than the law has traditionally recognized. This article highlights this narrative through the lens that Meek Mill provides because of his current prominence in hip hop and the importance of his narrative claims. Despite his success in achieving the status of a true hip hop icon, Meek Mill suffered the kind of childhood adversity and trauma that emerging health care research indicates leads to debilitating health outcomes in adulthood. Powerful health studies conducted over the past two decades have uncovered the startling impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (“ACEs”). ACEs are traumatic events that occur in childhood, ranging from abuse and neglect to other traumatic experiences derived from household and community dysfunction. Today, ACEs are generally placed by health researchers into seven to ten categories of childhood adversities ranging from sexual, physical and emotional abuse to the incarceration of a family member, living with someone who abuses alcohol or drugs and poverty, community violence and homelessness. These identified categories of trauma, although not fully understood or grasped as late as the 1990s, were known to occur in the lives of children all over the United States; however, the overall impact of childhood trauma on an individual’s long term health outcomes was only first measured in the now famous CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE study. The findings of this study shook the health care world, forever altering the understanding of the link between childhood trauma and adult health outcomes. These links pushed researchers to look more deeply into the ultimate impact of traumatic childhood experiences on overall adult health. The groundbreaking study concluded that the more trauma a child experiences, the fewer years that child would live as an adult. In fact, in a 2009 study, CDC researchers determined that exposure to childhood trauma literally shortens an individual’s lifespan. On average, a person with six or more ACEs died twenty years earlier than a person that had experienced no Adverse Childhood Experiences. This reality, that traumatic childhood experiences are directly and inextricably linked to negative health outcomes, is now widely recognized in the public health and clinical literature. Dr. Robert Block, former President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, has warned that “[a]dverse childhood experiences are the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today.” More recently, this literature has begun to explore the connection between trauma and race, outlining how structural violence and historical trauma—particularly violence and discrimination experienced by Black, indigenous, and persons of color—is often experienced both at the individual and community levels. Such work has focused on improving economic opportunities for trauma- stricken communities, improving the physical/built environment, and supporting the development of healthy social-cultural environments. The prevailing framework for addressing the ACEs crisis has been a medical model focused on interventions for individual survivors and communities rather than addressing the glaring systemic issues that directly contribute to the vast majority of the trauma suffered by those communities and the individuals and families that inhabit them. Largely and undeniably absent from the body of work on childhood trauma, and the proposed solutions to confronting and rectifying its deadly impact, is the exploration of how the American legal and justice systems, from municipal law enforcement to the appellate courts, stands at the epicenter of the current crisis. Each of the recognized categories of ACEs listed in medical screening instruments used by physicians to identity trauma have a direct nexus to the justice system. If we as a society are committed to treating ACEs as the public health crisis that they are, it is incumbent upon us to examine where and how our legal system is complicit in perpetuating trauma upon minority children. In addition, we need to consider how it can intervene—both at the individual and structural levels—to eliminate practices that contribute to multi-generational cycles of trauma and work to equip those with justice-system involvement to succeed and build the resilience necessary to heal minority individuals and communities who have been stricken by trauma and its life-long negative consequences. Indeed it is the responsibility of our justice system, as a major contributor to so-called “social determinants of health.” Meek Mill, in his intimate autobiographical tracks of Trauma, Oodles O’Noodles Babies, and Otherside of America, describes experiencing not just several instances of childhood trauma as identified by the CDC-Kaiser Permanente study, but as a teenager, he suffered additional cruel trauma at the hands of U.S. police and a criminal justice system that wrongly imprisoned and unfairly positioned him in a revolving door between probation and prison. The data tells us that the trauma Meek experienced as a child and teenager statistically predicts a poorer life expectancy for him than those individuals that experienced no trauma or little trauma as a child and youth. Because of the anti-Black culture of policing in America, and because of the deep systemic racism that permeates the criminal justice system, simple exposure to U.S. policing and its courts should qualify as an Adverse Childhood Experience for Black and minority children—one that contributes to harmful adult outcomes, including a shortened life expectancy. Mill’s personal childhood trauma as described in his music carefully extrapolates the ways that American policing and the criminal justice system literally traumatized and endangered his young Black life, as it does so many Black children. This article begins in Section I by providing an in-depth examination of ACEs research, including how the groundbreaking original ACE study discovered the direct link between high ACE scores and poor health outcomes and the prevalence of ACEs in the Black community. It then turns, in Section II, to a brief discussion of the broad ACE category of social disadvantage, and how a child growing up in an environment built on a foundation of poverty and violence will inevitably have more trauma, more ACEs, and be harmed through his or her experience of toxic stress. Section III will provide an overview of anti-Black policing and how law enforcement, as currently constituted, traumatizes minority communities and youth. Section IV explains how criminal charging, jailing, and sentencing traditions have disproportionately targeted Black men, contributing to the trauma that their children and families experience with the loss of a loved one to death or incarceration. The article next argues that minority youth exposure to U.S. law enforcement agents and the justice system at large functions as an ACE for youth of color in a way that is simply not present for non-minority youth and, as such, should be added to the list of ACEs that are formally recognized by public health officials. Finally, the article concludes with how Meek Mill himself is seeking to reform a system rife with debilitating trauma. Throughout each section, Meek Mill, and the raw lyrics from some of his most personal tracks, will serve as an illustration, and example, of how social disadvantage, police misconduct and brutality, and the American criminal justice system at large, cause harmful and lifelong trauma for Black Americans

Hexamoll(R) DINCH and DPHP metabolites in urine of children and adolescents in Germany: Human biomonitoring results of the German Environmental Survey GerES V, 2014-2017

The production and use of the plasticisers Hexamoll(R) DINCH (di-(iso-nonyl)-cyclohexane-1,2-dicarboxylate) and DPHP (di-(2-propylheptyl) phthalate) have increased after both chemicals were introduced into the market in the early 2000s as substitutes for restricted high molecular weight phthalates. During the population representative German Environmental Survey (GerES) of Children and Adolescents (GerES V, 2014–2017), we collected urine samples and measured the concentrations of DINCH and DPHP metabolites in 2228 and in a subsample of 516 participants, respectively. We detected DINCH and DPHP metabolites in 100% and 62% of the 3-17 years old children and adolescents, respectively. Geometric means of DINCH metabolites were 2.27 μg/L for OH-MINCH, 0.93 μg/L for oxo-MINCH, 1.14 μg/L for cx-MINCH and 3.47 μg/L for DINCH (Σ of OH-MINCH + cx-MINCH). Geometric means of DPHP metabolites were 0.30 μg/L for OH-MPHP, 0.32 µg/L for oxo-MPHP and 0.64 μg/L for DPHP (Σ of OH-MPHP + oxo-MPHP). The 3-5 years old children had almost 3-fold higher DINCH biomarkers levels than adolescents (14-17 years). Higher concentrations of DPHP biomarkers among young children only became apparent after creatinine adjustment. Urinary levels of DINCH but not of DPHP biomarkers were associated with the levels of the respective plasticisers in house dust. When compared to HBM health-based guidance values, we observed no exceedance of the HBM-I value of 1 mg/L for DPHP (Σ of OH-MPHP + oxo-MPHP). However, 0.04% of the children exceeded the health based guidance value HBM-I of 3 mg/L for DINCH (Σ of OH-MINCH + cx-MINCH). This finding shows that even a less toxic replacement of restricted chemicals can reach exposures in some individuals, at which, according to current knowledge, health impacts cannot be excluded with sufficient certainty. In conclusion, we provide representative data on DINCH and DPHP exposure of children and adolescents in Germany. Further surveillance is warranted to assess the substitution process of plasticisers, and to advise exposure reduction measures, especially for highly exposed children and adolescents. Providing the results to the European HBM Initiative HBM4EU will support risk assessment and risk management not only in Germany but also in Europe

Five-Branes in Heterotic Brane-World Theories

The effective action for five-dimensional heterotic M-theory in the presence of five-branes is systematically derived from Horava-Witten theory coupled to an M5-brane world-volume theory. This leads to a five-dimensional N=1 gauged supergravity theory on S^1/Z_2 coupled to four-dimensional N=1 theories residing on the two orbifold fixed planes and an additional bulk three-brane. We analyse the properties of this action, particularly the four-dimensional effective theory associated with the domain-wall vacuum state. The moduli Kahler potential and the gauge-kinetic functions are determined along with the explicit relations between four-dimensional superfields and five-dimensional component fields.Comment: 19 pages, Latex, typos corrected, reference adde

Phthalate metabolites in urine of children and adolescents in Germany: human biomonitoring results of the German Environmental Survey GerES V, 2014-2017

During the population representative German Environmental Survey of Children and Adolescents (GerES V, 2014-2017) 2256 first-morning void urine samples from 3 to 17 years old children and adolescents were analysed for 21 metabolites of 11 different phthalates (di-methyl phthalate (DMP), di-ethyl phthalate (DEP), butylbenzyl phthalate (BBzP), di-iso-butyl phthalate (DiBP), di-n-butyl phthalate (DnBP), di-cyclohexyl phthalate (DCHP), di-n-pentyl phthalate (DnPeP), di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), di-iso-nonyl phthalate (DiNP), di-iso-decyl phthalate (DiDP) and di-n-octyl phthalate (DnOP)). Metabolites of DMP, DEP, BBzP, DiBP, DnBP, DEHP, DiNP and DiDP were found in 97%-100% of the participants, DCHP and DnPeP in 6%, and DnOP in none of the urine samples. Geometric means (GM) were highest for metabolites of DiBP (MiBP: 26.1 μg/L), DEP (MEP: 25.8 μg/L), DnBP (MnBP: 20.9 μg/L), and DEHP (cx-MEPP: 11.9 μg/L). For all phthalates but DEP, GMs were consistently higher in the 3–5 years old children than in the 14-17 years old adolescents. For DEHP, the age differences were most pronounced. All detectable phthalate biomarker concentrations were positively associated with the levels of the respective phthalate in house dust. In GerES V we found considerably lower phthalate biomarker levels than in the preceding GerES IV (2003–2006). GMs of biomarker levels in GerES V were only 18% (BBzP), 23% (MnBP), 23% (DEHP), 29% (MiBP) and 57% (DiNP) of those measured a decade earlier in GerES IV. However, some children and adolescents still exceeded health-based guidance values in the current GerES V. 0.38% of the participants had levels of DnBP, 0.08% levels of DEHP and 0.007% levels of DiNP which were higher than the respective health-based guidance values. Accordingly, for these persons an impact on health cannot be excluded with sufficient certainty. The ongoing and substantial exposure of vulnerable children and adolescents to many phthalates confirms the need of a continued monitoring of established phthalates, whether regulated or not, as well as of potential substitutes. With this biomonitoring approach we provide a picture of current individual and cumulative exposure developments and body burdens to phthalates, thus providing support for timely and effective chemicals policies and legislation

Complete intersections: Moduli, Torelli, and good reduction

We study the arithmetic of complete intersections in projective space over number fields. Our main results include arithmetic Torelli theorems and versions of the Shafarevich conjecture, as proved for curves and abelian varieties by Faltings. For example, we prove an analogue of the Shafarevich conjecture for cubic and quartic threefolds and intersections of two quadrics.Comment: 37 pages. Typo's fixed. Expanded Section 2.