Do Low Income Youth of Color See "The Bigger Picture" When Discussing Type 2 Diabetes: A Qualitative Evaluation of a Public Health Literacy Campaign.

As Type 2 diabetes spikes among minority and low-income youth, there is an urgent need to tackle the drivers of this preventable disease. The Bigger Picture (TBP) is a counter-marketing campaign using youth-created, spoken-word public service announcements (PSAs) to reframe the epidemic as a socio-environmental phenomenon requiring communal action, civic engagement and norm change. METHODS:We examined whether and how TBP PSAs advance health literacy among low-income, minority youth. We showed nine PSAs, asking individuals open-ended questions via questionnaire, then facilitating a focus group to reflect upon the PSAs. RESULTS:Questionnaire responses revealed a balance between individual vs. public health literacy. Some focused on individual responsibility and behaviors, while others described socio-environmental forces underlying risk. The focus group generated a preponderance of public health literacy responses, emphasizing future action. Striking sociopolitical themes emerged, reflecting tensions minority and low-income youth experience, such as entrapment vs. liberation. CONCLUSION:Our findings speak to the structural barriers and complexities underlying diabetes risk, and the ability of spoken word medium to make these challenges visible and motivate action. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS:Delivering TBP content to promote interactive reflection has potential to change behavioral norms and build capacity to confront the social, economic and structural factors that influence behaviors

The Full Employment Mandate of the Federal Reserve: Its Origins and Importance

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the landmark Humphrey-Hawkins Act, this report underscores how the Federal Reserve's full employment mandate has made the Fed more accountable to working people. The report first traces the historical origins of the full employment mandate and highlights the pivotal but little-known role racial justice activists played in its creation. From the 1930s and through the rise of the civil rights movement, racial justice activists including Coretta Scott King, called for a coordinated federal effort to attain full employment. They envisioned an economy where every person who seeks employment can secure a job. King joined Congressional leaders Augustus Hawkins and Hubert Humphrey in eventually passing the landmark 1978 Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act (Humphrey-Hawkins) which legally required the Fed to pursue maximum employment.The report then turns to Federal Reserve monetary policy in the 1990's which offers an instructive model of what a full employment economy can look like. This real-world case study from our recent history shows that when labor markets tighten, workers begin to see broad-based wage gains, and persistent economic inequalities are reduced. Finally, the report underscores the continued importance of the full employment mandate today while providing an overview of proposed policies to eliminate or significantly curtail its effectiveness. In light of these findings, this report calls on Federal Reserve policymakers to use all tools at their disposal to fully realize the Fed's full employment mandate. Members of Congress must publicly affirm the importance of full employment while committing to reject any efforts to weaken or eliminate the full employment mandate. In particular, the Senate must reject nominees to the Board of Governors who have called for the narrowing of the Fed's mandate or who support policies that would undermine the Fed's ability to pursue full employment

The ecodist Package for Dissimilarity-based Analysis of Ecological Data

Ecologists are concerned with the relationships between species composition and environmental framework incorporating space explicitly is an extremely flexible tool for answering these questions. The R package ecodist brings together methods for working with dissimilarities, including some not available in other R packages. We present some of the features of ecodist, particularly simple and partial Mantel tests, and make recommendations for their effective use. Although the partial Mantel test is often used to account for the effects of space, the assumption of linearity greatly reduces its effectiveness for complex spatial patterns. We introduce a modification of the Mantel correlogram designed to overcome this restriction and allow consideration of complex nonlinear structures. This extension of the method allows the use of partial multivariate correlograms and tests of relationship between variables at different spatial scales. Some of the possibilities are demonstrated using both artificial data and data from an ongoing study of plant community composition in grazinglands of the northeastern United States.

The Perception of Literary Quality Differing as a Function of Authorial Gender and Emotionality

Previous research suggests that gender acknowledgment yields significant consequences on subsequent judgments. In the current research, we examined whether gender of authorial names affected the perception of literary quality. Participants read a short story excerpt designated as male‐authored or female‐authored that contained either exaggerated emotional content or minimal emotional content. Following presentation of the passage, participants reported perceived quality and emotionality and then completed the 10-item short form of the Need for Affect Questionnaire (NAQ-S; cf. Maio & Esses, 2001) followed by the 18‐item Need for Cognition Scale (Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao 1984). Results indicated that participants rated female authors higher in quality than male authors when reading a highly emotional passage. When reading a minimally emotional passage, there was no difference in rating based on author gender. My research thus suggests that individuals may implicitly judge source type based on gender in conjunction with perceived emotionality and allow stereotypes to influence their judgments of quality, providing interesting implications for female authors and publishers

ROOT ASSOCIATED MICROBES: THE MEDIATORS BETWEEN PLANTS AND SOIL

Globally, increasing human populations have either caused or accelerated several types of environmental change. Symbiotic microbes have powerful effects on plant fitness, yet little study has been done on how microbial-plant relationships are affected by environmental changes. In two different ecosystems I explore how either nitrogen (N) pollution or drought can alter root associated microbe (RAM)-plant relationships using Next Generation Sequencing. In moist-meadow alpine tundra at Niwot Ridge, CO, I examine the relative contribution of host identity, N enrichment, and plant neighborhood on RAM diversity and community composition in two co-dominant plant species; Geum rossii and Deschampsia cespitosa. In New Mexican piñon-juniper woodlands, I sampled roots from a site in which mass Pinus edulis dieback was simulated to mimic the effects of extreme drought events, which are predicted to become more frequent as climate change progresses. I examine the effect of host and neighbor identity, as well as the effect of dead P. edulis neighbors, on root associated fungi (RAF) of P. edulis and Juniperus monosperma. I also compare RAF communities between piñon-juniper woodlands and more arid juniper savanna, a good proxy for what piñon-juniper woodlands will become should these extreme drought events become more frequent