Ethnicity Matters: The Socioeconomic Gradient in Health among Asian Americans

This study examines the relationship between socioeconomic indicators and health status among Asian Americans using data from the 2001 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), a population-based random-digit-dial survey with race-ethnic supplemental samples. Multivariate logistic regression analyses show that the inverse relationship between socioeconomic position and health status is similar for Asian Americans when measured as an aggregate group compared to Whites. However, when specific Asian American ethnic groups are examined, the relationship varies greatly. For example, among Chinese Americans and Vietnamese Americans, education is a significant predictor of poor health status, but household income is more significant among Korean Americans. The importance of disaggregation for subgroup populations in research and policy is discussed

Generalized relation between the relative entropy and dissipation for nonequilibrium systems

Recently, Kawai, Parrondo, and Van den Broeck have related dissipation to time-reversal asymmetry. We generalized the result by considering a protocol where the physical system is driven away from an initial thermal equilibrium state with temperature $\beta_0$ to a final thermal equilibrium state at a different temperature. We illustrate the result using a model with an exact solution, i.e., a particle in a moving one-dimensional harmonic well.Comment: 4 page

The Mason Music & Memory Initiative (M3I)

Educational Objectives 1. Explain the benefits of a nonpharmacological intervention, such as the M3I, for persons with dementia. 2. Describe the work of M3I and its collaboration with students and faculty throughout the state. 3.Highlight lessons learned and future directions for the M3I

Electron-Phonon mechanism for Superconductivity in Na0.35_{0.35}CoO2_2: Valence-Band Suhl-Kondo effect Driven by Shear Phonons

To study the possible mechanism of superconductivity in Na$_{0.35}$CoO$_2$, we examine the interaction between all the relevant optical phonons (breathing and shear phonons) and $t_{2g}(a_{1g}+e_g')$-electrons of Co-ions, and study the transition temperature for a s-wave superconductivity. The obtained $T_{\rm c}$ is very low when the $e_g'$-valence-bands are far below the Fermi level. However, $T_{\rm c}$ is strongly enhanced when the top of the $e_g'$-valence-bands is close to the Fermi level (say -50meV), thanks to interband hopping of Cooper pairs caused by shear phonons. This ``valence-band Suhl-Kondo mechanism'' due to shear phonons is significant to understand the superconductivity in Na$_{0.35}$CoO$_2$. By the same mechanism, the kink structure of the band-dispersion observed by ARPES, which indicates the strong mass-enhancement ($m^\ast/m\sim3$) due to optical phonons, is also explained.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures; v2:Added references, published in J. Phys. Soc. Jp

Amino acid coevolution reveals three-dimensional structure and functional domains of insect odorant receptors.

Insect odorant receptors (ORs) comprise an enormous protein family that translates environmental chemical signals into neuronal electrical activity. These heptahelical receptors are proposed to function as ligand-gated ion channels and/or to act metabotropically as G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Resolving their signalling mechanism has been hampered by the lack of tertiary structural information and primary sequence similarity to other proteins. We use amino acid evolutionary covariation across these ORs to define restraints on structural proximity of residue pairs, which permit de novo generation of three-dimensional models. The validity of our analysis is supported by the location of functionally important residues in highly constrained regions of the protein. Importantly, insect OR models exhibit a distinct transmembrane domain packing arrangement to that of canonical GPCRs, establishing the structural unrelatedness of these receptor families. The evolutionary couplings and models predict odour binding and ion conduction domains, and provide a template for rationale structure-activity dissection