Battered Parents in California: Ignored Victims of Domestic Violence

This Comment examines the currently available remedies for battered parents in California. The author suggests that the legal system has been slow to acknowledge the growing trend of parental abuse and slower still to provide adequate remedies for these parents. The author provides a survey of the potential remedies for battered parents in California and discusses the inherent problems in each. The author concludes with suggestions for more effective remedies, proposing mandatory family counseling or a restructuring of the methods for court processing of abusive children

Non-backtracking alternating walks

The combinatorics of walks on a graph is a key topic in network science. Here we study a special class of walks on directed graphs. We combine two features that have previously been considered in isolation. We consider alternating walks, which form the basis of algorithms for hub/authority detection and for discovering directed bipartite substructure. Within this class, we restrict to non-backtracking walks, since this constraint has been seen to offer advantages in related contexts. We derive a recursive formula for counting the total number of non-backtracking alternating walks of a given length, leading to an expression for any associated power series expansion. We discuss computational issues for the widely used cases of resolvent and exponential series, showing that non-backtracking can be incorporated at very little extra cost. We also derive an appropriate asymptotic limit which gives a parameter-free, spectral analogue. We perform tests on an artificial data set in order to quantify the advantages of the new methodology. We also show that the removal of backtracking allows us to identify larger bipartite subgraphs within an anatomical connectivity network from neuroscience

On the exponential generating function for non-backtracking walks

We derive an explicit formula for the exponential generating function associated with non-backtracking walks around a graph. We study both undirected and directed graphs. Our results allow us to derive computable expressions for non-backtracking versions of network centrality measures based on the matrix exponential. We find that eliminating backtracking walks in this context does not significantly increase the computational expense. We show how the new measures may be interpreted in terms of standard exponential centrality computation on a certain multilayer network. Insights from this block matrix interpretation also allow us to characterize centrality measures arising from general matrix functions. Rigorous analysis on the star graph illustrates the effect of non-backtracking and shows that localization can be eliminated when we restrict to non-backtracking walks. We also investigate the localization issue on synthetic networks

Activation of the hsp70 promoter by environmental inorganic and organic chemicals: relationships with cytotoxicity and lipophilicity.

International audienceStress proteins (heat shock proteins, HSPs) have been proposed as general markers of cellular aggression and their use for environmental monitoring is often suggested. The aim of this work was to study the potency of various environmentally relevant organic and inorganic chemicals to induce the expression of the HSP70 marker. For this purpose, we used an established HeLa cell line containing the chloramphenicol acetyl transferase (CAT) gene under the control of the hsp70 promoter. The screening of three metallic and 15 organic chemicals revealed differences in their capacities to induce the hsp70 promoter. The three metals tested (cadmium, zinc and mercury) were able to induce a stress response. Some organochlorine compounds (chlorophenol derivatives, tetrachlorohydroquinone, 3, 4-dichloroaniline, ethyl parathion and 1-chloro-2,4-dinitrobenzene) induced a response, whereas other common halogenated pesticides or aromatic hydrocarbons (e.g. benzo(a)pyrene, 2, 4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, endosulfan, diuron, 4-nonylphenol) did not. The potency to induce hsp70 was significantly correlated to the octanol-water partition coefficient (log K(ow)) of the inducing chemicals, except for 1-chloro-2,4-dinitrobenzene and ethyl parathion. Cytotoxicity assays run in parallel to the induction measurements revealed that the three metals were effective at non cytotoxic doses whereas all organic compounds, except tetrachlorohydroquinone and 1-chloro-2,4-dinitrobenzene, induced the promoter at cytotoxic doses. These results suggest that hsp70 is induced by different mechanisms of toxicity. We propose that this model can be used in mechanistic studies for the detection of toxic effects of certain pollutants

Estimating the Thickness of Sea Ice Snow Cover in the Weddell Sea from Passive Microwave Brightness Temperatures

Passive microwave satellite observations have frequently been used to observe changes in sea ice cover and concentration. Comiso et al. showed that there may also be a direct relationship between the thickness of snow cover (h(sub s)) on ice and microwave emissivity at 90 GHz. Because the in situ experiment of experiment of Comiso et al. was limited to a single station, the relationship is re-examined in this paper in a more general context and using more extensive in situ microwave observations and measurements of h from the Weddell Sea 1986 and 1989 winter cruises. Good relationships were found to exist between h(sub s) sand the emissivity at 90 GHz - 10 GHz and the emissivity at 90 GHz - 18.7 GHz when the standard deviation of h(sub s) was less than 50% of the mean and when h(sub s) was less than 0.25 m. The reliance of these relationships on h(sub s) is most likely caused by the limited penetration through the snow of radiation at 90 GHz. When the algorithm was applied to the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) satellite data from the Weddell Sea, the resulting mean h(sub s) agreed within 5% of the mean calculated from greater than 1400 in situ observations

Tapping Environmental History to Recreate America’s Colonial Hydrology

To properly remediate, improve, or predict how hydrological systems behave, it is vital to establish their histories. However, modern-style records, assembled from instrumental data and remote sensing platforms, hardly exist back more than a few decades. As centuries of data is preferable given multidecadal fluxes of both meteorology/climatology and demographics, building such a history requires resources traditionally considered only useful in the social sciences and humanities. In this Feature, Pastore et al. discuss how they have undertaken the synthesis of historical records and modern techniques to understand the hydrology of the Northeastern U.S. from Colonial times to modern day. Such approaches could aid studies in other regions that may require heavier reliance on qualitative narratives. Further, a better insight as to how historical changes unfolded could provide a “past is prologue” methodology to increase the accuracy of predictive environmental models

Structure-properties relationships of polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) filled PS nanocomposites

The polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) additivated polystyrene (PS) based nanocomposites were prepared by melt processing and the structure-properties relationships of the POSS-PS systems were compared to those of the neat PS. In order to investigate the effect of these structural parameters on the final properties of the polymer nanocomposites, five different kinds of POSS samples were used, in particular, POSS with different inorganic cage and with different organic pendent groups. The rheological investigation suggests clearly that the POSS acts as a plasticizer and that the processability of the PS was positively modified. The affinity between the POSS samples and the PS matrix was estimated by the calculated theoretical solubility parameters, considering the Hoy’s method and by morphology analysis. Minor difference between the solubility parameter of POSS and the matrix means better compatibility and no aggregation tendency. Furthermore, the POSS loading leads to a decrease of the rigidity, of the glass transition temperature and of the damping factor of the nanocomposite systems. The loading of different POSS molecules with open cage leads to a more pronounced effect on all the investigated properties that the loading of the POSS molecules with closed cage. Moreover, the melt properties are significantly influenced by the type of inorganic framework, by the type of the pendent organic groups and by the interaction between the POSS organic groups and the host matrix, while, the solid state properties appears to be influenced more by the kind of cage

Preserving sparsity in dynamic network computation

Time sliced networks describing human-human digital interactions are typically large and sparse. This is the case, for example, with pairwise connectivity describing social media, voice call or physical proximity, when measured over seconds, minutes or hours. However, if we wish to quantify and compare the overall time-dependent centrality of the network nodes, then we should account for the global flow of information through time. Because the time-dependent edge structure typically allows information to diffuse widely around the network, a natural summary of sparse but dynamic pairwise interactions will generally take the form of a large dense matrix. For this reason, computing nodal centralities for a timedependent network can be extremely expensive in terms of both computation and storage; much more so than for a single, static network. In this work, we focus on the case of dynamic communicability, which leads to broadcast and receive centrality measures. We derive a new algorithm for computing time-dependent centrality that works with a sparsified version of the dynamic communicability matrix. In this way, the computation and storage requirements are reduced to those of a sparse, static network at each time point. The new algorithm is justified from first principles and then tested on a large scale data set. We find that even with very stringent sparsity requirements (retaining no more than ten times the number of nonzeros in the individual time slices), the algorithm accurately reproduces the list of highly central nodes given by the underlying full system. This allows us to capture centrality over time with a minimal level of storage and with a cost that scales only linearly with the number of time points

A multi-layer extension of the stochastic heat equation

Motivated by recent developments on solvable directed polymer models, we define a 'multi-layer' extension of the stochastic heat equation involving non-intersecting Brownian motions.Comment: v4: substantially extended and revised versio