Getting the Most Out of Your 401(k)

Planning for your retirement is an active and ongoing endeavor. It requires a certain amount of diligence and knowledge to ensure you have an adequate amount of financial stability at retirement. In order to safeguard your economic security, it is important to know if you are getting the most out of your 401(k) retirement savings account. This factsheet provides basic information about enrolling in a 401(k) retirement savings account and important items to keep in mind once you are enrolled

Illinois Secure Choice Savings Program Act (Passed Jan. 4, 2015)

The Illinois Secure Choice Savings Program Act, passed on January 4, 2015, creates an automatic enrollment payroll deduction IRA. The purpose of the program is to promote increased retirement savings participation for employees in the private sector. This fact sheet answers some basic questions about how this new program will affect workers and their employers in Illinois

Understanding the Specialized Language of Retirement Plans

Whether you are a participant in a defined benefit plan or a defined contribution plan, the realm of pension benefits can be tricky and confusing to navigate. Some of the terminology used might be unfamiliar to the average person. This glossary of common terms associated with retirement plans is meant to serve as a helpful resource for plan participants

Understanding the Differences Between Defined Benefit Pension And Defined Contribution

In recent years, more and more employers are offering employees defined contribution plans instead of defined benefit plans. Although, there has been a shift away from the defined benefit pension plan, it is important for employees to understand the difference and value of both pension plans. Each type of pension plan has both advantages and disadvantages. What may appear as an advantage to one person might seem to be a disadvantage to another person. For example, a person who spends all or most of her career with a single employer will have very different concerns from someone who changes jobs many times over the course of her career. It is important to understand these factors in light of your own particular work history

Hardship Withdrawals and Loans: Some Words of Caution

As defined benefit pension plans become more and more rare, the responsibility of saving for retirement falls increasingly on individuals. Many studies have been published about the average or median balances in retirement savings accounts and virtually all of them have reached the same conclusion - most Americans aren’t saving enough money to last them through their retirement years. In this fact sheet we will take a look at one of the factors that contributes to this problem, that is, the availability of loans and hardship withdrawals from 401(k) retirement accounts, which can lead to lower account balances overall. Sometimes, when you are facing a financial need, you might look to borrow or withdraw money from your retirement account. This approach may be an option, but there are a number of things you should consider first. This fact sheet highlights some of the reasons why taking these loans and withdrawals might have a long-term impact on a person’s retirement security

The Half-Earth City

At the intersection of the biophilic city and the global commitment to halt biodiversity declines lies the half-earth city. E.O. Wilson inspired the global effort to conserve and restore half the Earth, to sustain remaining biodiversity, necessarily focused on areas where the human footprint is small and the conversion of land to anthropogenic land use is less pronounced. However, given the increasing urbanization of the globe, cities must also play a central role in the conservation of global biodiversity. Holistic ecoregional planning must account for the impact of cities and work to ensure that urban areas are built in harmony with a world where nature receives half. Cities provide both a known challenge, but also lesser understood opportunities. Uncontrolled urban expansion and expanding ecological footprints are a primary driver of habitat loss and species decline. To the extent that these trends can be slowed or even reversed, cities can work to limit damaging impacts beyond the borders of cities. With their global economic influence, it is critical for cities to assume a leadership role in the stewardship of global biodiversity by participating in city-to-city diplomacy and supporting global commitments. Cities can contribute significantly to the half-earth vision by pursuing a more sustainable path of consumption, while also committing to a resolve to conserve irreplaceable biodiversity at the global scale. As growing science and the vision of the biophilic city suggests, cities can also provide for flourishing biodiversity within the borders of the city. Through the conservation of remnant habitat and the nurturing of unique human-influenced habitats found only in cities, new spaces and connections through and across the urban landscape can be forged. A central tenant of the biophilic cities’ vision is the acknowledgment that despite the many challenges presented by increasing urbanization, cities are laboratories for continued experimentation and identification of innovative means to balance an improved quality of life with continued flourishing of human and nonhuman species alike. The benefits derived from the integration of nature across the cities are well documented and manyfold. These include: improved health and wellbeing; increased community resilience in the form of the equitable distribution of critical infrastructure such as tree canopies; multimodal transportation; environmental benefits of enhanced stream health, improved water quality, and reduced flood risk; and the promotion of biodiversity through preserved and enhanced ecosystems and habitats. Thus, biodiversity conservation in the form of abundant and accessible nature is part of a larger biophilic city vision that seeks to reverse the negative trends of urban areas and “create healthy, resilient cities and towns for both people and biodiversity.” Indeed, cities are already at the forefront of biodiversity conservation and the goal of half-earth. The City of Boulder, Colorado, augments its own conservation within the city by building a seamless connection to surrounding national park and federal wilderness areas, and through these collective efforts more than half of the land within surrounding Boulder County is protected. Perhaps even more impressive is the feat of Singapore, a partner city in the Biophilic Cities Network, which has protected more than half of the city through a combination of large-scale, connected reserves and smaller scale neighborhood parks. This Article examines the law, policy and practices available to cities to nurture the unique biodiversity possible within urban landscapes and to contribute to the larger global effort to regenerate lost migratory pathways and core conservation areas, thereby contributing to the biophilic city and half-earth visions and halting the decline of global biodiversity

Finding a Financial Planner

This fact sheet provides information on how to find the right financial planner to help you meet your retirement planning goals. This fact sheet suggests things to consider prior to picking a financial planner and answers questions like: What do financial planners do? How do you know if you need a financial planner? How do you find the right financial planner? What type of professional title does a financial planner have

A large-scale simulation of the piriform cortex by a cell automaton-based network model

An event-driven framework is used to construct physiologically motivated large-scale model of the piriform cortex containing in the order of 105 neuron-like computing units. This approach is based on a hierarchically defined highly abstract neuron model consisting of finite-state machines. It provides computational efficiency while incorporating components which have identifiable counterparts in the neurophysiological domain. The network model incorporates four neuron types, and glutamatergic excitatory and inhibitory synapses. The spatio-temporal patterns of cortical activity and the temporal and spectral characteristics of simulated electroencephalograms (EEGs) are studied. In line with previous experimental and compartmental work, 1) shock stimuli elicit EEG profiles with either isolated peaks or damped oscillations, the response type being determined by the intensity of the stimuli, and 2) temporally unpatterned input generates EEG oscillations supported by model-wide waves of excitation. <br/

Altered functional and structural brain network organization in autism.

Structural and functional underconnectivity have been reported for multiple brain regions, functional systems, and white matter tracts in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Although recent developments in complex network analysis have established that the brain is a modular network exhibiting small-world properties, network level organization has not been carefully examined in ASD. Here we used resting-state functional MRI (n&nbsp;=&nbsp;42 ASD, n&nbsp;=&nbsp;37 typically developing; TD) to show that children and adolescents with ASD display reduced short and long-range connectivity within functional systems (i.e., reduced functional integration) and stronger connectivity between functional systems (i.e., reduced functional segregation), particularly in default and higher-order visual regions. Using graph theoretical methods, we show that pairwise group differences in functional connectivity are reflected in network level reductions in modularity and clustering (local efficiency), but shorter characteristic path lengths (higher global efficiency). Structural networks, generated from diffusion tensor MRI derived fiber tracts (n&nbsp;=&nbsp;51 ASD, n&nbsp;=&nbsp;43 TD), displayed lower levels of white matter integrity yet higher numbers of fibers. TD and ASD individuals exhibited similar levels of correlation between raw measures of structural and functional connectivity (n&nbsp;=&nbsp;35 ASD, n&nbsp;=&nbsp;35 TD). However, a principal component analysis combining structural and functional network properties revealed that the balance of local and global efficiency between structural and functional networks was reduced in ASD, positively correlated with age, and inversely correlated with ASD symptom severity. Overall, our findings suggest that modeling the brain as a complex network will be highly informative in unraveling the biological basis of ASD and other neuropsychiatric disorders