Seeing Guns to See Urban Violence: Racial Inequality & Neighborhood Context

Guns are central to the comprehension of the racial inequalities in neighborhood violence. This may sound simple when presented so plainly. However, its significance derives from the limited consideration that the neighborhood research paradigm has given guns: they are typically conceived of as a background condition of disadvantaged neighborhoods where violence is concentrated. Instead, I argue that guns belong at the forefront of neighborhood analyses of violence. Employing the logic and language of the ecological approach, I maintain that guns must be considered as mechanisms of neighborhood violence, with the unequal distribution of guns serving as a critical link between neighborhood structural conditions and rates of violence. Furthermore, I make the case that American gun policy should be understood as a set of macrostructural forces that represent a historic and persistent source of disadvantage in poor Black neighborhoods.

The 4Ms of Age-Friendly Care: Successful Infusion into Electronic Medical Records Leads to Improved Care

Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Health Information Technology (HIT) have changed the daily operations of the healthcare industry. For primary care systems/clinics, it has meant the purchase and tailoring of systems to fit specific needs of users and patients. As one of the HRSA funded Geriatric Workforce Enhancement recipients, the AR Geriatric Education Collaborative (AGEC) worked with a rural federally qualified healthcare clinic system for over a year to help them become IHI certified in Age-Friendly Care and the EMR has been a critical link. The system was crucial in identifying compliancy to the clinical Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) measures which helped identify the areas where most improvement was needed. Included in the process was a new geriatric screening tab in the EMR system. This tab contains 8 screenings including: depression, anxiety, alcohol use, prescription opioid use and recreational drug use, mentation, medication and mobility. This is in addition to asking “what matters” so that all four of the 4M’s age friendly framework components were included. Clinicians are successfully using the systems and improvements in outcomes are beginning to be noted. The outcome MIPS measures are obtained quarterly from an EMR report and data is shared with the staff and new quality improvement projects are developed using PDSA (plan, do, study, act) cycles based on the outcomes of the data. Next steps with the EMR will be the development of flags that will notify the clinicians when a screening is needed.

Novel cytoplasmic lncRNA IKBKBAS promotes lung adenocarcinoma metastasis by upregulating IKKβ and consequential activation of NF-κB signaling pathway

NF-κB signaling pathway is a critical link between inflammation and cancer. Emerging evidence suggested that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) were involved in dysregulation of NF-κB. Herein, we reported a novel lncRNA IKBKBAS that activated NF-κB in lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) by upregulating IKKβ, a key member of NF-κB signaling pathway, thereby promoting the metastasis of LUAD both in vitro and in vivo. The upregulated IKBKBAS functioned as a competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) via competing with IKKβ mRNA for binding miR-4741, consequently leading to upregulation and activation of IKKβ, and ultimately activation of NF-κB. The abnormally elevated IKBKBAS in LUAD was mainly resulted from the extremely decrease of miR-512-5p that targeting IKBKBAS. Furthermore, we identified a positive feedback loop between NF-κB and IKBKBAS, in which NF-κB activation induced by overexpression of IKBKBAS could promote the transcription of IKBKBAS by binding the κB sites within IKBKBAS promoter. Our studies revealed that IKBKBAS was involved in the activation of NF-κB signaling by upregulating the expression of IKKβ, which made it serve as a potential novel target for therapies to LUAD.

Community Interpreting and linguistics: A fruitful alliance? A survey of linguistics-based research in CI

Since the first Critical Link Conference in Geneva Park, Canada, in 1995, Community Interpreting (CI) has experienced a dramatic change in both theory and practice. National and international conferences, seminars, courses, and workshops all around the world have made it possible for practitioners, trainers, and researchers to get together and discuss their views and exchange ideas. At the same time, an ever-growingflow ofpublications reflects the enormous activity in this field. Nevertheless, CI re- search is still farfrom being in the same category as infields such as conference interpreting or translation, and this is all the more so for linguistics-based CI research.As a researcher working in a department mostly involved with linguistics and related areas but with an increasing interest in cultural studies and translation studies, it is my intention to analyze and classify the contributions to CI conferences and the publications of CI papers using a linguistics-based methodology. To begin with, the evolution of linguistics and those sub-areas, which have had the greatest influence in the lastfew decades, will be briefly discussed, as will its methodologies. Secondly, an analysis will be presented of the characteristics and tools of linguistics-based CI research. And thirdly, conclusions will be drawn concerning the evolution, trends or gaps in CI research in general, and in linguistics-based CI research in particular.

Abrupt hippocampal remapping signals resolution of memory interference

Remapping refers to a decorrelation of hippocampal representations of similar spatial environments. While it has been speculated that remapping may contribute to the resolution of episodic memory interference in humans, direct evidence is surprisingly limited. We tested this idea using high-resolution, pattern-based fMRI analyses. Here we show that activity patterns in human CA3/dentate gyrus exhibit an abrupt, temporally-specific decorrelation of highly similar memory representations that is precisely coupled with behavioral expressions of successful learning. The magnitude of this learning-related decorrelation was predicted by the amount of pattern overlap during initial stages of learning, with greater initial overlap leading to stronger decorrelation. Finally, we show that remapped activity patterns carry relatively more information about learned episodic associations compared to competing associations, further validating the learning-related significance of remapping. Collectively, these findings establish a critical link between hippocampal remapping and episodic memory interference and provide insight into why remapping occurs.

Measuring the Network Vulnerability Based on Markov Criticality

Vulnerability assessment—a critical issue for networks—attempts to foresee unexpected destructive events or hostile attacks in the whole system. In this article, we consider a new Markov global connectivity metric—Kemeny constant, and take its derivative called Markov criticality to identify critical links. Markov criticality allows us to find links that are most influential on the derivative of Kemeny constant. Thus, we can utilize it to identity a critical link ( i , j ) from node i to node j , such that removing it leads to a minimization of networks’ global connectivity, i.e., the Kemeny constant. Furthermore, we also define a novel vulnerability index to measure the average speed by which we can disconnect a specified ratio of links with network decomposition. Our method is of high efficiency, which can be easily employed to calculate the Markov criticality in real-life networks. Comprehensive experiments on several synthetic and real-life networks have demonstrated our method’s better performance by comparing it with state-of-the-art baseline approaches.

Distinct regulation of tonic GABAergic inhibition by NMDA receptor subtypes

Tonic inhibition mediated by extrasynaptic gamma-aminobutyric acid type A receptors (GABAARs) play important roles in the regulation of various brain functions. However, the regulatory mechanisms for tonic inhibition remain largely unknown. Here we report distinct actions of GluN2A- and GluN2B-containing subtypes of NMDA receptors (NMDARs) on tonic inhibition in hippocampal neurons. Mechanistically, GluN2A- and GluN2B-containing NMDARs play differential roles in alpha5-GABAAR internalization. Additionally, GluN2A-, but not GluN2B-, containing receptors are required for the homeostatic potentiation of tonic inhibition. In an acute seizure model induced by kainic acid, tonic inhibition is decreased during acute seizures, while it is increased 24 h later, and these alterations are dependent on the distinct GluN2-containing NMDARs. Collectively, these data reveal a critical link between NMDARs and extrasynaptic GABAARs in both physiological and pathological conditions.