It Is Surprisingly Difficult to Measure Income Segregation.

Recent studies have shown that U.S. Census- and American Community Survey (ACS)-based estimates of income segregation are subject to upward finite sampling bias (Logan et al.

Precise Genomic Riboregulator Control of Metabolic Flux in Microbial Systems.

Engineered microbes can be used for producing value-added chemicals from renewable feedstocks, relieving the dependency on nonrenewable resources such as petroleum. These microbes often are composed of synthetic metabolic pathways; however, one major problem in establishing a synthetic pathway is the challenge of precisely controlling competing metabolic routes, some of which could be crucial for fitness and survival. While traditional gene deletion and/or coarse overexpression approaches do not provide precise regulation, -repressors (CRs) are RNA-based regulatory elements that can control the production levels of a particular protein in a tunable manner.

School racial segregation and long-term cardiovascular health among Black adults in the US: A quasi-experimental study.

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) disproportionately affects Black adults in the United States. This is increasingly acknowledged to be due to inequitable distribution of health-promoting resources. One potential contributor is inequities in educational opportunities, although it is unclear what aspects of education are most salient.

School Racial Segregation and the Health of Black Children.

Objectives: Few researchers have evaluated whether school racial segregation, a key manifestation of structural racism, affects child health, despite its potential impacts on school quality, social networks, and stress from discrimination. We investigated whether school racial segregation affects Black children's health and health behaviors.

Methods: We estimated the association of school segregation with child health, leveraging a natural experiment in which school districts in recent years experienced increased school segregation.

Phosphorylation and acetylation of mitochondrial transcription factor A promote transcription processivity without compromising initiation or DNA compaction.

Mitochondrial transcription factor A (TFAM) plays important roles in mitochondrial DNA compaction, transcription initiation, and in the regulation of processes like transcription and replication processivity. It is possible that TFAM is locally regulated within the mitochondrial matrix via such mechanisms as phosphorylation by protein kinase A and nonenzymatic acetylation by acetyl-CoA. Here, we demonstrate that DNA-bound TFAM is less susceptible to these modifications.

Increases in Income-Related Disparities in Early Elementary School Obesity, 1998-2014.

Objective: Research shows that population-level rates of obesity, which rose dramatically from the 1970s through the mid-2000s, have since plateaued or even started to decline. However, overall improvements may mask differences in trends for different subgroups. For instance, obesity rates have continued to climb among low-income adolescents, leading to growing income-related gaps in obesity.

States as Sites of Educational (In)Equality: State Contexts and the Socioeconomic Achievement Gradient.

Socioeconomic achievement gaps have long been a central focus of educational research. However, not much is known about how (and why) between-district gaps vary among states, even though states are a primary organizational level in the decentralized education system in the United States. Using data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), this study describes state-level socioeconomic achievement gradients and the growth of these gradients from Grades 3 to 8.

Long-Term Outcome of a Brief Intervention to Address Adolescent Drug Abuse in a School Setting.

The present study used data from a randomized controlled trial on brief interventions with adolescents to identify distinct longitudinal patterns of substance use and identify predictors, as well as outcomes associated with those use patterns. Data were originally collected for the purpose of evaluating two brief intervention conditions with adolescents who had been identified in a school setting as abusing alcohol or other drugs (total sample, = 315). Adolescents were randomly assigned to a two-session adolescent only brief intervention (BI-A), a two-session adolescent- plus an additional parent session (BI-AP), or an assessment only control session (CON).

From Census Tracts to Local Environments: An Egocentric Approach to Neighborhood Racial Change.

Most quantitative studies of neighborhood racial change rely on census tracts as the unit of analysis. However, tracts are insensitive to variation in the geographic scale of the phenomenon under investigation and to proximity among a focal tract's residents and those in nearby territory. Tracts may also align poorly with residents' perceptions of their own neighborhood and with the spatial reach of their daily activities.

Educational Opportunity in Early and Middle Childhood: Using Full Population Administrative Data to Study Variation by Place and Age.

I use standardized test scores from roughly forty-five million students to describe the temporal structure of educational opportunity in more than eleven thousand school districts in the United States. Variation among school districts is considerable in both average third-grade scores and test score growth rates. The two measures are uncorrelated, indicating that the characteristics of communities that provide high levels of early childhood educational opportunity are not the same as those that provide high opportunities for growth from third to eighth grade.

Has Income Segregation Really Increased? Bias and Bias Correction in Sample-Based Segregation Estimates.

Several recent studies have concluded that residential segregation by income in the United States has increased in the decades since 1970, including a significant increase after 2000. Income segregation measures, however, are biased upward when based on sample data. This is a potential concern because the sampling rate of the American Community Survey (ACS)-from which post-2000 income segregation estimates are constructed-was lower than that of the earlier decennial censuses.

Patterns of literacy among U.S. students.

How well do U.S. students read? In this article, Sean Reardon, Rachel Valentino, and Kenneth Shores rely on studies using data from national and international literacy assessments to answer this question.

Meta-analysis of supplemental treatment for depressive and anxiety disorders in patients being treated for alcohol dependence.

Approximately half of those receiving treatment for an alcohol use disorder (AUD) also suffer with an anxiety or depressive (internalizing) disorder. Because all internalizing disorders mark a poor alcohol treatment outcome, it seems reasonable to supplement AUD treatment with a psychiatric intervention when these disorders co-occur with AUD. However, this conclusion may be faulty given that the various possible interrelationships between AUD and internalizing disorders do not uniformly imply a high therapeutic yield from this approach.

Income inequality and income segregation.

This article investigates how the growth in income inequality from 1970 to 2000 affected patterns of income segregation along three dimensions: the spatial segregation of poverty and affluence, race-specific patterns of income segregation, and the geographic scale of income segregation. The evidence reveals a robust relationship between income inequality and income segregation, an effect that is larger for black families than for white families. In addition, income inequality affects income segregation primarily through its effect on the large-scale spatial segregation of affluence rather than by affecting the spatial segregation of poverty or by altering small-scale patterns of income segregation.

Race and space in the 1990s: changes in the geographic scale of racial residential segregation, 1990-2000.

We use newly developed methods of measuring spatial segregation across a range of spatial scales to assess changes in racial residential segregation patterns in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2000.

The geographic scale of metropolitan racial segregation.

This article addresses an aspect of racial residential segregation that has been largely ignored in prior work: the issue of geographic scale. In some metropolitan areas, racial groups are segregated over large regions, with predominately white regions, predominately black regions, and so on, whereas in other areas, the separation of racial groups occurs over much shorter distances. Here we develop an approach-featuring the segregation profile and the corresponding macro/micro segregation ratio-that offers a scale-sensitive alternative to standard methodological practice for describing segregation.

Beyond the Census Tract: Patterns and Determinants of Racial Segregation at Multiple Geographic Scales.

The census tract-based residential segregation literature rests on problematic assumptions about geographic scale and proximity. We pursue a new tract-free approach that combines explicitly spatial concepts and methods to examine racial segregation across egocentric local environments of varying size. Using 2000 census data for the 100 largest U.

Retail tobacco outlet density and youth cigarette smoking: a propensity-modeling approach.

Objectives: We examined whether retail tobacco outlet density was related to youth cigarette smoking after control for a diverse range of neighborhood characteristics.

Methods: Data were gathered from 2116 respondents (aged 11 to 23 years) residing in 178 census tracts in Chicago, Ill. Propensity score stratification methods for continuous exposures were used to adjust for potentially confounding neighborhood characteristics, thus strengthening causal inferences.

How beliefs about substance use differ by socio-demographic characteristics, individual experiences, and neighborhood environments among urban adolescents.

In this article, we tested a series of Item Response Theory (IRT) models to examine the individual and neighborhood variation in perceived risk along dimensions of substance use (alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs) and usage patterns (light/experimental use, moderate use, heavy/regular use). Data were gathered from 2266 adolescents aged 9, 12, and 15 residing in 79 Chicago neighborhoods. Developmental patterns for age and amount of use were observed whereby older respondents rated alcohol and marijuana as less harmful compared to the younger respondents, but rated hard drugs as more harmful.

Differences in onset and persistence of substance abuse and dependence among whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

Objective: This article describes patterns of onset, persistence, and cessation of substance abuse among whites, blacks, and Hispanics that are masked in cross-sectional prevalence data.

Methods: The authors analyzed longitudinal data from a sample of 1,004 white, black, and Hispanic respondents from Chicago to investigate processes of onset, persistence, and cessation of substance abuse and dependence for two age cohorts, 15 and 18 at baseline and 17 and 20 at follow-up.

Results: The data show few racial or ethnic differences in the prevalence of alcohol and marijuana abuse and dependence at age 15.

Estimating Multi-Level Discrete-Time Hazard Models Using Cross-Sectional Data: Neighborhood Effects on the Onset of Adolescent Cigarette Use.

Investigating the effects of social context (e.g., neighborhood or school context) on the timing of behaviors (such as cigarette use initiation) requires both multi-level modeling and eventhistory analysis, and often requires the construction of a retrospective person-period data set from cross-sectional data.