Ethnically bounded homeownership: qualitative insights on Los Angeles immigrant homeowners’ experiences during the U.S. Great Recession

Immigrant homeowners’ function within ethnic boundaries in the housing market may have helped or hindered them during the recent U.S. Great Recession. This research explores this theme through interviews with immigrant and non-immigrant homeowners from four ethnic communities in Los Angeles County and the non-profit organizations that tried to assist them. Immigrant homeowners turned to co-ethnics for advice and support and formed multigenerational households as a strategy to achieve and sustain homeownership. Language and cultural barriers primed them for risky loans and thwarted their pursuit of refinance and modification when they struggled to make mortgage payments. These findings conform to existing evidence of ethnic segmentation in the housing market and imply that analyses of home buying and homeownership in areas with significant immigrant populations should factor in the role of ethnicity.     

Ab initio study of phase stability in doped TiO2

Ab initio density functional theory calculations of the relative stability of the anatase and rutile polymorphs of TiO₂ were carried out using all-electron atomic orbitals methods with local density approximation. The rutile phase exhibited a moderate margin of stability of ~ 3 meV relative to the anatase phase in pristine material. From computational analysis of the formation energies of Si, Al, Fe and F dopants of various charge states across different Fermi level energies in anatase and in rutile, it was found that the cationic dopants are most stable in Ti substitutional lattice positions while formation energy is minimised for F^? doping in interstitial positions. All dopants were found to considerably stabilise anatase relative to the rutile phase, suggesting the anatase to rutile phase transformation is inhibited in such systems with the dopants ranked F?>?Si?>?Fe?>?Al in order of anatase stabilisation strength. Al and Fe dopants were found to act as shallow acceptors with charge compensation achieved through the formation of mobile carriers rather than the formation of anion vacancies.     

SAPPHIRE: A toolkit for building efficient stream programs for medical video analysis

This paper describes the design and implementation of SAPPHIRE – a novel middleware and software development kit for stream programing on a heterogeneous system of multi-core multi-CPUs with optional hardware accelerators such as graphics processing unit (GPU). A stream program consists of a set of tasks where the same tasks are repeated over multiple iterations of data (e.g., video frames). Examples of such programs are video analysis applications for computer-aided diagnosis and computer-assisted surgeries. Our design goal is to reduce the implementation efforts and ease collaborative software development of stream programs while supporting efficient execution of the programs on the target hardware. To validate the toolkit, we implemented EM-Automated-RT software with the toolkit and reported our experience. EM-Automated-RT performs real-time video analysis for quality of a colonoscopy procedure and provides visual feedback to assist the endoscopist to achieve optimal inspection of the colon during the procedure. The software has been deployed in a hospital setting to conduct a clinical trial.     

Environmental and individual exposure to secondhand aerosol of electronic cigarettes in confined spaces: Results from the TackSHS Project†

Secondhand electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) aerosol (SHA) might impair indoor air quality and expose bystanders. This study aims to investigate exposure to SHA in controlled conditions of enclosed settings simulating real-world scenario. An experiment was performed in a car and in a room, in which SHA was generated during a 30-minute ad libitum use of an e-cigarette. The experiment was replicated on five consecutive days in each setting. We measured PM_2.5, airborne nicotine concentrations, and biomarkers of exposure to SHA, such as nicotine metabolites, tobacco-specific nitrosamines, propylene glycol, and glycerol in bystanders’ saliva samples before, during, and after the exposure period. Self-reported health symptoms related to exposure to SHA were also recorded. The results showed that the highest median PM_2.5 concentration was recorded during the exposure period, being 21 µg/m³ in the room setting and 16 µg/m³ in the car setting—about twofold increase compared to the baseline. Most concentrations of the airborne nicotine and all biomarkers were below the limit of quantification in both settings. Bystanders in both settings experienced some short-term irritation symptoms, expressed as dry throat, nose, eyes, and phlegm. In conclusion, short-term use of an e-cigarette in confined spaces increased indoor PM_2.5 level and caused some irritation symptoms in bystanders.     

Probing the Substrate Promiscuity of Isopentenyl Phosphate Kinase as a Platform for Hemiterpene Analogue Production

Isoprenoids are a large class of natural products with wide-ranging applications. Synthetic biology approaches to the manufacture of isoprenoids and their new-to-nature derivatives are limited due to the provision in nature of just two hemiterpene building blocks for isoprenoid biosynthesis. To address this limitation, artificial chemo-enzymatic pathways such as the alcohol-dependent hemiterpene (ADH) pathway serve to leverage consecutive kinases to convert exogenous alcohols into pyrophosphates that could be coupled to downstream isoprenoid biosynthesis. To be successful, each kinase in this pathway should be permissive of a broad range of substrates. For the first time, we have probed the promiscuity of the second enzyme in the ADH pathway—isopentenyl phosphate kinase from Thermoplasma acidophilum—towards a broad range of acceptor monophosphates. Subsequently, we evaluate the suitability of this enzyme to provide unnatural pyrophosphates and provide a critical first step in characterizing the rate-limiting steps in the artificial ADH pathway.     

Human gait recognition using localized Grassmann mean representatives with partial least squares regression

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Gait recognition has become popular due to the rising demand for nonintrusive biometrics. At its nascent stage of development, gait recognition faces a number of...     

A Symmetrical Diester as the Sex Attractant Pheromone of the North American Click Beetle Parallelostethus attenuatus (Say) (Coleoptera: Elateridae)

Hexanoic acid, 1-octanol, 1,8-octanediol, octyl hexanoate, 1,8-octanediol monohexanoate, and 1,8-octanediol dihexanoate were identified in headspace volatiles collected from the crushed abdomen of a female click beetle of the species Parallelostethus attenuatus (Say) (Elaterinae, tribe Elaterini). In field trials carried out in Illinois, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, adult male beetles were strongly attracted to 1,8-octanediol dihexanoate alone. Blends of the dihexanoate with one or more of the other compounds proved to be less attractive than the dihexanoate alone, suggesting that the pheromone of this species may consist of a single compound. The symmetrical diester structure of the pheromone is a novel natural product and appears to be structurally unique among insect pheromones.