Oakland California Research Articles

Review of My girls: The power of friendship in a poor neighborhood By JasminSandelson, Oakland CA: University of California Press. 2023. 311 pp.

Review of My girls: The power of friendship in a poor neighborhood By JasminSandelson, Oakland CA: University of California Press. 2023. 311 pp.

S1412 Non-Invasive NAFLD Screening in the Primary Care Setting of a Safety Net Hospital System

Introduction: Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the most common etiologies of cirrhosis and fastest growing indications for liver transplantation in Western countries. Currently, there is no universal recommendation for NAFLD screening in the primary care setting. Clinical data analysis can be used to identify patients at risk for developing NAFLD with advanced liver disease so that these patients can be referred for liver elastography for further risk stratification. Methods: 2528 patients from the Highland primary care clinic in Oakland California from 2020 to 2022 were evaluated using the Epic Software electronic medical record system. The inclusion criteria included patients at Alameda Health System (AHS) Highland Hospital Adult Medicine with a hemoglobin A1c ≥ 6.5%, BMI ≥ 30, age ≥ 50, with aspartate aminotransferase (AST) ≥ 15 U/L, alanine transaminase (ALT) ≥ 15 U/L, albumin < 3.5 mg/dL, and platelets (PLT) < 160 per microliter that, at a minimum, corresponds to a NAFLD Fibrosis Score (NFS) of 0.7 (Fibrosis stage 3-4). The exclusion criteria included a history of viral or autoimmune hepatitis, clinically significant alcohol use, or previously diagnosed cirrhosis from an etiology other than NAFLD. Results: The percentage of patients with NAFLD who were at risk for advanced liver disease increased from 16.79% [Confidence Interval (CI) 0.61; 16.2-17.4] in 2020-2021 to 18.55% [CI 0.57; 17.9-19.2] in 2021-2022. The percentage was highest in Black patients (42.3%, p < 0.01) and female patients (57.0%, p < 0.01), and lowest in Asian patients (8.2%, p < 0.01) (Figure). The percentage of Black, White, Asian, and male patients was relatively unchanged from 2020 to 2022, while the percentage in Hispanic patients increased from 11.9% to 12.7%, and the percentage of women increased from 57.0% to 60.1% (Figure). Conclusion: NAFLD with advanced liver disease is closely associated with diabetes and obesity. The United States Preventive Services Task Force currently does not recommend screening for NAFLD. However, non-invasive criterion-based screenings are feasible and effective at identifying patients with risk factors for developing NAFLD with advanced liver disease. Furthermore, screenings should be implemented in the primary care setting using criterion targeted clinical data, to identify patients who will benefit from liver elastography, so that early interventions can be performed to prevent cirrhosis and cardiovascular related complications.Figure 1: . (F1). Demographic trends for NAFLD in AHS county hospital primary care setting in Oakland California from 2020 to 2022.

Turfs and timbers

Viking Age ring fortresses were some of the largest construction projects in Danish prehistory. In this article we reconstruct the amount of turf and timber used in the construction of the Borgring ring fortress and estimate the resource area needed to supply the building materials. Using REVEALS pollen data modelling, we quantify the regional oak land cover and estimate the resource area. The results show that even though Borgring was built in an open cultural landscape, sufficient supply of oak for the construction would have been accessible within a few kilometres from the fortress.

(Community) garden in the city: Conspicuous labor and gentrification

Community gardens are fertile fields of complex political, economic and social relations, on both a local and global level. From environmentalism to urban policy and planning, racial and gender studies, transnational migration, commodity chains and food studies, the garden in the city offers an abundance of research opportunities and analytical resources. This article seeks to contribute to the efforts to understand and contest hegemonic forces in the urban environment, forces that are rooted in what Foucault identified as a set of sacred binaries which underpin a host of power relations that are “given” and form the unquestioned framework of a given set of power relations. This is therefore a project which is bent on a “theoretical desanctification of space” by a disordering of one set of several sanctified oppositions which can be found in the space of the community garden. The article de-sanctifies space by exploring the historical context of the community garden in New York and Oakland California and posits that the work of the gardener is co-opted into a value regime by a process I call “conspicuous labor”. This process is similar to Veblen's conspicuous consumption except the value generated is not in modeling consumption but rather in emulating class patterns and re-configuring the urban poor as a productive, passive and pastoral.

Child's Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan ed. by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall

Reviewed by: Child's Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan ed. by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall Mark Jones (bio) Child's Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan. Edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall. University of California Press, Oakland CA, 2017. x, 302 pages. $39.95, paper. Open Access. The essays in this edited volume present a series of snapshots of Japanese childhood, from the worlds of acolytes in medieval monasteries to aspiring young soccer players during the "lost decades." Not all contributions deal [End Page 544] directly with child's play, as the title seems to suggest, but all do attempt to reinvigorate a floundering field—the history of childhood in Japan. French Annales historian Phillipe Ariès birthed the field known as the history of childhood. Ariès's classic text L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime was published in 1960 and translated into English in 1962 with the title Centuries of Childhood. Ariès's central conceit was captured in the phrase "the discovery of childhood." This phrase posited that at a particular point in the past—the seventeenth century, in Europe's case—the child came to be seen as a being different in nature and need from the adult. The book and the phrase quickly inspired European and American historians. Their goal was less to recreate a child's-eye view of the world and more to explore the adult actors who distinguished the child from the adult, created a public understanding of the child's nature, and built the child's world. These historians adopted the methodology known as social constructionism, and they intertwined the history of the adults who constructed modern childhood, from child psychologists and highly educated mothers to children's authors and toymakers, with a series of important historical transformations in the family, education, consumer culture, science, mass media, class formation, and state building. Despite its prominence in American and European historiography dating back to the 1970s, the history of childhood only appeared in Englishlanguage scholarship on Japan starting in the late 1990s. The monographs of Kathleen Uno (1999), David Ambaras (2005), and Mark Jones (2010) hewed closely to the methodological approach of social constructionism, and together they illuminated the adult interests at work in the development of child day-care centers (Uno), the policing of juvenile delinquency (Ambaras), and the birth of a middle-class version of childhood (Jones).1 After the publication of these three monographs, the following decade witnessed only sporadic interest in children's history. The field appeared to be fading until this volume appeared. Frühstück and Walthall have gathered a group of scholars interested in deepening our knowledge of the construction of Japanese childhood and also taking up thorny and unresolved issues in the field of children's history. A number of solid essays in this volume follow the established methodology of social constructionism, focusing on the adult construction of the child's image and world. Jinnō Yuki examines the material and philosophical struggles of two Taisho-era interior designers, Kogure Joichi and Moritani [End Page 545] Nobuo, to design a child's room in the home that centered on the needs of the child as opposed to those of the adult. In a point that echoes a similar observation by historian Gary Cross in the case of American childhood toys, Jinnō asserts that the ideology of child-centeredness was pivotal in giving birth to a child-centered industry that catered exclusively to children and, thus, contributed to the gradual process of expelling adults from the child's material, spatial, and social world. Harald Salomon's essay on the golden age of childhood film in wartime Japan explores how popular films and their directors shaped the public understanding of the child's nature. Films such as Tsubota Jōji's 1937 Kaze no naka no kodomotachi (Children in the wind) promoted a psychologically nuanced, realistic portrait of the child, whose essence was associated with resilience and cheerfulness as much as fragility and struggle. Salomon concludes that these sunny films, and their corresponding vision of childhood, were...

Racial discrimination in the life course of older adults experiencing homelessness: results from the HOPE HOME study

ABSTRACT Over 2.5 million people experience homelessness yearly in the United States. Black persons are overrepresented by three-fold among those experiencing homelessness but little research has examined the relationship between race and homelessness. We aimed to understand the relationship between race and the experience of homelessness for older adults. We used grounded theory methodology to analyze in-depth qualitative interviews (n = 65) of persons experiencing homelessness. We recruited participants who were enrolled in two sub-studies of the Health Outcomes of People Experiencing Homelessness in Older Middle AgE (HOPE HOME) Study in Oakland California. We identified two major themes within interviews with Black participants (n = 52) related to race: (1) participants experienced overt racial discrimination in early life and (2) structural racism precipitated and perpetuated adult homelessness. Further, we identified sub-themes of structural racism that contributed to participants becoming or staying homeless: criminal justice discrimination, employment discrimination, exposure to violence, premature death, and limited family wealth. We developed a theoretical model of how these elements of structural racism may increase susceptibility to homelessness. These relationships between racial discrimination and homelessness may serve as targets for policies aimed at preventing homelessness.

The Specter of the Jews: Emperor Julian and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Syrian Antioch. By Ari Finkelstein. Oakland California: University of California Press, 2018. xvii + 251 pp. $95.00 cloth; $95.00 ebook.

The Specter of the Jews: Emperor Julian and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Syrian Antioch. By Ari Finkelstein. Oakland California: University of California Press, 2018. xvii + 251 pp. 95.00 ebook. - Volume 88 Issue 3

The problem of FGM as a discursive concept. Miroslava Prazak, Making the Mark: gender, identity, and genital cutting. Athens OH: Ohio University Press (hb US$80 – 978 0 8968 0309 1; pb US$29.95 – 978 0 8968 0310 7). 2016, 311 pp. Saida Hodžić, The Twilight of Cutting: African activism and life after NGOs. Oakland CA: University of California Press

The problem of FGM as a discursive concept. Miroslava Prazak, Making the Mark: gender, identity, and genital cutting. Athens OH: Ohio University Press (hb US$80 – 978 0 8968 0309 1; pb US$29.95 – 978 0 8968 0310 7). 2016, 311 pp. Saida Hodžić, The Twilight of Cutting: African activism and life after NGOs. Oakland CA: University of California Press

Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shū sui and Japan's First AntiImperialist Movement by Robert Thomas Tierney

Reviewed by: Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shū sui and Japan's First AntiImperialist Movement by Robert Thomas Tierney Max Ward (bio) Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan's First AntiImperialist Movement. By Robert Thomas Tierney. University of California Press, Oakland CA, 2015. viii, 267 pages. $70.00, cloth; $70.00, E-book. Japanese socialists and anarchists made important contributions to late Meiji politics and thought and, as Umemori Naoyuki has recently argued, were the "first self-conscious explorers" of the capitalist social formation in Japan, not solely as an economic system, but as a form of social domination [End Page 406] that permeated a variety of intellectual and cultural domains, including language, literature, subjectivity, and sexuality.1 Despite their wide-ranging contributions, however, the English-language scholarship on early socialists and anarchists in Japan has been disparate and often focused on a few sensational events or characters. Kōtoku Shū sui (1871–1911) takes a prominent place in this literature, both for his leadership in the early socialist movement and his arrest and execution in the notorious Great Treason Incident (Taigyaku Jiken) of 1910–11. Earlier scholarship on Kōtoku, such as F. G. Notehelfer's 1971 Kōtoku Shū sui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical, reduced the nuances of Kōtoku's politics to an attempt to translate premodern Confucian ethics into a modern political idiom, rendering Kōtoku and Japanese anarchism more generally as cultural anachronisms inadequate to political modernity.2 More recent scholarship has restored Japanese anarchists to their modern, global moment. For example, Sho Konishi has explored how the intellectual dialogue between Russian anarchists and Japanese thinkers produced a unique "temporality and corresponding order of knowledge and practice" across a variety of cultural fields that comprised an alternative modernity, what Konishi deems "cooperatist anarchist modernity."3 Although Konishi's book challenges the earlier modernization paradigm that informed Notehelfer's study, Konishi's intellectual history approach risks sacrificing anarchism's explicitly revolutionary politics to its cultural and intellectual permutations. This is where Robert Tierney's excellent new study and translation, Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan's First Anti-Imperialist Movement, makes an important intervention by foregrounding Kōtoku's theory of imperialism and illuminating the political legacies of early Japanese socialism in a global context. Tierney's Monster of the Twentieth Century is neither a history of Japanese anarchism nor a political biography of Kōtoku. Rather, it consists of an extended analysis and complete translation of Kōtoku's seminal 1901 text Teikokushugi: nijūseiki no kaibutsu (Imperialism: monster of the twentieth century). Kōtoku's work is often read as a proto-anarchist treatise and thus as a moralistic precursor to later, more "scientific," Marxian critiques of imperialism. However, Kōtoku did not come to anarchism until later (around 1905–6) and, as Tierney's study demonstrates, his anarchism developed from his analysis of imperialism. Tierney thus reverses the conventional association of imperialism and anarchism in Kōtoku's thought—wherein it was assumed the latter informed his critique of the former—and utilizes [End Page 407] Teikokushugi to explore the larger debates about nationalism, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism taking place in socialist circles at the time. By doing so, Tierney returns Kōtoku and his interlocutors to a larger global moment in which activists and intellectuals throughout the world debated the essence of imperialism and its relation to state power and capitalism. The first half of Monster consists of Tierney's extended analysis of Kōtoku's thought and political activities. In the introduction Tierney outlines the stakes of his analysis, positing that while it is necessary to acknowledge "Kōtoku's importance as an early Japanese socialist and anarchist," it is equally if not more important to recognize his role as a "leader of the anti-imperialist movement" and, by extension, the place of anti-imperialist movements in late-Meiji Japanese history (p. 3). In this way, Tierney connects Kōtoku to a wider, global moment of anti-imperialist activism and shows how international events and movements influenced Kōtoku's understanding of Japanese society and his increasing political...

Iron Overload Is Under-Recognized and Under-Treated in SCD: A Report from the Grndad Registry

Background: Chronic transfusion therapy (CTT) is a mainstay of prophylactic management and treatment for adults and children with high risk Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). We estimate that 10-20% of all adults with SCD managed at our centers, especially those with homozygous HbSS disease, are on CTT, for long-term management of cerebral vasculopathy, significant end organ damage, or chronic pain. Iron overload is a common complication of CTT and for patients receiving intermittent transfusion to treat acute complications. Each unit of transfused blood introduces approximately 250 mg of iron into the bloodstream, and with it, increased oxidative stress (A. Remacha, et al., “Guidelines on haemovigilance of post-transfusional iron overload,” Blood Transfusion, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 128-139, 2013). High iron levels in the blood cumulatively lead to systemic iron deposition, particularly in the liver and heart, and untreated may lead to organ dysfunction or death. Patients with high iron levels should be put on iron chelation. Recent NHLBI guidelines suggest that patients on CTT be monitored for iron accumulation with quarterly ferritin levels, and annual or semiannual liver iron scans to assess hepatic iron burden, though the optimal frequency of these scans has not been established (B. P. Yawn, et al., “Management of Sickle Cell Disease: Summary of the 2014 Evidence-Based Report by Expert Panel Members,” JAMA, vol. 10, no. 312, pp. 1033-1048, 2014). We examined iron overload, its frequency, severity, and management, in a modern population of adults with SCD enrolled in the multi-center prospective sickle cell registry, Globin Research Network of Data and Discovery (GRNDaD).Methods: GRNDaD is a multi-site registry of both adult and pediatric SCD patients, currently accruing at 5 urban sickle cell centers, in Baltimore MD, Cleveland OH, Milwaukee WI, Columbus OH, and Oakland CA. It currently contains prospective baseline and annual update information on nearly 500 people with SCD. Additionally, approximately 150 more patients have consented, with data entry pending. The dataset comprises demographics as well as baseline and yearly lab values, complications, procedures, treatment, and vaccination history for each patient. Among these data are ferritin levels, liver iron scan results, and chelation therapy information. We analyzed ferritin levels in people with SCD, relative to genotype, age, gender, treatment type, liver iron scan results, and chelation therapy history.Results: There were 402 adults (age≥18 years) in GRNDaD who had a non-crisis ferritin level from a routine follow-up visit. This included people with phenotypic homozygous SCD (HbSS, n=255 and Sβ0 thalassemia, N=13), variant SCD (HbSC, n=80, or Sβ+ thalassemia, n=37), and other or unknown genotypes (n=17, Table 1). Nearly 3 in 10 of all patients with SCD (n=118, 29.3%) had a ferritin level at baseline ≥1500 mg/dL, which is an accepted threshold above which to initiate chelation. Most people with an elevated ferritin had phenotypic SCA (homozygous Hb S) (n=111, or 94%). Over half of all SCD patients with a critically elevated ferritin were on CTT (n=64, 54%), and a similar number of people with SCD and critical ferritin levels were on chelation (n=64, 54%). Less than 1 in 4 had had a liver iron scan within 3 years (n=27, 23%). More than 1 in 3 patients with critical ferritin levels and no chelation therapy remained on CTT (n=21, not shown).Conclusions: Our multi-site registry, GRNDaD, prospectively surveyed a sizable population of adults with SCD, including data about iron overload. Of the adults in the GRNDaD registry with iron overload, we identified an unacceptably high fraction, nearly half, who were not on chelation. Most of these patients were people with phenotypic homozygous SCD. We are systematically addressing this deficiency with educational tools through GRNDaD.Since GRNDaD sites are academic centers across the country which focus on the management of SCD, we speculate that the problem of undertreated iron overload nationally is probably both widespread and under-recognized. We anticipate that, as GRNDaD continues to add additional sites, it will evolve as a robust resource through which to highlight important opportunities for clinical quality improvement in the expanding young adult population with SCD. GRNDaD may be a model for identifying and addressing deficiencies in current clinical practices for management of SCD. [Display omitted] DisclosuresLanzkron:selexys: Research Funding; Ironwood: Research Funding; PCORI: Research Funding; HRSA: Research Funding; Pfizer: Research Funding; NHLBI: Research Funding; GBT: Research Funding; Prolong: Research Funding. Field:Incyte: Research Funding; Prolong: Research Funding; Ironwood: Consultancy, Research Funding. Desai:University of Pittsburgh: Research Funding; Selexy/Novartis: Research Funding; NIH: Research Funding; Ironwood: Other: Adjudication Committee; FDA: Research Funding; Pfizer: Research Funding. Little:PCORI: Research Funding; NHLBI: Research Funding; Hemex: Patents & Royalties: Patent, no honoraria; Doris Duke Charitable Foundations: Research Funding.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: African American English, language policy, and African American learners

Despite the substantive body of research on African American Language (AAL), designating it a meaningful, rule-governed language system and the first language of many African Americans, schools in the US have systematically failed to integrate a language policy related to African American English learners (AAELs). In this article, we employ a critical discourse and policy analysis to examine two major policies related to AAL and AAELs – the Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al. v. Ann Arbor School District, a federal district case in Michigan known as the Ann Arbor Decision, and the Ebonics Resolution adopted by the Oakland California Board of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Our analysis reveals three themes across these texts – they affirm AAL as a ‘home and community language’ in its own right, mandate teachers to take ‘appropriate action’ in teaching AAL speakers, and dispel notions that AAL stems from cultural, social, and economic deprivation.

Janet McIntosh , Unsettled: denial and belonging among white Kenyans. Oakland CA: University of California Press (hb US$85 – 978 0 520 29049 5; pb US$29.95 – 978 0 520 29051 8). 2016, 312 pp.

Janet McIntosh , Unsettled: denial and belonging among white Kenyans. Oakland CA: University of California Press (hb US$85 – 978 0 520 29049 5; pb US$29.95 – 978 0 520 29051 8). 2016, 312 pp.

Book review: Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community (Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc, Oakland CA 2015) 264 pp.

Book review: Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community (Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc, Oakland CA 2015) 264 pp.

TWO ETHNOGRAPHIES OF SOUTH–NORTH MIGRATION - RUBEN ANDERSSON, Illegality, Inc.: clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. Oakland CA: University of California Press (pb US$29.95 – 978 0 52028 252 0). 2014, 338 pp. - IRIS BERGER, TRICIA REDEKER HEPNER, BENJAMIN N. LAWRANCE, JOANNA T. TAGUE and MEREDITH TERRETTA, editors, African Asylum at a Crossroads: activism, expert testimony, and

TWO ETHNOGRAPHIES OF SOUTH–NORTH MIGRATION - RUBEN ANDERSSON, Illegality, Inc.: clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. Oakland CA: University of California Press (pb US$29.95 – 978 0 52028 252 0). 2014, 338 pp. - IRIS BERGER, TRICIA REDEKER HEPNER, BENJAMIN N. LAWRANCE, JOANNA T. TAGUE and MEREDITH TERRETTA, editors, African Asylum at a Crossroads: activism, expert testimony, and

JASON HICKEL , Democracy as Death: the moral order of anti-liberal politics in South Africa. Oakland CA: University of California Press (pb US$34.95 – 978 0 520 28423 4). 2015, 280 pp.

JASON HICKEL , Democracy as Death: the moral order of anti-liberal politics in South Africa. Oakland CA: University of California Press (pb US$34.95 – 978 0 520 28423 4). 2015, 280 pp.

The impact of prenatal parental tobacco smoking on risk of diabetes mellitus in middle-aged women.

Growing evidence indicates that parental smoking is associated with risk of offspring obesity. The purpose of this study was to identify whether parental tobacco smoking during gestation was associated with risk of diabetes mellitus. This is a prospective study of 44- to 54-year-old daughters (n = 1801) born in the Child Health and Development Studies pregnancy cohort between 1959 and 1967. Their mothers resided near Oakland California, were members of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and reported parental tobacco smoking during an early pregnancy interview. Daughters reported physician diagnoses of diabetes mellitus and provided blood samples for hemoglobin A1C measurement. Prenatal maternal smoking had a stronger association with daughters' diabetes mellitus risk than prenatal paternal smoking, and the former persisted after adjustment for parental race, diabetes and employment (aRR = 2.4 [95% confidence intervals 1.4-4.1] P < 0.01 and aRR = 1.7 [95% confidence intervals 1.0-3.0] P = 0.05, respectively). Estimates of the effect of parental smoking were unchanged when further adjusted by daughters' birth weight or current body mass index (BMI). Maternal smoking was also significantly associated with self-reported type 2 diabetes diagnosis (2.3 [95% confidence intervals 1.0-5.0] P < 0.05). Having parents who smoked during pregnancy was associated with an increased risk of diabetes mellitus among adult daughters, independent of known risk factors, providing further evidence that prenatal environmental chemical exposures independent of birth weight and current BMI may contribute to adult diabetes mellitus. While other studies seek to confirm our results, caution toward tobacco smoking by or proximal to pregnant women is warranted in diabetes mellitus prevention efforts.

Community Structure and Seasonal Changes of Soil Microarthropods in a Native Oak Stand and Scots Pine Plantation

The community structures and seasonal changes of soil microarthropods were investigated in a natural Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) stand and adjacent Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) plantation located in the Belgrad Forest of Istanbul. Soils for microarthropods were sampled monthly using steel soil corers between November 2008 and October 2009. Soil fauna samples were extracted with a modified Berlese-Tullgren funnel and stored in 70% ethanol. A total of 26 taxons of microarthropods were identified in the oak stand and Scots pine plantation. The mean annual number of microarthropods per square meter was 42.851 for the oak stand versus 42.276 for the Scots pine plantation. The Collembola and Acarina are the two dominant taxa in numbers constituting 94% and 93% of all soil microarthropods of the native oak and Scots pine plantation, respectively. The Shannon diversity index (H') of microarthropods in the Scots pine site (1.72) was found significantly (P=0.008) higher than those of the native oak (1.57). This result implies that even though conversion of Sessile oak land to a Scots pine plantation may decrease the abundance but increased the diversity of soil microarthropods.

Integrated fire dynamic and thermomechanical modeling of a bridge under fire

This paper proposes a nonlinear computational modeling approach for the behaviors of structural systems subjected to fire. The proposed modeling approach consists of fire dynamics analysis, nonlinear transient-heat transfer analysis for predicting thermal distributions, and thermomechanical analysis for structural behaviors. For concretes, transient heat formulations are written considering temperature dependent heat conduction and specific heat capacity and included within the thermomechanical analyses. Also, temperature dependent stress-strain behaviors including compression hardening and tension softening effects are implemented within the analyses. The proposed modeling technique for transient heat and thermomechanical analyses is first validated with experimental data of reinforced concrete (RC) beams subjected to high temperatures, and then applied to a bridge model. The bridge model is generated to simulate the fire incident occurred by a gas truck on April 29, 2007 in Oakland California, USA. From the simulation, not only temperature distributions and deformations of the bridge can be found, but critical locations and time frame where collapse occurs can be predicted. The analytical results from the simulation are qualitatively compared with the real incident and show good agreements.

Pathways for resilience in Mediterranean cork oak land use systems

Abstract Context Loss of woodlands and degradation of vegetation and soil have been described for all Mediterranean-type ecosystems worldwide. In the Western Iberian Peninsula, overexploitation of evergreen cork oak land use systems has led to soil erosion, failures in oak recruitment, and loss of forests. Degraded and dry sites are quickly colonised by pioneer heathland rockrose (Cistus spp.) shrubs forming highly persistent patches. Aims Although traditionally shrublands have been considered as a transient successional state, we present evidence that they can represent persistent alternative states to former cork oak forests. Review trends and conclusions We first describe how Mediterranean vegetation evolved in the Iberian Peninsula and the role of fire and long-term human management as main disturbances. We then discuss alternative pathways through state-and-transition models indicating the ecological and land use variables that halt cork oak regeneration and recruitment and drive vegetation transitions towards persistent shrublands. Unless concerted management actions and restoration programmes are undertaken, the cork oak land use systems will not be sustainable.

Inpatient management of sickle cell pain: A ‘snapshot’ of current practice

The Sickle Cell Disease Clinical Research Network (SCDCRN) designed the PROACTIVE Feasibility Study (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00951808) to determine whether elevated serum levels of secretory phospholipase A2 (sPLA2) during hospitalization for pain would permit preemptive therapy of sickle cell acute chest syndrome (ACS) by blood transfusion. While PROACTIVE was not designed to assess pain management and was terminated early due to inadequate patient accrual, collection of clinical data allowed a "snapshot" of current care by expert providers. Nearly half the patients admitted for pain were taking hydroxyurea; hydroxyurea did not affect length of stay. Providers commonly administered parenteral opioid analgesia, usually morphine or hydromorphone, to adults and children, generally by patient-controlled analgesia (PCA). Adult providers were more likely to prescribe hydromorphone and did so at substantially higher morphine equivalent doses than were given to adults receiving morphine; the latter received doses similar to children who received either medication. All subjects treated with PCA received higher daily doses of opioids than those treated by time-contingent dosing. Physicians often restricted intravenous fluids to less than a maintenance rate and underutilized incentive spirometry, which reduces ACS in patients hospitalized for pain.