Many protected areas may not be adequately safeguarding biodiversity from human activities on surrounding lands and global change. The magnitude of such change agents and the sensitivity of ecosystems to these agents vary among protected areas. Thus, there is a need to assess vulnerability across networks of protected areas to determine those most at risk and to lay the basis for developing effective adaptation strategies. We conducted an assessment of exposure of U.S. National Parks to climate and land use change and consequences for vegetation communities. We first defined park protected-area centered ecosystems (PACEs) based on ecological principles. We then drew on existing land use, invasive species, climate, and biome data sets and models to quantify exposure of PACEs from 1900 through 2100. Most PACEs experienced substantial change over the 20th century (.740% average increase in housing density since 1940, 13% of vascular plants are presently nonnative, temperature increase of 18C/100 yr since 1895 in 80% of PACEs), and projections suggest that many of these trends will continue at similar or increasingly greater rates (255% increase in housing density by 2100, temperature increase of 2.58–4.58C/100 yr, 30% of PACE areas may lose their current biomes by 2030). In the coming century, housing densities are projected to increase in PACEs at about 82% of the rate of since 1940. The rate of climate warming in the coming century is projected to be 2.5–5.8 times higher than that measured in the past century. Underlying these averages, exposure of individual park PACEs to change agents differ in important ways. For example, parks such as Great Smoky Mountains exhibit high land use and low climate exposure, others such as Great Sand Dunes exhibit low land use and high climate exposure, and a few such as Point Reyes exhibit high exposure on both axes. The cumulative and synergistic effects of such changes in land use, invasives, and climate are expected to dramatically impact ecosystem function and biodiversity in national parks. These results are foundational to developing effective adaptation strategies and suggest policies to better safeguard parks under broad-scale environmental change.

This paper examines the effect of where immigrants live on their labor market outcomes. We provide robust evidence that both the number and the labor market activity of immigrants neighbors affect their employment. In particular, we demonstrate that immigrants are much more likely to be employed in the same firm as their geographic neighbors than are other immigrants.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, also known as welfare reform. As part of this act, Congress established welfare block grant programs that included a set of provisions intended to promote employment. In the aftermath of these reforms, policy makers turned to transportation as one strategy to transition welfare recipients and other low-income adults rapidly into the labor market. As the foundation for these transportation programs, studies documented the travel patterns of the poor and highlighted the limited access of these individuals to automobiles. Given the many changes since the 1990s, it is time to revisit these data. This study draws on the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey and the 2009 National Household Travel Survey to examine changes in the commute travel of low-income adults since welfare reform. The data provide evidence that the reliance on automobiles has increased significantly over time; the growth reflects the many advantages of cars in increasingly decentralized environments. However, some population groups-particularly the carless-have become more dependent on public transit to access work. These findings suggest the importance of protecting and expanding vital transit services for those who need them, as well as acting on behalf of low-income households that may be better served through personal vehicular travel.

Some risks of having children at older ages are widely documented, and the biological clock is a popular media concern, but the association between cognitive disability generally and both mothers and fathers age is not well known. This paper assesses descriptively the relationship between childrens cognitive disability and parents age at birth, using a sample of 353,119 children aged 5 to 11 living with two married parents from the 2009-2011 American Community Survey. Cognitive disability varied by parental age categories from 1.8% to 5.4%, with overall rates of 2.2%. Odds of disability were much more strongly associated with mothers age at birth than with fathers age at birth, with highest odds for children whose mothers were age 45 or higher at the time of their birth (adjusted odds ratio 2.7 relative to age 30-34) and lowest for those born to mothers in their early 30s. These results demonstrate that the risk is strongly associated with mothers age at birth but not fathers. This is consistent with previous research showing that it is mothers health, rather than age per se, which is most important for the health of their children.

The purpose of this study was to develop a policy analysis and brief to support the development of a National Institutes of Health funding application for a project that would be the first examine the attitudes and behaviors adults (40 years of age) male and female African American (AA), Afro-Caribbean (AC), and first and second generation immigrant West/West Central African (W/WCA) Muslims, regarding cancer prevention. The objective of the proposed research was to identify culturally and religiously-tailored interventions that would most likely promote the use of cancer screening among these populations. Using an interdisciplinary social science appoarch, we were able to present for the first time to our knowledge, data that allows for policy inferences concerning the effects of Islamic religious affiliation on cancer-prevention attitudes and practices in African descended men at who are are at risk for prostate cancer. This study addressed the high rates of cancer-related morbidity and mortality, especially breast and prostate cancer, among peoples of African descent and Muslim faith in the Washington DC Metropolitan area. There is currently no existing scientific research on the influence of ethnicity and religion among AA, AC, W/WCA communities and willingness to participate in cancer prevention programs, including their acceptance of clinical screening. This study involved conducting structured interviews with members of this ethnic and religious groups. The findings indicated that despite any cultural differences between AA, AC, W/WCA Muslims, the idea of upholding and following Islamic beliefs were commonly of higher priority for participants. The results from these interviews suggest that overall, participants will benefit the most from general health education as well as education on cancer prevention. Moreover, 100% of the subject agreed to participate in cancer screening if it was necessary or recommended by a trustworthy, qualified and preferable Muslim healthcare provider. Implications for the proposed NIH funded research included culturally and religiously competent care preferably a Muslim doctor, in addition to health education and population-based screening having the greatest potential to produce sustainable anti-cancer behaviors.

Prominent social psychological and economic theories link ethnic diversity and low-skilled immigration to reduced provision of public goods. Both the level of ethnic diversity and the presence of low-skilled immigrants have increased dramatically in the United States since the 1960s. Immigration from Mexico has been the largest and most persistent driver of these demographic shifts. This dissertation theorizes and then explores empirically whether and how Mexican immigration has influenced local fiscal policy and related public preferences. Applying a new instrumental variables design, it finds little evidence that Mexican immigration has eroded local government spending on public goods or reduced tax receipts, though there is evidence that it has substantially increased the level of public debt. Subsequent chapters turn to explaining why Mexican immigration did not erode public goods spending as predicted. Leveraging the shock in the rate of naturalization among Mexican immigrants that followed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act's legalization program, it argues that the acquisition of citizenship by Mexican immigrants helps explain non-negative effects of Mexican immigration on public goods provision and taxation. On the other hand, an analysis of 2006-2012 national survey data reveals that Mexican immigration does induce natives to express less support for public goods spending and taxation and less support for progressive taxation in particular. These findings suggest that while Mexican immigration does erode public support for the provision of public goods, these changes in public opinion do not in turn translate straightforwardly into the policy changes predicted in much of the literature on ethnic diversity and public goods. Finally, there is evidence that Mexican immigration increases mass polarization by heightening constraint between ideological identification, immigration policy preferences, and preferences over budgetary policy.

Among the many qualities that attract people to live in southern New Hampshire is the beauty of its beaches, wetlands, fields, and forests. Yet as the population grows, there has been a rise in the impervious surfaces that allow polluted stormwater runoff to flow into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. This has led to a decline in the natural infrastructure that preserves water quality and protects property from storms and floods. At the same time, a shifting climate is bringing more frequent and intense storms to the area. Excessive rain, combined with increasing impervious surfaces is generating more runoff— often more than existing stormwater infrastructure can handle. Regional research conducted by the University of New Hampshire Stormwater Center (UNHSC) supports the idea that green stormwater infrastructure techniques that capture runoff close to its source and weave natural processes into the built environment could address these challenges.

Recession may increase divorce through a stress mechanism, or reduce divorce by exacerbating cost barriers or strengthening family bonds. After establishing an individual-level model predicting U.S. womens divorce, the pa-per tests period effects, and whether unemployment and foreclosures are associated with the odds of divorce using the 2008-2011 American Community Survey. Results show a downward spike in the divorce rate after 2008, almost recovering to the expected level by 2011, which suggests a negative recession effect. On the other hand, state foreclosure rates are positively associated with the odds of divorce with individual controls, although this effect is not significant when state fixed effects are introduced. State unemployment rates show no effect on odds of divorce. Future research will have to determine why national divorce odds fell during the recession while state-level economic indicators were not strongly associated with divorce. Exploratory analysis which shows unemployment decreasing divorce odds for those with college degrees, while foreclosures have the opposite effect, provides one possible avenue for such research.

The learning of probability distributions from data is a ubiquitous problem in the fields of Statistics and Artificial Intelligence. During the last decades several learning algorithms have been proposed to learn probabilitydistributions based on decomposable models due to their advantageous theoretical properties. Some of these algorithms can be used to search for a maximum likelihood decomposable model with a given maximum clique size, k, which controls the complexity of the model. Unfortunately, the problem of learning a maximum likelihood decomposable model given a maximum clique size is NP-hard for k > 2. In this work, we propose a family of algorithms which approximates this problem with a computational complexity of O(k n2 log n) in the worst case, where n is the number of implied random variables.The structures of the decomposable models that solve the maximum likelihood problem are called maximal k-order decomposable graphs. Our proposals, called fractal trees, construct a sequence of maximal i-order decomposablegraphs, for i = 2; :::; k, in k

With almost half of all marriages ending in divorce, the U.S. claims the highest divorce rate in the world (Amato, 2010; Cherlin, 2010). Most divorced individuals do not stay single (Sweeney 2010). Data from the mid-1990s indicate 69% of women and 78% of men remarry after a divorce (Schoen and Standish, 2001). Although remarriage rates were declining in the 1980s and 1990s, recent estimates have not been available due to a lack of appropriate data (Sweeney, 2010). The 2012 ACS offers a unique opportunity to estimate the current remarriage rate. • In 2012, the overall marriage rate was approximately 37 per 1,000-37 marriages occurred per 1,000 unmarried men and women aged 18 and older. ○ The marriage rate was higher for men (39 per 1,000) than for women (34 per 1,000). • Among all marriages in 2012, nearly one in three (31%) were remarriages. • The remarriage rate in 2012 was approximately 30 per 1,000-30 remarriages occurred per 1,000 men and women aged 18 and older who were eligible for a remarriage (see Note below). ○ The remarriage rate was much higher for men (43 per 1,000) than for women (23 per 1,000).

We examine the effects of local immigration enforcement efforts on U.S. agriculture in dozens of U.S. counties from 2002-2010 by using variations in the timing of adoption of 287(g) programs, which permit local police to enforce immigration law. Difference-in-differences models using microdata from the American Community Survey (2005-2010 waves) and county tabulations from the Census of Agriculture (1997, 2002, and 2007) yield robust evidence that county enforcement efforts have reduced immigrant presence in adopting jurisdictions. We also find evidence that wages of farm workers, patterns of farm labor use, output choices, and farm profitability may have been affected in a manner consistent with farm labor shortages.

Several studies have highlighted the increasing number of women in higher education and graduate school. In particular, the share of women pursuing degrees in law, medicine, and business has surged. While it is clear that increased opportunities in the labor market play an important role in this trend, we hypothesize that the availability of infertility treatments increases the value of such degrees, because it allows women to delay childbearing in their 20s and 30s while establishing their careers and reaping the financial benefits of obtaining a professional degree. We exploit the state and time level variation in the enactment of insurance mandates to cover infertility treatments in employer sponsored health plans. These insurance mandates dramatically increase access to assisted reproductive technology. We use a triple-difference strategy and data from the Current Population Survey to analyze the impact of these mandates on the probability that women choose to invest in professional degrees or go into professional occupations. Our results indicate that mandate to cover assisted reproductive technology does increase the probability that a woman chooses to invest in a professional degree and to work in a professional career.

This paper describes an innovative solution for geovisualization of the demographic and administrative history of French municipalities, named "communes" in French. This solution allows for the open dissemination of such data. The challenge is to provide a web interface for unskilled users in order to help them understand complex information about the demographic evolution of French territories. Our approach combines interactive thematic, spatial, and temporal views. We describe our architecture, based on open-source technologies, and the organization of this imperfect geo-historical information in our spatiotemporal database. Our second contribution concerns the concept of an acquaintance graph that has been used to obtain an efficient design with good performance in our geovisualization website.

Dramatic fertility swings over the last 100 years have been the subject of literatures in demography and economics. Recent research has claimed that the post-1960 fertility decline is exceptional enough to constitute a Second Demographic Transition. The empirical case for a Second Demographic Transition, however, rests largely on comparisons of the post-1960 period with the baby boom era, which was exceptional in many ways. Our analysis of the U.S. instead compares the fertility decline in the 1960s and 1970s to the decline earlier in the twentieth century, especially the 1920s and 1930s.

Large population biobanks, important resources for genomic research, also present ethical challenges. The Michigan BioTrust for Health makes dried bloodspots (DBS) leftover from newborn screening, including ~4.5 million collected before 2010 without written consent, available for health research. Absent prospectively gathered consent and/or current engagement with 18- to 29-year olds, little is known about opinions and beliefs from this age group about use of the bloodspots for research. We engaged 2,101 studentsBioTrust participants and their peersat information booths at 20 college campuses across the state to educate youth about the BioTrust and gather information about consent preferences and about hopes and concerns about this public health program. We surveyed student stakeholder DBS research consent preferences and fielded a postengagement survey to gauge the attitudes of participants and to evaluate the campus engagement. The most prevalent themes in open-ended comments were support for biobank research and concern that Michiganders are not aware of their participation. While 78 % of students said they would, if asked, opt in to the BioTrust, half of these preferred to be contacted each time a researcher sought to use their DBS. Students reported great interest in the topic and strong likelihood to share what they had learned. BioTrust participants are interested in learning about their role in an initiative whose goals they widely support. Public engagement is particularly important to biobank participants who, absent traditional consent practices, are unaware of their participation. Health-fair style engagements were effective for targeting college-aged stakeholders, communicating complex messages, and likely increasing knowledge. Retrospective biobanks and biobanks that collect proxy consent need policies to respect those who would opt out and will need resources to educate participants and conduct community outreach that is a safeguard to public trus

Using US county homicide mortality data and a spatial Durbin panel regression model which accounts for the spatial clustering of homicide deaths and unobserved heterogeneity between counties, this study examines the impact of changes in foreign born population share on changes in county homicide rates. Increases in the foreign born population share are associated with reductions in the homicide rate, a process observed most clearly in the South region of the US. This reduction is largely the result of spillover, the indirect effect of growth in the immigrant population in one county on homicide rates in other counties.

This article estimates the effect of county level income inequality on violent and property crime rates using data on eight years of data on California counties. Initial cross-sectional analysis suggests income inequality decreases most categories of crime. However, the impact of income inequality on all crime categories is statistically significant using a well structured panel data estimation.

“Los clientes podrán acceder al portal de PAIS DIRECTO y recargar el celular de sus parientes en sus países de origen, transferir dinero a sus familiares, comprar tarjetas de larga distancia, etc.” PAIS DIRECTO es una empresa vanguardista, creada para satisfacer las necesidades de comunicación y conexión de los “Inmigrantes Latinoamericanos” con sus países de origen, a través de una plataforma web en Internet. El negocio consiste en la implementación de una plataforma en Internet de servicios integrados enfocado a las necesidades de los inmigrantes de Latinoamérica. Para los proveedores, PAIS DIRECTO es un canal de venta unificado, que concentra la oferta de la gran cantidad de proveedores de telefonía internacional, telefonía móvil, trasferencia de dinero presentes en Latinoamérica. El alcance de los servicios está asociado a todo tipo de transacción electrónica, inicialmente los servicios a ofrecer serán la compra de PIN´s de Larga Distancia, Recarga de Celulares Internacional, Envío de Dineros, hasta llegar a ofrecer en un futuro cercano hasta seguros y administración de pensiones internacionales. En general los grandes operadores de telecomunicaciones realizan sus esfuerzos de marketing en los mercados internos de cada país. Por lo mismo, se presenta una oportunidad a PAIS DIRECTO para satisfacer . . .