As we enter the 21st century, it is possible to reach beyond the headlines to describe what is now known about climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change evaluated the scientific aspects of global climate change; the current consensus is described in a recent series of reports. Since the 19th century, concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and sulfate aerosol dust have increased significantly. While there is scientific agreement that warming is occurring, the controversy now concerns the extent of subsequent impacts in the future. In California, the impacts of global warming are likely to include reduced water availability and quality, poorer air quality, associated economic consequences, biodiversity shifts and health effects. The changes are expected to continue at an increasing pace well into the next century, perhaps outstripping our scientific, economic and social ability to cope with them.

This project implemented the initial phase of California-2100 (Cal21), which is aimed at making and evaluating high resolution estimates of climate change over California out to the year 2100. The initial WRC component of this project has been focused on evaluating how well regional climate models reproduce the variations of important components of the water budget for California, and estimating the effects of the increases over the past century in irrigation in California on regional climate, especially snow accumulation. The results show that global warming has a large effect on precipitation, snow water, surface temperature, low level winds and soil moisture They also show in summer that irrigation has a strong effect on the differences between recent and past conditions in maximum temperature, surface latent and sensible heat fluxes, surface moisture, and surface humidity.

The availability of software tools, high frequency data, and

recent advances in statistical inference all allow a greater study of

continuous-time models of price and volatility processes.

This research studies the structure of intraday stock volatility over

a selected group of stocks from 2007 to 2011. We use nearly every

valid transaction in the Trades and Quotes database to obtain a price

series which is sampled every second. We calculate realized variation

(RV), the sum of squared log returns, to estimate squared volatility.

We partition the trading day at the level of 100-second time

intervals, and we observe mean reversion in RV even at this time

scale. We estimate a modified Heston model for RV in which

statistical criteria are used to detect volatility jumps.

In 2015, we called upon our colleagues to address a glaring oversight of a potentially transformative frontier in biogeography – the geography of sound (Lomolino et al. 2015).  Our purpose here is to lay the conceptual foundations, based on the fundamental unifying principles of biogeography, to guide the development of the nascent field of sonoric geography.  We define sonoric geography as an emerging subdiscipline of biogeography that attempts to discover and articulate patterns of geographic variation in the acoustic properties of biological communities and identify the underlying, causal explanations for those patterns.

We see at least two major benefits to this initiative.  First, it will advance the field of biogeography by expanding the spectrum of biological properties studied – demonstrating how the field’s fundamental, unifying principles can be applied to a novel component of biological diversity – sound and acoustic assemblages across the principal geographic dimensions (area, isolation, elevation/depth, and latitude).  Second, a research program in sonoric geography will, in synergism, advance the fields of soundscape ecology (Pijanowski et al. 2011, Slabbekoorn 2018) and acoustic ecology (Wrightson 2000) by integrating an explicit geographic context into their conceptual foundations, empirical investigations, and applications for conserving biological diversity, sensu lato—again, all this guided by the fundamental unifying principles of biogeography.

Introduction: Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia (SAB) is the second-most common cause of community-onset (CO) bacteremia. The incidence of methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) has recently decreased across much of the United States, and we seek to describe risk factors for COMRSA bacteremia, which will aid emergency providers in their choice of empiric antibiotics.

Methods: This is a retrospective cohort study of all patients with SAB at a 500-bed safety net hospital. The proportion of S. aureus isolates that were MRSA ranged from 32-35% during the study period. Variables of interest included age, comorbid medical conditions, microbiology results, antibioticadministration, duration of bacteremia, duration of hospital admission, suspected source of SAB, and Elixhauser comorbidity score. The primary outcome was to determine risk factors for CO-MRSA bacteremia as compared to methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) bacteremia in patients admittedto the hospital through the emergency department.

Results: We identified 135 consecutive patients with CO-SAB. In comparison to those with MSSA bacteremia, patients with MRSA bacteremia were younger (odds ratio [OR] 0.5, 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.4-0.7) with higher Elixhauser comorbidity scores (OR 1.4, 95% CI, 1.1-1.7). Additionally, these patients were more likely to have a history of MRSA infection or colonization (OR 8.9, 95% CI,2.7-29.7) and intravenous drug use (OR 2.4, 95% CI, 1.0-5.7).

Conclusion: SAB continues to be prevalent in our urban community with CO-MRSA accounting for almost one-third of SAB cases. Previous MRSA colonization was the strongest risk factor for current MRSA infection in this cohort of patients with CO-SAB.

Background

Results

Conclusions