By March of 2020, most cities worldwide had enacted stay-at-home public health orders to slow the spread of COVID-19. Restrictions on nonessential travel had extensive impacts across the transportation sector in the short term. This study explores the effects of COVID-19 on shared e-scooters by analyzing route trajectory data in the pre- and during-pandemic periods in Austin, TX, from a single provider. Although total shared e-scooter trips decreased during the pandemic, partially owing to vendors pulling out of the market, this study found average trip length increased, and temporal patterns of this mode did not meaningfully change. A count model of average daily trips by road segment found more trips on segments with sidewalks and bus stops during the pandemic than beforehand. More trips were observed on roads with lower vehicle miles traveled and fewer lanes, which might suggest more cautious travel behavior since there were fewer trips in residential neighborhoods. Stay-at-home orders and vendor e-scooter rebalancing operations inherently influence and can limit trip demand, but the unique trajectory data set and analysis provide cities with information on the road design preferences of vulnerable road users.

Today’s child care system is a patchwork of various public and private local, state and federally-funded programs – one that ultimately leaves low-wage parents and their children with the illusion of choice. California’s more than 33,000 family child care providers have been essential to helping low-wage parents navigate the child care system – and more recently, have come together with these families under the banner of Raising California Together to wake policymakers and the public to the need for new solutions to this crisis of care.1 Bridging the experiences of low-wage parents with those of family child care providers that offer round-the-clock care to working families, often for below minimum wages, we can better understand the role child care and labor policy plays in closing the educational and economic achievement gaps plaguing California’s current and future workforce.

With funding support from the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Garment Worker Center, the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education (UCLA Labor Center), and Research Action Design surveyed 82 garment workers in LA’s iconic garment district about their experiences accessing child care. The purpose of this study was to understand the impact of child care demands on low-wage workers in the garment industry, in order to inform policy makers and the public about the needs of low-income working families. Workers’ responses offer a glimpse into the difficult choices working parents, particularly immigrant women, face as they attempt to care for their children and earn a living in the shadows of the 21st century global economy. Survey respondents were employed in the Los Angeles Downtown Fashion District. The district is located around major transportation hubs, apparel wholesalers, and around a readily available pool of recently arrived immigrants, often undocumented workers. Women, predominantly immigrants from Mexico, comprised 80 percent of survey respondents.

Wage theft is the non-payment or underpayment of wages and other benefits to which workers are legally entitled to. Workers in low-wage industries, immigrant workers, women, and people of color are disproportionately affected by wage theft. On average, victims of wage theft lose $2,070 annually from total annual earnings of $16,536. In a given week, an estimated 655,000 low-wage workers in Los Angeles County experience at least one pay-based violation. The majority of these violations take place within the City of Los Angeles. Low-wage workers in Los Angeles lose more than $26.2 million per week as a result of wage theft violations, making L.A. the wage theft capital of the United States. The most common forms of wage theft experienced by L.A. low-wage workers include violations of the laws that require minimum wage, overtime pay, and breaks for meals and rest, as well as “off-the-clock” work without payment of any kind.

This study proposes an approach of leveraging information gathered from multiple traffic data sources at different resolutions to obtain approximate inference on the traffic distribution of Chicago's O'Hare Airport area. Specifically, it proposes the ingestion of traffic datasets at different resolutions to build spatiotemporal models for predicting the distribution of traffic volume on the road network. Due to its good adaptability and flexibility for spatiotemporal data, the Gaussian process (GP) regression was employed to provide short-term forecasts using data collected by loop detectors (sensors) and supplemented by telematics data. The GP regression is used to make predictions of the distribution of the proportion of sensor data traffic volume represented by the telematics data for each location of the sensors. Consequently, the fitted GP model can be used to determine the approximate traffic distribution for a testing location outside of the training points. Policymakers in the transportation sector can find the results of this work helpful for making informed decisions relating to current and future transportation conditions in the area.

The sensory and cognitive abilities of the mammalian neocortex are underpinned by intricate columnar and laminar circuits formed from an array of diverse neuronal populations. One approach to determining how interactions between these circuit components give rise to complex behavior is to investigate the rules by which cortical circuits are formed and acquire functionality during development. This review summarizes recent research on the development of the neocortex, from genetic determination in neural stem cells through to the dynamic role that specific neuronal populations play in the earliest circuits of neocortex, and how they contribute to emergent function and cognition. While many of these endeavors take advantage of model systems, consideration will also be given to advances in our understanding of activity in nascent human circuits. Such cross-species perspective is imperative when investigating the mechanisms underlying the dysfunction of early neocortical circuits in neurodevelopmental disorders, so that one can identify targets amenable to therapeutic intervention.

Background

Women are twice as likely as men to develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Abnormal acquisition of conditioned fear has been suggested as a mechanism for the development of PTSD. While some studies of healthy humans suggest that women are either no different or express less conditioned fear responses during conditioning relative to men, differences in the acquisition of conditioned fear between men and women diagnosed with PTSD has not been examined.

Methods

Thirty-one participants (18 men; 13 women) with full or subsyndromal PTSD completed a fear conditioning task. Participants were shown computer-generated colored circles that were paired (CS+) or unpaired (CS-) with an aversive electrical stimulus and skin conductance levels were assessed throughout the task.

Results

Repeated measures ANOVA indicated a significant sex by stimulus interaction during acquisition. Women had greater differential conditioned skin conductance responses (CS + trials compared to CS- trials) than did men, suggesting greater acquisition of conditioned fear in women with PTSD.

Conclusions

In contrast to studies of healthy individuals, we found enhanced acquisition of conditioned fear in women with PTSD. Greater fear conditioning in women may either be a pre-existing vulnerability trait or an acquired phenomenon that emerges in a sex-dependent manner after the development of PTSD. Characterizing the underlying mechanisms of these differences is needed to clarify sex-related differences in the pathophysiology of PTSD.