This study examines how the United States Federal Courts have framed questions of fetal viability, fetal rights, and women's rights in abortion cases from the past three years, from June 2019 to January 2022, using the following frames: the right to abortion, the post-viability fetal right to life, the pre-viability embryonic right to life, the recognition of fetal heartbeat, and abortion as a crime. In cases in which the court supported abortion rights, the most common frame found in their opinions is the right to abortion, often specified as a civil, human, or women’s right. Yet the conditionality of this right is emphasized in two-thirds of the cases, with the courts clarifying that abortion is only a right prior to fetal viability as stated by Roe v. Wade. On the other hand, cases in which the court restricted abortion rights most often used the frame of the pre-viability embryonic right to life. Unlike the pro-abortion rights argument which focused more so on legal precedent and the protected rights of the pregnant person, this argument is more morally focused on the belief that life begins at conception. Fetal viability matters far less to the anti-abortion rights argument as they are far more focused on the potential for life rather than whether the fetus or embryo could survive outside the womb at an exact moment in time.

“Street Children” argues that St. Louis shaped the nation’s child reform movement and that the Civil War inspired reformers to seek novel solutions to child reform in the following decades. During the war, a cascade of refugees, orphans, and freed slave children descended on St. Louis, straining its existing children’s institutions. The dissertation illuminates and recovers the lives of many of the marginalized children struggling under wartime hardship. Reformers reckoning with the crisis produced new institutions and a new consensus that the state owed care to displaced and orphaned children of Union soldiers. After the war, child reformers expanded their focus and drew from German thought and familial reform models intended to boost the state’s role in child reform and fold marginalized children into real and imagined institutional families. This dissertation links St. Louis to a growing national and international child reform movement that laid the foundation for Progressive Era child reform.

This article reports on research on the role of land-use planning in the emergence of new urban centers, or "edge cities, in Contra Costa County, on the eastern periphery of the San Francisco Bay Area. Based on an examination of the development of four employment and commercial nodes in that county, this article examines the process of planning these new suburban centers, and the role of pub­ lic land-use planners, local electorates concerned with growth, and traditional market players.

Cell migration is an integral function of immunity. Control of cellular infiltration and behavior are critical to prevent inflammation-induced pathology while still combating infection. Nowhere in the body is this balance more important than the CNS. As an immune privileged site, the brain needs a potent response that is compatible with the surrounding sensitive tissue. Chronic infection with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii provides a model of balance. T cells must migrate efficiently within the brain to find sites of infection and keep parasites from replicating. Many factors can influence cell behavior once leukocytes enter the brain. This dissertation examines the role two molecules play in T cell migration during chronic Toxoplasma infection.

First, the role of the intracellular adaptor protein β-arrestin 2 (β-arr2) is examined in T cell migration in response to the chemokine CCL21. β-arr2 is required for migration of naïve cells and those isolated from the brain. Chemotaxis studies demonstrate this requirement is a result of mediating migratory speed. Next, β-arr2’s role in cell trafficking to infected tissue is tested in vivo. Finally, using two-photon microscopy β-arr2 is shown to mediate migratory speed of infiltrating T cells in the brain. Together these data define the specific role for β-arr2 in regulating T cell velocity in the CNS.

Next, the effect of the matricellular glycoprotein SPARC is discussed. Infected astrocytes are the source of SPARC in the infected brain, the same source as CCL21. Novel binding partners for SPARC- CCL21 and CCL19- are reported, expanding the potential roles of SPARC to include the maintenance of chemokine signals in the brain. SPARC’s presence enhances T cell migration in response to CCL21. Finally, two-photon imaging reveals SPARC enhances T cell access to the brain and slightly enhances T cell migration behavior within the brain. These data demonstrate how SPARC cooperates with other proteins in the brain matrix to contribute to T cell behavior.

Lastly, additional levels of regulation for chemokine dependent cell migration are considered and potential areas of further investigation are proposed. This dissertation provides new insight into T cell migration during a protective immune response in the brain.

This report is a follow-up study to last year's CalSpeed publication, "High-Speed Trains for California," Working Paper No. 565. The purpose of this paper is to test rigorously and critically the cost estimate methodology presented in that previous working paper. This has been accomplished primarily by focusing on the issue of cost escalation of rail projects, with reference to both U.S. and foreign experience.

This dissertation discusses observing causality within point processes. Firstly, a novel hypothesis test for distinguishing between inhomogeneity and causal clustering is described, validated on simulations, and then used in shooting data. Next, the hypothesis test is also applied to temporal disease data to identify social contagion mechanisms. Lastly, a discus sion of a novel potential outcomes framework as applied to point process data is defined and applied to simulated data.