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netpanty88-blog · 5 years ago

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MORRIS PARK, Bronx

I hadn’t sallied up Morris Park Avenue in the Bronx for some time — not since 2006-7 or so, and on this sort of hangdog afternoon on either side of Christmas, I figured it was time.

Morris Park, located in about the exact center of the Bronx, appears to be one of the borough’s most stable and long-standing neighborhoods, but it’s only a few decades old and occupies what used to be a vast racetrack. Many of NYC’s more “stable” neighborhoods, such as Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, are located where the ponies used to run and automotive pioneers raced.

The name Morris turns up a number of times in the Bronx, primarily from two different families: the Revolution-era Morrises: Richard, who arrived in the 1660s and first settled the South Bronx; Declaration signer Lewis, US Sen. Gouverneur, and Robert, who was a three-term NYC mayor in the 1850s.

The Morris of Morris Park was John A. Morris, whose Westchester Racing Association acquired 152 acres in 1888 on the outskirts of the old Bear Swamp and built a racetrack and clubhouse there. As opulent as the racetrack was, though, it was in operation from only 1890 to 1904 (though a vestige of horse racing in the area, the Track Restaurant and Tavern, held down a corner at Eastchester and Williamsbridge Rds. some distance from the old track until 1957). The track itself burned to the ground in 1910.

In 1908, the abandoned racetrack became the world’s first formal airfield and the American Eagle, the largest dirigible in history to that time at a full 105 feet in length, was built there, and one of the first gliders, piloted by 17-year-old Lawrence Lesh, was launched from the former track that year. And, in the early-1900s, the old racetrack was also used for speed and endurance races for the newfangled automobile, and a young Swiss driver named Louis once won a gold watch for driving a Fiat a the-record 52.8 MPH there. The driver, along with his brother Gaston, competed in many road races at the Morris Park track and Gaston won at Indianapolis in 1920. Of course, it was Louis Chevrolet (1878-1941), who ironically sold his share in the Chevrolet Motor Car Company he founded in 1911 to original partner William Durant in 1915, and returned to the racing business, as well as aeronautics. (The gold watch he won had been donated by Walter Chrysler.)

It wasn’t until the 1920s that streets were cut through and houses constructed; the neighborhood was not “completed” until the 1970s!

I took the #2 train from Penn Station to East 180th Street, which has some decorative platform signboards and lamps. The lamps date back to a station renovation of about a decade ago (mid to late 2000s). If I were to stay on the #2 I would go up the el above White Plains Road to wakefield, near the border with Mount Vernon. I could transfer across the platform to the #5, which uses the right of way of a former commuter railroad, the NYW&B (see below). Instead, I walked down to Morris Park Avenue and headed east.

The building above at E. 180th St. and Morris Park Ave., which exhibits an air of faded magnificence, was constructed in 1912 as a grand Italian villa station for the New York, Westchester and Boston Railroad that operated between the Bronx and Westchester from 1912 to 1937 (it never made it to Boston) and was subsequently sold to NYC and became the Dyre Avenue Line.

It currently serves as a simple portal for the E. 180th St. station, serving the #2 and #5 trains. Though it was renovated in the last five years, receiving a new gleaming white paint job, the lowest bidder strikes again, and the paint job is already peeling off.

The clock tells correct time, but Mercury in his winged helmet looks a little displeased at that peeling paint job. Mercury, in Roman times the messenger god, was known for his speed, and the NYW&H and his symbols, including a winged staff entwined with two snakes, were used on railroad overpasses and stations.

The NYW&H, by the way, shouldn’t be confused with the New York, New Haven and Hartford RR, a little east of here, which was absorbed by NY Central. Its trackage, now used by Amtrak, is now slated to become home to the Metro-North and open 4 new Bronx stations by 2023, with the line terminating in Penn Station.

I may have said it already on previous pages, but the Morris Park station is among my favorite subway stops in the city. Its large station house was formerly home to a police precinct, and its hanging pendant lamps, exposed columns and rivets hark back to a golden age of railroading. Remember, as first conceived this line was supposed to go all the way to Boston.

There are a number of picture windows just inside the entrance. In one of them is a mounted Hagstrom map of the Bronx. The map cannot be younger than 1973, because the Third Avenue El is shown on the map. In 1973, the old el was cut back to a shuttle lien between the Hub and Fordham university; formerly, it had been bridged over the Harlem River, connecting to Manhattan’s 3rd Avenue El which ran from the 1880s to 1955.

Here the Bronx River Parkway is bridged over Morris Park Avenue and East 180th. The parkway originates in the Soundview neighborhood and runs into Westchester County and beyond. Unlike White Plains Road, this is a direct route to White Plains, north of which it become the Taconic State Parkway. Its oldest section in Westchester opened at the dawn of the Auto Age in 1907!

US Representative Paul Fino (1913-2009) was elected to the State Senate from 1946-1950 and elected to Congress in 1952, where he served eight terms, and then the State Supreme Court in 1968. He was known for his staunch opposition to Mayor John Lindsay, who he considered too moderate. In 1972, he sentenced a 17-year-old to 30 years in prison, who’d been convicted of selling one-seventy-third of an ounce of heroin.

This painted sign on Morris Park Ave. and Adams St., one of two surviving campaign ads for Fino, was likely made in the 1960s for one of his State Senate campaigns.

Morris Park Avenue is separated from the 180th Street/Unionport subway yards servicing the #2 and #5 trains by a high concrete wall. At about Melville Street you see this filled-in archway, with a small sconce above it. There’s probably a story behind this, but at this point I’d guess that it was once a simple entrance to the yards.

590 (left) to 582 Morris Park Avenue, east of Melville. 590 in particular has retained some of the appearance it had in 1940. These buildings likely date to the late 1800s.

Macca Vivero, a meat wholesaler/slaughterhouse at Morris Park Avenue and Garfield Street.

608 Morris Park Avenue, likely the best-preserved building in this stretch, has its original window lintels.

This section of the Bronx is Italian, Albanian and Latino and is chockablock with Catholic parishes. The one serving the west end of Morris Park Avenue is St. Dominic. The parish was established and the church constructed in 1925. Inscribed above the front entrance are the Latin words, Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae (“Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house”) from the Old Testament Psalm 26.

St. Dominic merged with the nearby Our Lady of Solace parish (see below) approximately a decade ago (as of 2019).

Unionport Road is one of the Bronx’s oldest routes, running diagonally from about Bronx Park southeast to Westchester Avenue through the former Catholic Protectory, now the site of the Parkchester housing development. There was a former community known as Unionport as well, in southern Castle Hill. Unionport was a mecca for German and Irish immigrants in the mid-to-late 1890s. After the eastern Bronx was annexed to NYC in 1895 the streets were renamed for local luminaries and settlers, and Unionport was absorbed into what’s now Castle Hill.

Before the Parkchester housing complex was built in The Bronx, it was the site of the New York Catholic Protectory. The Protectory was created in 1863 as a home to care for destitute or truant children. The need for the Protectory grew out of the reality of thousands of vulnerable Catholic children wandering the streets of the city and fending for themselves. [Academic Works, CUNY]

Vatican-Mater Dei Church goods, a Catholic supplies shop across the street from St. Dominic at 1738 Unionport Road.

Van Nest Hardware, #669 Morris Park Avenue. Actually, Van Nest Avenue is a block south of here, but asection of Morris Park is also called Van Nest.

Van Nest is an old name and comes from Dutch colonial settler Pieter Pietersen Van Neste, who arrived in North America from Holland in 1647. However, the family is only honored here because of the Van Nest Land & Improvement Company, which began developing the neighborhood in 1892. Scions of the Van Nests became railroad company directors and developers but according to Bronx historian John McNamara, no Van Nest actually lived in the Bronx.

It’s likely that the owners of Happy Land Restaurant at #680 near White Plains Road are new to the Bronx; otherwise, they wouldn’t have gone near this name. The Happy Land social club, on Southern Blvd. in West Farms, was set afire by an arsonist on March 25, 1990, killing 87 — making it one of NYC’s worst massacres to date.

The wheels of technological change grind slowly in Morris Park. E.S. Business Machines, #704 Morris Park Ave., east of White Plains Rd., still promotes its typewriter repair service prominently in its display window, and the awning (which appears as if it was constructed recently) touts fax service and cash registers, as well. According to Baruch College, owner Sam Vasquez, born in 1937, has owned and operated the store in Morris Park since the 1980s, and before that in lower Manhattan. While praising the new computer technology that largely eliminated typewriters, Vasquez claims he still gets adequate business from young writers who wish to compose the old-fashioned way. I still have my 1940s Remington, and keep it around in case the grid fails. I need a new ribbon, but now I know where to find one.

A passageway at #704 appears to lead to a backhouse, a separate house on the same property that carries a different house number.

The Spanish-style Lucchese Funeral Home at Hunt Avenue was constructed in 1921. It looked pretty much the same in 1940. Note the rock outcropping to the left of the church in the 1940 photo. It was blasted a way years ago and the space is now a parking lot for the funeral home.

Here’s a “faded ad” seen on the west side of #742 Morris Park Avenue with a fickle finger point two blocks away where there is an “office and pockets.” Any idea what this could be?

As a nod to the many Italian Americans in Morris Park, the center median of MPA is painted in the red, white and green of the Italian flag.

Our Lady of Solace Roman Catholic Church, its rectory and former parochial school (now the Bronx Charter School For Excellence) dominate MPA at Holland Avenue. The church was established in 1928, one year after St. Dominic a few blocks away, which have combined to form a single parish, with both church buildings open for worship.

Yet another Morris Park Avenue house of worship is this Seventh Day Adventist Church between Barnes and Matthews Avenues. The Adventists are a Protestant Christian sect co-founded by Ellen White in 1863.

I’ve always been fascinated with Graham Place, a dead-end alley on the north side of Morris Park Avenue between Matthews and Muliner Avenues. However, today, I found the entrance fenced off.

I wanted to get new photographs of the two residences on Graham Place, #191 and 193. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. I walked around to Matthews-Muliner Playground, and you can see them through the wire fence on the basketball court. I believe the two buildings are no longer occupied, and a new building may go up in their place, wiping all trace of Graham Place off the map.

What is Graham Place doing here, anyway? A partial answer can be found when you look at a 1902 map of Morris Park. Back then this was a planned development called Hudson Park, and two small streets were mapped: Graham and Delancey Streets. Graham Place barely survives…

…while Delancey (Place) was fully developed and is now one of NYC’s few L-shaped streets. Muliner Avenue was built on a NW-SE axis and Delancey Street was jogged over a very short block to meet it.

Formerly, when the city wanted to rename a street, they went “whole hog” and renamed the street for its entire length. For example, north of Central Park, 7th and 8th avenues were renamed Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in the 1970s. Down went the 7th and 8th Avenue signs, and up went the new signs. However, so many people are honored these days that the old names are retained and just short portions of streets get what I call “subnames.” Who are the people honored? At his site, NYC Streets, Gil Tauber has the answer:

William J. Madonna (1961-2017) was educated at Northeastern University and the New England School of Law. He began his legal career in the office of the NYC Corporation Counsel. and later joined the Bronx District Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor. From 1994, he had a successful private practice in the Morris Park section of the Bronx. He represented victims of domestic violence, as well as handled divorce and family law, criminal law and real estate. He was a member of the Bronx County Bar Association, the Bronx Family Court Bar Association and served as chief counsel to then state-assemblyman, Mark Gjonaj. He represented the Tracey Towers tenant organization in their fight to block rent increases. He also represented the Friends of Pelham Parkway in its successful lawsuit to save the trees that were set to be removed for the reconstruction of Pelham Parkway.

This section of Morris Park Avenue is unusually illuminated. Double mast telephone lamps like this are fairly common in NYC, but they’re usually not paired with Bell fixtures. However Morris Park Avenue got a makeover about 15 years ago (writing this in 2019) and the DOT came up with this combination. It’s also employed on Williamsbridge Road, but I can’t find it elsewhere in the city.

The Morris Park NYPL branch at #985 MPA features a contemporary design. According to the Library it opened in 2006, making it the first library in Morris Park. Since the area was developed in the early 20th Century I found that a bit incredulous. Where’s the next nearest branch?

Further east on Morris Park Avenue, its Italian identity comes more to the fore, with fireplugs painted in red, white and green and a Patsy’s pizza outpost. The original Patsy’s was founded by Pasquale “Patsy” Lancieri in East Harlem in 1933, making it one of NYC’s earliest pizzerias. Brooklyn’s Grimaldi Pizza, of the lengthy tourist lines on Old Fulton Street, was founded by Lancieri’s nephew. The midtown Patsy’s on West 56th Street, patronized by Frank Sinatra and other celebrities, was founded by a different Patsy, Pasquale Scognamillo, and is not associated with the Lancieri Patsy’s.

The Morris Park Patsy’s sign proclaims “since 1933,” and my guess is that they’re an outpost of the original Lancieri Patsy’s of East Harlem.

This awning sign features the serif fonts, Bodoni and Baskerville.

Old-school sidewalk signs on the Morris Park Meat Market.

Brightly colored building art at Emilio’s of Morris Park at Hone Avenue. It’s reminiscent of Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra‘s work.

This fire alarm box has been decommissioned, and someone decided to put a see-through plastic panel at the front. One wonders what will be displayed there. As a rule, New Yorkers use old alarms as trash receptacles.

Eastern Morris Park is the borough’s Hospital Row, as Jacobi Medical Center, on a vast plant between Pelham Parkway, Eastchester Rd., Morris Park and Seminole Aves., is the Bronx’ largest public hospital. Also in this stretch are the Belfer Institute, the brooding Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the airier Michael F. Price center for Genetic and Translational Medicine (shown above), Bronx Psychiatric Center, Montefiore Medical Center on Eastchester Rd. and Calvary Hospital, where my father rested comfortably in his final days.

The streets in this section of Morris park curve around, and they were once part of a late 19th Century development called Westchester Heights. Some streets were given Indian-sounding names, such as Seminole, Choctaw, and Pawnee. Much of the old development was replaced by Hospital Row beginning in the 20th Century.

Morris Park Avenue comes to an end at Bassett Avenue, which runs along the Amtrak Northeast Corridor tracks. This is the former NY, NH & H tracks that are planned to include Metro-North service to Penn Station by 2023. As a rule, commuter railroad fares are more expensive than mass transit, and it remains to be seen if new Bronx Metro-North stations will get much patronage, as residents here tend to be poorer than those living in Westchester County.

Intending to finish at Pelham Bay Park, I struck north on Stillwell Avenue, which is lined with auto repair shops. At McDonald Street I saw something unusual. Signature Chrome Customs is also a barber shop! What an unusual combination. Can anyone shed a light on this?

I hadn’t been on Pelham Parkway lately, but I see they have a new set of davit-style lamps (davits have no mast; the shaft curves over the road, with the fixture placed at the end). They have been used more and more frequently on NYC streets over the past decade.

Meanwhile, this two-angled mast, used mostly in industrial areas, has been losing out. A few pairs show up on the bridge that takes Pelham Parkway over Amtrak.

I found an ancient “arrowhead” sign pointing traffic toward the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. A much larger green sign in back of it does the same thing.

At Stillwell Ave. and Pelham Parkway, you find this stolid structure, opened in 2016, that resembles Star Trek’s Borg Cube, or perhaps the Ministry of Truth from Orwell’s 1984. In fact, vital business is carried on here. You may be aware of the TV show 911, which follows the lives of emergency service workers in Los Angeles. This building, PSAC II, is where over 11 million 911 calls for the NYPD and FDNY have been fielded, joining PSAC I at MetroTech Center in Brooklyn. It’s one of the most heavily protected and secured buildings in New York City, constructed of concrete clad with silvery aluminum panels. The building is nearly windowless, but workers inside—who have a stressful task—enjoy the benefits of walls in the lobby and cafeteria lined with plants that partially serve as an air filtration system.

East of Amtrak, Pelham Parkway encounters a series of spaghetti roads that connect it to both the Hutchinson River Parkway and New England Thruway. The parkway itself becomes Shore Road, running on the east end of Pelham Bay Park into Westchester County. This area is also interspersed with a number of bicycle paths that run north and east; for Bronx bicyclists, it’s a golden age.

At the Hutch and Continental Avenue, in the small Bronx neighborhood called Pelham Bay, adjoining the park, I found a mystery. It appears to be a parking lot that hasn’t been used for some time. However, the DOT lights it, there is the leaf symbol of NYC Parks, and “no trespassing” signs. (I trespassed; if you want to ticket me, I’m here.) My guess is that it’s a parking lot for Parks personnel.

It’s dueling Art Deco apartment buildings at St. Paul Avenue and East 196th Street. I can’t decide which one I like better. Other than exceptions like East 222nd and 233rd, which extend several miles deep into eastern Bronx, East 194th through East 197th in Pelham Bay are the easternmost numbered streets in the borough.

St. Paul Avenue isn’t named for the Biblical apostle — a Paul family owned the land in the colonial area.

This former public restroom can be found at Westchester Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard just west of Pelham Bay Park at the eastern end of the #6 train. It has now been fenced off, so perhaps some criminal activity was going on there.

From here I got the bus back to Flushing. An express bus runs twice an hour on the weekends, and one was just pulling in when I got to the stop. This was too good a coincidence to not take advantage.

Check out the ForgottenBook, take a look at the gift shop, and as always, “comment…as you see fit.”

1/27/19

Source: https://forgotten-ny.com/2019/01/morris-park-bronx-2/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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kathleenseiber · 4 years ago

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3D mapping reveals how wounds begin to heal

Researchers have figured out for the first time how the wound healing process begins.

The finding may provide new insight into fibrosis and cancer metastasis, according to a new study.

For the new study, published in ACS Nano, the team discovered the way fibroblasts, or common cells in connective tissue, interact with the extracellular matrix, which provides structural support as well as biochemical and biomechanical cues to cells. The researchers uncovered a recursive process that goes on between the cells and their environment as well as structures in the cells that were previously unknown.

“Clinical efforts to prevent the progression of fibrocontractile diseases, such as scarring and fibrosis, have been largely unsuccessful, in part because the mechanisms that cells use to interact with the protein fibers around them are unclear,” says Delaram Shakiba, a postdoctoral fellow from the NSF Science and Technology Center for Engineering Mechanobiology (CEMB) at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

“We found that fibroblasts use completely different mechanisms in the early—and I think the most treatable—stages of these interactions, and that their responses to drugs can therefore be the opposite of what they would be in the later stages.”

Controlling the shape of cells

The process has stymied mechanobiology researchers for some time, says Guy Genin, professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of CEMB.

“Researchers in the field of mechanobiology thought that cells pulled in collagen from the extracellular matrix by reaching out with long protrusions, grabbing it and pulling it back,” Genin says.

“We discovered that this wasn’t the case. A cell has to push its way out through collagen first, then instead of grabbing on, it essentially shoots tiny hairs, or filopodia, out of the sides of its arms, pulls in collagen that way, then retracts.”

Now that they understand this process, Genin says, they can control the shape that a cell takes.

“With our colleagues at CEMB at the University of Pennsylvania, we were able to validate some mathematical models to go through the engineering process, and we now have the basic rules that cells follow,” he says. “We can now begin to design specific stimuli to direct a cell to behave in a certain way in building a tissue-engineered structure.”

The researchers learned they could control the cell shape in two ways: First, by controlling the boundaries around it, and second, by inhibiting or upregulating particular proteins involved in the remodeling of the collagen.

Fibroblasts pull the edges of a wound together, causing it to contract or close up. Collagen in the cells then remodels the extracellular matrix to fully close the wound—where mechanobiology comes into play.

“There’s a balance between tension and compression inside a cell that is newly exposed to fibrous proteins,” Genin says. “There is tension in actin cables, and by playing with that balance, we can make these protrusions grow extremely long. We can stop the remodeling from occurring or we can increase it.”

Better wound healing

The team used a 3D-mapping technique—the first time researchers have applied it to collagen—along with a computational model to calculate the 3D strain and stress fields created by the protrusions from the cells.

As cells accumulated collagen, tension-driven remodeling and alignment of collagen fibers led to the formation of collagen tracts. This requires cooperative interactions among cells, through which cells can interact mechanically.

“New methods of microscopy, tissue engineering, and biomechanical modeling greatly enhance our understanding of the mechanisms by which cells modify and repair the tissues they populate,” says Elliot Elson, professor emeritus of biochemistry and molecular biophysics.

“Fibrous cellular structures generate and guide forces that compress and reorient their extracellular fibrous environment. This raises new questions about the molecular mechanisms of these functions and how cells regulate the forces they exert and how they govern the extent of matrix deformation.”

“Wound healing is a great example of how these processes are important in a physiologic way,” Genin says. “We’ll be able to come up with insight in how to train cells not to excessively compact the collagen around them.”

The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Engineering Mechanobiology, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering funded the work.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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janicehavener-blog · 5 years ago

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ECO/561: Economics Entire Course

Follow Below Link to Download Study Guide Tutorial

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ECO/561: Economics Entire Course

ECO 561 Wk 1 Individual: Influence of Economics on Household Decision Making

Resources: Influence of Economics on Household Decision Making Grading Guide

Purpose of Assignment

To locate, retrieve, and evaluate the effects of macroeconomic indicators on your own decision making.

Assignment Steps

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel® and Word functions can be found on the Microsoft® Office website. There are also additional tutorials via the web offering support for Office products.

Scenario: Consider your last big purchase such as a car, appliances, home repairs, home purchase, computer equipment, college tuition, or another “big-ticket” item, which are often purchased using loans/financing (by borrowing money). Also consider your decision-making process that led you to choose a particular make, model, or brand of the product (or service) you purchased and whether it was the right time to make the purchase given economic conditions at the time of your purchase. While analyzing your decision, keep in mind everything from interest rates to the prices of complementary and substitute goods are driven by human economic behavior.

Develop a minimum 1,050-word analysis of your decision-making process in which you include the following:

· Retrieve statistics on Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and on Real Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) by year for the last ten years. You can retrieve those statistics from internet sources including, but not limited to, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis’s FRED web site, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) web site, or another credible source of your choice. Post these statistics in a single worksheet of an Excel® workbook and submit your Excel® file with your report. In your report, discuss the latest 10-year trends in both GDP and PCE. Also discuss how the trends in GDP compare with trends in PCE. You are encouraged to include graphs of these statistics in your report; you could create the graphs in Excel® and copy them into your report.

· Retrieve statistics on the Effective Federal Funds Rate and on the Consumer Price Index: All Items Less Food and Energy by year for the last 30 years. You can retrieve those statistics from internet sources including, but not limited to, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis’s FRED web site, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) web site, or other credible sources of your choice. Post these statistics in a single worksheet of an Excel® workbook and submit your Excel® file with your report. In your report, discuss how the trends in the Effective Federal Funds Rate compare with trends in inflation. If you took out a loan to pay for your “big-ticket” purchase, what was the interest rate on your loan? Were interest rates rising or falling at that time? Were interest rates relatively high or low at that time? You are also encouraged to include graphs of these statistics in your report.

· Discuss the influence of any Federal government or state government programs, such as tax credits or tax deductions for energy-saving/efficiency purchases, on your decision to make your last big purchase; or if government incentives did not factor into your decision, explain why not.

· Develop conclusions about the economy’s influence on personal and business decision-making relative to purchases of big-ticket items, investments, or other major purchases.

Cite a minimum of three peer-reviewed sources. Note: The Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics can be cited to fulfill this requirement.

Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.

Submit your assignment. Be sure you submit your paper as well as the two required Excel® files..

Resources

· Center for Writing Excellence

· Reference and Citation Generator

· Grammar and Writing Guides

· Learning Team Toolkit

ECO 561 Wk 2 Team Assignment: Learning Team Charter

Overview

In this course, your team will work together to complete a few assignments. This chartering assignment is designed to help you apply your project management skills to understand the scope of your project, then break the project into goals, tasks, responsibilities, resources, and milestones. The assignment also asks you to discuss and answer some questions that will lay the foundation for developing your project.

Beyond the Standard Charter

You will notice that this chartering process goes beyond your standard University of Phoenix Charter by helping your team create a project plan for team success by providing you with opportunities to define your deliverables, recognize the connections between the deliverables and other classroom activities, determine your timelines and milestones, identify each team member’s expected contribution, and answer questions that lay the foundation for building your projects.

Putting “I” in “Team”

Important to note is the section for defining learning team expectations related to participation, collaboration, communication, team contributions, assignment deadlines, and other considerations. Please take the time to discuss and document how your team will address each area and any challenges that may arise. It is important to understand that we are “Putting ‘I’ in ‘Team’”. In short, we will recognize and reward individuals according to their contributions to team output, not according to their team membership. This means that individual grades may be different from the team grade depending on each individual’s contribution to each team deliverable.

Completing This Assignment

Do the following to complete the assignment:

· Review the Charter and Project plan.

· Review the weekly Learning Team deliverables.

· Complete the provided Learning Team Charter and Project Plan, including the following: team member contact information, project by week, learning team expectations, team discussion questions.

Submit your assignment

Resources

· Center for Writing Excellence

· Reference and Citation Generator

· Grammar and Writing Guides

· Learning Team Toolkit

ECO 561 Wk 2 Individual: Government Intervention

Resource: Government Intervention Grading Guide

Purpose of Assignment

The theory of market economies emphasizes freedom of choice and limited government intervention. The classic argument for government intervention is market failure – the inability of the market economy to correct itself from a dysfunctional state (such as the Great Depression). Students will examine articles from the University library to analyze real-world examples of U.S. government intervention programs and apply current week readings to make intelligent conclusions about the economic policies.

Assignment Steps

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel and Word functions can be found on the Microsoft Office website. There are also additional tutorials via the web offering support for Office products.

Locate up to three different articles/publications and/or use The Economist Online. Examine one case of significant government intervention as it relates to your current industry of employment or an industry in which you are interested in working. You may access EBSCOhost, ProQuest or The Economist Online.

Examples of intervention programs you may select, but are not limited to:

· US agriculture support programs

· Low income support programs (Food Stamps, Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families)

· Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)

· Low-income rent controls and housing vouchers

· Government promotion of renewable energy sources to discourage use of fossil fuels such as coal and oil

· Unemployment Insurance

· Bailout of U.S. banks and other financial institutions during the Great Recession

· Bailout of U.S. auto makers during the Great Recession

· Social Security retirement benefits

Develop a minimum 10-slide Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation including detailed speaker notes or voiceover including the following:

· Describe the intervention and detail its history.

· Analyze the arguments for government intervention as opposed to arguments for market-based solutions. Hint: See the information in our course textbook on market failures.

· Examine who may be helped and who may be hurt by the selected government intervention.

· Examine externalities and/or unintended consequences of such intervention.

· Determine the cost trend of the intervention program since its implementation including whether costs are increasing, decreasing, or vary with the state of the economy.

· Evaluate the success or failure of the intervention in achieving its objectives and develop conclusions.

· Recommend whether the program should be continued as is, discontinued, or modified and defend your recommendation.

Note: The use of tables and/or charts to display economic data over the time period discussed is highly encouraged. However, if your source includes the copyright symbol, which looks like this: ©, then you should not copy any table and/or charts from that source. You could use, but are not required to use, charts/graphs retrieved from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED web site as long as the data sources used by FRED to create those charts are government sources such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis or the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Cite a minimum of three scholarly, peer-reviewed references.

Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.

Submit your assignment.

Resources

· Center for Writing Excellence

· Reference and Citation Generator

· Grammar and Writing Guides

· Learning Team Toolkit

ECO 561 Wk 3 Team Assignment: Managing Fixed and Variable Costs for Organization

Resource: Managing Fixed and Variable Costs for Organization Grading Guide

Purpose of Assignment

In this week, students are learning about managing different types of economic costs. Organizations typically have either high fixed costs or low fixed costs, and it is important to understand how business decisions differ in organizations with high fixed costs from organizations with low fixed costs.

Assignment Steps

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel® and Word functions can be found on the Microsoft® Office website. There are also additional tutorials via the web offering support for Office products. Hoover’s Company Profiles by ProQuest located in the University Library

Choose two publicly-held organizations. One organization must have high fixed costs and low variable costs, and the other organization must have low fixed costs and high variable costs. Do NOT pick two companies in the same industry, as they will have similar costs structures. You need to chose from companies from different industries. (For example if one of the companies you chose is Walmart, the other company cannot be Target, Best Buy, or Amazon, etc. and vice versa)

Note: A publicly-held organization is a private-sector firm that is owned by stock holders. Companies with high fixed costs include manufacturing companies, such as automobile manufactures, whereas service companies, such as accounting firms, might have low fixed costs.

Create a minimum 8-slide Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation, including detailed speaker notes or voiceover, analyzing the methods of managing cost depending on the cost construction. Research the University Library for recent publications regarding each company and the industry data. The analysis should include the following:

· Analyze your two chosen companies’ cost construction. Do the companies have high fixed costs or low fixed costs? Do the companies have high variable costs or low variable costs? What evidence presents itself to support your findings?

· In Excel®, chart the relationship between total cost and the number of units produced (output) for each organization/company. Plot two lines on the graph – one line for each company you analyzed. Copy your graph from Excel® and paste it into your PowerPoint® presentation.

· Analyze currently used methods to minimize costs for the companies and provide recommendations how to improve the process of minimizing costs based on the available information for the industries in which the companies operate. Note: Companies are categorized by the industries they operate in. For example, Wal-Mart is a company operating within the retail trade industry. Hoover’s Company Profiles by ProQuest located in the University Library may be helpful.

Cite a minimum of three peer-reviewed sources.

Format the assignment consistent with APA guidelines.

Submit your assignment.

Note: Grades are awarded based upon individual contributions to the Learning Team assignment. Each Learning Team member receives a grade based upon his/her contributions to the team assignment. Students might receive different grades for the team assignment depending on their contributions to the team assignment.

Resources

· Center for Writing Excellence

· Reference and Citation Generator

· Grammar and Writing Guides

· Learning Team Toolkit

ECO 561 Wk 3 Individual: Research Analysis for Business

Resource: Research Analyses for Business Grading Guide

Purpose of Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is the creation of a research analysis. Every day, consumers make millions of decisions that impact the marketplace and influence firms’ decisions. Firms use economic concepts, models, and other “tools” of economics to help determine pricing, output, and profit maximization. As an MBA student of economics, you can apply the “tools” of economics to microeconomic and macroeconomic data to create recommendations for how firms can maximize revenue, profit and market share.

Assignment Steps

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel® and Word functions can be found on the Microsoft® Office website. There are also additional tutorials via the web offering support for Office products.

Scenario: Imagine you are a business consultant to a firm of your choice. You have been asked to analyze, advise, and create recommendations on how the firm can ensure its future success in its current market.

Work with your instructor to choose a firm that matches the following criteria: a publicly-traded company operating in the U.S. market. Note: A publicly-traded company is a private-sector firm owned by its shareholders/stock holders.

Prepare a minimum 1,050-word analysis of economic data and business data to explain how the core economic principles impact the sustainability of the firm and what actions the firm can take to ensure success.

Address the following:

· Identify the market structure your chosen firm operates in, analyze your chosen firm’s current market share, and identify the firm’s local/global competitors. Analyze the barriers to entry in this market to illustrate the potential for new competition and its impact on your firm’s future in the market. Hints: Be sure you review the barriers to entry discussed in the course text. You might consider presenting the data graphically.

· Identify and explain trends in current macroeconomic indicators for last three years including:

· Current stage of the business cycle.

· Real gross domestic product (GDP).

· Inflation as measured by the consumer price index (CPI).

· Unemployment rate.

· Federal funds rate.

· Current rate for borrowing funds such as the so-called “prime rate.” Note: A requirement of the Week 1 Influence of Economics on Household Decision Making report was to gather data on the CPI, GDP, and interest rates, so you should consider reviewing the feedback you received on the Week 1 report.

· Evaluate trends in demand over last three years and explain their impact on the industry and the firm. Include quarterly (last two quarters) and annual sales (last three years) figures for the product your firm sells. Create business strategies by analyzing information and data related to the demand for and supply of your firm’s product(s) to support your recommendation for the firm’s actions. Remember to include a graphical representation of the data and information used in your analysis.

· Examine available, current data and information, such as pricing and the availability of substitutes, and explain how you could determine the price elasticity of demand for your firm’s product. Assess how the price elasticity of demand impacts the firm’s pricing decisions and revenue growth.

· Apply the concepts of variable and fixed costs to your firm for informing its output decisions. For instance, analyze how different kinds of costs (labor, research and development, raw materials) affect the firm’s level of output.

· Based on the data gathered and analysis performed for this report write a conclusion in which you:

· Create business strategies, including price and non-price strategies, based on your market structure to ensure the market share and potential market expansions and explore global opportunities for your business in a dynamic business environment and provide recommendations.

· Develop a recommendation for how the firm can manage its future production by synthesizing the macroeconomic and microeconomic data presented.

· Propose how the firm’s position within the market and among its competitors will allow it to take your recommended action.

· Recommend strategies for the firm to sustain its success going forward by evaluating the findings from demand trends, price elasticity, current stage of the business cycle, and government policies.

Cite a minimum of three peer-reviewed references and a minimum of two government economic data sources/references.

Format your assignment consistent with APA guidelines.

Submit your assignment.

Resources

· Center for Writing Excellence

· Reference and Citation Generator

· Grammar and Writing Guides

· Learning Team Toolkit

ECO 561 Wk 4 Individual: Inflation and Analyses of Monetary Policies

Resource: Inflation and Analyses of Monetary Policies Grading Guide

Purpose of Assignment

This assignment will introduce students to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data and provide students with the skills to calculate inflation and interpret the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Note: The BLS is the primary source of information on inflation, but their data is re-posted in other sources, such as the St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED site, among others.

Assignment Steps

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel® and Word functions can be found on the Microsoft® Office website. There are also additional tutorials via the web offering support for Office products.

Use an internet search or the University Library to locate information on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Internet sites you might find useful include the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Federal Reserve of St. Louis FRED web site although you are allowed to use other sources.

Develop a minimum 700-word analysis of inflation by including the following:

· Choose a product or service you currently consume/use, such as apparel or educational services, that is included in the CPI’s “market basket.” Find the annual CPI index numbers for your chosen good or service for the years 1995, 2005, 2010, and 2015. Enter those index numbers in an Excel® file and calculate the percent change (inflation rates) in those index numbers from 1995 to 2005, from 1995 to 2010, and from 1995 to 2015.

· Analyze the trends in overall inflation over the last five years and whether your income has kept pace with inflation. How has inflation over the last five years affected you and/or your family?

· Discuss how a business manager, such as a human resources manager, might use CPI statistics.

Cite a minimum of three scholarly, peer-reviewed references.

Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.

Submit your assignment.

Resources

· Center for Writing Excellence

· Reference and Citation Generator

· Grammar and Writing Guides

· Learning Team Toolkit

ECO 561 Wk 5 Individual: Effectiveness of the Counter-Cyclical Policies

Purpose of Assignment

This assignment addresses how both monetary and fiscal policies have been used during the so-called Great Recession, which began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, to the present to moderate the business cycle.

Assignment Steps

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel® and Word functions can be found on the Microsoft® Office website. There are also additional tutorials via the web offering support for Office products.

Create a minimum 10-slide PowerPoint® presentation, including detailed speaker notes or voiceover, in which you analyze your choice of one the following markets or industries:

· The housing market

· Financial markets

· Commodity and stock markets

· An industry of your choice, such as the automobile industry, the airline industry, retail trade, or any other major industry that suffered heavy losses during the Great Recession

Your analysis will extend from the beginning of the Great Recession, which was December 2007, to the present and should include the following:

· An Excel® workbook with the following datasets:

· One dataset related to the U.S. housing industry such as housing starts, the FHFA housing price index, or another dataset of your choice related to the housing market.

· One dataset related to personal or household income or to personal or household saving.

· One dataset related to the labor market such as the unemployment rate, initial claims for unemployment insurance, or another dataset of your choice related to the U.S. labor force.

· One dataset related to production and business activity within the market or industry you choose to analyze.

· Find your datasets by using different internet data sources, including, but not limited to, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s FRED site, U.S. Dept. of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), U.S. Dept. of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau, and The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Using data results analyze the economic and sociological forces that drove the market equilibrium to unsustainable heights, commonly referred to as “bubbles,” and the shocks that brought the markets back down.

· Discuss specific changes in supply and demand within the markets and/or industries you chose to analyze.

· Examine prior government policies and legislation that might have exacerbated the impact of the shocks. Also, discuss government actions/regulations that might be undertaken, and/or have been undertaken, to moderate the effects of extreme economic fluctuations.

· Evaluate the actions of the federal government (fiscal policy) and the Federal Reserve (monetary policy) to restore the economy and foster economic growth. Base your evaluation on information available at Internet sources such as, but not limited to, the Fed’s The Economy Crisis and Response website as well as other appropriate sources found on the Internet and in the University Library. Be sure you address the effectiveness of those counter-cyclical policies.

Cite a minimum of three peer-reviewed sources and economic data not including the course text. Submit the data results in a separate Microsoft® Excel® file.

Format the assignment consistent with APA guidelines.

Submit your assignment.

Resources

· Center for Writing Excellence

· Reference and Citation Generator

· Grammar and Writing Guides

· Learning Team Toolkit

ECO 561 Wk 6 Individual: Signature Assignment: Challenges of Expansion to a Foreign Location

Purpose of Assignment

This week students will review and revise their Week 3 Research Analysis for Business Signature Assignment based on economic analysis and the feedback provided by their facilitator. Students will also expand their Week 3 analyses to evaluate the challenges of expanding their chosen company’s production to a foreign market.

About Your Signature Assignment

This signature assignment is designed to align with specific program student learning outcome(s) in your program. Program Student Learning Outcomes are broad statements that describe what students should know and be able to do upon completion of their degree. The signature assignments might be graded with an automated rubric that allows the University to collect data that can be aggregated across a location or college/school and used for program improvements.

Assignment Steps

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel® and Word functions can be found on the Microsoft® Office website. There are also additional tutorials via the web offering support for Office products.

Revise your Week 3 assignment, Research Analysis for Business, using the feedback provided by your facilitator. This Week 6 report should only include one conclusion, so you will need to rewrite the conclusion you included in your Week 3 assignment, Research Analysis for Business.

Select a foreign market in which to expand your chosen product. If you wish, you may use one of the countries your team analyzed in their Week 5 Comparative and Absolute Advantage Assignment.

Prepare a minimum1,750-word report addressing the points listed below. The use of tables and/or charts to display economic data over the time period discussed is highly encouraged, you may submit any economic data in Microsoft® Excel® format in a separate file. You may use the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. Dept. of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Federal Reserve of St. Louis’s FRED data, the CIA World Fact Book, World Bank data, and World Trade Organization, or other appropriate sources you might find on the Internet or in the University Library. The new sections of your report should:

· Evaluate current global economic conditions and their effects on macroeconomic indicators in your selected country. Provide forecasts for population growth, gross domestic product (GDP) growth, GDP per capita growth, export growth, and sales growth.

· Evaluate any competitors’ existing production in the chosen country.

· Assess sales forecasts in the selected country by using the Federal Reserve of St. Louis’s FRED data, the CIA World Fact Book, World Bank data, World Trade Organization, or other appropriate sources you might find on the Internet or in the University Library.

· Categorize the type of economy that exists in your selected country as closed, mixed, or market. What is the difference between these types of economies and how might this affect your expansion?

· Assess how your chosen country’s current credit market conditions, especially interest rates and the availability of financing, affect demand for your product or service and your planning or operating decision for your production in that country.

· Analyze the role of the selected country’s central bank on that country’s economy.

· Compare the availability, education, and job skills of the work force in the selected country. Discuss any additional challenges of international production, such as political stability, availability of government financing or other incentives, threat of capital controls, and exchange rate risks.

· Explain any additional supply chain challenges you anticipate if attempting to make your product in your chosen country and selling the product in other countries.

· Based on the data gathered and analysis performed for this report write a conclusion in which you:

· Develop a recommendation for how the firm can manage its future production by synthesizing the macroeconomic and microeconomic data presented.

· Propose how the firm’s position within the market and among its competitors will allow it to take your recommended action.

· Recommend strategies for the firm to sustain its success going forward by evaluating the findings from demand trends, price elasticity, current stage of the business cycle, and government.

· Recommend any comparative advantages your company will have over competitors currently operating in that country, and defend your position, either for or against, expanding your company’s production into your chosen country based on your research.

Integrate with the Week 3 Individual Assignment, and incorporate corrections and suggestions from the instructor’s feedback. The final report should be a minimum of 2,800 words.

Cite a minimum of three peer reviewed sources not including the textbook.

Include all peer-reviewed references and government economic data sources/references from Week 3.

Format your assignment consistent with APA guidelines.

Submit your assignment.

Resources

· �� Center for Writing Excellence

· Reference and Citation Generator

· Grammar and Writing Guides

· Learning Team Toolkit

ECO 561 Wk 5 Team Assignment: Comparative and Absolute Advantage

Resource: Comparative and Absolute Advantage Grading Guide

Purpose of Assignment

This assignment will help students master research and other analytical skills and will help students recognize reasons why economic growth varies by country. By using macroeconomic indicators, students will complete analysis and determine comparative and absolute advantage in different product categories for each country’s economy.

Assignment Steps

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel® and Word functions can be found on the Microsoft® Office website. There are also additional tutorials via the web offering support for Office products.

Develop a minimum 1,050-word analysis of the international economy in which you do the following:

· As a team, choose three countries, one from each group in the list below. Research each country, using resources such as the CIA World Fact Book, World Bank data, World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Federal Reserve Bank. Research each of your three chosen country’s economic, political, and cultural development:

Group 1

· USA

· Australia

· Canada

· Germany

Group 2

· Great Britain

· Italy

· Japan

· France

Group 3

· China

· Saudi Arabia

· Democratic Republic of Congo

· Kenya

· Analyze measures of economic growth and of comparative and absolute advantage in international trade.

· Use tables and/or graphs to compare the following economic statistics/indicators of your three chosen countries for the most recent year available and for 2009 (the trough of the last economic cycle):

· Country Real GDP

· Country CPI

· Country Real Exports

· Country Real Imports

· Country Unemployment Rate

· Country Industrial Production

· Discuss reasons why the economic growth of the three countries varies. How does international trade influence the strength of the economy worldwide?

· Discuss the following for each country:

· At least two products that have provided the country an absolute advantage in trade (if any).

· At least two products that have provided the country a comparative advantage in trade.

· Factors that might have prevented any of your three chosen countries from achieving absolute and/or comparative advantages.

Cite a minimum of three peer-reviewed sources.

Format the assignment consistent with APA guidelines.

Submit your assignment.

Note: Grades are awarded based upon individual contributions to the Learning Team assignment. Each Learning Team member receives a grade based upon his/her contributions to the team assignment. Not all students may receive the same grade for the team assignment.

Resources

· Center for Writing Excellence

· Reference and Citation Generator

· Grammar and Writing Guides

· Learning Team Toolkit

ECO 561 Wk 6 Individual Final Examination

Question 1

/ 5

Macroeconomics approaches the study of economics from the viewpoint of:

Question 2

/ 5

All else equal, a large decline in the real interest rate will shift the:

Question 3

/ 5

If an unintended increase in business inventories occurs at some level of GDP, then GDP:

Question 4

/ 5

The simple circular flow model shows that:

Question 5

/ 5

The two basic markets shown by the simple circular flow model are:

Question 6

/ 5

Two major virtues of the market system are that it:

Question 7

/ 5

Because the federal government typically provides disaster relief to farmers, many farmers do not buy crop insurance even through it is federally subsidized. This illustrates:

Question 8

/ 5

Buyers will opt out of markets in which:

Question 9

/ 5

Which of the following statements best describes the 12 Federal Reserve Banks?

Question 10

/ 5

Research for industrially advanced countries indicates that:

Question 11

/ 5

Normal profit is:

Question 12

/ 5

Pure monopolists may obtain economic profits in the long run because:

Question 13

/ 5

A monopolistically competitive industry combines elements of both competition and monopoly. The monopoly element results from:

Question 14

/ 5

As output increases, total variable cost:

Question 15

/ 5

The business cycle depicts:

Question 16

/ 5

The term “recession” describes a situation where:

Question 17

/ 5

Mrs. Arnold is spending all her money income by buying bottles of soda and bags of pretzels in such amounts that the marginal utility of the last bottle is 60 utils and the marginal utility of the last bag is 30 utils. The prices of soda and pretzels are $.60 per bottle and $.40 per bag respectively. It can be concluded that:

Question 18

/ 5

Suppose you have a limited money income and you are purchasing products A and B, whose prices happen to be the same. To maximize your utility, you should purchase A and B in such amounts that:

Question 19

/ 5

Countercyclical discretionary fiscal policy calls for:

Question 20

/ 5

Contractionary fiscal policy is so named because it:

Question 21

/ 5

Assume the reserve ratio is 25 percent and Federal Reserve Banks buy $4 million of U.S. securities from the public, which deposits this amount into checking accounts. As a result of these transactions, the supply of money is:

Question 22

/ 5

If the Federal Reserve System buys government securities from commercial banks and the public:

Question 23

/ 5

In order for mutually beneficial trade to occur between two otherwise isolated nations:

Question 24

/ 5

The primary gain from international trade is:

Question 25

/ 5

The fact that international specialization and trade based on comparative advantage can increase world output is demonstrated by the reality that:

Question 26

/ 5

In the theory of comparative advantage, a good should be produced in that nation where:

Question 27

/ 5

Why are economists concerned about inflation?

Question 28

/ 5

If the prices of all goods and services rose, but the quantity produced remained unchanged, what would happen to nominal and real GDP?

Question 29

/ 5

Which of the following will generate a demand for country X’s currency in the foreign exchange market?

Question 30

/ 5

Which of the following have substantially equivalent effects on a nation’s volume of exports and imports?

#ECO/561: Economics Entire Course

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investmart007 · 7 years ago

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SANTA FE, Texas | Family, friends recall shooting victims' optimism, humor

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/U0r1NV

SANTA FE, Texas | Family, friends recall shooting victims' optimism, humor

SANTA FE, Texas (AP) — Hardworking. Funny. Loving. Grieving family and friends recalled the endearing qualities of some of the victims of Friday’s mass shooting at a Texas high school, as authorities on Saturday released the names of the 10 killed.

Eight of the 10 were students: Kimberly Vaughan, Shana Fisher, Angelique Ramirez, Christian Riley Garcia, Jared Black, Sabika Sheikh, Christopher Jake Stone and Aaron Kyle McLeod. The other two, Glenda Perkins and Cynthia Tisdale, were teachers.

At least 13 people were injured in the attack at the high school in Santa Fe, which is about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southeast of Houston. A 17-year-old student, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, is being held on murder charges.

Here are some of the victims’ stories: ___ GLENDA PERKINS

Perkins for years had been a substitute teacher at Santa Fe High School, where her grandchildren are students.

Student Jay Mann, a junior, tells the Houston Chronicle she always had a smile on her face, took the time to learn students’ names and became part of the fabric of the school.

Mann says she had a great attitude and “never got mad at anybody for doing something stupid.”

An all-female Galveston Mardi Gras krewe, Tutu Live Krewe, has posted on Facebook that Perkins, along with her daughter, was a member of their marching group. ___ ANGELIQUE RAMIREZ

The senior pastor at Dayspring Church says Ramirez was a member of the Santa Fe church’s youth ministry.

Pastor Brad Drake says she had occasionally accompanied a younger brother to the ministry at the church where her parents are among the some 150 people to attend Sunday services.

Drake on Sunday described the 15-year-old as “a sweet young lady, had a style all of her own.” He says she “almost always had a new hairstyle.”

An aunt, Sylvia Pritchett, said in a Facebook post she has “a broken heart and a soul that just can’t process all this right now.” ___ JARED BLACK

Black turned 17 on Wednesday and was looking forward to a party this weekend at his family’s just-purchased, above-ground swimming pool.

An older brother, Anthony, from Odessa, Texas, was planning to visit with his wife and kids. Jared also had a younger brother, Houston, 13.

The Houston Chronicle reports his family now is planning for his funeral.

His stepfather, Travis Stanich, tells the newspaper Black took daily medication for attention deficit disorder and was quiet and kind and loved art, video games and sci-fi, wrestling and wolves.

Stanich called him “a great kid” who was creative, drew cartoons and loved people. ___ SHANA FISHER

The mother of 16-year-old Shana Fisher believes that her daughter was intentionally targeted by Pagourtzi.

Sadie Rodriguez said Pagourtzis repeatedly made advances toward Fisher in the four months leading up to the shooting. Pagourtzis was an ex-boyfriend of Fisher’s best friend, she said.

“He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no,” said Rodriguez over Facebook Messenger. “He continued to get more aggressive.”

Rodriguez said that the week before the shooting, Fisher “stood up to him” by “embarrass(ing) him in class.” Rodriguez gave no other details.

Rodriguez described her daughter as “shy and sweet” with a passion for video games. Rodriguez shared a video of Fisher from 2015, in which the teen contemplates whether or not she’ll continue making gaming videos because her computer keeps crashing.

The day of the shooting, Rodriguez wrote in a Facebook status to “love like (you’re) getting one more day with them.”

“Anything can happen,” she wrote. “I will no longer get to see my baby my 1st born anymore.” ___ CHRIS STONE

Stone was among a group of students who blocked the door to try to prevent the gunman from entering their art classroom, freshman Abel San Miguel, who was in the class, told The Associated Press.

The shooter fired his shotgun through the door, though, striking Stone in the chest, he said.

Stone was outgoing, “really funny” and had a lot of friends, said Branden Auzston, a 17-year-old junior at Santa Fe High. He said he knew Stone for about three years, and Stone was one of his best friends.

Auzston’s mother, Nicole Auzston, described Stone as a part of her family.

“We would have done anything for him,” she said. “He’s just a great kid.”

Robert Stone told the AP by phone Saturday that his family was grieving his nephew’s death and requested privacy. ___ SABIKA SHEIKH

Abdul Aziz Sheikh was expecting his daughter Sabika to return home to Pakistan in a few weeks for Eid al-Fitr, the three-day holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Instead, he learned that his oldest child was among those killed in the mass shooting at Santa Fe High School, where Sabika arrived as an exchange student last August.

Surrounded by mourning friends and family at his home in Karachi on Saturday, Abdul Aziz Sheikh fought back tears as he relived his frantic efforts to check whether his daughter was safe half a world away. She wasn’t returning his calls and neither were her friends. He eventually learned from the exchange program that she was among the dead.

“We are still in a state of denial. We can’t believe it. It’s like a nightmare,” Sheikh told The Associated Press.

He said his daughter was a hard-working and accomplished student who aspired to work in civil service, hoping one day to join Pakistan’s Foreign Office.

“One should not lose his heart by such kind of incidents,” he said. “One should not stop going for education to the U.S. or U.K., or China, or anywhere. One must go for education undeterred. But controlling such incidents is the responsibility of the respective governments.” ___ CYNTHIA TISDALE

Leia Olinde said Tisdale, her aunt and a substitute teacher at the school, was like a mother to her and helped her shop for wedding dresses last year.

“She helped me put it on, she helped fix my hair,” Olinde said through tears. “She was wonderful. She was just so loving,” said Olinde, 25. “I’ve never met a woman who loved her family so much.”

She said Tisdale was married to her husband for close to 40 years and that they had three children and eight grandchildren.

Tisdale’s house was the center of family gatherings and she loved cooking Thanksgiving dinner and decorating her house, Olinde said. Olinde’s fiance, Eric Sanders, said of Tisdale that “words don’t explain her lust for life and the joy she got from helping people.” ___ AARON KYLE MCLEOD

McLeod, a freshman who went by Kyle, could always be counted on to make light of any situation, said close friend Kali Reeves, who added she wouldn’t have been surprised if the 15-year-old “made a joke about getting shot” if he were still alive.

Reeves, 15, said she knew McLeod for years and became close friends with him in the eighth grade. She said he always had a smile on his face and loved to hang out with his friends.

“He was never one to be a sad or down person, he always had to joke or laugh about things,” she said. “He was just outgoing and super sweet. He definitely didn’t deserve this.”

Reeves heard that her friend had been shot as she was evacuating Santa Fe High School. She joked to her boyfriend that if she FaceTimed McLeod, he would have “made a joke about him getting shot,” adding that “he just always looked on the bright side of things.” Reeves said she texted McLeod throughout the day to check up on him. She sent him one final text, saying she hopes he “gets better.”

Shortly after, she checked Facebook and learned he was one of the 10 killed. ___ JOHN BARNES

School police officer John Barnes was shot in the arm when he confronted the gunman. A bullet damaged the bone and a major blood vessel around Barnes’ elbow, which required surgery to repair, said David Marshall, chief nursing officer at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

Barnes was the first to engage Pagourtzis, according to Marshall. Walter Braun, the school district’s chief of police, said Saturday that the last he had heard, Barnes was in critical condition. ___ ROME SHUBERT

Sophomore baseball player Rome Shubert said the gunman walked into his classroom and tossed something onto desks.

Shubert told the Houston Chronicle that he then heard “three loud pops” before the attacker fled into the hall. Shubert said he realized he’d been wounded as he was running out the back door.

Shubert said he was hit in the back of his head with what he says was a bullet, but that it “missed everything vital.” He also tweeted that he was OK and stable. ___ Zimmerman reported from Springfield, Illinois. Associated Press writers Sudhin Thanawala in San Francisco and Amanda Lee Myers in Los Angeles and Michael Graczyk in Houston contributed to this report. ___ This story has been corrected to fix the spelling of the suspect’s name in the first segment.

By JUAN LOZANO and SARAH ZIMMERMAN , By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC(R.A)

#Dimitrios Pagourtzis #Glenda Perkins #Los Angeles and Michael Graczyk #Santa Fe #Texas #Texas high school #TodayNews

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cellandcomputerrepair · 3 days ago

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#St. Louis Computer Repair center

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barrami-blog · 7 years ago

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smexygilan-blog · 7 years ago

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hoody-spooktacular-blog · 7 years ago

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betterhomesandgardensmagazi-blog · 7 years ago

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kathleenseiber · 5 years ago

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Special food boosts gut microbiomes of malnourished children

A type of therapeutic food, specifically designed to repair the gut microbiomes of malnourished children, is superior to standard therapy, according to a clinical trial in Bangladesh.

The new approach to addressing the pressing global health problem of childhood malnutrition focuses on selectively boosting key growth-promoting gut microbes using ingredients present in affordable, culturally acceptable foods.

Reported in two studies in Science, the work supports the notion that healthy growth of infants and children is inexorably linked to healthy development of their gut communities following birth.

“We found that children who are malnourished have incompletely formed gut microbial communities compared with their healthy counterparts” says senior author Jeffrey I. Gordon, professor and director of the Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“Therefore, we set about to design therapeutic foods to repair this immaturity and to determine whether such repair would restore healthy growth.”

Twice a day

The clinical trial included 63 Bangladeshi children, 12-18 months of age, diagnosed with moderate acute malnutrition, meaning the children were ill but not close to death. Researchers randomly assigned the children to one of four treatment groups. Children in three of the groups each received one of the three newly designed therapeutic foods, while those in the fourth group received a standard therapeutic food not designed for its effects on the gut microbiome.

The International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research locally produced all foods for the trial. Mothers brought the children twice daily to a nutritional rehabilitation center and administered the therapeutic foods under the supervision of health-care workers.

A set of measuring tools, developed through advances in genomic medicine, provided a new, much more comprehensive definition of molecular features associated with malnutrition, its underlying mechanisms, and the effectiveness of treatment.

The winning treatment

One of the therapeutic foods stood out from the rest, even in this relatively short one-month trial. When scientists measured 1,300 blood proteins, including those intimately involved in directing bone growth, development of the brain, immune function, and metabolism in various tissues, they found that this food prototype produced a pronounced shift toward a healthy state compared with what they observed in the other three groups of children.

At the end of the study, the researchers also found that, unlike in the three other treatment groups, the gut microbial communities residing in the intestines of children receiving this lead therapeutic food had undergone a reconfiguration and more closely resembled microbial communities found in age-matched healthy children living in the same locale.

The formulation contained, among other components, a mixture of nutrients from chickpeas, soy, bananas, and peanuts.

150 million children under 5

Childhood malnutrition is a massive global health problem, affecting 150 million children under age 5 worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Many studies have shown that malnutrition is the result of many factors, with reliable access to adequate amounts of affordable, nutritious food being one but not the only factor.

Therapeutic foods exist to increase the amount of key nutrients children consume. Malnourished children who receive these foods are less likely to die, but other consequences of malnutrition have remained largely unresponsive to treatment, including stunted growth, impaired immunity, and reduced cognitive function. Scientists didn’t design these foods based on a consideration of their effects on the development of the gut microbiome, Gordon says.

The new microbiome-directed therapeutic foods emanated from earlier studies of gut microbial community development in healthy children living in Bangladesh.

Several years ago, researchers discovered that children with malnutrition had immature gut communities—ones that appeared younger than their age-matched healthy counterparts and researchers found that conventional therapeutic foods failed to repair this immaturity in the malnourished children they had treated, says Tahmeed Ahmed, the director of nutrition and clinical services at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research.

Gordon’s group went on to transplant immature communities from malnourished children, and normally maturing communities from healthy children, into mice raised under sterile conditions. The results revealed that immature communities associated with reduced weight gain, defective bone development, plus abnormal metabolic and immune functions in the recipient animals. These findings provided early evidence that failure to form a normal microbial community may be a cause rather than simply an effect of malnutrition.

“There is uncertainty about what foods are best to administer during the period of complementary feeding—when children transition from exclusive milk feeding to solid foods,” Gordon says.

“Our studies were inspired by the notion that these commonly used, affordable, culturally acceptable complementary foods could contain ingredients coveted by key microbes that are underrepresented and underperforming in the gut microbiomes of malnourished children. These microbes were our therapeutic targets.”

Bone, brain, and immune system

The study provides the first evidence that a therapeutic food, developed specifically to support growth and expansion of gut microbes linked to healthy microbiome development, has beneficial effects outside the gut related to many aspects of healthy growth.

These effects involve key mediators of metabolism, and of bone, brain, and immune system development—organ systems that have been very difficult to repair in malnourished children by supplementing their diet with traditional therapeutic foods.

In the first paper, researchers describe how they first used germ-free mice, and then germ-free piglets, colonized with gut microbial community members from Bangladeshi children to screen a series of diets comprised of complementary food ingredients used in Bangladesh.

They formulated Microbiome-Directed Complementary Food prototypes that could repair immature microbial communities from malnourished Bangladeshi children in both these animal models and improve the health of the animals. Scientists then tested these prototypes in the double-blind controlled feeding study described above.

In the second paper, first author Arjun S. Raman describes development of new computational methods, based on methods originally developed by the field of econophysics to analyze how fluctuations in the economy affect features of complex, dynamic financial markets.

The approach provided new, generally applicable ways of characterizing the organization of human gut communities—their normal development, how they are perturbed in disease states such as malnutrition, and how they respond to therapeutic interventions designed to repair them.

“The goal of human microbiome research is not simply to describe the component parts of a microbial community but rather to characterize how the components interact with one another to shape community functions,” Gordon says. “Complicating matters, the number of possible interactions between the components in a gut community is literally astronomical.”

The researchers wanted to be able to focus their attention, finding ways to reduce the number of components or features of the microbiome to a minimum number that could portray in an informative way the organizational properties of healthy and diseased gut communities, Raman says.

Studying the microbiomes of healthy Bangladeshi children sampled monthly from birth through five years, and using the new computational method, they identified a network of 15 gut bacterial community members that consistently interacted with one another. They named this network an ecogroup.

Lasting benefits?

The components of the ecogroup provided an accurate way of describing normal gut development of infants and children living in Bangladesh as well as several other low-income countries. It further served as a sensitive and accurate way of determining how severely disrupted microbial communities are in children with moderate and severe malnutrition, and the degree to which they are repaired with various treatments.

“A longer and larger clinical trial is currently underway at two sites in Bangladesh to see if the new Microbiome-Directed Complementary Food has sustained benefits,” Ahmed says. “This trial includes children with moderate malnutrition as well as children with severe malnutrition treated with conventional therapy but left with incompletely repaired microbiomes, stunting and various other growth impairments.”

“It is possible that some children may have gut microbial communities so damaged that a food-based intervention alone won’t be sufficient. So our Washington University and International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research team is interested in studying the possibility of giving the specific beneficial organisms—or even the beneficial products those microbes make, as we become more knowledgeable about what those are—in combination with a Microbiome-Directed Complementary Food.

“That could be a second line of defense. Our studies also present the possibility of monitoring development of gut microbial communities and catching deviations from normal development earlier in life, giving us opportunities for prevention.”

Efforts designed to repair the perturbed microbial communities of malnourished children hold the promise of revealing more informed guidelines for feeding children in the first several years of life so that they can develop healthy microbiomes, Gordon says.

“We need to be effective stewards of the precious microbial resources of our children. If we are, the effects may be long-lived and herald a new dimension to preventive medicine—one that starts with their developing microbiomes.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Washington University School of Medicine Physician Scientist Training Program, the Russian Science Foundation, and Agilent Technologies supported the work.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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