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This study examines the intergenerational consequences of court-imposed monetary sanctions for parents and children. Research on punishment and families has generally focused on imprisonment, yet monetary sanctions are far more commonly imposed. We extend research on intergenerational financial exchanges to conceptualize payment of monetary sanctions as stigmatized transfers, analyzing 70 semi-structured interviews with debtholders in Minnesota. Adult children reported perceiving anger and financial strain from family members who provide assistance. Those with minor children expressed hopelessness, stress, and financial strain, as they prioritized basic needs over meeting their outstanding financial obligations. We conclude by discussing the implications of these intergenerational impacts for research, law, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite both scholarly and popular claims that citizen journalism (CJ) represents a growing democratizing force in the journalistic field, recent scholarship in the area has noted the decline of the organizational population of CJ. In this paper, we investigate how individual characteristics of sites and the dynamics of larger organizational population affect a CJ site’s risk of experiencing a mortality. Drawing on the largest sample to date of US-based English-language CJ sites, this study examines the risk of site mortality through an event history framework. Findings indicate that the strongest predictor of a site’s mortality is the age of the site, consistent with organizational population theory’s ‘liability of newness.’ We also find that for-profit and community-based sites have lower rates of site mortality, indicating that adopting legitimate conventions of journalism may serve as a protective buffer to site death. The results offer mixed evidence on whether CJ has become more professionalized via attrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous research has considered patterns of homogeneity and heterogeneity in the journalistic field, existing literature has largely ignored the factors that contribute to the growth and contraction of the field. Using citizen journalism (CJ) as a case study, we examine how four forces – organizational population dynamics, technological innovations, exogenous political events, and endogenous disruptions elsewhere in the field – shaped the growth of CJ over time and, consequently, the journalistic field. Using a snowball sampling method, we collected a “near-population” of U.S.-based, English-language CJ sites (n = 1829) to measure yearly density and rates of foundings and mortalities. The population of CJ sites increased through most of the period, foundings declined after a spike in 2005, and mortalities rose dramatically after 2010. The results provide evidence that organizational population and technological change affected the size of the population of CJ sites, while political upheaval and disruptions within professional journalism held less sway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regulation of host-pathogen interactions during Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection remains unresolved. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are important regulators of the immune system, and so we used a systems biology approach to construct an miRNA regulatory network activated in macrophages during Mtb infection. Our network comprises 77 putative miRNAs that are associated with temporal gene expression signatures in macrophages early after Mtb infection. In this study, we demonstrate a dual role for one of these regulators, miR-155. On the one hand, miR-155 maintains the survival of Mtbinfected macrophages, thereby providing a niche favoring bacterial replication; on the other hand, miR-155 promotes the survival and function of Mtb-specific T cells, enabling an effective adaptive immune response. MiR-155-induced cell survival is mediated through the SH2 domain-containing inositol 5-phosphatase 1 (SHIP1)/protein kinase B (Akt) pathway. Thus, dual regulation of the same cell survival pathway in innate and adaptive immune cells leads to vastly different outcomes with respect to bacterial containment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]