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The article reports that the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) issued a white paper on October 6, 2016 stating social stigma as a major issue in accessing mental health treatment. Topics discussed include the potential of marriage and family therapists in rendering mental health services on issues like depression, anxiety and addiction, the approach of CAMFT in promoting access to mental health treatment, and the formation of a public outreach committee.

In this paper, the sensitivity of the neural network (NN) outputs to device parameter uncertainties (non-idealities) in inverter-based memristor (IM) crossbar neuromorphic circuits is mathematically modeled and verified using exhaustive circuit and system-level simulations. The NN sensitivity is obtained by modeling the sensitivity of the IM neuron output to the non-idealities of its circuit elements. The analysis reveals a higher sensitivity of the output voltage of the IM neuron to the non-idealities of the inverters compared to the conductance variation of the memristors. Among the inverter non-idealities, horizontal shift of the inverters voltage transfer characteristic (VTC) shows the highest impact on the output voltage of the neuron. To reduce the accuracy loss due to the variations, a training approach which includes a sensitivity term in the cost function of the training phase, is suggested. The achievable improvements through the said NN training approach are evaluated. In the evaluation, the California Housing, MNIST, and Fashion MNIST datasets are employed. The results show up to 50% reduction in the NN output variations in the presence of circuit elements’ non-idealities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensuring the human right to water requires monitoring at national or subnational levels, but few comprehensive frameworks exist for industrialized contexts. This paper introduces a subnational-level framework - known as the California Human Right to Water Framework and Data Tool (CalHRTW) - developed by the authors at the California EPA's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. This paper has two objectives: (1) to present the theoretical foundations and methodology used to develop the first version of CalHRTW (CalHRTW 1.0) and (2) to showcase how results can be used. CalHRTW 1.0 measures three components of the human right to water: drinking water quality, accessibility and affordability for community water systems in California. Nine individual indicators grouped by component, and three indices that summarize component-level outcomes are used to quantify system-level results. CalHRTW allows users to: (1) summarize system-level conditions statewide and identify challenges, (2) explore social equity implications and (3) centralize information for planning. CalHRTW draws on approaches from existing international monitoring efforts and complements existing California efforts by being the first US effort to comprehensively and explicitly monitor the HRTW under one umbrella. This work offers other US states and countries a model to build monitoring efforts to realize the human right to water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stormwater utility fees provide dedicated revenues for managing stormwater. In setting fees, household-level affordability should be considered. Existing research does not address methods to evaluate the affordability of stormwater utility fees, especially alongside other household water costs. This paper aims to fill that gap. We present a scenario-based approach to evaluate household affordability of stormwater utility fees in a municipality, which considers other essential household water service charges. We estimate the relative contribution of stormwater utility fees to total household water costs and evaluate affordability across income brackets by integrating data for socioeconomic status, land use, water utility charges, and impervious surface cover. Using data for a case study region, results indicate that stormwater utility fees are small contributors to overall household urban water costs and comprise no more than 2% of the median household income across nearly all income quintiles. For low-income households, stormwater charges only exceed 1% of the household income for the lowestincome brackets (,$20,000) and still represent a small portion of household water costs. The analysis demonstrates a generalizable approach that can be applied everywhere when evaluating a stormwater utility fee as a funding strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the letters of gratitude from cadet members of the U.S. Naval Sea Cadet Corps Sacramento Division in California who received grant funding from the Navy League STEM Institute to attend the Aerospace Museum of California's (AMC) summer Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Camp. The cadets share their experience and the lessons they learned including about engineering, paper rocket building, planets and stars.

The article discusses the benefits of plastic bags, focusing on the ban or tax on plastic use in countries such as South Africa, Bangladesh and several U.S. states. It is noted that San Francisco in California, was the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags due to its environmental effects such as water pollution and water disposal. It states that the major concern for banning plastic grocery bags is the safety of marine life; however the technology behind plastic bag creation has won Nobel Prize.

The article discusses the importance of managed rangelands in the San Francisco Bay Area, California to wildlife and native plants at a time of climate change. Topics include the land trust movement and their working lands programs like the locavore food movement, and the Conservation Lands Network report of the Bay Area Open Space Council on its plan for preserving biodiversity. It also references the paper "The California Serengeti" by California State Parks senior ecologist E. Breck Parkman.

The papers in this special section consists of expanded versions of six papers presented at the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), held in San Jose, CA, USA, in September 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• Criticality condition in the case of seismic fluctuations is due to the interaction. • We make use of geographical data to show that. • Effect of making the fault under observation move towards the breaking condition. • Fault interaction makes the temporal complexity parameter μ shift. • Namely the time distance between two consecutive critical fluctuations. We study seismic fluctuations in California and Hindu Kush using Diffusion Entropy Analysis (DEA), a technique designed to detect the action of crucial events in time series generated by complex dynamical systems. The time distance between two consecutive crucial events is described by an inverse power law distribution density with a power index μ close to the value μ = 2 , corresponding to an ideal 1/ f noise. DEA was used in the recent past to study neurophysiological processes that in the healthy condition are found to generate 1/ f noise and μ close to 2. In this paper we find that in both California and Hindu-Kush the seismic fluctuations of extended areas, implying the action of many faults, yield μ ≈ 2.1, while the regions involving the action of only one fault, or of a very small number of faults, are characterized by μ ≈ 2.4. This observation leads us to make the conjecture that the seismic criticality is due to the interaction of many faults. To support this conjecture we adopt a dynamical model for fault dynamics proposed by Braun and Tosatti and we extend it to describe the interaction between many faults. The DEA applied to surrogate sequences generated by this dynamical model, yields μ = 2.37 for a single fault and μ = 2.16 for many interacting faults, in a better agreement with the observation of real seismic fluctuations. This result supports our conjecture and suggests interesting applications to neurophysiological and sociological processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the white paper from Saïd Business School's Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation in Great Britain and the San Diego School of Law in California which discusses the effect of online media and social network to the reputation of businesses and governments. Topics include the reasons why people post their views online, the influence of information network, and how organizations can manage biased information and its threat to their reputation.

The article discusses Northern California based nonprofit The Crayon Initiative (TCI) promoting the arts for children encouraging donate unwanted crayons and recycling them into new ones.