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Civil society can help make sure that we in America do not turn our back on fundamental values, or forget about those who lack market and political power.

Listening to beneficiaries should be part and parcel of any initiative that seeks to help others. Part of a series produced for SSIR with the support of the Hewlett Foundation.

Impact investing makes sense in theory, but there are good reasons, particularly for large foundations, to pause before putting a lot of resources into it.

Funders should be wary of the latest fad of making large grants for quick results and abandoning long-term commitments to the many organizations working on our most important problems., Stanford Social Innovation Review, 15(3), 61-62

A new attitude toward collaboration could help funders achieve greater long-term gains.

The relationship between anxious/depressed traits and neuromaturation remains largely unstudied. Characterizing this relationship during healthy neurodevelopment is critical to understanding processes associated with the emergence of child/adolescent onset mood/anxiety disorders. In this study, mixed-effects models were used to determine longitudinal cortical thickness correlates of Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and Young Adult Self Report Anxious/Depressed scores in healthy children. Analyses included 341 subjects from 4.9 to 22.3 year-old with repeated MRI at up to 3 time points, at 2-year intervals (586 MRI scans). There was a significant “CBCL Anxious/Depressed by Age” interaction on cortical thickness in the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), including the medial orbito-frontal, gyrus rectus, and subgenual anterior cingulate areas. Anxious/Depressed scores were negatively associated with thickness at younger ages (

Steps funders can take to tackle partisan gridlock and solve social problems at scale.

Although reduced working memory brain activation has been reported in several brain regions of cocaine-dependent subjects compared with controls, very little is known about whether there is altered connectivity of working memory pathways in cocaine dependence. This study addresses this issue by using functional magnetic resonance imaging-based stochastic dynamic causal modeling (DCM) analysis to study the effective connectivity of 19 cocaine-dependent subjects and 14 healthy controls while performing a working memory task. Stochastic DCM is an advanced method that has recently been implemented in SPM8 that can obtain improved estimates, relative to deterministic DCM, of hidden neuronal causes before convolution with the hemodynamic response. Thus, stochastic DCM may be less influenced by the confounding effects of variations in blood oxygen level-dependent response caused by disease or drugs. Based on the significant regional activation common to both groups and consistent with previous working memory activation studies, seven regions of interest were chosen as nodes for DCM analyses. Bayesian family level inference, Bayesian model selection analyses, and Bayesian model averaging (BMA) were conducted. BMA showed that the cocaine-dependent subjects had large differences compared with the control subjects in the strengths of prefrontal-striatal modulatory (B matrix) DCM parameters. These findings are consistent with altered cortical-striatal networks that may be related to reduced dopamine function in cocaine dependence. As far as we are aware, this is the first between-group DCM study using stochastic methodology.

Several in vivo quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) techniques have been proposed as surrogate measures to map iron content in the human brain. The majority of in vivo qMRI iron mapping methods utilized the age-dependent iron content data based on postmortem data. In this work we fused atlas-based human brain volumetry obtained on a large cohort of healthy adults using FreeSurfer with T2 relaxation time measurements. We provide a brain atlas-based T2 relaxation time map which was subsequently used along with published postmortem iron content data to obtain a map of iron content in subcortical and cortical gray matter. We have also investigated the sensitivity of the linear model relating transverse relaxation rate with published iron content to the number of regions used. Our work highlights the challenges encountered upon using the simple model along with postmortem data to infer iron content in several brain regions where postmortem iron data are scant (e.g. corpus callosum, amygdale).