The Colorado Immersion Training in Community Engagement (CIT) program supports a change in the research trajectory of junior faculty, early career researchers, and doctoral students toward Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). CIT is within the Community Engagement and Health Equity Core (CEHE) at the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI), an NIH-funded Clinical and Translational Science award. This Translational Science Case Study reports on CIT’s impacts from 2010 to 2019. A team from The Evaluation Center at the University of Colorado Denver utilized four primary data sources: administrative records, participant written reflections, participant and Community Research Liaison (CRL) interviews, and community partner surveys. Data were analyzed using the framework of CBPR principles and the conceptual logic model. CIT trained 122 researchers in CBPR through embedded education within various Colorado communities. CIT Alumni secured ∼$8,723,000 in funding between CCTSI Pilot Grants and external funding. Also, CIT alumni implemented CBPR into curricula and community programming and developed deep, lasting relationships. Further key learnings include the crucial role of CRLs in building relationships between university and community partners and how CIT may serve as a mechanism to improve historical mistrust between communities and universities.

Rebels regularly provide public services, especially legal services, but the consequences of such programs are unclear. We argue that rebel courts can boost civilian support for insurgency and augment attack capacity by increasing the legitimacy of the rebellion, creating a vested interest in rebel rule, or enabling rebel coercion of the civilian population. We study the impact of the Taliban's judiciary by leveraging cross-district and over-time variation in exposure to Taliban courts using a trajectory-balancing design. We find that rebel courts reduced civilian support for the government and increased it for the Taliban, and were associated with more attacks and more coalition casualties. Exploring mechanisms, we find that courts resolved major interpersonal disputes between civilians but also facilitated more insurgent intimidation of civilians, and that changes in public opinion are unlikely to have been driven solely by social desirability bias. Our findings help explain the logic of rebel courts and highlight the complex interactions between warfare and institutional development in weak states.

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: The purpose of this study was to characterize the pharmacokinetics of phosphatidylethanol (PEth) 16:0/20:4 homolog in uncoagulated, human blood samples taken from 18 participants in a clinical laboratory setting after consumption of 2 doses of ethanol. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Male and female participants received either 0.4 or 0.8 g/kg oral doses of ethanol during a 15-minute period. Blood samples were collected before and throughout 6 hours immediately after alcohol administration, then after 2, 4, 7, 11, and 14 days of administration day. PEth 16:0/20:4 levels were quantified by liquid mass spectrometry. Breath ethanol concentrations were measure concurrently with each blood collection during the administration day, as well as transdermal ethanol concentrations monitored constantly before, during and after ethanol administration day. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: (1) Single doses of 0.4 and 0.8 g ethanol/kg produced proportional increases in BrAC and PEth 16:0/20:4 levels; (2) the increase of Peth 16:0/20:4 from base line to Cmax was less than either PEth 16:0/18:1 or PEth 16:0/18:2 during the 6-hour period after ethanol administration; (3) the mean rate of formation of PEth 16:0/20:4 was lower than those of the other 2 homologs; (4) the mean half-life of PEth 16:0/20:4 was 2.18 days, which was shorter than that of either PEth 16:0/18:1 and PEth 16:0/18:2, which were 6.80 and 6.62, respectively. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: The results of this study further confirm that PEth homologs are a sensitive biomarker for ethanol consumption. The measurement of three PEth homologs appears to provide additional information about the level and time frame of drinking.

Acetolactate synthase (ALS)-inhibiting herbicide carryover in soil can severely affect sugarbeets grown in the year(s) following application. Two newly developed imidazolinone-resistant (IMI-R) sugarbeet somatic cell selections (Sir-13 and 93R30B) were examined for magnitude of resistance and extent of cross-resistance to other classes of ALS inhibitors and compared to a previously developed sulfonylurea-resistant (SU-R) selection, Sur. In vitro shoot culture tests indicated Sir-13 resistance was specific to imidazolinone (IMI) herbicides at approximately a 100-fold resistance compared to the sensitive control sugarbeet. Sur was 10,000-fold resistant to the sulfonylurea (SU) herbicide, chlorsulfuron, and 40-fold resistant to the triazolopyrimidine sulfonanilide (TP) herbicide, flumetsulam, but not cross-resistant to the IMI herbicides. 93R30B was selected for IMI-R from a plant homozygous for the SU-R allele, Sur, and displayed similar in vitro SU-R and TP-R as Sur, but also displayed a very high resistance to various IMI herbicides (400- to 3,600-fold). Compared to the sensitive control, Sir-13 was 300- and > 250-fold more resistant to imazethapyr and imazamox residues in soil, respectively. Response by whole plants to postemergence herbicide applications was similar to that observed in shoot cultures. Sir-13 exhibited > 100-fold resistance to imazethapyr as well as imazamox, and 93R30B showed > 250-fold resistance to both herbicides. 93R30B showed great enough resistance to imazamox to merit consideration of imazamox for use as a herbicide in these sugarbeets. Sir-13 showed a two- to threefold higher level of resistance in the homozygous vs. heterozygous state, indicating that like most ALS-inhibitor resistance traits, it was semidominantly inherited.

In vitro acetolactate synthase (ALS) activity from three commercial imidazolinone-resistant corn hybrids (ICI 8692 IT, Pioneer 3751 IR, and Ciba 4393 IMR) was compared to imidazolinone-sensitive isogenic hybrid controls for sensitivity to 11 herbicides representing four classes of ALS-inhibiting herbicide chemistry. Acetolactate synthase activity from Pioneer IR and Ciba IMR was cross-resistant to all four classes of ALS inhibitors, ranging from 48- to 5,000-fold. The ICI IT hybrid displayed only four- to eightfold resistance to the six imidazolinone herbicides and the pyrimidinylthiobenzoate herbicide, pyrithiobac, but no cross-resistance to the sulfonylurea and triazolopyrimidine sulfonanilide herbicides. The four- to eightfold enzyme resistance to imidazolinone herbicides provides whole-plant resistance; however, the sevenfold enzyme resistance to pyrithiobac was insufficient to afford whole-plant protection to a field application rate of the herbicide. A second imidazolinone-specific resistance allele, XI-12, currently under commercial development, was examined for the level of dominance at the enzyme level. In the heterozygous state, imazethapyr resistance was fivefold, compared to 250-fold in the homozygous condition, indicating XI-12 is a semidominant trait. No cross-resistance to nicosulfuron or primisulfuron was observed in the heterozygous XI-12 hybrid extracts nor to nicosulfuron in the XI-12 homozygote; however, a fivefold resistance to primisulfuron was detected in the XI-12 homozygote.

Three sugarbeet selections differing in cross-resistance to three classes of acetolactate synthase (ALS)-inhibiting herbicides have been developed using somatic cell selection. Sugarbeet selections resistant to imidazolinone herbicides, Sir-13 and 93R30B, do not metabolize [14C]-imazethapyr any faster or differently than sensitive, wild-type sugarbeets or a sulfonylurea-resistant/imidazolinone-sensitive selection, Sur. ALS specific activity from the three herbicide-resistant selections ranged from 73 to 93% of the wild-type enzyme extracts in the absence of herbicide, indicating enzyme overexpression was not a factor in resistance. Acetolactate synthase from Sir-13 plants showed a 40-fold resistance to imazethapyr but no resistance to chlorsulfuron or flumetsulam. Polymerase chain reaction amplification and sequencing of two regions of the ALS gene spanning all known sites for ALS-based herbicide resistance in plants indicated a single nucleotide change in the Sir-13 gene (G337 to A337) resulting in a deduced substitution of threonine for alanine at position 113 in the sugarbeet amino acid sequence. Sur ALS was not significantly resistant to imazethapyr, but was 1,000- and 50-fold resistant to chlorsulfuron and flumetsulam, respectively. Sur gene sequencing indicated a single nucleotide change (C562 to T562) resulting in a serine for proline substitution at position 188 of the ALS primary structure. The 93R30B nucleotide sequence indicated two mutations resulting in two deduced amino acid substitutions: threonine for alanine at position 113 plus serine for proline at position 188. The 93R30B double mutant incorporated the changes observed in each of the single mutants above and correlated with higher resistance levels to imazethapyr (> 1,000-fold), chlorsulfuron (4,300-fold), and flumetsulam (200-fold) at the ALS level than observed in either of the single mutants. 93R30B represents the first double mutant derived by a two-step selection process that incorporates two class-specific ALS-inhibitor resistance mutations to form a single broad cross-resistance trait. The interaction of the two altered amino acids is synergistic with respect to enzyme resistance vs. the resistance afforded by each of the individual mutations.

The Norwood site in Sibley Co., Minnesota, contains 1.6 m of silt resting on till and overlain by peat. The base of the peat has been radiocarbon dated at 12,400 ± 60 and the top at 11,200 ± 250 yr B.P. The pollen, plant macrofossils, and insect remains in the basal silt consist of boreal species inhabiting open environments, but not tundra. No modern analogue exists for the insect assemblage, which includes elements of boreal forest, tundra-forest, and western affinities. The transition from an unstable open environment to a stable coniferous forest is reflected by both plant and insect fossils and is interpreted as a successional rather than a climatic event. During this time of significant biologic change, the climate is inferred to have been relatively uniform, with temperatures similar to those presently existing in the boreal forest south of the tundra-forest transition zone. The geologic and ecologic succession at Norwood is generally similar to that presently associated with ice stagnation of the Klutlan Glacier in the Yukon Territory. Localized successional sequences similar to those at Norwood are conceived to have occurred repeatedly during the melting of the Laurentide ice, and thus the proposed model has potentially broad application to the interpretation of late-glacial sequences.

Savage et al. (1977) found that the radio source PKS 1448-232 coincided with a stellar object of about magnitude 16.4 having an ultraviolet excess. A low resolution spectrum obtained with the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) confirmed this object as a QSO with zem = 2.22 and revealed many absorption lines short-ward of the La emission. Consequently this object was included in a programme of spectroscopy at intermediate resolution with the AAT to investigate QSO absorption lines. Savage et al. have given a finding chart with an optical position of 14h48m09s.3, −23°17′10″ (1950.0). The radio fluxes are 0.40 Jy at 2.7 GHz and 0.31 Jy at 5.0 GHz.

One of the most prevalent and widely-accepted themes in the history of the Mandinka of Senegambia concerns the great Mandinka migrations--the westward movement of large groups of people that included the distant ancestors of today's Senegambian Mandinka population. The migrants are supposed to have come from traditional Manding homelands east and southeast of present locations of Mandinka peoples in Senegambia; conquest and longterm settlement were the ususal results of these migrations.

For over a century scholarly (and not so scholarly) works dealing with the western Mandinka have shown acceptance as fact and included discussions at varying length of the early westward migrations. At a 1980 conference in Dakar, which historians, linguists, anthropologists, traditionists, and others from four continents attended, considerable time actually went toward discussing and disputing the specific routes the major migrant leaders took and toward attempting to work out paradigms of the various “waves” of Mandinka migration. And lest I appear too smug in my implied criticism of studies of these migrations, I should admit that I, too, have written of the phenomena in ways that could be interpreted as scholarly discussion of their causes, timing, and (gulp) even their “flow.”

The major reason for the widespread acceptance of early Mandinka westward migrations and subsequent conquest and settlement--aside from the present ethnic and linguistic arrangement of the western Mandinka--is, of course, the frequency with which one hears tales of such in Senegambian traditions of origin. It is a rare Gambian Mandinka oral narrative--whether focusing on the history of a state, a village, or a separate lineage--that does not begin with where the ancestors originated.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

Over a thousand miles separate the Fulbe emirate of Liptako in Upper Volta from the region of the lower Gambia River, where several Mandinka states long held political authority. Fundamental differences between the areas are easy to notice. Besides speaking its own language and following its own set of social customs, Liptako's Fulbe population practiced a mixed pastoral and agrarian mode of subsistence on land where rainfall was only marginally sufficient. The Mandinka were more strictly farmers in an area that receives on average about twice as much rainfall as Liptako. Liptako existed as a unified Fulbe state only since the first decade of the nineteenth century, whereas many of the Mandinka states of the lower Gambia date to at least three centuries earlier. Commerce was important to both regions, but Liptako's commercial focus was toward the Sahara and the desert-side trade, whereas the lower Gambia was a point of contact between savanna merchants and Atlantic shippers. But, despite these obvious differences, there is a remarkable degree of similarity in the way individuals living in the two areas remember their past, and historians find a host of like problems they must confront when attempting to reconstruct the precolonial histories of either region.

I had become increasingly aware of some of the difficulties in working with Mandinka oral tradition during fieldwork in the lower Gambia. But only recently have I become familiar with problems another historian encountered as he studied traditions from Liptako, so many miles from my own area of interest. A Fulbe emirate, Liptako rose in the wake of Usuman dan Fodio's jihad early in the nineteenth century.

In the late summer of 1976, amid considerable publicity, Doubleday and Company published Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Almost overnight author and book gained considerable fame. Americans and soon others accepted the essential validity of the story of Haley's maternal ancestors, which reached back to the Gambia River and to the eighteenth century. Within a few months of its publication Roots had been serialized for televison. Before a year had passed Doubleday had sold over 1,500,000 copies of the book, it had gone into translation in several dozen languages, and Haley had been awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, neither for fiction nor non-fiction, but for something in between felicitously denominated “faction.” The magnitude of Roots' impact makes criticism of the basis of its argument somewhat indivious but perhpas all the more necessary.

One aspect of Roots that added considerably to its popularity was the apparent authenticity of the genealogy which Haley used to identify his African ancestor. Haley claimed that, largely through oral history, he had proved the existence of his ancestor, one Kunta Kinte, who had been kidnapped into slavery over two hundred years ago and brought directly to the British North American colonies. A decade of diligent searching had made it possible for Haley to piece together the basic outlines of his ancestry. To nearly everyone who read the book or heard the story of his quest, such success in locating his roots in Africa, after a century of slavery and another of difficult freedom, seemed to justify the endeavor.

Traditions of origin of most of the prominent Gambian Mandinka lineages tend to be bodies of myth containing small, but often recognizable, skeletons of historical truth. Members of these lineages typically think of one of several mythical, sometimes composite, figures as their ancestors. These figures are invariably great leaders, if not of western migrations with large followings, then of successful military expeditions in the west for the Mali empire. Usually, these traditions serve a particular purpose. The ancestral figures symbolize the lineages' ties, real or imagined, to the Mandinka homelands and the center of Mandinka culture on the upper Niger River. The stories of their ancestors' early arrival or successful conquests in the western Mandinka region justify historically the positions of political and social prominence these lineages held throughout the last four centuries or more of the pre-colonial period.

Two of the three traditionally dominant lineages in the region of the Gambia known as Niumi have traditions of origin that are no exceptions to this rule. Niumi was one of more than a dozen Mandinka states that existed along the banks of the navigable Gambia River from perhaps as early as the fourteenth century until colonial times. Occupying forty miles of the river's north bank at its estuary, Niumi was long a focal point for the exchange of slaves and other commodities among Africans and between Africans and Europeans. By what was likely the early sixteenth century, seven extended families of three larger lineages -- themselves segments of still larger, more widely dispersed groups of lineages having the same patronymics -- emerged to rotate political leadership in Niumi and to dominate social and economic aspects of life in the state.

I made a mistake teaching my course on precolonial African history this past fall. I vowed (to myself) to be absolutely honest. I decided to admit to students how little historians know for certain about much of Africa's early history. I focused on the evidence, emphasizing how little there is for determining what occurred several centuries ago—let alone 2000 years ago—in sub-Saharan Africa. I gave one lecture—downright sterling, I thought—in which, in the first part, I taught about “Bantu Expansion” as I had done in my first year on the job, way back in 1976. I had read Roland Oliver's 1966 article in the Journal of African History, which had made everything clear to me once upon a time.

With that as a basis I laid out an entire scheme about how these humans, who spoke related languages, had populated nearly all of sub-equatorial Africa since the beginning of the modern era. I had maps on overhead projection (copies handed out) showing when the Bantu migrated where; I spoke of the evidence for it all, even reading from Ptolemy's Geography and the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea; and recalled how clear it all was to myself and the students, who wrote down nearly every word and made notations on the maps.

Then, in the second part of the lecture, I talked about how incorrect it all was (student pens here coming to rest)—how our reading of some of the linguistic evidence was faulty, how we read things into Ptolemy and the Periplus because they fit the scheme, and how subsequent archeological evidence has simply proved most of the neat scheme wrong. I concluded with an honest, if pessimistic, note that, because of the paucity of evidence, there simply is a lot about early African history that we will not be able to know.

Probably the most popular and most frequently-recited oral tradition in all of Senegambia and somewhat beyond is the epic of Kelefa Saane. From southwestern Guiné-Bissau to Bondu on the middle Senegal, griots regularly play the tune of “Kelefa” on their harp-lutes as they sing the familiar refrains:

The war was a disaster.
There was no one who could take
Kelefa Saane's place.…
Wounded men
Crawled back
To Niumi. …
Ah, the nobles are finished
War has finished the nobles…

Such epics have captured the attention of African historians since early in the years of professional interest in the continent. Over the last decade historians have made fresh examination of oral data and their use in reconstructing the African past. One volume of essays, The African Past Speaks, edited by Joseph C. Miller, assesses problems associated with analysis of these traditions. In his introductory essay Miller makes a point that most of the authors of subsequent chapters reinforce. It is that many forms of oral traditions are sociological models of the societies they come from. The structure and content of a narrative, Miller asserts, often provides insight into the nature of a particular society at some point in the precolonial past. Conversely, knowledge of the structure of the society in which traditionists tell the narrative helps one evaluate the narrative as a historical source.

In 1974—the same year I ventured into the field to begin collecting oral data for my doctoral thesis, a precolonial history of a Mandinka state at the mouth of the Gambia River—Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman published their now much maligned work on African American slavery, Time on the Cross. With publication of the book, Fogel and Engerman did something few historians had done before or have done since: they made public their evidence—all of it, data and statistical methodology—so others could determine how they had arrived at their conclusions. Perhaps it was because their interpretation of slavery was so different from those preceding it that historians used Fogel and Engerman's published evidence to dismantle, piece by piece, their arguments and the way they had arrived at them.

But making available otherwise inaccessible evidence seemed to me the right thing to do. So, in the field and afterward, I offered up my oral data. (The written evidence I used was already available, either published or in archives at various places on three continents.) I deposited copies of cassette tapes of my interviews, with copies of transcribed translations, in the Gambia and in the United States. Also, within a few years of finishing the dissertation I published two volumes of translated, transcribed, and annotated oral traditions from the collection in an inexpensive series that I thought would be accessible to most interested parties. If people wanted to test my hypotheses, attack my methods, or berate my conclusions, they at least had the materials for doing so.

Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries-long commerce that connected people living along the Gambia River to a vast Atlantic economic system, the heart of which was the sale and transportation of humans.

To my disappointment, with only a few exceptions, Gambian informants did not recall much about the slave trade. In Albreda and Juffure, the two Gambia-River villages where people were most involved in dealings with Europeans during the slave-trading era, the best informants could say little beyond noting ruins of old buildings and mentioning vague doings of “the Portuguese.” In the end, only three informants were able and willing to say anything beyond the most banal generalities about the capture, movement, and sale of slaves that occurred in the Gambia River. My assessment was that in the body of stories that Gambians held in their collective memory, a vast void existed between tales of the long-ago, and likely mythical, origins of a clan, village, or state and events that occurred much more recently, in this case after the British settled Bathurst, near the river's mouth, in 1816.