Understanding the Economic Consequences of Shifting Trends in Population Health

The public economic burden of shifting trends in population health remains uncertain. Sustained increases in obesity, diabetes, and other diseases could reduce life expectancy – with a concomitant decrease in the public-sector’s annuity burden – but these savings may be offset by worsening functional status, which increases health care spending, reduces labor supply, and increases public assistance. Using a microsimulation approach, we quantify the competing public-finance consequences of shifting trends in population health for medical care costs, labor supply, earnings, wealth, tax revenues, and government expenditures (including Social Security and income assistance). Together, the reduction in smoking and the rise in obesity have increased net public-sector liabilities by $430bn, or approximately 4% of the current debt burden. Larger effects are observed for specific public programs: annual spending is 10% higher in the Medicaid program, and 7% higher for Medicare.disability, health care costs, social security, microsimulation

Titanium alloy stress corrosion cracking in presence of dinitrogen tetroxide

Study resulting in a satisfactory stress corrosion cracking test with extremely consistent results produced six new analytical methods. Methods detect and determine differences in the minor constituent composition of different types of dinitrogen tetroxide

International Differences in Longevity and Health and their Economic Consequences

In 1975, 50 year-old Americans could expect to live slightly longer than their European counterparts. By 2005, American life expectancy at that age has diverged substantially compared to Europe. We find that this growing longevity gap is primarily the symptom of real declines in the health of near-elderly Americans, relative to their European peers. In particular, we use a microsimulation approach to project what US longevity would look like, if US health trends approximated those in Europe. We find that differences in health can explain most of the growing gap in remaining life expectancy. In addition, we quantify the public finance consequences of this deterioration in health. The model predicts that gradually moving American cohorts to the health status enjoyed by Europeans could save up to $1.1 trillion in discounted total health expenditures from 2004 to 2050.disability, mortality, international comparisons, microsimulation

Slatted pen floors reduce Salmonella in market swine held in abattoirs

The objective of this study was to directly compare Salmonella isolation rates from pig slaughtered after 4 hours holding on slatted or solid concrete floors. Seven truckloads (replicates) of market swine ( 120 kg) from a fully integrated farrow-to-slaughter operation were studied. At unloading, groups of pigs (15-30) were sorted to 1) no-hold (20-45 minutes waiting), 2) pens with solid concrete floors (4 hours), 3) slatted concrete floors (4 hours). Postmortem samples were cultured for Salmonella. Those pigs held in pens with slatted floors (63.6%) had significantly (P \u3c 0.05) less Salmonella in their ceca than those held on solid floors (72.7%)

Cold War Legacies in Digital Editing

The editorial methods developed during the Cold War professionalized scholarly editing and appealed to new ideas about the relationship between American academics and the government by aligning with the supposedly value-neutral goals and methods of the behavioral sciences, much to the discomfort of many humanists. Some of the implicit assumptions underlying midcentury editorial methods persist in digital editing, and may risk positioning digital editions as marginalized scholarship within the digital era, just as print scholarly editions became widely considered second-rate scholarship in the twentieth century

Teaching Attentive Reading and Motivated Writing through Digital Editing

Though English departments, including my own at the University of Nebraska, have been teaching digital humanities (DH) courses for over a decade, hyperbolic claims about the perils and promises of using computers in the study of literature continue to appear in the press. A piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books likens the algorithms used by some digital humanities methods to fascism (Marche). Another, in The Huffington Post, compares the rise of digital humanities to “our uncritical acceptance of drone attacks” (Mohamed). On the other hand, digital humanists such as Franco Moretti, who famously promote “distant reading” as opposed to close reading, project a future for the humanities that radically departs from long-cherished methods. The controversial Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, put out by a group of scholars at UCLA, includes a lot of talk about DH’s “utopian core” and optimistic “democratization of culture and scholarship” (Presner). In my experience teaching dozens of courses and workshops on digital textual representation, the pedagogical value of digital tools—specifically TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)—is more complex and ultimately more rewarding than these caricatures imply. Text encoding, at least the in-depth, student-conceived markup that I teach in my classes, is not free of complications. It is labor-intensive, timeconsuming, and sometimes extremely frustrating to beginners. It requires reliable computers, preferably ones the students can take home, and a classroom license for software (I use Oxygen XML Editor) that costs several hundred dollars. In order to create projects that can be publicly displayed, students require access to a server with certain technological specifications. Also, TEI is far from an uncontroversial way of approaching texts even in the digital editing community—it is predicated on a theory of textuality that is open to an array of criticisms, and anyone who has worked with it for a long time will have a lengthy list of quibbles regarding various features. (Frankly, I’d like to see TEI become one of several widely accepted and well-documented ways we can approach digital editing.) Notwithstanding its practical and theoretical hurdles, TEI is an invaluable tool for teaching literature. It makes a few pedagogical goals central to the work of the class: students must pay careful, consistent attention to the text; they learn to understand the cultural record as malleable; they feel a clear sense of purpose, audience, and expertise when writing; they leave with transferable technical skills. I’d like to offer instructors curious about digital humanities some considerations for how digital text editing can augment important teaching goals

Noise suppression by noise

We have analyzed the interplay between an externally added noise and the intrinsic noise of systems that relax fast towards a stationary state, and found that increasing the intensity of the external noise can reduce the total noise of the system. We have established a general criterion for the appearance of this phenomenon and discussed two examples in detail.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Teaching Attentive Reading and Motivated Writing through Digital Editing

Though English departments, including my own at the University of Nebraska, have been teaching digital humanities (DH) courses for over a decade, hyperbolic claims about the perils and promises of using computers in the study of literature continue to appear in the press. A piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books likens the algorithms used by some digital humanities methods to fascism (Marche). Another, in The Huffington Post, compares the rise of digital humanities to “our uncritical acceptance of drone attacks” (Mohamed). On the other hand, digital humanists such as Franco Moretti, who famously promote “distant reading” as opposed to close reading, project a future for the humanities that radically departs from long-cherished methods. The controversial Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, put out by a group of scholars at UCLA, includes a lot of talk about DH’s “utopian core” and optimistic “democratization of culture and scholarship” (Presner). In my experience teaching dozens of courses and workshops on digital textual representation, the pedagogical value of digital tools—specifically TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)—is more complex and ultimately more rewarding than these caricatures imply. Text encoding, at least the in-depth, student-conceived markup that I teach in my classes, is not free of complications. It is labor-intensive, timeconsuming, and sometimes extremely frustrating to beginners. It requires reliable computers, preferably ones the students can take home, and a classroom license for software (I use Oxygen XML Editor) that costs several hundred dollars. In order to create projects that can be publicly displayed, students require access to a server with certain technological specifications. Also, TEI is far from an uncontroversial way of approaching texts even in the digital editing community—it is predicated on a theory of textuality that is open to an array of criticisms, and anyone who has worked with it for a long time will have a lengthy list of quibbles regarding various features. (Frankly, I’d like to see TEI become one of several widely accepted and well-documented ways we can approach digital editing.) Notwithstanding its practical and theoretical hurdles, TEI is an invaluable tool for teaching literature. It makes a few pedagogical goals central to the work of the class: students must pay careful, consistent attention to the text; they learn to understand the cultural record as malleable; they feel a clear sense of purpose, audience, and expertise when writing; they leave with transferable technical skills. I’d like to offer instructors curious about digital humanities some considerations for how digital text editing can augment important teaching goals

Phase synchronization and noise-induced resonance in systems of coupled oscillators

We study synchronization and noise-induced resonance phenomena in systems of globally coupled oscillators, each possessing finite inertia. The behavior of the order parameter, which measures collective synchronization of the system, is investigated as the noise level and the coupling strength are varied, and hysteretic behavior is manifested. The power spectrum of the phase velocity is also examined and the quality factor as well as the response function is obtained to reveal noise-induced resonance behavior.Comment: to be published in Phys. Rev.