The Politics of Middle Class Decline and Growth in Industrialized Democracies, 1980 to 2010

This research explains why some industrialized democracies have experienced middle class decline while others have experienced middle class growth since the 1980s. The prevailing political science literature based on the median voter theory predicts that middle class decline should not occur in democracies, whereas economic theories fail to explain national variation of middle class decline by attributing the decline to common developments such as globalization or technological change. I analyze data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database, the Comparative Welfare States Dataset, and the Comparative Welfare Entitlement Dataset, and demonstrate a significant partisan effect on middle class decline. I argue that middle class decline is contingent on the type of right party that is dominant in the country. Christian Democratic parties differ from secular right parties in shaping the institutions of social insurance and wage-settings over the course of neoliberal policy reforms since the 1980s. Due to their ideological orientation, Christian right parties have been much less receptive to the neoliberal turn than secular right parties. Christian Democrats have tempered income polarization and income insecurity by supporting broad bargaining coverage and maintaining generous income-related social insurance policies

GPU acceleration of many-body perturbation theory methods in MOLGW with OpenACC

Quasiparticle self-consistent many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) methods that update both eigenvalues and eigenvectors can calculate the excited-state properties of molecular systems without depending on the choice of starting points. However, those methods are computationally intensive even on modern multi-core central processing units (CPUs) and thus typically limited to small systems. Many-core accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPUs) may be able to boost the performance of those methods without losing accuracy, making starting-point-independent MBPT methods applicable to large systems. Here, we GPU accelerate MOLGW, a Gaussian-based MBPT code for molecules, with open accelerators (OpenACC) and achieve speedups of up to 9.7x over 32 open multi-processing (OpenMP) CPU threads

Risk factors of Metabolic Syndrome and Lifestyle in Early Adulthood in Korea

The objective of this study was to identify risk factors of metabolic syndrome in early adulthood which has currently shown an increase in Korea, due to a westernized lifestyle. Health medical examination data collected from a total of 5801 participants, gathered by the National Health Insurance Service(NHIS) in 2013, was used to proceed with the study. NCEP ATP-III was used as diagnostic criteria for determining metabolic syndrome. The prevalence rate for metabolic syndrome totaled 32.8%, 29.7% for men and 3.1% for women. Among the subjects, 21.5% of men were found to have abnormal waist circumferences compared to a percentage of 2.3% for women. However, the HDL-cholesterol levels for both men and women were very similar, at 13.6% and 13.3% respectively. There were statistically significant differences in their BMIs, family histories of diabetes, smoking periods, smoking frequencies, alcohol consumption, drinking frequencies, and intense physical activities for the metabolic syndrome group and the normal group. The factors influencing metabolic syndrome were BMI(OR=1.645, 95% CI, 1.599-1.692), a high risk of diabetes(OR=8.818, 95% CI, 4.493-17.306), drinking frequency(OR=1.151, 95% CI, 1.074-1.233), smoking period(OR=1.037, 95% CI, 1.010-1.064), whereas the family history of diabetes, smoking frequency, and physical activity showed no significance. The factors attributing to a high risk in diabetes were BMI(OR=1.021, 95% CI, 1.008-1.035), family history of diabetes(OR=1.835, 95% CI, 1.045-3.225), smoking period(OR=1.125, 95% CI, 1.050-1.206), presence of metabolic syndrome(OR=8.519, 95% CI, 4.876-14.885). The result from the data illustrates the necessity in developing programs and management education for such factors (BMI, smoking, drinking) that influence metabolic syndrome in early adulthood. Promotion of the environment and social awareness of metabolic syndrome is also required to make possible improvements in lifestyle