Long-term Effects of Early Childhood Malaria Exposure on Education and Health: Evidence from Colonial Taiwan

We estimate the effects of early childhood malaria exposure on education and health at older ages by exploiting variations in malaria exposure risk around birth that resulted from a universal malaria eradication campaign in colonial Taiwan in the early 20th century. We find that malaria exposure around birth leads to lower life-time educational attainment and to worse mental and physical health outcomes in old age as reflected in particular in worse cognitive function, a higher likelihood of cardiovascular diseases and a higher mortality hazard, compared to those who were not exposed.malaria, early childhood, education, health, Taiwan

TARP: A traffic-aware restructuring protocol for Bluetooth radio networks

[[abstract]]Bluetooth is a low-cost and short-range wireless communication technology. The Bluetooth device randomly searches and connects with other devices using the inquiry/inquiry scan and the page/page scan operations, resulting an uncontrolled scatternet topology. The unpredictable scatternet topology usually raises the problem of redundant traffic and causes inefficient communications. A traffic-aware restructuring protocol (TARP) is presented for partially restructuring a piconet or a pair of two neighboring piconets by applying role switch mechanism. The proposed TARP mainly consists of intra-piconet and inter-piconet restructuring protocols. According to the recent routes and their traffic load information, the intra-piconet restructuring protocol adjusts piconet structure by selecting the proper device to play a master role of a piconet and applies takeover operation to rapidly restructure the piconet topology. The inter-piconet restructuring protocol exchanges devices of two neighboring piconets to reduce the route length and thus improve the power and bandwidth consumptions and the end-to-end transmission delay. Performance results reveal that the proposed restructuring protocols reduce path length of recent routes and save power consumption, thus significantly improve the performance for a given connected scatternet.[[incitationindex]]SCI[[conferencelocation]]Berlin, German

Contrasting acrylate versus methacrylate crosslinking reactions and the impact of temperature

Divinyl monomers containing multiple vinyl groups are commonly used in polymerization reactions to introduce crosslinked networks. The reactivity of the second vinyl group in a crosslinker monomer decreases once it becomes incorporated in a polymer chain. This Reduced Reactivity Parameter (Ψ) depends on the monomer-crosslinker pair. To date, our group has developed this concept exclusively from methacrylate-based copolymerization systems1,2. Acrylate co-monomers introduce another level of complexity from a competing mechanism toward gel content and macromolecular network development; long chain branching from chain transfer to polymer. The later form networks via α-hydrogen abstraction, which is a prominent reaction with acrylates. Moreover, the differences in reactivity ratio between acrylates and methacrylates add another layer of heterogeneity through the polymerization which also impacts the kinetics and ultimate network structure. In this work, we compare the network formation reaction and the Ψ-parameters for 1,4 butanediol dimethacrylate (BDDMA, containing methacrylate groups) with its acrylate-based counterpart (BDDA, containing acrylate groups) in copolymerization reactions with either n-butyl methacrylate (nBMA) or n-butyl acrylate (nBA). The Ψ-parameter for all systems is estimated by comparing the experimental results with Monte Carlo simulations of the polymerization reactions. The goal of the work is to decouple the contributions of pendent-vinyl based crosslinking and long-chain branching (α-hydrogen abstraction) from the resulting kinetic profile that the Ψ parameter is determined from. Moreover, we contrast the balance of contributions from propagation, chain transfer, reactivity ratios, and utility of the pendent vinyl groups for crosslinking between reactions at either 60 or 70 °C. Even this seemingly small shift in temperature has a marked impact on the kinetics and resulting network for the different pairs of (meth)acrylate comonomers. Tripathi, A.K.; Neenan, M.L.; Sundberg, D.C.; Tsavalas, J.G., Influence of n-Alkyl Ester Groups on Efficiency of Crosslinking for Methacrylate Monomers Copolymerized with EGDMA: Experiments and Monte Carlo Simulations of Reaction Kinetics and Sol-Gel Structure , Polymer (2016), 96, 130–145, DOI:10.1016/j.polymer.2016.04.017 Tripathi, A.K.; Tsavalas, J.G.; Sundberg, D.C., “Monte Carlo Simulations of Free Radical Polymerizations with Divinyl Crosslinker: Pre- and Post-Gel Simulations of Reaction Kinetics and Molecular Structure , Macromolecules (2015) 48, 184−197, DOI: 10.1021/ma502085

Effects of Convolutional Autoencoder Bottleneck Width on StarGAN-based Singing Technique Conversion

Singing technique conversion (STC) refers to the task of converting from one voice technique to another while leaving the original singer identity, melody, and linguistic components intact. Previous STC studies, as well as singing voice conversion research in general, have utilized convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) for conversion, but how the bottleneck width of the CAE affects the synthesis quality has not been thoroughly evaluated. To this end, we constructed a GAN-based multi-domain STC system which took advantage of the WORLD vocoder representation and the CAE architecture. We varied the bottleneck width of the CAE, and evaluated the conversion results subjectively. The model was trained on a Mandarin dataset which features four singers and four singing techniques: the chest voice, the falsetto, the raspy voice, and the whistle voice. The results show that a wider bottleneck corresponds to better articulation clarity but does not necessarily lead to higher likeness to the target technique. Among the four techniques, we also found that the whistle voice is the easiest target for conversion, while the other three techniques as a source produce more convincing conversion results than the whistle.Comment: The original edition of this paper will be published in the CMMR 2023 Proceedings. This ArXiv publication is a cop

Long-term effects of early childhood malaria exposure on education and health: Evidence from colonial Taiwan

We estimate the effects of early childhood malaria exposure on education and health at older ages by exploiting variations in malaria exposure risk around birth that resulted from a universal malaria eradication campaign in colonial Taiwan in the early 20th century. We find that malaria exposure around birth leads to lower life-time educational attainment and to worse mental and physical health outcomes in old age as reflected in particular in worse cognitive function, a higher likelihood of cardiovascular diseases and a higher mortality hazard, compared to those who were not exposed