"Employment Effects of the 2009 Minimum Wage Increase: Evidence from State Comparisons of At-Risk Workers"

In July, 2009, the U.S. Federal minimum wage was increased from $6.55 to$7.25. Individuals in some states were unaffected by this increase, since the state minimum wage already exceeded $7.25 and the state minimum was not increased further. We use this variation, as well as variation in the actual amount of the increase, to make comparisons of the employment of “at-risk” workers across states with their peers and within states with workers arguably unaffected by the increase. Our data come from the 2009 CPS, four and five months before and after the increase. We find some evidence that the employment of some at-risk demographic groups declined as a result of the minimum wage increase, but the impacts are not statistically significant. We also find that the employment changes were not responsive to the actual amount of the increase.minimum wage

"Employment Effects of the 2009 Minimum Wage Increase: Evidence from State Comparisons of At-Risk Workers (Revised Version)"

In July, 2009, the U.S. Federal minimum wage was increased from $6.55 to$7.25. Individuals in some states were unaffected by this increase, since the state minimum wage already exceeded $7.25. We use this variation to make comparisons of the employment of “at-risk” workers with their peers across states and with workers within states who were arguably unaffected by the increase. Our data come from the 2009 CPS, four and five months before and after the increase. We find little evidence of negative employment effects for teens or less- educated adults, but some stronger evidence of a negative effect for young adults with a high school degree or less. Control for demographic characteristics reduces the size and significance of the estimated effects.Minimum Wage

Genetic clustering of depressed patients and normal controls based on single-nucleotide variant proportion

This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This author accepted manuscript is made available following 12 month embargo from date of publication (Nov 2017) in accordance with the publisher’s archiving policyBackground Genetic components play important roles in the susceptibility to major depressive disorder (MDD). The rapid development of sequencing technologies is allowing scientists to contribute new ideas for personalized medicine; thus, it is essential to design non-invasive genetic tests on sequencing data, which can help physicians diagnose and differentiate depressed patients and healthy individuals. Methods We have recently proposed a genetic concept involving single-nucleotide variant proportion (SNVP) in genes to study MDD. Using this approach, we investigated combinations of distance metrics and hierarchical clustering criteria for genetic clustering of depressed patients and ethnically matched controls. Results We analysed clustering results of 25 human subjects based on their SNVPs in 46 newly discovered candidate genes. Conclusions According to our findings, we recommend Canberra metric with Ward's method to be used in hierarchical clustering of depressed and normal individuals. Futures studies are needed to advance this line of research validating our approach in larger datasets, those may also be allow the investigation of MDD subtypes. Limitations High quality sequencing costs limited our ability to obtain larger datasets

Nlrp2, a Maternal Effect Gene Required for Early Embryonic Development in the Mouse

Maternal effect genes encode proteins that are produced during oogenesis and play an essential role during early embryogenesis. Genetic ablation of such genes in oocytes can result in female subfertility or infertility. Here we report a newly identified maternal effect gene, Nlrp2, which plays a role in early embryogenesis in the mouse. Nlrp2 mRNAs and their proteins (∼118 KDa) are expressed in oocytes and granulosa cells during folliculogenesis. The transcripts show a striking decline in early preimplantation embryos before zygotic genome activation, but the proteins remain present through to the blastocyst stage. Immunogold electron microscopy revealed that the NLRP2 protein is located in the cytoplasm, nucleus and close to nuclear pores in the oocytes, as well as in the surrounding granulosa cells. Using RNA interference, we knocked down Nlrp2 transcription specifically in mouse germinal vesicle oocytes. The knockdown oocytes could progress through the metaphase of meiosis I and emit the first polar body. However, the development of parthenogenetic embryos derived from Nlrp2 knockdown oocytes mainly blocked at the 2-cell stage. The maternal depletion of Nlrp2 in zygotes led to early embryonic arrest. In addition, overexpression of Nlrp2 in zygotes appears to lead to normal development, but increases blastomere apoptosis in blastocysts. These results provide the first evidence that Nlrp2 is a member of the mammalian maternal effect genes and required for early embryonic development in the mouse

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Association of hemoglobin with ankle-brachial index in general population

OBJECTIVES: Previous studies have demonstrated that both low and high hemoglobin concentrations are predictive of adverse cardiovascular outcomes in various populations. However, an association of hemoglobin with the ankle-brachial index, which is widely used as a screening test for peripheral arterial disease, has not yet been identified. METHODS: We examined 786 subjects (236 women and 550 men) who received routine physical check-ups. The ankle-brachial index and several hematological parameters, including the hemoglobin level, hematocrit and red blood cell count and other demographic and biochemical characteristics were collected. Univariate and multivariate linear regression analyses were performed to assess the relationships between the ankle-brachial index and the independent determinants. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was conducted to calculate the cut-off level of hemoglobin for detecting a relatively low ankle-brachial index (less than 20% of all subjects, which was 1.02). RESULTS: The hemoglobin level, hematocrit and red blood cell count were correlated with the ankle-brachial index in the males (r=-0.274, r=-0.224 and r=-0.273, respectively,

Dynamic Change of Polymer in Rice Analogues and Its Effect on Texture Quality

Macromolecules will leach from the inside of rice analogues (RA) to the external environment and form escaping substances (ES) when boiling in water for a long time. Some escaped substances adhere to the surface of cooked rice analogues (CRA) to form an adhesive layer (AL), which has an important impact on the cooking quality of RA. In this study, hydrocolloids and emulsifier were added and formed RA. Physicochemical, structural, and textural properties of ES, AL, and CRA samples were analyzed to study the effect of hydrocolloids on cooking quality of RA. The results showed that SA inhibited the leach of molecules, reduced MW of AL, decreased starch content of ES and AL, decreased shear viscosity of RA, and enhanced hydrogen bonding interactions. Ca2+ increased the dry matter content of CRA and AL, enhanced hydrogen bonding interactions of ES and CRA, and decreased MW of ES. Textural property results showed that the gelatinous properties of RA were enhanced after SA was added. The Ca2+ in the solution increased the adhesiveness of RA, while decreasing their elasticity. This study explained how hydrocolloids affect the texture properties of RA at a molecular level

Association of hemoglobin with ankle-brachial index in general population

OBJECTIVES: Previous studies have demonstrated that both low and high hemoglobin concentrations are predictive of adverse cardiovascular outcomes in various populations. However, an association of hemoglobin with the ankle-brachial index, which is widely used as a screening test for peripheral arterial disease, has not yet been identified. METHODS: We examined 786 subjects (236 women and 550 men) who received routine physical check-ups. The ankle-brachial index and several hematological parameters, including the hemoglobin level, hematocrit and red blood cell count and other demographic and biochemical characteristics were collected. Univariate and multivariate linear regression analyses were performed to assess the relationships between the ankle-brachial index and the independent determinants. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was conducted to calculate the cut-off level of hemoglobin for detecting a relatively low ankle-brachial index (less than 20% of all subjects, which was 1.02). RESULTS: The hemoglobin level, hematocrit and red blood cell count were correlated with the ankle-brachial index in the males (r=-0.274, r=-0.224 and r=-0.273, respectively, p<0.001 for all), but these associations were not significant in the females. Multivariate linear regression analysis revealed that the independent determinants of the ankle-brachial index included age, total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and the white blood cell count for the females and age, hypertension, total cholesterol and hemoglobin (β=-0.001, p<0.001) for the males after adjusting for confounding factors. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis revealed that the cut-off level of hemoglobin for predicting a low ankle-brachial index was 156.5 g/L in the males. CONCLUSIONS: A high hemoglobin concentration was independently correlated with a low ankle-brachial index in the healthy males, indicating that an elevation in this level may be associated with an increased atherosclerosis risk