Do long distance moves discourage homeownership? evidence from England

We hypothesize that as the distance of a residential move increases, the cost of collecting information on the destination housing market rises, the amount and quality of information collected fall, and the chances of making an ill-informed housing purchase decision increases, reducing the likelihood of such a purchase. Since owning relative to renting is associated with a much larger financial commitment and much higher transaction costs, the propensity to own can be expected to decrease with the distance moved. Using data from the Survey of English Housing from 1993 to 2008, we document that, consistent with our prior, an increase in the distance moved by one standard deviation decreases the probability that a household owns the next home by 3.2 percentage points

Lyapunov-based control of non isothermal continuous stirred tank reactors using irreversible thermodynamics.

International audienceIn this paper, the thermodynamic availability function is used as a Lyapunov function for the practical derivation of non linear control laws for the stabilization of a large class of CSTRs far from the equilibrium. The strict convexity of the availability function is guaranteed as long as one of the extensive variables is fixed. In this study, we consider liquid mixture with constant volume, the constraint on the volume being insured by perfect regulation of the outlet flow of the CSTR. Several control laws are then derived which insure global asymptotic stability, exponential stability or simple asymptotic stability. These control laws are discussed regarding the magnitude and the dynamic variations of the control variable. It is shown that the availability function can be split into two parts: one corresponds to the mixing term and depends on mole numbers only and the other depends on both temperature and mole numbers. The two parts are positive and the second one is chosen as a new Lyapunov function. The use of this new Lyapunov function insures smooth variations of the control variable. An exothermal, first order chemical reaction leading to multiple steady-state operating points of the CSTR illustrates the proposed theory

Over-Expression of Leptin Receptors in Hypothalamic POMC Neurons Increases Susceptibility to Diet-Induced Obesity

Diet-induced obesity (DIO) in rodents is characterized by impaired activation of signal-transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) by leptin receptors (LepRb) within the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus. This signaling defect likely plays an important role in development of DIO. However, the neuro-chemical identity of the leptin-STAT3 resistant arcuate neurons has not been determined and the underlying mechanisms responsible for development of cellular leptin resistance remain unclear. To investigate this, we first measured arcuate gene expression of known key signaling components of the LepRb signaling pathway and tested whether specifically the critical arcuate pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons are resistant to LepRb-STAT3 signaling in mice given a high-fat-diet (HFD) compared to mice provided a low-fat control diet (LFD). We found that leptin-dependent STAT3 phosphorylation was decreased within POMC neurons of HFD mice. In addition, Leprb mRNA and suppressor of cytokine signaling 3 (Socs3) mRNA were elevated in the arcuate of HFD mice. To investigate whether increased LepRb expression per se in POMC neurons can influence development of DIO and Socs3 expression, we created mice that over-express LepRb selectively in POMC neurons (POMC-LepRb). No differences in body weight, fat mass or food intake were found between LFD POMC-LepRb mice and LFD controls. Surprisingly, body weight, fat mass and caloric intake of HFD POMC-LepRb mice was markedly higher than HFD control mice. In addition, arcuate Socs3 mRNA was increased in HFD POMC-LepRb mice compared to HFD controls. These data show that specifically POMC neurons of DIO mice are resistant to STAT3 activation by leptin, indicating that those cells might play a role in development of DIO. Furthermore, over-expression of LepRb selectively in POMC neurons increases susceptibility to the development of DIO. We propose a model where over-reactivity of the leptin-LepRb signaling system in arcuate neurons may play causal a role in development of diet-induced obesity

Propagation of blood clotting in the complex biochemical network of hemostasis is described by a simple mechanism

Hemostasis is the complex biochemical network that controls blood clotting. We previously described a chemical model that mimicked the dynamics of hemostasis based on a simple regulatory mechanisma threshold response due to the competition between production and removal of activators. Here, we used human blood plasma in phospholipid-coated microfluidic channels to test predictions based on this mechanism. We demonstrated that, for a given geometry of channels, clot propagation from an obstructed channel into a channel with flowing blood plasma is dependent on the shear rate in the channel with flowing blood plasma. If confirmed in vivo, these results may explain clot propagation from a small vessel to a larger, clinically relevant vessel. In addition, these results would further validate the use of modular mechanisms, simplified chemical models, and microfluidics to study complex biochemical networks

Effects of shear rate on propagation of blood clotting determined using microfluidics and numerical simulations

This paper describes microfluidic experiments with human blood plasma and numerical simulations to determine the role of fluid flow in the regulation of propagation of blood clotting. We demonstrate that propagation of clotting can be regulated by different mechanisms depending on the volume-to-surface ratio of a channel. In small channels, propagation of clotting can be prevented by surface-bound inhibitors of clotting present on vessel walls. In large channels, where surface-bound inhibitors are ineffective, propagation of clotting can be prevented by a shear rate above a threshold value, in agreement with predictions of a simple reaction-diffusion mechanism. We also demonstrate that propagation of clotting in a channel with a large volume-to-surface ratio and a shear rate below a threshold shear rate can be slowed by decreasing the production of thrombin, an activator of clotting. These in vitro results make two predictions, which should be experimentally tested in vivo. First, propagation of clotting from superficial veins to deep veins may be regulated by shear rate, which might explain the correlation between superficial thrombosis and the development of deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Second, nontoxic thrombin inhibitors with high binding affinities could be locally administered to prevent recurrent thrombosis after a clot has been removed. In addition, these results demonstrate the utility of simplified mechanisms and microfluidics for generating and testing predictions about the dynamics of complex biochemical networks

Pressure-Dependent Line Intensity and Continuum Absorption for Pure Co2: Experimental Results

Fourier-transform measurements of pure CO2 in the 1.6 µm region covering bands from ground state to 30011, 30012, 30013, and 30014 states at ambient temperature and 212 K with pressures up to 1 bar have been recorded. Line parameters have been retrieved by multispectrum fitting. An intensity depletion parameter quantifying linear intensity dependence on pressure was introduced and fitted. From the fitted baseline polynomials the self continuum was determined for the 30012 and 30013 bands. The depleted intensity was found to be transferred to the continuum for both temperatures, thus the band intensity is conserved. The intensity in the continuum at 1 atm was about 1% of the total band intensities for ambient temperature and about 3% at 212 K. For both temperatures the depleted intensity/continuum area was found in excellent agreement with values calculated from the second virial coefficient. The experimental work is accompanied by rCMDS calculations. The results presented here have significant impact on CO2 retrieval from atmospheric measurements. For OCO/CO2M-type observations it was calculated that in case of the 2 µm band retrieved CO2 columns are too large by about 3% when omitting depletion and continuum. A new spectroscopic database was produced. Systematic line intensity uncertainties are well below 0.1%

Conformation of a Polyelectrolyte Complexed to a Like-Charged Colloid

We report results from a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation on the conformations of a long flexible polyelectrolyte complexed to a charged sphere, \textit{both negatively charged}, in the presence of neutralizing counterions in the strong Coulomb coupling regime. The structure of this complex is very sensitive to the charge density of the polyelectrolyte. For a fully charged polyelectrolyte the polymer forms a dense two-dimensional "disk", whereas for a partially charged polyelectrolyte the monomers are spread over the colloidal surface. A mechanism involving the \textit{overcharging} of the polyelectrolyte by counterions is proposed to explain the observed conformations.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures (6 EPS files

KIT’s IWSLT 2021 Offline Speech Translation System

This paper describes KIT’submission to the IWSLT 2021 Offline Speech Translation Task. We describe a system in both cascaded condition and end-to-end condition. In the cascaded condition, we investigated different end-to-end architectures for the speech recognition module. For the text segmentation module, we trained a small transformer-based model on high-quality monolingual data. For the translation module, our last year’s neural machine translation model was reused. In the end-to-end condition, we improved our Speech Relative Transformer architecture to reach or even surpass the result of the cascade system