Unequal Primary Education Opportunities in Rural and Urban China

This article examines the unequal provision of primary education in rural and urban China. It first looks at the development of the “two-track” system and shows how educational opportunities have always been unevenly distributed in contemporary China. It then focuses on the dominant task of primary education—the universalisation of compulsory education—to underscore the profound difficulties that the Chinese government faces particularly in the provision of primary education in rural areas. The article concludes that the prospect of a successful delivery of primary education in the countryside lies in the further clarification of the financial relationship among different levels of the government, the diversification of sources of educational funding, and the integration of primary education with economic growth as the goal of sustainable development

Les inégalités d’accès à l’enseignement primaire entre urbains et ruraux

Cet article traite des inégalités dans l’accès à l’enseignement primaire entre urbains et ruraux. Il rappelle d’abord l’histoire du système « à deux voies », et montre comment ce dernier a abouti à un déséquilibre en termes d’accès à l’éducation. L’article s’intéresse ensuite au principal objectif poursuivi par l’enseignement primaire — la généralisation de la scolarisation obligatoire — et expose les importantes difficultés auxquelles le gouvernement est confronté en zone rurale. Toute amélioration de la situation dépend de la clarification des relations financières entre les différents niveaux de gouvernement. En outre, le développement de l’enseignement primaire apparaît comme une condition d’une croissance économique durable

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

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

Joint analysis of three genome-wide association studies of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in Chinese populations

We conducted a joint (pooled) analysis of three genome-wide association studies (GWAS) 1-3 of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) in ethnic Chinese (5,337 ESCC cases and 5,787 controls) with 9,654 ESCC cases and 10,058 controls for follow-up. In a logistic regression model adjusted for age, sex, study, and two eigenvectors, two new loci achieved genome-wide significance, marked by rs7447927 at 5q31.2 (per-allele odds ratio (OR) = 0.85, 95% CI 0.82-0.88; P=7.72x10−20) and rs1642764 at 17p13.1 (per-allele OR= 0.88, 95% CI 0.85-0.91; P=3.10x10−13). rs7447927 is a synonymous single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in TMEM173 and rs1642764 is an intronic SNP in ATP1B2, near TP53. Furthermore, a locus in the HLA class II region at 6p21.32 (rs35597309) achieved genome-wide significance in the two populations at highest risk for ESSC (OR=1.33, 95% CI 1.22-1.46; P=1.99x10−10). Our joint analysis identified new ESCC susceptibility loci overall as well as a new locus unique to the ESCC high risk Taihang Mountain region

Les inégalités d'accès à l'enseignement primaire entre urbains et ruraux

Fu Teng Margaret, Jacquet Raphaël. Les inégalités d'accès à l'enseignement primaire entre urbains et ruraux. In: Perspectives chinoises, n°89, 2005. pp. 30-36