2,994 research outputs found
U.S. HOUSEHOLD CONSUMPTION OF FRESH FRUITS
This study uses the 1987-88 U.S. Department of Agriculture Nationwide Food Consumption Survey data to analyze the impacts of income, prices, and selected socioeconomic characteristics on household consumption of fresh fruits. Results suggest that fresh fruits are considered economic necessities, with own prices significantly influencing consumption. Cross-price effects are generally weak and insignificant, but the number of adults in the age group 18-64 is an important determinant of household consumption of fresh fruits. While nutrition information and household savings have significant, positive influences on most fresh fruit consumption, the presence of a working wife has a significant and negative influence.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,
Overcoming Adverse Selection: How Public Intervention Can Restore Market Functioning
The paper provides a first analysis of market jump starting and its two-way interaction between mechanism design and participation constraints. The government optimally overpays for the legacy assets and cleans up the market of its weakest assets, through a mixture of buybacks and equity injections, and leaves the firms with the strongest legacy assets to the market. The government reduces adverse selection enough to let the market rebound, but not too much, so as to limit the cost of intervention. The existence of a market imposes no welfare cost. (JEL D82, D83, G01, G31, H81)
An Improved Encoder-Decoder Framework for Food Energy Estimation
Dietary assessment is essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Automatic
image-based dietary assessment is a growing field of research due to the
increasing prevalence of image capturing devices (e.g. mobile phones). In this
work, we estimate food energy from a single monocular image, a difficult task
due to the limited hard-to-extract amount of energy information present in an
image. To do so, we employ an improved encoder-decoder framework for energy
estimation; the encoder transforms the image into a representation embedded
with food energy information in an easier-to-extract format, which the decoder
then extracts the energy information from. To implement our method, we compile
a high-quality food image dataset verified by registered dietitians containing
eating scene images, food-item segmentation masks, and ground truth calorie
values. Our method improves upon previous caloric estimation methods by over
10\% and 30 kCal in terms of MAPE and MAE respectively.Comment: Accepted for Madima'23 in ACM Multimedi
SOD1 Overexpression Preserves Baroreflex Control of Heart Rate with an Increase of Aortic Depressor Nerve Function
Overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS), such as the superoxide radical (O2∙-), is associated with diseases which compromise cardiac autonomic function. Overexpression of SOD1 may offer protection against ROS damage to the cardiac autonomic nervous system, but reductions of O2∙- may interfere with normal cellular functions. We have selected the C57B6SJL-Tg (SOD1)2 Gur/J mouse as a model to determine whether SOD1 overexpression alters cardiac autonomic function, as measured by baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) and aortic depressor nerve (ADN) recordings, as well as evaluation of baseline heart rate (HR) and mean arterial pressure (MAP). Under isoflurane anesthesia, C57 wild-type and SOD1 mice were catheterized with an arterial pressure transducer and measurements of HR and MAP were taken. After establishing a baseline, hypotension and hypertension were induced by injection of sodium nitroprusside (SNP) and phenylephrine (PE), respectively, and ΔHR versus ΔMAP were recorded as a measure of baroreflex sensitivity (BRS). SNP and PE treatment were administered sequentially after a recovery period to measure arterial baroreceptor activation by recording aortic depressor nerve activity. Our findings show that overexpression of SOD1 in C57B6SJL-Tg (SOD1)2 Gur/J mouse preserved the normal HR, MAP, and BRS but enhanced aortic depressor nerve function
An Improved Upper Bound on the Rate-Distortion Function of Images
Recent work has shown that Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) can be used to
upper-bound the information rate-distortion (R-D) function of images, i.e., the
fundamental limit of lossy image compression. In this paper, we report an
improved upper bound on the R-D function of images implemented by (1)
introducing a new VAE model architecture, (2) applying variable-rate
compression techniques, and (3) proposing a novel \ourfunction{} to stabilize
training. We demonstrate that at least 30\% BD-rate reduction w.r.t. the intra
prediction mode in VVC codec is achievable, suggesting that there is still
great potential for improving lossy image compression. Code is made publicly
available at https://github.com/duanzhiihao/lossy-vae.Comment: Conference paper at ICIP 2023. The first two authors share equal
contribution
Resonance Assignments and Secondary Structure Predictions of the As(III) Metallochaperone ArsD in Solution
ArsD is a metallochaperone that delivers As(III) to the ArsA ATPase, the catalytic subunit of the ArsAB pump encoded by the arsRDABC operon of Escherichia coli plasmid R773. Conserved ArsD cysteine residues (Cys12, Cys13 and Cys18) construct the As(III) binding site of the protein, however a global structural understanding of this arsenic binding remains unclear. We have obtained NMR assignments for ArsD as a starting point for probing structural changes on the protein that occur in response to metalloid binding and upon formation of a complex with ArsA. The predicted solution structure of ArsD is in agreement with recently published crystallographic structural results
Are All Ratings Created Equal? The Impact of Issuer Size on the Pricing of Mortgage-backed Securities
We examine whether rating agencies (Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch) reward large issuers of mortgage-backed securities, who bring substantial business, by granting them unduly favorable ratings. The initial yield on both AAA-rated and non-AAA rated tranches sold by large issuers is higher than that on similar tranches sold by small issuers during the market boom years of 2004-2006. Moreover, the prices of MBS sold by large issuers drop more than those sold by small issuers, and the differences are concentrated among tranches issued during 2004-2006. We conclude that large issuers receive more favorable ratings and that the market prices the risk of inflated ratings, especially during booming periods.
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