Exploration of the impact of demographic changes on life insurance consumption: empirical analysis based on Shanghai Cooperation Organization

Based on the panel data of eight member states of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) from 1996 to 2019, this study explores the impact of demographic changes on life insurance consumption in SCO member countries under the framework of static panel model and dynamic panel model. And the study analyzes the heterogeneity of religious division and different aging degrees. The empirical results show that both old-age dependency ratio and teenager dependency ratio have positive impacts on life insurance consumption in the SCO countries. Besides, the current consumption of ordinary life insurance significantly stimulates the future consumption of ordinary life insurance. Furthermore, demographic changes have heterogeneous impacts on life insurance consumption in terms of different religions and different degrees of aging. Our findings provide managerial implications for insurance companies that carry out life insurance business in SCO member states. Insurance companies should consider the policyholders’ life insurance consumption in accordance with demographic changes of both old-age dependency ratio and teenager dependency ratio, and also take differentiated life insurance sales strategies according to different degrees of aging and whether the residents believe in Islam

SkeleTR: Towrads Skeleton-based Action Recognition in the Wild

We present SkeleTR, a new framework for skeleton-based action recognition. In contrast to prior work, which focuses mainly on controlled environments, we target more general scenarios that typically involve a variable number of people and various forms of interaction between people. SkeleTR works with a two-stage paradigm. It first models the intra-person skeleton dynamics for each skeleton sequence with graph convolutions, and then uses stacked Transformer encoders to capture person interactions that are important for action recognition in general scenarios. To mitigate the negative impact of inaccurate skeleton associations, SkeleTR takes relative short skeleton sequences as input and increases the number of sequences. As a unified solution, SkeleTR can be directly applied to multiple skeleton-based action tasks, including video-level action classification, instance-level action detection, and group-level activity recognition. It also enables transfer learning and joint training across different action tasks and datasets, which result in performance improvement. When evaluated on various skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks, SkeleTR achieves the state-of-the-art performance.Comment: ICCV 202

Comparison of the Electrochemical Performance and Thermal Stability for Three Kinds of Charged Cathodes

The electrochemical performance and thermal stability of Li(Ni0.5Co0.2Mn0.3)O2, LiMn2O4, and LiFePO4 are investigated by the multi-channel battery cycler, electrochemical workstation, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and C80 instrument in this work. For electrochemical performance, Li(Ni0.5Co0.2Mn0.3)O2 shows the highest specific capacity but the worst cycle stability. For the thermal stability, the experimental results of thermogravimetry and C80 indicate that the charged Li(Ni0.5Co0.2Mn0.3)O2 has the worst thermal stability compared with charged LiFePO4 and LiMn2O4. It is also testified by calculating the chemical kinetic parameters of cathode materials based on the Arrhenius law. The pure Li(Ni0.5Co0.2Mn0.3)O2 starts to self-decompose at around 250°C with total heat generation of −88 J/g. As for a full battery, the total heat generation is −810 J/g with exothermic peak temperature of 242°C. The present results show that thermal runaway is more likely to occur for Li(Ni0.5Co0.2Mn0.3)O2 with the full battery

Tumor Suppressor CYLD Acts as a Negative Regulator for Non-Typeable Haemophilus influenza-Induced Inflammation in the Middle Ear and Lung of Mice

Non-typeable Haemophilus influenza (NTHi) is an important human pathogen causing respiratory tract infections in both adults and children. NTHi infections are characterized by inflammation, which is mainly mediated by nuclear transcription factor kappaB (NF-κB)-dependent production of inflammatory mediators. The deubiquitinating enzyme cylindromatosis (CYLD), loss of which was originally reported to cause a benign human syndrome called cylindromatosis, has been identified as a key negative regulator for NF-κB in vitro. However, little is known about the role of CYLD in bacteria-induced inflammation in vivo. Here, we provided direct evidence for the negative role of CYLD in NTHi-induced inflammation of the mice in vivo. Our data demonstrated that CYLD is induced by NTHi in the middle ear and lung of mice. NTHi-induced CYLD, in turn, negatively regulates NTHi-induced NF-κB activation through deubiquitinating TRAF6 and 7 and down-regulates inflammation. Our data thus indicate that CYLD acts as a negative regulator for NF-κB-dependent inflammation in vivo, hence protecting the host against detrimental inflammatory response to NTHi infection