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

Geographic structure of Chinese dialects: a computational dialectometric approach

Dialect classification is a long-standing issue in Chinese dialectology. Although various theories of Chinese dialect regions have been proposed, most have been limited by similar methodological issues, especially due to their reliance on the subjective analysis of dialect maps both individually and in the aggregate, as well as their focus on phonology over syntax and vocabulary. Consequently, we know relatively little about the geolinguistic underpinnings of Chinese dialect variation. Following a review of previous research in this area, this article presents a theory of Chinese dialect regions based on the first large-scale quantitative analysis of the data from the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects, which was collected between 2000 and 2008, providing the most up-to-date picture of the full Chinese dialect landscape. We identify and map a hierarchy of 10 major Chinese dialect regions, challenging traditional accounts. In addition, we propose a new theory of Chinese dialect formation to account for our findings

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