When Opportunity Knocks: China's Open Door Policy and Declining Educational Attainment

At the end of 1978, China opened the door to trade with foreign businesses. This study investigates how the Open Door Policy's implementation affected the skill composition and skill premium for workers born 1960-1970. Using measures of local labor markets' export exposure, we find that for every $1000 increase in exports per worker, high school completion rates decreased by 4.5 p.p. for workers born in 1970, compared to those born in 1960. Linking this to mid-career outcomes in 2010, we show that highly export-exposed workers in China have a$124 greater return to an additional year of schooling than their less export-exposed brethren. This suggests China's growth was likely dampened and its income inequality widened during the early industrialization of the 1980s and 1990s, as the Open Door Policy simultaneously reduced the availability of skilled labor and increased the skill premium

When Opportunity Knocks: China's Open Door Policy and Declining Educational Attainment

At the end of 1978, China opened the door to trade with foreign businesses. This study investigates how the Open Door Policy's implementation affected the skill composition and skill premium for workers born 1960-1970. Using measures of local labor markets' export exposure, we find that for every $1000 increase in exports per worker, high school completion rates decreased by 4.5 p.p. for workers born in 1970, compared to those born in 1960. Linking this to mid-career outcomes in 2010, we show that highly export-exposed workers in China have a$124 greater return to an additional year of schooling than their less export-exposed brethren. This suggests China's growth was likely dampened and its income inequality widened during the early industrialization of the 1980s and 1990s, as the Open Door Policy simultaneously reduced the availability of skilled labor and increased the skill premium

Role of interfacial tension on wettability-controlled fluid displacement in porous rock: A capillary-dominated flow and how to control it

Oil displacement by spontaneous imbibition is a capillary-governed process, in which wettability controls fluid displacement direction. Capillarity is a driving force to enhance oil displacement in water-wet system, while in oil-wet system capillarity is a resisting one. To promote oil displacement, the former requires high capillarity, but the latter opposes. Such requisites are hypothesized to be alternatively achieved by manipulating an oilwater interfacial tension, without altering wetting character. In this study, spontaneous imbibition was conducted with a set of specifically designed imbibing fluids. Brines at different valencies were meticulously selected to attain desired wettabilities: monovalent brine establishes a water-wetting while divalent brine provides an oil-wet characteristics. A non-ionic surfactant, Triton X-100, was intentionally chosen to solely reduce interfacial tension, with negligible change in wettability. By mixing each brine with the surfactant, high-interfacial tension and low-interfacial tension imbibing fluids at the same wettability for the two wetting regions were obtained, and hence the hypothesis can be examined. For water-wet system, reduced interfacial tension attributed to a weakened driving capillary force to oil displacement, and hence lower oil displaced. On the contrary in oil-wet system, reduction in resisting capillary force as contributed from a reduced interfacial tension displaced greater oil. The results demonstrate how the capillary-driven fluid displacement can be manipulated by the interfacial tension change only, without a challenge of altering wettability. With results obtained from both wetting regions, a correlation between capillarity and ultimate oil displacement was also observed.Document Type: Original articleCited as: Tangparitkul, S., Sukee, A., Jiang, J., Tapanya, C., Fongkham, N., Yang, H. Role of interfacial tension on wettability-controlled fluid displacement in porous rock: A capillary-dominated flow and how to control it. Capillarity, 2023, 9(3): 55-64. https://doi.org/10.46690/capi.2023.12.0

Co-exposure to multiple vitamins and the risk of all-cause mortality in patients with diabetes

ObjectiveAlthough the effect of vitamins on the risk of mortality in diabetic patients has been reported, most studies focus on individual vitamins. However, humans are often exposed to multiple vitamins simultaneously in daily life. Therefore, it is worth exploring the effects of co-exposure to multiple vitamins on the risk of mortality in diabetic patients.MethodsThis study included diabetic patients aged ≥20WD years who participated in NHANES from 2003 to 2006. An unsupervised K-means clustering method was used to cluster eight vitamins in serum into several patterns of co-exposure to multiple vitamins, and the Cox proportional hazards model was used to evaluate the impact of different patterns of co-exposure to multiple vitamins on the risk of all-cause mortality in diabetic patients.ResultsThree patterns of co-exposure to multiple vitamins were generated based on K-means clustering, namely, low-level, moderate-level, and high-level. Among the 484 diabetic patients, with a median follow-up of 13.7 years, a total of 211 deaths occurred. After adjusting for covariates, the individual vitamins had varying effects on the risk of all-cause mortality in diabetic patients. Compared to the low-level group of co-exposure to multiple vitamins, the high-level group significantly reduced the risk of all-cause mortality in diabetic patients, with a HR of 0.42 (95% CI: 0.20, 0.87). Subgroup analysis demonstrated that high levels of co-exposure to multiple vitamins significantly reduced the risk of all-cause mortality in males, individuals aged ≥ 60 years, and non-Hispanic White people with diabetes compared to the low-level group, with HR of 0.42 (95% CI: 0.18, 0.98), 0.53 (95% CI: 0.26, 0.98), and 0.26 (95% CI: 0.12, 0.58) respectively.ConclusionWhile individual vitamins had different effects on the risk of all-cause mortality in patients with diabetes, high-level co-exposure to multiple vitamins significantly reduced the risk of all-cause mortality in patients with diabetes, with differences observed among genders, ages, and race. This suggests that when developing vitamin intervention strategies for patients with diabetes, consideration should be given not only to the dosage of individual vitamins but also to the variations between different population groups

Health System Barriers and Facilitators to Delivering Additional Vaccines through the National Immunisation Programme in China: A Qualitative Study of Provider and Service-User Perspectives.

In China, there are two categories of vaccines available from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and associated public health agencies. Extended Program of Immunization (EPI) vaccines are government-funded and non-EPI vaccines are voluntary and paid for out-of-pocket. The government plans to transition some non-EPI vaccines to EPI in the coming years, which may burden public health system capacity, particularly in terms of budget, workforce, supply chains, and information systems. Our study explored vaccinator and caregiver perspectives on introducing non-EPI vaccines into routine immunization and perceived facilitators and barriers affecting this transition. We conducted a qualitative study from a realist perspective, analysing semi-structured interviews with 26 vaccination providers and 160 caregivers in three provinces, selected to represent regional socioeconomic disparities across Eastern, Central, and Western China. Data were analysed thematically, using deductive and inductive coding. Most participants were positive about adding vaccines to the national schedule. Candidate EPI vaccines most frequently recommended by participants were varicella, mumps vaccine, and hand-foot-mouth disease. Providers generally considered existing workspaces, cold-chain equipment, and funding sufficient, but described frontline staffing and vaccine information systems as requiring improvement. This is the first qualitative study to explore interest, barriers, and facilitators related to adding vaccines to China's national schedule from provider and caregiver perspectives. Findings can inform government efforts to introduce additional vaccines, by including efforts to retain and recruit vaccine programme staff and implement whole-process data management and health information systems that allow unified nationwide data collection and sharing

Infiltration of Traditional Music Elements in Piano Teaching Models Combining Wavelet Packet Domain Auditory Perception

In Chinese piano teaching practice, the importance of auditory perception of music has been neglected, so that in piano performance and teaching, many people play music that lacks personality and emotional experience. This paper proposes an auditory perception model based on wavelet packet domain based on the acoustic properties of the human ear. The model analyzes the acoustical perception characteristics of piano audio signals through wavelet transform, and introduces adaptive wavelet packet decomposition into the calculation of the auditory perception model to simplify the calculation of the model, so that the obtained auditory masking threshold is closer to the actual value. Finally, the acoustic perception model is practically applied to piano teaching to verify its effectiveness. And the traditional Chinese music elements of Gong, Zheng and Shang were infiltrated in piano teaching. The results showed that the model detected the 3rd harmonic g1 with root tone C, whose frequency peak was most prominent at 397.25 Hz, and the sound pressure value reached 39.50 dB, indicating that the auditory perception ability directly affects the musical expression and creativity. This study cultivates students’ musical auditory perception ability, which significantly improves piano playing ability

Correlation‐guided multi‐object tracking with correlation feature transfer

Here, the authors propose a correlation‐guided Monte Carlo Markov chain (MCMC) solver to promote the efficiency for tracking multiple objects under recursive Bayesian filtering framework. Instead of randomly proposing the target location according to certain distribution, the authors’ method guides the MCMC solver to sample among locations that the targets are more likely to appear. The high possible locations for each target are obtained using its corresponding response map by evaluating the correlation between the target appearance and its online model. Furthermore, the proposed tracking framework is natural to transfer the rich domain‐specific offline correlation features into the target online model. With the calculation in the Fourier domain and the reversible jump strategy for MCMC, the correlation‐guided method is able to track variable multiple objects with high efficiency. At the same time, the correlation feature transfer strategy is capable of improving tracking precision with easy offline training. The proposed method is evaluated by both the synthetic and real scenario videos. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superior performance against its counterparts

Modification of safety factor of defective pipeline based on radial basis function network

Safety factor is one of the important parameters for pipeline integrity assessment, but only the impact of the safety level of the place where the pipeline is located is considered in the traditional assessment method, so the actual safety status of pipeline cannot be assessed comprehensively. Here, the relevant risk factors of pipeline were extracted, the relative importance of factors was compared, a scoring system was established to feature the different risk states, and thereby, the safety factor was modified according to the risk score obtained, so that the modified safety factor could reflect the actual risk state of the defective pipeline section. Combined with the self-learning characteristics of the radial basis function network method, a calculation model of pipeline safety factor based on radical basis function network was established with risk factors as the input and the modified safety factor as the output. The calculated safety factor from the model training is in good agreement with the test sample value, which verifies the accuracy of this model. The results show that the modified safety factor introduces the influence of other important risk factors on the basis of the regional level, which provides a new idea for determining the value of safety factor in the pipeline integrity assessment

Harmonic suppression of charging station based on harmonic superposition

With the rapid development of electric vehicles, the high permeability of electric vehicles brings new challenges to the power grid, one of which is harmonic pollution. This paper first analyzes the harmonic characteristics of the two chargers. During the conventional charging process, the harmonic distortion of the two chargers will increase in the later stage of constant voltage, exceeding the requirement of harmonic grid connection. Then the principle and superposition method of harmonic cancellation are introduced, and the feasibility of harmonic cancellation between chargers is verified by simulation. Finally, through the harmonic counteracting function of different chargers, the ratio of chargers is determined, and the harmonic distortion of constant voltage stage is reduced as far as possible, which provides the reference for the harmonic control and the actual construction of charging station