Rural-Urban Economic Disparities among China’s Elderly

Some of the most controversial effects of China's post-1978 economic reforms have been on regional income disparities and on the divide between urban and rural development. How important are those income disparities? And how do they affect the elderly, who are perhaps the most vulnerable to the changes brought by China’s transition? What is the government’s role in providing income support? This paper examines the rural-urban disparities in income, expenditures, and government support among the elderly in China. We test for significant differences in levels and sources of income and in types of expenditures using a nationwide survey on rural and urban elderly conducted by China’s Elderly Scientific Research Center in 1992. This survey consists of two separate sets of responses, one for urban areas (9,889 respondents) and the other for rural areas (10,194 respondents), and provides demographic, socioeconomic, and health characteristics of the elderly. In addition, we propose to investigate the type and level of government income support programs at the local and state level. The findings are evaluated and policy implications discussed in the context of China’s transition to a market economy and choice of development strategies.

Socioeconomic-Demographic Characteristics and Supporting Resources of the Chinese Elderly

Inspired by the perspectives of Modernization Theory and Social Stratification Theory of Aging, this paper examines the social resources and the demographic characteristics of the Chinese elderly. The paper addresses the following questions: What social resources are available to the Chinese elderly after retirement? Are the demographic characteristics of the elderly associated with their social resources? Utilizing the 2006 China national survey data, this study demonstrates the current characteristics of the Chinese elderly aged 60 years and above and presents the availability of social resources for the elderly in five categories: external financial resources, medical resources, physical resources, family resources, and self-resources. The study explores the associations between demographic characteristics and the social resources in each area. To complete the above analysis and to test the above theories, methods of statistics of cross-tabulations, Chi-square significance test, and indicators of strengths shown by Cramer’s V and tau-c are applied. The results disclose a comprehensive picture of diverse social resources of the older people in contemporary Chinese society. The findings show that medical and self-resources are most closely associated with the demographic characteristics, followed by family resources, external financial resources, and lastly, physical resources. Policy implications are also addressed

The Regulatory Role of MeAIB in Protein Metabolism and the mTOR Signaling Pathway in Porcine Enterocytes.

Amino acid transporters play an important role in cell growth and metabolism. MeAIB, a transporter-selective substrate, often represses the adaptive regulation of sodium-coupled neutral amino acid transporter 2 (SNAT2), which may act as a receptor and regulate cellular amino acid contents, therefore modulating cellular downstream signaling. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of MeAIB to SNAT2 on cell proliferation, protein turnover, and the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway in porcine enterocytes. Intestinal porcine epithelial cells (IPEC)-J2 cells were cultured in a high-glucose Dulbecco's modified Eagle's (DMEM-H) medium with 0 or 5 mmoL/L System A amino acid analogue (MeAIB) for 48 h. Cells were collected for analysis of proliferation, cell cycle, protein synthesis and degradation, intracellular free amino acids, and the expression of key genes involved in the mTOR signaling pathway. The results showed that SNAT2 inhibition by MeAIB depleted intracellular concentrations of not only SNAT2 amino acid substrates but also of indispensable amino acids (methionine and leucine), and suppressed cell proliferation and impaired protein synthesis. MeAIB inhibited mTOR phosphorylation, which might be involved in three translation regulators, EIF4EBP1, IGFBP3, and DDIT4 from PCR array analysis of the 84 genes related to the mTOR signaling pathway. These results suggest that SNAT2 inhibition treated with MeAIB plays an important role in regulating protein synthesis and mTOR signaling, and provide some information to further clarify its roles in the absorption of amino acids and signal transduction in the porcine small intestine

Detection and Characterization of E-Health Research: A Bibliometrics (2001–2016)

E-health is the use of ICT to improve the ability to treat patients, facilitate behavior change, and improve health. It has many benefits like healthcare cost reduction, convenience for users, and health system improvement. Several literature reviews have included one part or the other of the field, but an overall review is lacking possibly due to the field’s constant evolution. An overview of E-health research is needed. We selected the related literature on E-health downloaded from Web of Science and PubMed as data source and used the visualization analysis function of CiteSpace. Literature information would be converted into precise mapping knowledge domain. Through further analysis of mappings, we explored the theoretical framework and the forefront in the field of E-health. Our study shows that over the past 15 years, the USA, England, and Australia were the top three countries that published the largest number of papers. Researches about Internet technology, telemedicine (m-health), and healthcare lay the basis of E-health research development. Particularly, m-health, health system management, and experimental intervention have emerged and formed the new study frontier in the recent 3–5 years. With the advancement of E-health projects, an increasing number of scholars have been studying the commercialization of E-health

Efficient Core-selecting Incentive Mechanism for Data Sharing in Federated Learning

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning system that uses participants' data to train an improved global model. In federated learning, participants cooperatively train a global model, and they will receive the global model and payments. Rational participants try to maximize their individual utility, and they will not input their high-quality data truthfully unless they are provided with satisfactory payments based on their data quality. Furthermore, federated learning benefits from the cooperative contributions of participants. Accordingly, how to establish an incentive mechanism that both incentivizes inputting data truthfully and promotes stable cooperation has become an important issue to consider. In this paper, we introduce a data sharing game model for federated learning and employ game-theoretic approaches to design a core-selecting incentive mechanism by utilizing a popular concept in cooperative games, the core. In federated learning, the core can be empty, resulting in the core-selecting mechanism becoming infeasible. To address this, our core-selecting mechanism employs a relaxation method and simultaneously minimizes the benefits of inputting false data for all participants. However, this mechanism is computationally expensive because it requires aggregating exponential models for all possible coalitions, which is infeasible in federated learning. To address this, we propose an efficient core-selecting mechanism based on sampling approximation that only aggregates models on sampled coalitions to approximate the exact result. Extensive experiments verify that the efficient core-selecting mechanism can incentivize inputting high-quality data and stable cooperation, while it reduces computational overhead compared to the core-selecting mechanism

Energy efficiency in the Chinese provinces:a fixed effects stochastic frontier spatial Durbin error panel analysis

Energy efficiency improvement has been a key objective of China's long- term energy policy. In this paper, we derive single-factor technical energy efficiency (abbreviated as energy efficiency) in China from multi-factor efficiency estimated by means of a translog production function and a stochastic frontier model on the basis of panel data on 29 Chinese provinces over the period 2003-2011. We find that average energy efficiency has been increasing over the research period and that the provinces with the highest energy efficiency are at the east coast and the ones with the lowest in the west, with an intermediate corridor in between. In the analysis of the determinants of energy efficiency by means of a spatial Durbin error model both factors in the own province and in first-order neighboring provinces are considered. Per capita income in the own province has a positive effect. Furthermore, foreign direct investment and population density in the own province and in neighboring provinces have positive effects, whereas the share of state-owned enterprises in Gross Provincial Product in the own province and in neighboring provinces has negative effects. From the analysis it follows that inflow of foreign direct investment and reform of state-owned enterprises are important policy handles

Decision analysis of slope ecological restoration based on AHP

The serious deterioration of the ecological environment comes from a large number of geological disasters. These disasters were caused by a number of engineering activities. Ecological restoration is an important measure to reduce geological disasters and protect the ecological environment. On the basis of the introduction of cast-in-situ grids technology, external-soil spray seeding technology and vegetation bag technology, according to the ecological restoration experiment of the road slope attach to the Three Gorges Pumped-Storage Power Station in Hohhot, decision analysis of slope ecological restoration is done with AHP. It is shown that in arid and semi-arid area, selection of slope ecological restoration scheme mainly needs considering the ecological effect and stability. The major factor of ecological effects is survival rate of vegetation. The major factor of stability is the stability in a whole. Cast-in-situ grids technology will be the first choice for ecological restoration of road slope in arid and semi-arid area. This study provides reference for decision of the slope ecological restoration in arid and semi-arid region