Parental Education and Child Health: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan

This paper exploits a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of parental education on child health in Taiwan. In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from six to nine years. From that year through 1973, the government opened 254 new junior high schools, an 80 percent increase, at a differential rate among regions. We form treatment and control groups of women or men who were age 12 or under on the one hand and between the ages of 13 and 20 or 25 on the other hand in 1968. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for schooling. We employ this instrument to estimate the causal effects of mother's or father's schooling on the incidence of low birthweight and mortality of infants born to women in the treatment and control groups or the wives of men in these groups in the period from 1978 through 1999. Parents' schooling, especially mother's schooling, does indeed cause favorable infant health outcomes. The increase in schooling associated with the reform saved almost 1 infant life in 1,000 live births, resulting in a decline in infant mortality of approximately 11 percent.

CP Violation and the Baryonic Asymmetry of the Universe

The physics of electroweak baryogenesis is described with the aim of making the essentials clear to non-experts. Several models for the source of the necessary CP violation are discussed: CKM phases as in the minimal standard model, general two higgs doublet models, the supersymmetric standard model, $Z$ condensates, and the singlet majoron model. In a more technical section, a strategy is introduced for consistently treating quark dynamics in the neighborhood of the bubble wall, where both local and non-local interactions are important. This provides a method for deciding whether gluonic corrections wash out the elecroweak contribution to the baryonic asymmetry in the minimal standard model.Comment: latex, 42pp, no figs. Invited talk at Trends in Astroparticle Physics, Stockholm, Sept 1994

The first soft-shelled turtle from the Jehol Biota of China

A new turtle from the Early Cretaceous (Aptian) Jiufotang Formation of western Liaoning, China, Perochelys lamadongensis, gen. et sp. nov., represents the first species of soft-shelled turtle from the Jehol Biota. The new taxon is diagnosed by the combination of the following characters: nuchal bone about five times wider than long; preneural absent; reversal of the orientation in the neural series at neural V; neural series fully separates costal series; costal VIIIs reduced; plastral callosities poorly developed and poorly sculpted; postorbital bar narrow, around one-fourth of orbit diameter; jugal contacting squamosal; foramen jugulare posterius separated from fenestra postotica; neural spines weakly developed on anterior cervicals; and phalangeal formula for pes 2-3-3-4-?. High levels of homoplasy make the phylogenetic relationships of the new taxon difficult to assess, and the possibility therefore exists that Perochelys lamadongensis either represents a stem or a crown trionychid. This phylogenetic uncertainty confirms that the skeletal morphology of trionychids has remained virtually unchanged for the last 120 million years

Decoding a Complex Visualization in a Science Museum -- An Empirical Study

This study describes a detailed analysis of museum visitors' decoding process as they used a visualization designed to support exploration of a large, complex dataset. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that it took, on average, 43 seconds for visitors to decode enough of the visualization to see patterns and relationships in the underlying data represented, and 54 seconds to arrive at their first correct data interpretation. Furthermore, visitors decoded throughout and not only upon initial use of the visualization. The study analyzed think-aloud data to identify issues visitors had mapping the visual representations to their intended referents, examine why they occurred, and consider if and how these decoding issues were resolved. The paper also describes how multiple visual encodings both helped and hindered decoding and concludes with implications on the design and adaptation of visualizations for informal science learning venues.Comment: IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST/SciVis) 2019 ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing, Visualization, Empirical studies in visualizatio

Type IIA Orientifold Limit of M-Theory on Compact Joyce 8-Manifold of Spin(7)-Holonomy

We show that M-theory compactified on a compact Joyce 8-manifold of $Spin(7)$-holonomy, which yields an effective theory in $D = 3$ with $\N$ = 1 supersymmetry, admits at some special points in it moduli space a description in terms of type IIA theory on an orientifold of compact Joyce 7-manifold of $G_2$-holonomy. We find the evidence in favour of this duality by computing the massless spectra on both M-thory side and type IIA side. For the latter, we compute the massless spectra by going to the orbifold limit of the Joyce 7-manifold.Comment: 26 pages, 2 eps figures, Latex file, two references and one footnote added, corrected some typo

Estimating the Fatality Rate of Covid-19

As the coronavirus disease Covid-19 rages in China and spreads to other countries in the world, good estimations of the disease’s epidemiological parameters are crucial to help governments, hospitals, businesses, and the general public to prepare for and to stop the spread of the disease. However, the disease’s fatality rate, one of the most important parameters, is not calculated properly in many government websites and research papers and thus is misleading people’s understanding of the severity of the disease. In this study, we compare various definitions or methods to calculate the fatality rate and point out why they are misleading. We also propose a statistical model to analyze patients’ contraction, recovery, or death process and develop a method to estimate the fatality rate based on available disease statistics

Content and Grade Trends in State Assessments and NAEP

Each state is required by the No Child Left Behind Act to report the percents of its students who have reached a score level called “proficient” or above for certain grades in the content areas of reading (or a similar construct) and math. Using 2005 data from public web sites of states and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), state-to-state differences in percents were analyzed, both unconditionally and conditionally on NAEP, for (1) trend across content areas (horizontal moderation), (2) trend across grade levels (vertical moderation), and (3) consistency with NAEP. While there was considerable variation from state to state, especially on an idealistic-realistic dimension, the results generally show that states are relatively consistent in trends across grades and contents. Accessed 14,802 times on https://pareonline.net from August 27, 2007 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right

Sea of Genes: Combining Animation and Narrative Strategies to Visualize Metagenomic Data for Museums

We examine the application of narrative strategies to present a complex and unfamiliar metagenomics dataset to the public in a science museum. Our dataset contains information about microbial gene expressions that scientists use to infer the behavior of microbes. This exhibit had three goals: to inform (the) public about microbes' behavior, cycles, and patterns; to link their behavior to the concept of gene expression; and to highlight scientists' use of gene expression data to understand the role of microbes. To address these three goals, we created a visualization with three narrative layers, each layer corresponding to a goal. This study presented us with an opportunity to assess existing frameworks for narrative visualization in a naturalistic setting. We present three successive rounds of design and evaluation of our attempts to engage visitors with complex data through narrative visualization. We highlight our design choices and their underlying rationale based on extant theories. We conclude that a central animation based on a curated dataset could successfully achieve our first goal, i.e., to communicate the aggregate behavior and interactions of microbes. We failed to achieve our second goal and had limited success with the third goal. Overall, this study highlights the challenges of telling multi-layered stories and the need for new frameworks for communicating layered stories in public settings.Comment: This manuscript has been accepted to VIS 2020 and TVCG 9 pages 2 reference

Effects of cloud overlap in photochemical models

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95365/1/jgrd10939.pd