Do maternal health problems influence child's worrying status? Evidence from the British Cohort Study

Conventional methods apply symmetric prior distributions such as a normal distribution or a Laplace distribution for regression coefficients, which may be suitable for median regression and exhibit no robustness to outliers. This work develops a quantile regression on linear panel data model without heterogeneity from a Bayesian point of view, i.e. upon a location-scale mixture representation of the asymmetric Laplace error distribution, and provides how the posterior distribution is summarized using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Applying this approach to the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS) data, it finds that a different maternal health problem has different influence on child's worrying status at different quantiles. In addition, applying stochastic search variable selection for maternal health problems to the 1970 BCS data, it finds that maternal nervous breakdown, among the 25 maternal health problems, contributes most to influence the child's worrying status

Regge-cascade hadronization

We argue that the evolution of coloured partons into colour-singlet hadrons has approximate factorization into an extended parton-shower phase and a colour-singlet resonance--pole phase. The amplitude for the conversion of colour connected partons into hadrons necessarily resembles Regge-pole amplitudes since qq-bar resonance amplitudes and Regge-pole amplitudes are related by duality. A `Regge-cascade' factorization property of the N-point Veneziano amplitude provides further justification of this protocol. This latter factorization property, in turn, allows the construction of general multi-hadron amplitudes in amplitude-squared factorized form from (1->2) link amplitudes. We suggest an algorithm with cascade-decay configuration, ordered in the transverse momentum, suitable for Monte-Carlo simulation. We make a simple implementation of this procedure in Herwig++, obtaining some improvement to the description of the event-shape distributions at LEP.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Flavour structure of low-energy hadron pair photoproduction

We consider the process $\gamma\gamma\to H_1\bar H_2$ where $H_1$ and $H_2$ are either mesons or baryons. The experimental findings for such quantities as the $p\bar p$ and $K_SK_S$ differential cross sections, in the energy range currently probed, are found often to be in disparity with the scaling behaviour expected from hard constituent scattering. We discuss the long-distance pole--resonance contribution in understanding the origin of these phenomena, as well as the amplitude relations governing the short-distance contribution which we model as a scaling contribution. When considering the latter, we argue that the difference found for the $K_SK_S$ and the $K^+K^-$ integrated cross sections can be attributed to the s-channel isovector component. This corresponds to the $\rho\omega\to a$ subprocess in the VMD (vector-meson-dominance) language. The ratio of the two cross sections is enhanced by the suppression of the $\phi$ component, and is hence constrained. We give similar constraints to a number of other hadron pair production channels. After writing down the scaling and pole--resonance contributions accordingly, the direct summation of the two contributions is found to reproduce some salient features of the $p\bar p$ and $K^+K^-$ data.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, revised version to be published in EPJ

Deconstructing classical water models at interfaces and in bulk

Using concepts from perturbation and local molecular field theories of liquids we divide the potential of the SPC/E water model into short and long ranged parts. The short ranged parts define a minimal reference network model that captures very well the structure of the local hydrogen bond network in bulk water while ignoring effects of the remaining long ranged interactions. This deconstruction can provide insight into the different roles that the local hydrogen bond network, dispersion forces, and long ranged dipolar interactions play in determining a variety of properties of SPC/E and related classical models of water. Here we focus on the anomalous behavior of the internal pressure and the temperature dependence of the density of bulk water. We further utilize these short ranged models along with local molecular field theory to quantify the influence of these interactions on the structure of hydrophobic interfaces and the crossover from small to large scale hydration behavior. The implications of our findings for theories of hydrophobicity and possible refinements of classical water models are also discussed

Metformin promotes antitumor immunity via endoplasmic-reticulum-associated degradation of PD-L1

Metformin has been reported to possess antitumor activity and maintain high cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) immune surveillance. However, the functions and detailed mechanisms of metformin’s role in cancer immunity are not fully understood. Here, we show that metformin increases CTL activity by reducing the stability and membrane localization of programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1). Furthermore, we discover that AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) activated by metformin directly phosphorylates S195 of PD-L1. S195 phosphorylation induces abnormal PD-L1 glycosylation, resulting in its ER accumulation and ER-associated protein degradation (ERAD). Consistently, tumor tissues from metformin-treated breast cancer patients exhibit reduced PD-L1 levels with AMPK activation. Blocking the inhibitory signal of PD-L1 by metformin enhances CTL activity against cancer cells. Our findings identify a new regulatory mechanism of PD-L1 expression through the ERAD pathway and suggest that the metformin-CTLA4 blockade combination has the potential to increase the efficacy of immunotherapy

Search for gravitational waves from Scorpius X-1 in the second Advanced LIGO observing run with an improved hidden Markov model

We present results from a semicoherent search for continuous gravitational waves from the low-mass x-ray binary Scorpius X-1, using a hidden Markov model (HMM) to track spin wandering. This search improves on previous HMM-based searches of LIGO data by using an improved frequency domain matched filter, the J-statistic, and by analyzing data from Advanced LIGO's second observing run. In the frequency range searched, from 60 to 650 Hz, we find no evidence of gravitational radiation. At 194.6 Hz, the most sensitive search frequency, we report an upper limit on gravitational wave strain (at 95% confidence) of h095%=3.47×10-25 when marginalizing over source inclination angle. This is the most sensitive search for Scorpius X-1, to date, that is specifically designed to be robust in the presence of spin wandering. © 2019 American Physical Society

Track D Social Science, Human Rights and Political Science

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138414/1/jia218442.pd