Mother's Education and Child Health: Is There a Nurturing Effect?

In this paper, we examine the effect of maternal education on the health of young children by using a large sample of adopted children from China. As adopted children are genetically unrelated to the nurturing parents, the educational effect on them is most likely to be the nurturing effect. We find that the mother's education is an important determinant of the health of adopted children even after we control for income, the number of siblings, health environments, and other socioeconomic variables. Moreover, the effect of the mother's education on the adoptee sample is similar to that on the own birth sample, which suggests that the main effect of the mother's education on child health is in post-natal nurturing. Our work provides new evidence to the general literature that examines the determinants of health and that examines the intergenerational immobility of socioeconomic status.

Microinsurance, Trust and Economic Development: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Field Experiment

We report results from a large randomized natural field experiment conducted in southwestern China in the context of insurance for sows. Our study sheds light on two important questions about microinsurance. First, how does access to formal insurance affect farmers' production decisions? Second, what explains the low takeup rate of formal insurance, despite substantial premium subsidy from the government? We find that providing access to formal insurance significantly increases farmers' tendency to raise sows. We argue that this finding also suggests that farmers are not previously insured efficiently through informal mechanisms. We also provide several pieces of evidence suggesting that trust, or lack thereof, for government-sponsored insurance products is a significant barrier for farmers' willingness to participate in the insurance program.Microinsurance; Trust, Natural Field Experiment

From Deterministic to Generative: Multi-Modal Stochastic RNNs for Video Captioning

Video captioning in essential is a complex natural process, which is affected by various uncertainties stemming from video content, subjective judgment, etc. In this paper we build on the recent progress in using encoder-decoder framework for video captioning and address what we find to be a critical deficiency of the existing methods, that most of the decoders propagate deterministic hidden states. Such complex uncertainty cannot be modeled efficiently by the deterministic models. In this paper, we propose a generative approach, referred to as multi-modal stochastic RNNs networks (MS-RNN), which models the uncertainty observed in the data using latent stochastic variables. Therefore, MS-RNN can improve the performance of video captioning, and generate multiple sentences to describe a video considering different random factors. Specifically, a multi-modal LSTM (M-LSTM) is first proposed to interact with both visual and textual features to capture a high-level representation. Then, a backward stochastic LSTM (S-LSTM) is proposed to support uncertainty propagation by introducing latent variables. Experimental results on the challenging datasets MSVD and MSR-VTT show that our proposed MS-RNN approach outperforms the state-of-the-art video captioning benchmarks

Pressures of Partial Crystallization and Magma Plumbing Systems Beneath Hawaiian Volcanoes

To interpret the plumbing systems beneath Hawaiian volcanoes, we have calculated the pressures of partial crystallization of basaltic magmas using the petrological method described by Kelly & Barton (2008). A total of 1576 major oxide analyses of glasses from four volcanoes (Kilauea and the Puna Ridge, Loihi, Mauna Loa, and Mauna Kea, on the Big Island) were compiled and used as input data. Glasses represent quenched liquid compositions rather than mixtures of crystals and melts, and therefore glass analyses are preferable to whole-rock analyses for calculation of pressures of partial crystallization. The results were filtered to exclude samples that yielded unrealistic results based on large errors associated with the calculated pressure or a negative value of pressure, and to exclude samples with non-basaltic compositions or those that did not lie along the liquid, olivine, plagioclase and clinopyroxene cotectic. Calculated pressures were converted to depths of partial crystallization. The majority (68.2%) of pressures of partial crystallization for the shield-stage subaerial lavas from Kilauea, Mauna Loa, and Mauna Kea, fell in the range 0–140 MPa, corresponding to depths of 0–5 km. Glasses from the Puna Ridge yielded pressures ranging from 18 to 126 MPa and were virtually identical to pressures determined from glasses from Kilauea (0–129 MPa), as expected because the Puna Ridge is an offshore extension of the East Rift zone of Kilauea. These results are consistent with the presence of magma reservoirs at depths of 0–5 km beneath the large shield volcanoes. The inferred depth of the magma reservoir beneath the summit of Kilauea (average = 1.8 km, maximum = 5 km) agrees well with depths (~2–6 km) estimated from seismic studies (Dzurisin et al, 1984). The results for Kilauea and Mauna Kea indicated that significant partial crystallization also occurs beneath the summit reservoirs at depths up to 11 km. These results are also consistent with seismic evidence for the presence of a magma reservoir at 8–11 km beneath Kilauea (Lin et al., 2014) at the base of the volcanic pile. The results for Loihi (100–400 MPa) indicate crystallization at higher average pressures and depths (3–14 km) than the large shield volcanoes, suggesting that the plumbing system is not yet fully developed, and that the Hawaiian volcanic plumbing systems evolve over time.Shell Exploration and Production CompanyFriends of Orton Hall fundA three-year embargo was granted for this item.Academic Major: Earth Science

Evidence on the impact of Sustained Exposure to Air Pollution on Life Expectancy from China's Huai River Policy

This paper's findings suggest that an arbitrary Chinese policy that greatly increases total suspended particulates (TSP) air pollution is causing the 500 million residents of Northern China to lose more than 2.5 billion life years of life expectancy. The quasi-experimental empirical approach is based on China's Huai River policy, which provided free winter heating via the provision of coal for boilers in cities North of the Huai River but denied heat to the South. Using a regression discontinuity design based on distance from the Huai River, we find that ambient concentrations of TSP are about 184 μg/m3 (95% CI: 61, 307) or 55% higher in the North. Further, the results indicate that life expectancies are about 5.5 (95% CI: 0.8, 10.2) years lower in the North due to an increased incidence of cardiorespiratory mortality. More generally, the analysis suggests that long-term exposure to an additional 100 μg/m3 of TSP is associated with a reduction in life expectancy at birth of about 3.0 years (95% CI: 0.4, 5.6).Robert Wood Johnson Foundatio

Synthesis of Dinitrogen‐Fused Spirocyclic Heterocycles via Organocatalytic 1,3‐dipolar Cycloaddition of 2‐Arylidene‐1,3‐indandiones and an Azomethine Imine

An efficient 1,3‐dipolar cycloaddition of 2‐arylidene‐1,3‐indandiones with an azomethine imine has been developed to furnish spiroindane‐1,3‐dione‐pyrazolidinones in generally good to high yields with excellent diastereoselectivity under mild conditions.On an upward spiro: An efficient cycloaddition between 2‐arylidene‐1,3‐indandiones and an azomethine imine has been developed for the construction of dinitrogen‐fused spirocyclic heterocycles.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137534/1/ajoc201500529.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137534/2/ajoc201500529-sup-0001-misc_information.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137534/3/ajoc201500529_am.pd