The change in productivity of Chinese state enterprises, 1983–1987

This study estimates the change in productivity of Chinese state enterprises during 1983–1987 using a panel data set of 403 firms. A new approach to productivity measurement is used. Under this approach, the production functions can differ arbitrarily across firms, important given the heterogeneity of the sample. The resulting coefficients estimate the marginal products of each factor as well as overall productivity growth. The results suggest Chinese productivity increased by 4.6% per year, with about half of this growth due to the rapidly improving education of the labor force.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47564/1/11123_2005_Article_BF01073492.pd

RICORS2040 : The need for collaborative research in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a silent and poorly known killer. The current concept of CKD is relatively young and uptake by the public, physicians and health authorities is not widespread. Physicians still confuse CKD with chronic kidney insufficiency or failure. For the wider public and health authorities, CKD evokes kidney replacement therapy (KRT). In Spain, the prevalence of KRT is 0.13%. Thus health authorities may consider CKD a non-issue: very few persons eventually need KRT and, for those in whom kidneys fail, the problem is 'solved' by dialysis or kidney transplantation. However, KRT is the tip of the iceberg in the burden of CKD. The main burden of CKD is accelerated ageing and premature death. The cut-off points for kidney function and kidney damage indexes that define CKD also mark an increased risk for all-cause premature death. CKD is the most prevalent risk factor for lethal coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the factor that most increases the risk of death in COVID-19, after old age. Men and women undergoing KRT still have an annual mortality that is 10- to 100-fold higher than similar-age peers, and life expectancy is shortened by ~40 years for young persons on dialysis and by 15 years for young persons with a functioning kidney graft. CKD is expected to become the fifth greatest global cause of death by 2040 and the second greatest cause of death in Spain before the end of the century, a time when one in four Spaniards will have CKD. However, by 2022, CKD will become the only top-15 global predicted cause of death that is not supported by a dedicated well-funded Centres for Biomedical Research (CIBER) network structure in Spain. Realizing the underestimation of the CKD burden of disease by health authorities, the Decade of the Kidney initiative for 2020-2030 was launched by the American Association of Kidney Patients and the European Kidney Health Alliance. Leading Spanish kidney researchers grouped in the kidney collaborative research network Red de Investigación Renal have now applied for the Redes de Investigación Cooperativa Orientadas a Resultados en Salud (RICORS) call for collaborative research in Spain with the support of the Spanish Society of Nephrology, Federación Nacional de Asociaciones para la Lucha Contra las Enfermedades del Riñón and ONT: RICORS2040 aims to prevent the dire predictions for the global 2040 burden of CKD from becoming true

Low-lying single-particle structure of 17C and the N = 14 sub-shell closure

The first investigation of the single-particle structure of the bound states of 17C, via the C transfer reaction, has been undertaken. The measured angular distributions confirm the spin-parity assignments of and for the excited states located at 217 and 335 keV, respectively. The spectroscopic factors deduced for these states exhibit a marked single-particle character, in agreement with shell model and particle-core model calculations, and combined with their near degeneracy in energy provide clear evidence for the absence of the sub-shell closure. The very small spectroscopic factor found for the ground state is consistent with theoretical predictions and indicates that the strength is carried by unbound states. With a dominant valence neutron configuration and a very low separation energy, the excited state is a one-neutron halo candidate

The CHEMDNER corpus of chemicals and drugs and its annotation principles

The automatic extraction of chemical information from text requires the recognition of chemical entity mentions as one of its key steps. When developing supervised named entity recognition (NER) systems, the availability of a large, manually annotated text corpus is desirable. Furthermore, large corpora permit the robust evaluation and comparison of different approaches that detect chemicals in documents. We present the CHEMDNER corpus, a collection of 10,000 PubMed abstracts that contain a total of 84,355 chemical entity mentions labeled manually by expert chemistry literature curators, following annotation guidelines specifically defined for this task. The abstracts of the CHEMDNER corpus were selected to be representative for all major chemical disciplines. Each of the chemical entity mentions was manually labeled according to its structure-associated chemical entity mention (SACEM) class: abbreviation, family, formula, identifier, multiple, systematic and trivial. The difficulty and consistency of tagging chemicals in text was measured using an agreement study between annotators, obtaining a percentage agreement of 91. For a subset of the CHEMDNER corpus (the test set of 3,000 abstracts) we provide not only the Gold Standard manual annotations, but also mentions automatically detected by the 26 teams that participated in the BioCreative IV CHEMDNER chemical mention recognition task. In addition, we release the CHEMDNER silver standard corpus of automatically extracted mentions from 17,000 randomly selected PubMed abstracts. A version of the CHEMDNER corpus in the BioC format has been generated as well. We propose a standard for required minimum information about entity annotations for the construction of domain specific corpora on chemical and drug entities. The CHEMDNER corpus and annotation guidelines are available at: http://www.biocreative.org/resources/biocreative-iv/chemdner-corpus

Composition en caroténoïdes, vitamines A et E des aliments consommés dans une zone de paludisme endémique au Cameroun (Ngali II)

Malaria remains the first cause of morbidity and mortality in Cameroon. The aim of this study is to determine carotenoïds, vitamin A and vitamin E contents in dishes consumed by Cameroonians living in a rural area which is a malaria endemic zone, called Ngali II. The dishes consumed by the people of this area are sauce prepared from several green leafy vegetables, leguminous seeds and cucurbit seeds, tubers and plantains. The nutrient contents were determined by High Performance Liquid Chromatography. The results obtained are expressed in micrograms per 100 grams dry weight: α-caroten 0-6434.7; ß-caroten 0-15612.5; vitamin A 0-1442.4 and vitamin E 0-40776. The dishes of fourth group have higher nutrient contents: 3808.52; 8722.50; 1761.65 and 18048 micrograms per 100 grams dry weight respectively for α-caroten, ß-caroten, vitamin A and vitamin E. Therefore, higher consumption of dishes for this group is recommended to prevent various infections like malaria in Ngali II. © Lavoisier - La photocopie non autorisée est un délit.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Allosteric regulation of glycogen synthase controls glycogen synthesis in muscle

SummaryGlycogen synthase (GS), a key enzyme in glycogen synthesis, is activated by the allosteric stimulator glucose-6-phosphate (G6P) and by dephosphorylation through inactivation of GS kinase-3 with insulin. The relative importance of these two regulatory mechanisms in controlling GS is not established, mainly due to the complex interplay between multiple phosphorylation sites and allosteric effectors. Here we identify a residue that plays an important role in the allosteric activation of GS by G6P. We generated knockin mice in which wild-type muscle GS was replaced by a mutant that could not be activated by G6P but could still be activated normally by dephosphorylation. We demonstrate that knockin mice expressing the G6P-insensitive mutant display an ∼80% reduced muscle glycogen synthesis by insulin and markedly reduced glycogen levels. Our study provides genetic evidence that allosteric activation of GS is the primary mechanism by which insulin promotes muscle glycogen accumulation in vivo