A Regular Demand System with Commodity-Specific Demographic Effects

Regular consumer demand systems almost invariably employ specifications that involve common functional forms in all equations. When applications involve crosssectional data it is often the case that demographic effects are important. However it is plausible that demographic effects are commodity-specific. In this case, there may be a loss of efficiency if a common functional form across commodities is imposed artificially by entering redundant explanators in demand equations for which specific demographic influences are unwarranted. This paper explores an approach to specifying a complete system of demand equations which is fully regular but which nevertheless allows for commodity-specific variation in the functional form of the demand equations.Consumer Economics: Theory, Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis, Demographic Economics

Antagonistic Managers, Careless Workers and Extraverted Salespeople: An Examination of Personality in Occupational Choice

This paper is an econometric investigation of the choice of individuals between a number of occupation groupings utilising an extensive array of conditioning variables measuring a variety of aspects of individual heterogeneity. Whilst the model contains the main theory of occupational choice, human capital theory, it also tests dynasty hysteresis through parental status variables. The focus is an examination of the relationship between choice and personality with the inclusion of psychometrically derived personality variables. Occupational choice is modelled using multinomial logit estimation using the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey data. Human capital variables are found to exhibit strong credentialism effects. Parental status has a small and limited effect on occupation outcomes indicative of only some small dynasty hysteresis. On the other hand, personality effects are found to be significant, relatively large and persistent across all occupations. Further, the strength of these personality effects are such that they can in many instances rival that of various education credentials. These personality effects include but are not limited to: managers being less agreeable and more antagonistic; labourers being less conscientiousness; and sales people being more extraverted.occupational choice, personality traits, credentialism, dynasty hysteresis

Occupational Choice: Personality Matters

In modern societies, people are often classified as "White Collar" or "Blue Collar" workers: that classification not only informs social scientists about the kind of work that they do, but also about their social standing, their social interests, their family ties, and their approach to life in general. This analysis will examine the effect of an individual's psychometrically derived personality traits and status of their parents on the probability of attaining a white collar occupation over the baseline category of a blue collar occupation; controlling for human capital and other factors. The paper uses data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to estimate a random effects probit model to capture the effects on the probability of being in a white collar occupation. The results are then examined using the average marginal effects of the different conditioning variables over the whole sample. The analysis confirms the previous findings of human capital theory, but finds that personality and parental status also have significant effects on occupational outcomes. The results suggest that the magnitude of the average marginal effect of parental status is small and the effect of the personality trait "conscientiousness" is large and rivals that of education. Finally, estimates of separate models for males and females indicate that effects differ between the genders for key variables, with personality traits in females having a relatively larger effect on their occupational outcomes due to the diminished effects of education.occupational choice, personality, human capital, dynasty hysteresis

Paper Session I-A - Hands-off Farming in Space

This paper focuses on the mechanization of a biomass production system (BPS) in enclosed environments for space agriculture. It requires an intelligent computer for the autonomous adjustment of controlled elements and a robotic system for measurement of plant growth and harvest. This research is to develop and integrate a BPS framework that enables autonomy, monitoring, diagnosis, fault detection and correction, and production optimization. The key feature is an integrated health monitoring and production management and control system (IHPMCS) implemented with the robotic system. IHPMCS is an integrated algorithm integrated into an embedded computer that can process biomass production data in real-time based on measurements of production elements in the chamber. The concept proposed is to take the human expert out of the control loop and build his expertise into the computer to yield an autonomous BPS. This will provide an optimal and autonomous biomass production capability so that BPS can maximize the ability to grow plants and allow astronauts to be more involved in scientific or technical activities. This is a collaborative research between academia (University of Central Florida), industry (Dynamac), and government agency (NASA) at Kennedy Space Center

Systematic Design of Attitude Control Systems for a Satellite in a Circular Orbit with Guaranteed Performance and Stability

In this paper two nonlinear control techniques are developed and compared for the satellite attitude control problem. The first technique is a robust recursive nonlinear method using Euler angle formulation. This method is related to integrator backstepping as well as feedback linearization techniques. However, in this paper a different formulation is presented which overcomes some of the previous difficulties in applying backstepping to this problem by treating the three axis satellite system as a fully coupled set of second order systems. The technique produces a robustly stable controller, which meets desired performance, accounts for system nonlinear behavior, and is easily implementable in a set of feedback equations that can be computed in real time. The second technique is a learning control that updates the control input iteratively in order to enhance the transient performance of systems that are repeatedly executed over a fixed finite duration. It updates the control input by learning laws without the computation of system parameters and inverse dynamics of systems. The advantage of utilizing learning control schemes for attitude control systems is the enhancement of transient performance from trial to trial by taking advantage of the periodicity of the repeated system operation. By learning unknown parameters or time functions, the learning control can compensate nonlinear dynamics so that the desired performance can be achieved. The performance of both techniques is demonstrated for a satellite attitude tracking maneuver which represents a satellite in a circular orbit maintaining one face toward the earth while tracking simultaneous sinusoidal pointing commands in the other two axes. It is shown that the recursive controller provides the desired tracking performance with reasonable control effort, and that the learning control technique can be used to compensate for periodic external disturbances

Real-Time Attitude and Orbit Control System of a Small LEO Satellite with Parallel-Processing Approach in a Ground Station

A Real-time Attitude and Orbit Control System (AOCS) using a parallel processing approach will be implemented using a Satellite Ground Control Station (SGCS). With this approach, the satellite will collect platform (attitude reference) and payload measurements (at 1Hz) over several orbits and down-link to the SGCS (at 5 KHz) where the real-time filtering, fault detection, diagnosis and corrective (if needed) control is generated. The control commands are up-linked to the satellite before losing telemetry lock. A substantial reduction in on-board computation can provide a cheaper and a higher reliable AOCS. In the proposed scheme, an advanced real-time estimation and control algorithm in the SGCS for monitoring the critical parameters of the system will be described for a gravity gradient stabilized Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite. The parallel (or distributed) processing technique effectively reduces the computation time and increases the subsystem performance dramatically where computation time becomes a critical factor due to the low earth orbit operation. The proposed scheme is based on (1) a Kalman Filter (KF) to perform the real-time estimation of the critical parameters, (2) a parallel processing technique to reduce the computation time, and (3) their implementation with an advanced control algorithm to reconfigure the complete AOCS from the SGCS (if necessary)

Predicting beneficial effects of atomoxetine and citalopram on response inhibition in Parkinson's disease with clinical and neuroimaging measures.

Recent studies indicate that selective noradrenergic (atomoxetine) and serotonergic (citalopram) reuptake inhibitors may improve response inhibition in selected patients with Parkinson's disease, restoring behavioral performance and brain activity. We reassessed the behavioral efficacy of these drugs in a larger cohort and developed predictive models to identify patient responders. We used a double-blind randomized three-way crossover design to investigate stopping efficiency in 34 patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease after 40 mg atomoxetine, 30 mg citalopram, or placebo. Diffusion-weighted and functional imaging measured microstructural properties and regional brain activations, respectively. We confirmed that Parkinson's disease impairs response inhibition. Overall, drug effects on response inhibition varied substantially across patients at both behavioral and brain activity levels. We therefore built binary classifiers with leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) to predict patients' responses in terms of improved stopping efficiency. We identified two optimal models: (1) a "clinical" model that predicted the response of an individual patient with 77-79% accuracy for atomoxetine and citalopram, using clinically available information including age, cognitive status, and levodopa equivalent dose, and a simple diffusion-weighted imaging scan; and (2) a "mechanistic" model that explained the behavioral response with 85% accuracy for each drug, using drug-induced changes of brain activations in the striatum and presupplementary motor area from functional imaging. These data support growing evidence for the role of noradrenaline and serotonin in inhibitory control. Although noradrenergic and serotonergic drugs have highly variable effects in patients with Parkinson's disease, the individual patient's response to each drug can be predicted using a pattern of clinical and neuroimaging features.The BCNI is supported by the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council. We are grateful to Dr Gordon Logan for advice on stop-signal reaction time estimation and to Dr Marta Correia for advice on diffusion-weighted imaging data analysis. Conflict of interest: Prof. Sahakian has received grants from Janssen/J&J, personal fees from Cambridge Cognition, personal fees from Lundbeck, and personal fees from Servier, outside the submitted work. Prof. Robbins has received personal fees and royalties from Cambridge Cognition, personal fees and grants from Eli Lilly Inc, personal fees and grants from Lundbeck, grants from GSK, personal fees from Teva Pharmaceuticals, personal fees from Shire Pharmaceuticals, grants from Medical Research Council, editorial honorarium from Springer Verlag Germany, and personal fees from Chempartners, outside the submitted work. Prof. Rowe has received grant funding from AZ-Medimmune unrelated to the current work. Dr Housden is an employee of Cambridge Cognition. Other authors reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflict of interest.This is the final version of the article. It was first available from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hbm.2308

Passive immunisation of convalescent human anti-Zika plasma protects against challenge with New World Zika virus in cynomolgus macaques.

Zika virus (ZIKV) causes neurological complications in susceptible individuals, highlighted in the recent South American epidemic. Natural ZIKV infection elicits host responses capable of preventing subsequent re-infection, raising expectations for effective vaccination. Defining protective immune correlates will inform viral intervention strategies, particularly vaccine development. Non-human primate (NHP) species are susceptible to ZIKV and represent models for vaccine development. The protective efficacy of a human anti-ZIKV convalescent plasma pool (16/320-14) developed as a candidate reference material for a WHO International Standard was evaluated in macaques. Convalescent plasma administered to four cynomolgus macaques (Macaca fascicularis) intra-peritoneally 24 hrs prior to sub-cutaneous challenge with 103 pfu ZIKVPRVABC59 protected against detectable infection, with absence of detectable ZIKV RNA in blood and lymphoid tissues. Passively immunised anti-ZIKV immunoglobulin administered prior to time of challenge remained present only at very low levels 42 days post-challenge. Absence of de novo antibody responses in passively immunised macaques indicate sterilising immunity compared with naïve challenge controls that exhibited active ZIKV-specific IgM and IgG responses post-challenge. Demonstration that the presence of convalescent anti-ZIKV at levels of 400 IU/mL neutralising antibody protects against virus challenge provides a scientific framework for development of anti-ZIKV vaccines and facilitates regulatory approval

Role of G protein‐coupled receptor kinases (GRKs) in β2‐adrenoceptor‐mediated glucose uptake

Truncation of the C‐terminal tail of the β2‐AR, transfection of βARKct or over‐expression of a kinase‐dead GRK mutant reduces isoprenaline‐stimulated glucose uptake, indicating that GRK is important for this response. We explored whether phosphorylation of the β2‐AR by GRK2 has a role in glucose uptake or if this response is related to the role of GRK2 as a scaffolding protein. CHO‐GLUT4myc cells expressing wild‐type and mutant β2‐ARs were generated and receptor affinity for [3H]‐CGP12177A and density of binding sites determined together with the affinity of isoprenaline and BRL37344. Following receptor activation by β2‐AR agonists, cAMP accumulation, GLUT4 translocation, [3H]‐2‐deoxyglucose uptake, and β2‐AR internalization were measured. Bioluminescence resonance energy transfer was used to investigate interactions between β2‐AR and β‐arrestin2 or between β2‐AR and GRK2. Glucose uptake after siRNA knockdown or GRK inhibitors was measured in response to β2‐AR agonists. BRL37344 was a poor partial agonist for cAMP generation but displayed similar potency and efficacy to isoprenaline for glucose uptake and GLUT4 translocation. These responses to β2‐AR agonists occurred in CHO‐GLUT4myc cells expressing β2‐ARs lacking GRK or GRK/PKA phosphorylation sites as well as in cells expressing the wild‐type β2‐AR. However, β2‐ARs lacking phosphorylation sites failed to recruit β‐arrestin2 and did not internalize. GRK2 knock‐down or GRK2 inhibitors decreased isoprenaline‐stimulated glucose uptake in rat L6 skeletal muscle cells. Thus, GRK phosphorylation of the β2‐AR is not associated with isoprenaline‐ or BRL37344‐stimulated glucose uptake. However, GRKs acting as scaffold proteins are important for glucose uptake as GRK2 knock‐down or GRK2 inhibition reduces isoprenaline‐stimulated glucose uptake

A Dynamic Pathway for Calcium-Independent Activation of CaMKII by Methionine Oxidation

SummaryCalcium/calmodulin (Ca2+/CaM)-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) couples increases in cellular Ca2+ to fundamental responses in excitable cells. CaMKII was identified over 20 years ago by activation dependence on Ca2+/CaM, but recent evidence shows that CaMKII activity is also enhanced by pro-oxidant conditions. Here we show that oxidation of paired regulatory domain methionine residues sustains CaMKII activity in the absence of Ca2+/CaM. CaMKII is activated by angiotensin II (AngII)-induced oxidation, leading to apoptosis in cardiomyocytes both in vitro and in vivo. CaMKII oxidation is reversed by methionine sulfoxide reductase A (MsrA), and MsrA−/− mice show exaggerated CaMKII oxidation and myocardial apoptosis, impaired cardiac function, and increased mortality after myocardial infarction. Our data demonstrate a dynamic mechanism for CaMKII activation by oxidation and highlight the critical importance of oxidation-dependent CaMKII activation to AngII and ischemic myocardial apoptosis