Credit, housing collateral and consumption: evidence from the UK, Japan and the US

The consumption behaviour of U.K., U.S. and Japanese households is examined and compared using a modern Ando-Modigliani style consumption function. The models incorporate income growth expectations, income uncertainty, housing collateral and other credit effects. These models therefore capture important parts of the financial accelerator. The evidence is that credit availability for U.K. and U.S. but not Japanese households has undergone large shifts since 1980. The average consumption-to-income ratio shifted up in the U.K. and U.S. as mortgage downpayment constraints eased and as the collateral role of housing wealth was enhanced by financial innovations, such as home equity loans. The estimated housing collateral effect is roughly similar in the U.S. and U.K., while land prices in Japan still have a negative effect on consumer spending. Together with evidence for negative real interest rate effects in the U.K. and U.S. and positive ones in Japan, this suggests important differences in the transmission of monetary and credit shocks between Japan and the U.S., U.K. and other credit-liberalized economies.Households - Economic aspects ; Consumption (Economics) ; Credit ; Business cycles ; Financial markets ; Economic conditions - United States ; Economic conditions - Japan ; Economic conditions - Great Britain

Vehicle-Rear: A New Dataset to Explore Feature Fusion for Vehicle Identification Using Convolutional Neural Networks

This work addresses the problem of vehicle identification through non-overlapping cameras. As our main contribution, we introduce a novel dataset for vehicle identification, called Vehicle-Rear, that contains more than three hours of high-resolution videos, with accurate information about the make, model, color and year of nearly 3,000 vehicles, in addition to the position and identification of their license plates. To explore our dataset we design a two-stream CNN that simultaneously uses two of the most distinctive and persistent features available: the vehicle's appearance and its license plate. This is an attempt to tackle a major problem: false alarms caused by vehicles with similar designs or by very close license plate identifiers. In the first network stream, shape similarities are identified by a Siamese CNN that uses a pair of low-resolution vehicle patches recorded by two different cameras. In the second stream, we use a CNN for OCR to extract textual information, confidence scores, and string similarities from a pair of high-resolution license plate patches. Then, features from both streams are merged by a sequence of fully connected layers for decision. In our experiments, we compared the two-stream network against several well-known CNN architectures using single or multiple vehicle features. The architectures, trained models, and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/icarofua/vehicle-rear

Evaluation of ethanol vortex ELISA for detection of bovine tuberculosis in cattle and deer

Background: The use of serological assays for diagnosis of bovine tuberculosis (TB) has been intensively studied and use of specific antigens have aided in improving the diagnostic accuracy of the assays. In the present study, we report an in-house enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), developed by using ethanol extract of Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis). The assay, named (ethanol vortex ELISA [EVELISA]), was evaluated for detection of anti- M. bovis antibodies in the sera of cattle and white-tailed deer. Methods: By using the EVELISA, we tested sera obtained from two species of animals; cattle (n = 62 [uninfected, n = 40; naturally infected, n = 22]) and white-tailed deer (n = 41 [uninfected, n = 25; naturally infected, n = 7; experimentally infected, n = 9]). To detect species specific molecules, components in the ethanol extract were analyzed by thin layer chromatography and western blotting. Results: Among the tested animals, 77.2% of infected cattle and 87.5% of infected deer tested positive for anti- M. bovis antibody. There were only minor false positive reactions (7.5% in cattle and 0% in deer) in uninfected animals. M. bovis -specific lipids and protein (MPB83) in the ethanol extract were detected by thin layer chromatography and western blotting, respectively. Conclusion: The results warrant further evaluation and validation of EVELISA for bovine TB diagnosis of traditional and alternative livestock as well as for free-ranging animal species

Restauração de serviços em nuvem óptica: uma abordagem tolerante à degradação de banda e ao atraso de restauração

Este artigo, aborda o problema de restauração de serviços na nuvem  com infraestrutura óptica na presença de falha em um único enlace. O algoritmo proposto, denominado R3D, leva em consideração dois parâmetros especificados em classes de serviço (tolerância ao atraso na restauração e degradação de banda passante) para fazer melhor uso dos recursos ópticos disponíveis durante o processo de restauração. Resultados, obtidos através de simulação, demonstram melhorias significativas na capacidade de restauração de serviços sem impactar de forma negativa a probabilidade de bloqueio

Vesicular glutamatergic transmission in noise-induced loss and repair of cochlear ribbon synapses

Noise-induced excitotoxicity is thought to depend on glutamate. However, the excitotoxic mechanisms are unknown, and the necessity of glutamate for synapse loss or regeneration is unclear. Despite absence of glutamatergic transmission from cochlear inner hair cells in mice lacking the vesicular glutamate transporter-3

Engineered MATE multidrug transporters reveal two functionally distinct ion-coupling pathways in NorM from Vibrio cholerae.

Multidrug and toxic compound extrusion (MATE) transport proteins confer multidrug resistance on pathogenic microorganisms and affect pharmacokinetics in mammals. Our understanding of how MATE transporters work, has mostly relied on protein structures and MD simulations. However, the energetics of drug transport has not been studied in detail. Many MATE transporters utilise the electrochemical H+ or Na+ gradient to drive substrate efflux, but NorM-VC from Vibrio cholerae can utilise both forms of metabolic energy. To dissect the localisation and organisation of H+ and Na+ translocation pathways in NorM-VC we engineered chimaeric proteins in which the N-lobe of H+-coupled NorM-PS from Pseudomonas stutzeri is fused to the C-lobe of NorM-VC, and vice versa. Our findings in drug binding and transport experiments with chimaeric, mutant and wildtype transporters highlight the versatile nature of energy coupling in NorM-VC, which enables adaptation to fluctuating salinity levels in the natural habitat of V. cholerae

Macrophage centripetal migration drives spontaneous healing process after spinal cord injury.

Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) brings numerous inflammatory cells, including macrophages, from the circulating blood to lesions, but pathophysiological impact resulting from spatiotemporal dynamics of macrophages is unknown. Here, we show that macrophages centripetally migrate toward the lesion epicenter after infiltrating into the wide range of spinal cord, depending on the gradient of chemoattractant C5a. However, macrophages lacking interferon regulatory factor 8 (IRF8) cannot migrate toward the epicenter and remain widely scattered in the injured cord with profound axonal loss and little remyelination, resulting in a poor functional outcome after SCI. Time-lapse imaging and P2X/YRs blockade revealed that macrophage migration via IRF8 was caused by purinergic receptors involved in the C5a-directed migration. Conversely, pharmacological promotion of IRF8 activation facilitated macrophage centripetal movement, thereby improving the SCI recovery. Our findings reveal the importance of macrophage centripetal migration via IRF8, providing a novel therapeutic target for central nervous system injury

DIP/WISH deficiency enhances synaptic function and performance in the Barnes maze

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>DIP (diaphanous interacting protein)/WISH (WASP interacting SH3 protein) is a protein involved in cytoskeletal signaling which regulates actin cytoskeleton dynamics and/or microtubules mainly through the activity of Rho-related proteins. Although it is well established that: 1) spine-head volumes change dynamically and reflect the strength of the synapse accompanying long-term functional plasticity of glutamatergic synaptic transmission and 2) actin organization is critically involved in spine formation, the involvement of DIP/WISH in these processes is unknown.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found that DIP/WISH-deficient hippocampal CA1 neurons exhibit enhanced long-term potentiation via modulation of both pre- and post-synaptic events. Consistent with these electrophysiological findings, DIP/WISH-deficient mice, particularly at a relatively young age, found the escape hole more rapidly in the Barnes maze test.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We conclude that DIP/WISH deletion improves performance in the Barnes maze test in mice probably through increased hippocampal long-term potentiation.</p