Economic and Poverty Impacts of Agricultural, Trade and Factor Market Reforms in China

Capitalizing on the most recent estimates of agricultural price distortions in China and in other countries, this paper assesses the economic and poverty impact of global and domestic trade reform in China. It also examines the interplay between the trade reforms and factor market reforms aimed at improving the allocation of labor within the Chinese economy. The results suggest that trade reforms in the rest of the world, land reform and hukou reform all serve to reduce poverty, while unilateral trade reforms result in a small poverty increase. Agricultural distortions are important factors in determining the distributional and poverty effects of trade reform packages, although their impacts on aggregate trade and welfare appear to be small. A comprehensive reform package which bundles the reforms in commodity and factor markets together may benefit all broad household groups in China.Distorted incentives, agricultural and trade policy reforms, national agricultural development, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade, F13, F14, Q17, Q18,

Rubidium resonant squeezed light from a diode-pumped optical-parametric oscillator

We demonstrate a diode-laser-pumped system for generation of quadrature squeezing and polarization squeezing. Due to their excess phase noise, diode lasers are challenging to use in phase-sensitive quantum optics experiments such as quadrature squeezing. The system we present overcomes the phase noise of the diode laser through a combination of active stabilization and appropriate delays in the local oscillator beam. The generated light is resonant to the rubidium D1 transition at 795nm and thus can be readily used for quantum memory experiments.Comment: 6 pages 4 figure

Statistics of correlated percolation in a bacterial community

Signal propagation over long distances is a ubiquitous feature of multicellular communities, but cell-to-cell variability can cause propagation to be highly heterogeneous. Simple models of signal propagation in heterogenous media, such as percolation theory, can potentially provide a quantitative understanding of these processes, but it is unclear whether these simple models properly capture the complexities of multicellular systems. We recently discovered that in biofilms of the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, the propagation of an electrical signal is statistically consistent with percolation theory, and yet it is reasonable to suspect that key features of this system go beyond the simple assumptions of basic percolation theory. Indeed, we find here that the probability for a cell to signal is not independent from other cells as assumed in percolation theory, but instead is correlated with its nearby neighbors. We develop a mechanistic model, in which correlated signaling emerges from cell division, phenotypic inheritance, and cell displacement, that reproduces the experimentally observed correlations. We find that the correlations do not significantly affect the spatial statistics, which we rationalize using a renormalization argument. Moreover, the fraction of signaling cells is not constant in space, as assumed in percolation theory, but instead varies within and across biofilms. We find that this feature lowers the fraction of signaling cells at which one observes the characteristic power-law statistics of cluster sizes, consistent with our experimental results. We validate the model using a mutant biofilm whose signaling probability decays along the propagation direction. Our results reveal key statistical features of a correlated signaling process in a multicellular community. More broadly, our results identify extensions to percolation theory that do or do not alter its predictions and may be more appropriate for biological systems.P50 GM085764 - NIGMS NIH HHS; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; R01 GM121888 - NIGMS NIH HHSPublished versio

On the error term in Weyl's law for the Heisenberg manifolds (II)

In this paper we study the mean square of the error term in the Weyl's law of an irrational $(2l+1)$-dimensional Heisenberg manifold . An asymptotic formula is established

Identification of the relationship between Chinese Adiantum reniforme var. sinense and Canary Adiantum reniforme

© 2014 Wang et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated

Studies on antioxidant capacity of anthocyanin extract from purple sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.)

The radical scavenging effects by α,α-diphenyl-β-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and superoxide anions of anthocyanin extract from purple sweet potato were investigated. The antioxidation experiments showed that the reducing power of the anthocyanin extract reduced 0.572 at 0.5 mg/ml, while those of Lascorbic acid (L-AA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) reduced 0.460 and 0.121, respectively. They also displayed potent antioxidant effects against the DPPH radical and superoxide anions radical, showing the IC50 values of 6.94 and 3.68 μg/ml, respectively. Moreover, this anthocyanin extract also could significantly inhibit the formation of lipid peroxidation compound. Sixteen kinds of anthocyanins in purple sweet potato were detected by high-performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detection (HPLC-DAD), and most of the anthocyanins were acylated.Key words: Antioxidant activity, anthocyanins, purple sweet potato

Structure Properties of Generalized Farey graphs based on Dynamical Systems for Networks

Farey graphs are simultaneously small-world, uniquely Hamiltonian, minimally 3-colorable, maximally outerplanar and perfect. Farey graphs are therefore famous in deterministic models for complex networks. By lacking of the most important characteristics of scale-free, Farey graphs are not a good model for networks associated with some empirical complex systems. We discuss here a category of graphs which are extension of the well-known Farey graphs. These new models are named generalized Farey graphs here. We focus on the analysis of the topological characteristics of the new models and deduce the complicated and graceful analytical results from the growth mechanism used in generalized Farey graphs. The conclusions show that the new models not only possess the properties of being small-world and highly clustered, but also possess the quality of being scale-free. We also find that it is precisely because of the exponential increase of nodes’ degrees in generalized Farey graphs as they grow that caused the new networks to have scale-free characteristics. In contrast, the linear incrementation of nodes’ degrees in Farey graphs can only cause an exponential degree distribution