THE INCIDENCE AND WAGE EFFECTS OF OVEREDUCATION: THE CASE OF TAIWAN

This paper, based on data from Survey of Family Income and Expenditure of Taiwan, shows that the recent trends of job match in Taiwan labor market have been marked by increasing proportion of overeducated workers due to the higher education expansion policy, while the incidence of undereducation continues to decline. Furthermore, workers¡¯ economic position is not completely determined by their educational levels. Working experience also plays an important role in workers¡¯ job placement and their wages. Workers with relatively less working experience are more likely to be overeducated, while workers with relatively more working experience are more likely to be undereducated. Overeducated (Undereducated) workers would earn more (less) than their co-workers with adequate education but less (more) than the workers having the same educational level with adequate education for jobs. However, the rewards (penalties) to adequate education and overeducation (undereducation) decline as more experience accumulated. Evidence also shows effect of bumping down from overeducation on the wages and employment of lower educated workers.Overeducation, Wage, Bumping Down, Labor Market, Taiwan

Purchasing power parity and uncovered interest parity: another look using stable law econometrics

In this study, we will re-examine the long-run PPP and UIP relationships by using standard cointegration test procedures but with critical values that are appropriate under infinite variance errors. These tests are performed using monthly observations over the period January 1973--December 1999 for Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom against the United States;Finite variance errors are a basic assumption for the distribution theory used to evaluate test statistics for the analysis of cointegration in PPP and UIP. But some recent studies have suggested that many financial variables, such as exchange rate returns, stock market returns, interest rate movements and commodity price movements, may have infinite variance. In this study we estimate the stability indices of the exchange rate, price index, and nominal interest rate series, and find evidence that most of them have an index of stability alpha less than 2. That is, it appears from the evidence that a stable non-Gaussian model may be more appropriate for these series in our data. Phillips-Perron unit root tests, along with the critical values in Caner (1998), implemented for determining the order of integration of those series generally cannot reject the null of a unit root. The finding of the non-Gaussian stable errors and the unit root in those series provide the motivation for re-doing the cointegration tests for the PPP and UIP relationships;For the PPP hypothesis, the results obtained by the multivariate likelihood-based cointegration tests demonstrate that while with the normal error assumption the results show some evidence of supporting the weak-form PPP relationship with the United States, weak-form PPP with the stable error assumption receives stronger support from the data. However, the restrictions for strong-form PPP are rejected. For the UIP hypothesis, the unrestricted cointegration results are consistent and strongly supportive of long-run UIP relationship with the United States under the assumption of stable errors. However, like PPP, the restrictions for strict UIP relationship are rejected

Modality-Independent Teachers Meet Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Event Parser

Audio-visual learning has been a major pillar of multi-modal machine learning, where the community mostly focused on its modality-aligned setting, i.e., the audio and visual modality are both assumed to signal the prediction target. With the Look, Listen, and Parse dataset (LLP), we investigate the under-explored unaligned setting, where the goal is to recognize audio and visual events in a video with only weak labels observed. Such weak video-level labels only tell what events happen without knowing the modality they are perceived (audio, visual, or both). To enhance learning in this challenging setting, we incorporate large-scale contrastively pre-trained models as the modality teachers. A simple, effective, and generic method, termed Visual-Audio Label Elaboration (VALOR), is innovated to harvest modality labels for the training events. Empirical studies show that the harvested labels significantly improve an attentional baseline by 8.0 in average F-score (Type@AV). Surprisingly, we found that modality-independent teachers outperform their modality-fused counterparts since they are noise-proof from the other potentially unaligned modality. Moreover, our best model achieves the new state-of-the-art on all metrics of LLP by a substantial margin (+5.4 F-score for Type@AV). VALOR is further generalized to Audio-Visual Event Localization and achieves the new state-of-the-art as well. Code is available at: https://github.com/Franklin905/VALOR

iTAR: A Web Server for Identifying Target Genes of Transcription Factors using ChIP-Seq or ChIP-Chip Data

Chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by massively parallel DNA sequencing (ChIP-seq) or microarray hybridization (ChIP-chip) has been widely used to determine the genomic occupation of transcription factors (TFs). We have previously developed a probabilistic method, called TIP (Target Identification from Profiles), to identify TF target genes using ChIP-seq/ChIP-chip data. To achieve high specificity, TIP applies a conservative method to estimate significance of target genes, with the trade-off being a relatively low sensitivity of target gene identification compared to other methods. Additionally, TIP’s output does not render binding-peak locations or intensity, information highly useful for visualization and general experimental biological use, while the variability of ChIP-seq/ChIP-chip file formats has made input into TIP more difficult than desired. To improve upon these facets, here we present are fined TIP with key extensions. First, it implements a Gaussian mixture model for p-value estimation, increasing target gene identification sensitivity and more accurately capturing the shape of TF binding profile distributions. Second, it enables the incorporation of TF binding-peak data by identifying their locations in significant target gene promoter regions and quantifies their strengths. Finally, for full ease of implementation we have incorporated it into a web server (http://syslab3.nchu.edu.tw/iTAR/) that enables flexibility of input file format, can be used across multiple species and genome assembly versions, and is freely available for public use. The web server additionally performs GO enrichment analysis for the identified target genes to reveal the potential function of the corresponding TF

Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome: A Single-institution Experience

Background:Superior mesenteric artery syndrome (SMAS) is a rare disease in adult. SMAS is characterized by acute, or, more commonly, chronic nonspecific symptoms due to duodenal obstruction and severe malnutrition with reduced arterio-mesenteric angle and distance. Surgical treatment may be necessary in most cases with chronic symptoms or when conservative treatment fails in SMAS.Methods:A retrospective chart review was performed on patients who underwent operation for SMAS from January 2008 to August 2020 in Cardinal Tien Hospital. Patients’ clinical presentations, surgical intervention, and outcomes.Results:Data from a total of 14 patients diagnosed with SMAS were analyzed, of which seven were diagnosed with SMAS by abdominal computed tomography and upper gastrointestinal series with water-soluble barium contrast. Six of the confirmed cases underwent surgery, namely, gastric decompression using a nasogastric tube, andcorrection of electrolyte imbalance. The nasoduodenal tube was placed through the obstructed duodenum to provide a high-nutrient fluid supplement. After conservative treatment failure, the patients underwent surgery. Of the six patients, four underwent duodenojejunostomy, one underwent a mini-laparotomy duodenojejunostomy bypass, and the last one underwent Roux-en-Y duodenojejunal bypass with duodenal feeding tube insertion.Conclusion:Patients with SMAS should initially be treated conservative. Surgical intervention should be considered in patients in whom conservative treatments were not effective.Complete resolution of all symptoms may not always be guaranteed after surgical intervention. Laparoscopy is currently widely used. In well-selected patients, minimally invasive or mini-laparotomy duodenojejunostomy is a safe and effective treatment for SMAS. The main advantages of mini-laparotomy duodenojejunostomy over other surgical approaches include half-length surgical incision and a shorter operative time. Duodenojejunostomy is rapidly becoming the standard procedure of this condition, and it has excellent outcomes comparable with those of open surgery