The Shape and Dimensionality of Phylogenetic Tree-Space Based on Mitochondrial Genomes

Phylogenetic analyses of large and diverse data sets generally result in large sets of competing phylogenetic trees. Consensus tree methods used to summarize sets of competing trees discard important information regarding the similarity and distribution of competing trees. A more fine grain approach is to use a dimensionality reduction method to project tree-to-tree distances in 2D or 3D space. In this study, we systematically evaluate the performance of several nonlinear dimensionality reduction (NLDR) methods on tree-to-tree distances obtained from independent nonparametric bootstrap analyses of genes from three mid- to large-sized mitochondrial genome alignments.
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The Intergenerational Transmission of Education: Evidence from Taiwanese Adoptions

This paper examines the causal effect of parental schooling on children’s schooling using a large sample of adoptees from Taiwan. Using birth-parents’ education to help control for selective placement of children with adoptive parents, we find that adoptees raised with more highly educated parents have higher educational attainment, measured by years of schooling and probability of university graduation. We also find evidence that adoptive father’s schooling is more important for sons’ and adoptive mother’s schooling is more important for daughters’ educational attainment. These results support the notion that family environment (nurture) is important in determining children’s educational outcomes, independent of genetic endowment.intergenerational transmission, education, schooling, adoption

Virtuous globalization, the three-zeros policy, and China’s choice

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Economic globalization is generally desirable and beneficial to a great extent, but not necessarily virtuous. Modern history has proven time and again that economic globalization may go astray if rivalry among big powers are not coordinated and regulated in a timely manner. Thorny issues arise inevitably when globalization involves big economies such as China, whose resource allocation mechanisms deviate significantly from that of a typical market economy. This paper will focus on: 1) What is virtuous globalization? 2) Why should big powers adopt the goal of three-zeros (zero tariff, zero barrier, and zero subsidy) as a necessary condition for achieving the goal of virtuous globalization? 3) Why should China in particular set a leading example to adopt and implement this policy to make a real contribution to the building of global institutions that are conducive to virtuous globalization as well as its domestic economic reforms

Why Was China Trapped in an Agrarian Society? An Economic Geographical Approach to the Needham Puzzle [post-print]

This paper argues that before the world started to globalize, the differences in the geographical endowments that different populations faced were the most important constraints to their long-term production and consumption. The paper uses this central hypothesis to explain the sharp contrast between the flourishing Song and the stagnant Ming and Qing. During the Song dynasty, despite the fact that China lost a significant amount of arable land to invading nomads as its population peaked, China witnessed a higher urbanization level, more prosperous commerce and international trade, and an explosion of technical inventions and institutional innovations. However, after having significantly improved its man-to-land ratio in the period after the Song China only found itself induced deeper into the agrarian trap, resulting in reduced urbanization, withering foreign trade, a declining division of labor, and stagnant in technology

Evaluation of Formal posterior distributions via Markov chain arguments

We consider evaluation of proper posterior distributions obtained from improper prior distributions. Our context is estimating a bounded function $\phi$ of a parameter when the loss is quadratic. If the posterior mean of $\phi$ is admissible for all bounded $\phi$, the posterior is strongly admissible. We give sufficient conditions for strong admissibility. These conditions involve the recurrence of a Markov chain associated with the estimation problem. We develop general sufficient conditions for recurrence of general state space Markov chains that are also of independent interest. Our main example concerns the $p$-dimensional multivariate normal distribution with mean vector $\theta$ when the prior distribution has the form $g(\|\theta\|^2) d\theta$ on the parameter space $\mathbb{R}^p$. Conditions on $g$ for strong admissibility of the posterior are provided.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOS542 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org