Inside the Black Box: Price Linkage and Transmission Between Energy and Agricultural Markets

This study addresses the complex relationship between energy and agricultural markets—represented by corn, ethanol, and gasoline prices—particularly in light of the growth in biofuel production. Contemporaneous price response and transmission of market shocks are investigated in a simultaneous-equation system to disclose fundamental driving forces before and after the development of large-scale ethanol production. We use a dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH model to demonstrate a strengthening relationship among corn, ethanol, and gasoline prices. We identify a structural change point at March 25, 2008 using the test by Bai and Perron (2003). The strengthened market relationship is further illustrated by variance decomposition based on a structural VAR model.corn, ethanol, gasoline, structural break, Structural VAR, GARCH, Agricultural and Food Policy, Demand and Price Analysis, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, C32, Q11, Q4,

Differential gene expression and cytotoxicity of bovine aortic and pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells infected with Mycoplasma bovis

The effects of Mycoplasma bovis on activation and cytotoxicity of bovine aortic and pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells were studied. Inoculation of bovine endothelial cells with M. bovis in vitro induced mediators such as vascular cellular adhesion molecule-1 and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1, which are specific for mononuclear cell but not for neutrophil extravasation. Differential activation of endothelial cells was also observed, with early activation of proinflammatory cytokines interlukin-1[beta] (IL-1[beta]) and IL-6 in microvascular endothelial cells, while induction of monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 and IL-8 was limited to microvascular endothelial cells. We also found that there were significant strain differences between responses to abscess-forming strain M. bovis 428E and nonabscess-forming strain DSA16. Specifically, only DSA16 was subcytotoxic to both endothelial cell types. As for their activation effects, significant strain differences were limited to responses in microvascular cells. Strain DSA16 induced significantly higher levels of mediators compared to strain 428E. Taken together, these results are consistent with the predominant perivascular mononuclear cell infiltration observed in M. bovis-infected lung lesions

To Be or Not To Be Humorous? Cross Cultural Perspectives on Humor

open access articleHumor seems to manifest differently in Western and Eastern cultures, although little is known about how culture shapes humor perceptions. The authors suggest that Westerners regard humor as a common and positive disposition; the Chinese regard humor as a special disposition particular to humorists, with controversial aspects. In Study 1, Hong Kong participants primed with Western culture evaluate humor more positively than they do when primed with Chinese culture. In Study 2a, Canadians evaluate humor as being more important in comparison with Chinese participants. In Study 2b, Canadians expect ordinary people to possess humor, while Chinese expect specialized comedians to be humorous. The implications and limitations are discussed

Can you forgive? It depends on how happy you are

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper examined how individual group status and happiness influence forgiveness. In Study 1, happiness was treated as a trait difference: highly happy people, compared with very unhappy people, were found to be more willing to forgive murderers. More important, an interaction effect between happiness and group status on forgiveness was found, that is, highly happy people tended to be more forgiving when either ingroup or outgroup mem- bers were killed; unhappy people, however, tended to be less forgiving about murder when ingroup rather than outgroup members were killed. In Study 2, happiness was treated as an emotional state difference: happiness, rather than sadness, was found to bring greater forgiveness. Moreover, consistent with the interaction effect displayed in Study 1, happy participants tended to forgive more when ingroup or outgroup members were hurt; sad partici- pants tended to forgive less when ingroup members rather than outgroup members were hurt. Implications for connections between happiness, group membership, and forgiveness are discussed

How Belief in a Just World Benefits Mental Health: The Effects of Optimism and Gratitude

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Past research suggests that individuals’ belief in a just world (BJW) is closely connected with their mental health. To clarify the underlying mechanism, the current study proposes that BJW encourages optimism and gratitude which then mediates the relation- ship between BJW and mental health as indicated by subjective well-being (SWB) and depression. A sample of 1,200 undergraduates yields results indicating that (a) BJW influences optimism, gratitude, SWB, and depression after controlling for gender, age, income, and personality; (b) optimism and gratitude mediate BJW effects by increasing SWB and decreasing depression. The issues of BJW’s adaptive functions are discussed

Map Generation from Large Scale Incomplete and Inaccurate Data Labels

Accurately and globally mapping human infrastructure is an important and challenging task with applications in routing, regulation compliance monitoring, and natural disaster response management etc.. In this paper we present progress in developing an algorithmic pipeline and distributed compute system that automates the process of map creation using high resolution aerial images. Unlike previous studies, most of which use datasets that are available only in a few cities across the world, we utilizes publicly available imagery and map data, both of which cover the contiguous United States (CONUS). We approach the technical challenge of inaccurate and incomplete training data adopting state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures such as the U-Net and the CycleGAN to incrementally generate maps with increasingly more accurate and more complete labels of man-made infrastructure such as roads and houses. Since scaling the mapping task to CONUS calls for parallelization, we then adopted an asynchronous distributed stochastic parallel gradient descent training scheme to distribute the computational workload onto a cluster of GPUs with nearly linear speed-up.Comment: This paper is accepted by KDD 202