Potential Reserve Army and Diverging Paths of Transition in Former State Socialist Economies

Since the rise of neoliberalism in the world in the last quarter of the 20th century, many former state socialist economies also started their transition into different kinds of market economic models. Over the course of the last three decades or so, there emerged distinct paths of transition among these economies. This paper proposes a Marxian framework to help understand the three major models of transitions among former socialist economies: the Russian path, the Chinese path, and the Cuban/North Korean path. The framework focuses on the differences in working-class composition and in particular the size of the potential reserve army in these socialist economies. An examination of the historical process of market reforms in former state socialist economies suggests that a sizable potential reserve army could give rise to a gradual approach to neoliberal transition while a negligible potential reserve army could lead to either a shock therapy or a long impasse

Its role of expression and regulation in T-lymphocyte activation and ageing

The aging process is strongly associated with decreased activity in the immune system. Dysregulation of T-lymphocyte function, such as reduced proliferation, is one problem faced by most elder people, which prevents them from successfully dealing with exogenous pathogens. Effective regulation of T-lymphocyte activity depends on the proper and prompt transduction of both positive and negative signals within Tlymphocytes and reflects the balance between positive and negative effects. Decline of positive signaling in aging has been studied and reported, while mechanisms concerning up-regulation of negative signaling with age and its role in immune senescence are still unclear. Cbl-b, an E3 ubiquitin ligase, was studied by our lab since it regulates the ubiquitin process, a protein modification process that has suppressive effects on signaling pathways. We first determined the reaction of Cbl-b to different stimuli in young rat splenic T-lymphocytes, and showed that there is a decrease in Cbl-b protein expression upon CD28 stimulation and such protein degradation is proteasome-dependent only. We also showed the mechanism of Cbl-b expression regulation involves the intracellular movement of Nedd4 toward Cbl-b and an up-regulation of Nedd4 expression. Then we proved that in old splenic T-lymphocytes, decreased proteasome activity was unable to down-regulate the Cbl-b protein. High levels of Cbl-b in old T-lymphocytes are functional in preventing PI3K activity and are associated with reduced T-lymphocyte proliferation upon regular stimulation. T-lymphocytes from old Cbl-b knock-out mice show similar proliferative reaction to CD3 stimulation as T-lymphocytes from young wild-type, which establishes the causeeffect relationship between sustained Cbl-b expression and decreased T-lymphocyte proliferation. In summary, these data suggest a unique role of Cbl-b in regulating Tlymphocyte signal transduction and provide critical preliminary data for extending Cbl-b studies into other fields, such as carcinogenesis.Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biolog

Chinas grain production: a decade of consecutive growth or stagnation?

pre-printSome progressive writers have argued that while China's agricultural privatization achieved short-term gains, it did so by undermining longterm production facilities such as the infrastructure and public services built in the socialist era.1 Environmental scholars have questioned the sustainability of the Chinese agriculture. In a report published in 1995, Lester R. Brown raised the question: "Who will feed China?" He argued that the Chinese population's changing diet, shrinking cropland, stagnating productivity, and environmental constraints would lead to a widening gap between China's food supply and demand, a gap the world's leading grain exporters would not be able to fill.

SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth

One of the two components of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8 is “economic growth”, a term which people in the 21st century are quite familiar with. The question of growth, or the lack thereof, has often featured prominently in political debates, scholarly writings, as well as popular media. Nevertheless, sustained economic growth was only a recent phenomenon in human history. The world economy remained stagnant throughout the first 1800 years in the Common Era and started to grow exponentially after that. 1Measured by international dollars in 1990, the world has seen more than 5 times increase in population in the last two centuries, but the real GDP has increased by more than 700 times

Photoacoustic tomography of water in biological tissue

As an emerging imaging technique that combines high optical contrast and ultrasonic detection, photoacoustic tomography (PAT) has been widely used to image optically absorptive objects in both human and animal tissues. PAT overcomes the depth limitation of other high-resolution optical imaging methods, and it is also free from speckle artifacts. To our knowledge, water has never been imaged by PAT in biological tissue. Here, for the first time, we experimentally imaged water in both tissue phantoms and biological tissues using a near infrared (NIR) light source. The differences among photoacoustic images of water with different concentrations indicate that laser-based PAT can usefully detect and image water content in tissue

Photoacoustic speckles: boundary dependence and experimental validation

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) suppresses speckles by prominent boundary buildups. We theoretically study the dependence of PAT speckles on the boundary roughness, which is quantified by the root-mean-squared (RMS) value and the correlation length of the height. The speckle visibility and the correlation coefficient between the reconstructed and actual boundaries are quantified as a function of the boundary roughness. The statistics of PAT speckles is studied experimentally

A Monte-Carlo-Based Network Method for Source Positioning in Bioluminescence Tomography

We present an approach based on the improved Levenberg Marquardt (LM) algorithm of backpropagation (BP) neural network to estimate the light source position in bioluminescent imaging. For solving the forward problem, the table-based random sampling algorithm (TBRS), a fast Monte Carlo simulation method we developed before, is employed here. Result shows that BP is an effective method to position the light source

How Does Information Bottleneck Help Deep Learning?

Numerous deep learning algorithms have been inspired by and understood via the notion of information bottleneck, where unnecessary information is (often implicitly) minimized while task-relevant information is maximized. However, a rigorous argument for justifying why it is desirable to control information bottlenecks has been elusive. In this paper, we provide the first rigorous learning theory for justifying the benefit of information bottleneck in deep learning by mathematically relating information bottleneck to generalization errors. Our theory proves that controlling information bottleneck is one way to control generalization errors in deep learning, although it is not the only or necessary way. We investigate the merit of our new mathematical findings with experiments across a range of architectures and learning settings. In many cases, generalization errors are shown to correlate with the degree of information bottleneck: i.e., the amount of the unnecessary information at hidden layers. This paper provides a theoretical foundation for current and future methods through the lens of information bottleneck. Our new generalization bounds scale with the degree of information bottleneck, unlike the previous bounds that scale with the number of parameters, VC dimension, Rademacher complexity, stability or robustness. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/xu-ji/information-bottleneckComment: Accepted at ICML 2023. Code is available at https://github.com/xu-ji/information-bottlenec

Multi-objective Transmission Planning Paper

2008-2009 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference pape