Assessing the Effects of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme on Alleviating the Health Payment-Induced Poverty in Shaanxi Province, China

Copyright: © 2016 Yang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Background Disease has become one of the key causes of falling into poverty in rural China. The poor households are even more likely to suffer. The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) has been implemented to provide rural residents financial protection against health risks. This study aims to assess the effect of the NCMS on alleviating health payment-induced poverty in the Shaanxi Province of China. Methods The data was drawn from the 5th National Health Service Survey of Shaanxi Province, conducted in 2013. In total, 41,037 individuals covered by NCMS were selected. Poverty headcount ratio (HCR), poverty gap and mean positive poverty gap were used for measuring the incidence, depth and intensity of poverty, respectively. The differences on poverty measures pre- and post- insurance reimbursement indicate the effectiveness of alleviating health payment-induced poverty under NCMS. Results For the general insured, 5.81% of households fell below the national poverty line owing to the health payment; this HCR dropped to 4.84% after insurance reimbursement. The poverty HCRs for the insured that had hospitalization in the past year dropped from 7.50% to 2.09% after reimbursement. With the NCMS compensation, the poverty gap declined from 42.90 Yuan to 34.49 Yuan (19.60% decreased) for the general insured and from 57.48 Yuan to 10.01 Yuan (82.59% decreased) for the hospital admission insured. The mean positive poverty gap declined 3.56% and 37.40% for two samples, respectively. Conclusion The NCMS could alleviate the health payment-induced poverty. The effectiveness of alleviating health payment-induced poverty is greater for hospital admission insured than for general insured, mainly because NCMS compensates for serious diseases. Our study suggests that a more comprehensive insurance benefit package design could further improve the effectiveness of poverty alleviation

Attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy of molecular hydrogen

We extend attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy (ATAS) to the study of hydrogen molecules, demonstrating the potential of the technique to resolve-simultaneously and with state resolution-both the electronic and nuclear dynamic

Reconstruction of an excited-state molecular wave packet with attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy

Attosecond science promises to allow new forms of quantum control in which a broadband isolated attosecond pulse excites a molecular wave packet consisting of a coherent superposition of multiple excited electronic states. This electronic excitation triggers nuclear motion on the molecular manifold of potential energy surfaces and can result in permanent rearrangement of the constituent atoms. Here, we demonstrate attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy (ATAS) as a viable probe of the electronic and nuclear dynamics initiated in excited states of a neutral molecule by a broadband vacuum ultraviolet pulse. Owing to the high spectral and temporal resolution of ATAS, we are able to reconstruct the time evolution of a vibrational wave packet within the excited B′Σu1+ electronic state of H2 via the laser-perturbed transient absorption spectrumThis material is based on work supported by the DARPA PULSE program through a grant from AMRDEC under Award No. W31P4Q1310017; the Army Research Office under Awards No. W911NF-11-1-0297, No. WN911NF-14- 1-0383, and No. FA9550-16-1-0013; the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Awards No. FA9550-15-1-0037 and No. FA9550-16-1-0149; the National Science Foundation under Award No. PHY-1506345, an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council XCHEM 290853; and European Grants MC-ITN CORINF, the European COST Action XLIC CM1204, the MINECO Project No. FIS2013-42002-R; and the ERA-Chemistry Project PIM2010EEC-0075

Auxin response factor 6A regulates photosynthesis, sugar accumulation, and fruit development in tomato.

Auxin response factors (ARFs) are involved in auxin-mediated transcriptional regulation in plants. In this study, we performed functional characterization of SlARF6A in tomato. SlARF6A is located in the nucleus and exhibits transcriptional activator activity. Overexpression of SlARF6A increased chlorophyll contents in the fruits and leaves of tomato plants, whereas downregulation of SlARF6A decreased chlorophyll contents compared with those of wild-type (WT) plants. Analysis of chloroplasts using transmission electron microscopy indicated increased sizes of chloroplasts in SlARF6A-overexpressing plants and decreased numbers of chloroplasts in SlARF6A-downregulated plants. Overexpression of SlARF6A increased the photosynthesis rate and accumulation of starch and soluble sugars, whereas knockdown of SlARF6A resulted in opposite phenotypes in tomato leaves and fruits. RNA-sequence analysis showed that regulation of SlARF6A expression altered the expression of genes involved in chlorophyll metabolism, photosynthesis and sugar metabolism. SlARF6A directly bound to the promoters of SlGLK1, CAB, and RbcS genes and positively regulated the expression of these genes. Overexpression of SlARF6A also inhibited fruit ripening and ethylene production, whereas downregulation of SlARF6A increased fruit ripening and ethylene production. SlARF6A directly bound to the SAMS1 promoter and negatively regulated SAMS1 expression. Taken together, these results expand our understanding of ARFs with regard to photosynthesis, sugar accumulation and fruit development and provide a potential target for genetic engineering to improve fruit nutrition in horticulture crops

Stochastic and State Space Models of Carcinogenesis Under Complex Situation

With more and more biological mechanisms of cancer development being discovered, in order to improve cancer control and prevention, it becomes necessary to develop effective and efficient mathematical and statistical models and methods to incorporate the biological information, and to identify critical events in the process of carcinogenesis. In this dissertation, the complex nature of carcinogenesis has been represented by stochastic system model; combining this model with information from observations and prior knowledge, we have developed state space models to evaluate cancer gene mutations and cell proliferation at different cancer development stages. Also, we have proposed a generalized Bayesian method via multi-level Gibbs sampling procedure to predict state (stage) variables of the models. In this dissertation, stochastic models have been proposed for initiation, promotion and complete carcinomas experiments; these experiments are most commonly performed in cancer risk assessment of environmental agents. These stochastic models are simple multi-pathway models which are constructed based on biological mechanisms. The estimates we obtained from the models have provided quantitative evaluation of dose related mutation rates of major genes and cells proliferation rates; these results could be used to assess the risk of developing malignant tumor in the environment we live. More complicated stochastic and state space models have been developed for sporadic human colon cancer and for hereditary and non-hereditary human liver cancer. We have utilized the proposed models to fit to Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) data. The results imply that our models have effectively incorporated biological information and observations; these models fitted the data very well and the inferences based on estimate were very consistent with biological findings. Furthermore, the models reflected the complex nature of carcinogenesis. We notice that many cancers are developed through multiple-stage multiple-pathway. Our analyses of colon cancer and liver cancer have showed that some pathways are more devastated than others. This suggests thus it would be more efficient to intervene or treat the critical events in the more devastated pathways

The site conditions of the Guo Shou Jing Telescope

The weather at Xinglong Observing Station, where the Guo Shou Jing Telescope (GSJT) is located, is strongly affected by the monsoon climate in north-east China. The LAMOST survey strategy is constrained by these weather patterns. In this paper, we present a statistics on observing hours from 2004 to 2007, and the sky brightness, seeing, and sky transparency from 1995 to 2011 at the site. We investigate effects of the site conditions on the survey plan. Operable hours each month shows strong correlation with season: on average there are 8 operable hours per night available in December, but only 1-2 hours in July and August. The seeing and the sky transparency also vary with seasons. Although the seeing is worse in windy winters, and the atmospheric extinction is worse in the spring and summer, the site is adequate for the proposed scientific program of LAMOST survey. With a Monte Carlo simulation using historical data on the site condition, we find that the available observation hours constrain the survey footprint from 22h to 16h in right ascension; the sky brightness allows LAMOST to obtain the limit magnitude of V = 19.5mag with S/N = 10.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in RA