Taxation and the worlds of welfare

We use Luxembourg Income Study data to compare the progressivity of the tax structure in the U.S. and Europe. While our study supports the arguments of other scholars that the US has more progressive taxes than the continental or social democratic countries, we also present the following qualifications: (1) While the US remains more progressive than other countries, since 1991 its tax structure is in fact regressive. All other countries for which it is possible to calculate overall regressivity have always been, and remain, regressive overall. (2) Britain's tax structure is as regressive as Sweden's. (3) It is a mistake to consider particular kinds of taxes (e.g. income or property) as progressive or regressive: there are examples of progressive property and payroll taxes, and regressive income taxes. And (4) the comparative pattern of progressivity is partly the result of the role of the value added tax in the European revenue structure, and the small role that sales taxes play in the U.S. We close with a discussion of whether the regressivity of the value added tax matters, and what agenda for future research our work suggests

Z∗Z^*: Zero-shot Style Transfer via Attention Rearrangement

Despite the remarkable progress in image style transfer, formulating style in the context of art is inherently subjective and challenging. In contrast to existing learning/tuning methods, this study shows that vanilla diffusion models can directly extract style information and seamlessly integrate the generative prior into the content image without retraining. Specifically, we adopt dual denoising paths to represent content/style references in latent space and then guide the content image denoising process with style latent codes. We further reveal that the cross-attention mechanism in latent diffusion models tends to blend the content and style images, resulting in stylized outputs that deviate from the original content image. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a cross-attention rearrangement strategy. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the diffusion-based $\underline{Z}$ero-shot $\underline{S}$tyle $\underline{T}$ransfer via $\underline{A}$ttention $\underline{R}$earrangement, Z-STAR

Dramatic Increases of Soil Microbial Functional Gene Diversity at the Treeline Ecotone of Changbai Mountain.

The elevational and latitudinal diversity patterns of microbial taxa have attracted great attention in the past decade. Recently, the distribution of functional attributes has been in the spotlight. Here, we report a study profiling soil microbial communities along an elevation gradient (500-2200 m) on Changbai Mountain. Using a comprehensive functional gene microarray (GeoChip 5.0), we found that microbial functional gene richness exhibited a dramatic increase at the treeline ecotone, but the bacterial taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing did not exhibit such a similar trend. However, the β-diversity (compositional dissimilarity among sites) pattern for both bacterial taxa and functional genes was similar, showing significant elevational distance-decay patterns which presented increased dissimilarity with elevation. The bacterial taxonomic diversity/structure was strongly influenced by soil pH, while the functional gene diversity/structure was significantly correlated with soil dissolved organic carbon (DOC). This finding highlights that soil DOC may be a good predictor in determining the elevational distribution of microbial functional genes. The finding of significant shifts in functional gene diversity at the treeline ecotone could also provide valuable information for predicting the responses of microbial functions to climate change

Cascaded Multi-task Adaptive Learning Based on Neural Architecture Search

Cascading multiple pre-trained models is an effective way to compose an end-to-end system. However, fine-tuning the full cascaded model is parameter and memory inefficient and our observations reveal that only applying adapter modules on cascaded model can not achieve considerable performance as fine-tuning. We propose an automatic and effective adaptive learning method to optimize end-to-end cascaded multi-task models based on Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework. The candidate adaptive operations on each specific module consist of frozen, inserting an adapter and fine-tuning. We further add a penalty item on the loss to limit the learned structure which takes the amount of trainable parameters into account. The penalty item successfully restrict the searched architecture and the proposed approach is able to search similar tuning scheme with hand-craft, compressing the optimizing parameters to 8.7% corresponding to full fine-tuning on SLURP with an even better performance

How does culture influence innovation? A systematic literature review

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review of the studies that have analyzed the impact of culture on innovation. Design/methodology/approach: The authors carried out a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed articles in the past 37 years (January 1980-January 2017). Based on a total of 61 identified primary studies, the authors developed two clusters of culture definition studied in relation to innovation, including organizational culture and national culture. Findings: After reporting the findings of the systematic literature review, the authors discuss how a variety of culturally related factors combine to facilitate or restrict innovation performance in their corresponding cluster. The findings highlight the complex and idiosyncratic relationship between culture and innovation. Future research lines are recommended. Research limitations/implications: The authors adopt a systematic literature review method to probe into existing literature, inevitably missing some empirical studies. Implications for future research are suggested. Practical implications: The paper offers interesting implications for managers and academia. For business practitioners, this study can provide a useful reference regarding the role of cultures in the corporate internal management or international operations; for scholars, the study can provide a current research landscape and development process in this field. Originality/value: The findings are derived from a systematic literature review that has studied the influence of culture on innovation. In addition, implications and insights as to where future research might be usefully inquired in this field are providedThis study was partially supported by Knowledge and Innovation in, to and from Emerging Markets Project Acronym: K.I.T.F.E.M. (Grant No.734447), China Scholarship Council (CSC) (FileNo. 201306090133), and the Monte Ahuja Endowment Fund for the Monte Ahuja Endowed Chair of Global Business at Cleveland State University, Ohio, US

Plugin Speech Enhancement: A Universal Speech Enhancement Framework Inspired by Dynamic Neural Network

The expectation to deploy a universal neural network for speech enhancement, with the aim of improving noise robustness across diverse speech processing tasks, faces challenges due to the existing lack of awareness within static speech enhancement frameworks regarding the expected speech in downstream modules. These limitations impede the effectiveness of static speech enhancement approaches in achieving optimal performance for a range of speech processing tasks, thereby challenging the notion of universal applicability. The fundamental issue in achieving universal speech enhancement lies in effectively informing the speech enhancement module about the features of downstream modules. In this study, we present a novel weighting prediction approach, which explicitly learns the task relationships from downstream training information to address the core challenge of universal speech enhancement. We found the role of deciding whether to employ data augmentation techniques as crucial downstream training information. This decision significantly impacts the expected speech and the performance of the speech enhancement module. Moreover, we introduce a novel speech enhancement network, the Plugin Speech Enhancement (Plugin-SE). The Plugin-SE is a dynamic neural network that includes the speech enhancement module, gate module, and weight prediction module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Plugin-SE approach is competitive or superior to other joint training methods across various downstream tasks

PP2A Mediated AMPK Inhibition Promotes HSP70 Expression in Heat Shock Response

BACKGROUND: Under stress, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) plays a central role in energy balance, and the heat shock response is a protective mechanism for cell survival. The relationship between AMPK activity and heat shock protein (HSP) expression under stress is unclear. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We found that heat stress induced dephosphorylation of AMPKα subunit (AMPKα) in various cell types from human and rodent. In HepG2 cells, the dephosphorylation of AMPKα under heat stress in turn caused dephosphorylation of acetyl-CoA carboxylase and upregulation of phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase, two downstream targets of AMPK, confirming the inhibition of AMPK activity by heat stress. Treatment of HepG2 cells with phosphatase 2A (PP2A) inhibitor okadaic acid or inhibition of PP2A expression by RNA interference efficiently reversed heat stress-induced AMPKα dephosphorylation, suggesting that heat stress inhibited AMPK through activation of PP2A. Heat stress- and other HSP inducer (CdCl(2), celastrol, MG132)-induced HSP70 expression could be inhibited by AICAR, an AMPK specific activator. Inhibition of AMPKα expression by RNA interference reversed the inhibitory effect of AICAR on HSP70 expression under heat stress. These results indicate that AMPK inhibition under stress contribute to HSP70 expression. Mechanistic studies showed that activation of AMPK by AICAR had no effect on heat stress-induced HSF1 nuclear translocation, phosphorylation and binding with heat response element in the promoter region of HSP70 gene, but significantly decreased HSP70 mRNA stability. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These results demonstrate that during heat shock response, PP2A mediated AMPK inhibition upregulates HSP70 expression at least partially through stabilizing its mRNA, which suggests a novel mechanism for HSP induction under stress

Habenular Stimulation for Neurosurgery Resistant Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Case Report.

BACKGROUND: Some patients suffer from persistent and severely disabling Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) symptoms that cannot be alleviated by conventional treatments or neuroablative interventions targeting cortico-striatal loop circuits. Currently, it is unclear how to manage the clinical symptoms of these unique patients. We reasoned that deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the habenula (HB) could be a valuable subsequent treatment option for these otherwise medically intractable cases of severe OCD. The HB is an epithalamic structure critically involved in the encoding and responding to aversive stimulus events, cognitive and brain processes known to be impaired in many patients with OCD. Similarly, HB DBS can alleviate depression and anxiety, which often co-occur with OCD. Here, we explore the clinical benefits and risks of HB DBS treatment in a patient with severe and refractory OCD. CASE PRESENTATION: A 30-year-old male patient presented with persistent and severely disabling OCD symptoms that were refractory to previous psychological and pharmacological treatments as well as to neuroablative surgical interventions involving both capsulotomy and cingulotomy. After HB DBS, however, the severity of the patient's OCD symptoms was markedly reduced at 1-month follow-up, which was sustained until the final (at 12-month) follow-up. The patient also reported enduring improvements in depression, anxiety, and health-related quality of life after several months of HB DBS treatment. CONCLUSIONS: This case report provides the first clinical evidence suggesting that HB DBS could serve as a safe and effective alternative neurosurgical intervention for severe and refractory OCD. The present findings are promising and warrant further research into the role of the HB in pathophysiology and treatment of OCD