10,681 research outputs found
How prudent are rural households in developing transition economies:
Rural households in developing economies frequently use precautionary saving to cope with income risk. Such prudent behavior can be strengthened in transition economies where more risks are typically faced by households during and after reforms. This paper uses a rich panel of rural households in Zhejiang, China, to examine the correlation between income uncertainty and the target ratio of wealth to permanent income as suggested by the buffer-stock model. The empirical results suggest that Chinese rural households hold a significant level of wealth to mitigate the adverse impacts of income risk. Simulation results show that an increase in income risk leads to a sharp increase in household wealth and precautionary saving could drop substantially if income risk is eliminated. The high level of prudence of rural households under economic transition can help us better understand the developments in China, which will have policy implications for both developing and transition countries.buffer-stock model, Income risk, precautionary saving,
Optical Tweezers as a Micromechanical Tool for Studying Defects in 2D Colloidal Crystals
This paper reports on some new results from the analyses of the video
microscopy data obtained in a prior experiment on two-dimensional (2D)
colloidal crystals. It was reported previously that optical tweezers can be
used to create mono- and di-vacancies in a 2D colloidal crystal. Here we report
the results on the creation of a vacancy-interstitial pair, as well as
tri-vacancies. It is found that the vacancy-interstitial pair can be
long-lived, but they do annihilate each other. The behavior of tri-vacancies is
most intriguing, as it fluctuates between a configuration of bound pairs of
dislocations and that of a locally amorphous state. The relevance of this
observation to the issue of the nature of 2D melting is discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
The Optimal Pricing Strategy of a Mobile Payment Service in a Two-sided Market
Acknowledging the high penetration rate of mobile devices, mobile payment is currently a hot topic and is expected to reach the tipping point of rapid growth. For such a nascent market, how to run a successful mobile payment platform remains unanswered. Therefore, we devote this study to investigate the pricing strategy of proximity mobile payment. Mobile payment serves as a two-sided platform connecting merchants and customers. By leveraging the emergent mobile payment knowledge, we present a game-theoretic model featuring network externality. In the short run, we find the platform will have incentives to apply “divide and conquer” strategy by subsidizing customers to adopt the mobile payment service at the beginning of the business. After the ignition, the platform then becomes profitable by charging per transaction fee from the merchants. In the long run, the subsidization strategy is suggested to be applied when the bank is not taking too much processing fee and leaves sufficient market share to the mobile payment platform. In terms of contributions to practice, this study offers a step forward of method to identify this promising market for mobile payment executives, financial institutes and all others ecosystem
Incorporating Intra-Class Variance to Fine-Grained Visual Recognition
Fine-grained visual recognition aims to capture discriminative
characteristics amongst visually similar categories. The state-of-the-art
research work has significantly improved the fine-grained recognition
performance by deep metric learning using triplet network. However, the impact
of intra-category variance on the performance of recognition and robust feature
representation has not been well studied. In this paper, we propose to leverage
intra-class variance in metric learning of triplet network to improve the
performance of fine-grained recognition. Through partitioning training images
within each category into a few groups, we form the triplet samples across
different categories as well as different groups, which is called Group
Sensitive TRiplet Sampling (GS-TRS). Accordingly, the triplet loss function is
strengthened by incorporating intra-class variance with GS-TRS, which may
contribute to the optimization objective of triplet network. Extensive
experiments over benchmark datasets CompCar and VehicleID show that the
proposed GS-TRS has significantly outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in
both classification and retrieval tasks.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
(E)-3-[4-(Dimethylamino)phenyl]-1-(4-methylphenyl)prop-2-en-1-one
In the title compound, C18H19NO, the dihedral angle between 4-methylphenyl and 4-(dimethylamino)phenyl rings is 45.5 (3)°. The C—C=C—C torsion angle of 173.8 (3)° indicates that the molecule adopts an E configuration. The dimethylamino group is nearly coplanar with the attached benzene ring, making a dihedral angle of 2.7 (3)°. Weak intermolecular C—H⋯π interactions are observed in the crystal structure
Neurochemical characterization of pERK-expressing spinal neurons in histamine-induced itch
Date of Acceptance: 08/07/2015 Acknowledgements This work was supported by grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2012CB966904, 2011CB51005), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31271182, 81200692, 91232724, 81200933, 81101026), Shanghai Natural Science Foundation (12ZR1434300), Key Specialty Construction Project of Pudong Health Bureau of Shanghai (PWZz2013-17), Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Molecular Biology of Neural Development (ZDSY20120617112838879), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (1500219072) and Sino-UK Higher Education Research Partnership for PhD Studies.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
New Approach of the Water Resource Conservation in Taiwan — an Ecological Check for Reservoir Watershed Project (ECRWP)
Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchive
Improving Antigenicity of the Recombinant Hepatitis C Virus Core Protein via Random Mutagenesis
In order to enhance the sensitivity of diagnosis, a recombinant clone containing domain I of HCV core (amino acid residues 1 to 123) was subjected to random mutagenesis. Five mutants with higher sensitivity were obtained by colony screening of 616 mutants using reverse ELISA. Sequence analysis of these mutants revealed alterations focusing on W84, P95, P110, or V129. The inclusion bodies of these recombinant proteins overexpressed in E. coli BL21(DE3) were subsequently dissolved using 6 M urea and then refolded by stepwise dialysis. Compared to the unfolded wild-type antigen, the refolded M3b antigen (W84S, P110S and V129L) exhibited an increase of 66% antigenicity with binding capacity of 0.96 and affinity of 113 μM−1. Moreover, the 33% decrease of the production demand suggests that M3b is a potential substitute for anti-HCV antibody detection
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