Social Identity and Inequality--The Impact of China’s Hukou System

We conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals? response to economic incentives. We focus on China?s decades old household registration system, or the hukou institution, which categorizes citizens into urban and rural residents, and favors the former over the latter in resource allocation. Our results indicate that making individuals? hukou status salient and public significantly reduces the performance of rural migrant students on an incentivized cognitive task by 10 percent. This leads to a leftward shift of their earnings distribution – the proportion of rural migrants below the 25th earnings percentile increases significantly by almost 19 percentage points. However, among non-migrants the proportion with earnings below the 25th percentile drops by 5 percentage points, and the proportion above the 75th percentile increases by almost 8 percentage points, albeit insignificantly. The results demonstrate the impact of institutionally imposed social identity on individuals? intrinsic response to incentives, and consequently on widening income inequality.social identity, hukou, inequality, field experiment, China

Valence-band structure of ferromagnetic semiconductor (InGaMn)As

To clarify the whole picture of the valence-band structures of prototype ferromagnetic semiconductors (III,Mn)As (III: In and Ga), we perform systematic experiments of the resonant tunneling spectroscopy on [(In_0.53Ga_0.47)_1-x Mn_x]As (x=0.06-0.15) and In_0.87Mn_0.13As grown on AlAs/ In_0.53Ga_0.47As:Be/ p+InP(001). We show that the valence band of InGaMnAs almost remains unchanged from that of the host semiconductor InGaAs, that the Fermi level exists in the band gap, and that the p-d exchange splitting in the valence band is negligibly small in (InGaMn)As. In the In0.87Mn0.13As sample, although the resonant peaks are very weak due to the large strain induced by the lattice mismatch between InP and InMnAs, our results also indicate that the Fermi level exists in the band gap and that the p-d exchange splitting in the valence band is negligibly small. These results are quite similar to those of GaMnAs obtained by the same method, meaning that there are no holes in the valence band, and that the impurity-band holes dominate the transport and magnetism both in the InGaMnAs and In_0.87Mn_0.13As films. This band picture of (III,Mn)As is remarkably different from that of II-VI-based diluted magnetic semiconductors.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

MicroRNA-like RNAs from the same miRNA precursors play a role in cassava chilling responses

Abstract MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are known to play important roles in various cellular processes and stress responses. MiRNAs can be identified by analyzing reads from high-throughput deep sequencing. The reads realigned to miRNA precursors besides canonical miRNAs were initially considered as sequencing noise and ignored from further analysis. Here we reported a small-RNA species of phased and half-phased miRNA-like RNAs different from canonical miRNAs from cassava miRNA precursors detected under four distinct chilling conditions. They can form abundant multiple small RNAs arranged along precursors in a tandem and phased or half-phased fashion. Some of these miRNA-like RNAs were experimentally confirmed by re-amplification and re-sequencing, and have a similar qRT-PCR detection ratio as their cognate canonical miRNAs. The target genes of those phased and half-phased miRNA-like RNAs function in process of cell growth metabolism and play roles in protein kinase. Half-phased miR171d.3 was confirmed to have cleavage activities on its target gene P-glycoprotein 11, a broad substrate efflux pump across cellular membranes, which is thought to provide protection for tropical cassava during sharp temperature decease. Our results showed that the RNAs from miRNA precursors are miRNA-like small RNAs that are viable negative gene regulators and may have potential functions in cassava chilling responses

Social identity and inequality: The impact of China's hukou system

We conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals' response to economic incentives. We focus on China's household registration (hukou) system which favors urban residents and discriminates against rural residents in resource allocation. Our results indicate that making individuals' hukou status salient and public significantly reduces the performance of rural migrant students on an incentivized cognitive task by 10 percent, which leads to a significant leftward shift of their earnings distribution. The results demonstrate the impact of institutionally imposed social identity on individuals' intrinsic response to incentives, and consequently on widening income inequality

Simulation and evaluation of 2-m temperature over Antarctica in polar regional climate model

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis ERA40, National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) 20th-century reanalysis, and three station observations along an Antarctic traverse from Zhongshan to Dome-A stations are used to assess 2-m temperature simulation skill of a regional climate model. This model (HIRHAM) is from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany. Results show: (1) The simulated multiyear averaged 2-m temperature field pattern is close to that of ERA40 and NCEP; (2) the cold bias relative to ERA40 over all of Antarctic regions is 1.8°C, and that to NCEP reaches 5.1°C; (3) bias of HIRHAM relative to ERA40 has seasonal variation, with a cold bias mainly in the summer, as much as 3.4°C. There is a small inland warm bias in autumn of 0.3°C. Further analysis reveals that the reason for the cold bias of 2-m temperature is that physical conditions of the near-surface boundary layer simulated by HIRHAM are different from observations: (1) During the summer, observations show that near-surface atmospheric stability conditions have both inversions and non-inversions, which is due to the existence of both positive and negative sensible heat fluxes, but HIRHAM almost always simulates a situation of inversion and negative sensible heat flux; (2) during autumn and winter, observed near-surface stability is almost always that of inversions, consistent with HIRHAM simulations. This partially explains the small bias during autumn and winter

Optimal Algorithms for Crawling a Hidden Database in the Web

A hidden database refers to a dataset that an organization makes accessible on the web by allowing users to issue queries through a search interface. In other words, data acquisition from such a source is not by following static hyper-links. Instead, data are obtained by querying the interface, and reading the result page dynamically generated. This, with other facts such as the interface may answer a query only partially, has prevented hidden databases from being crawled effectively by existing search engines. This paper remedies the problem by giving algorithms to extract all the tuples from a hidden database. Our algorithms are provably efficient, namely, they accomplish the task by performing only a small number of queries, even in the worst case. We also establish theoretical results indicating that these algorithms are asymptotically optimal -- i.e., it is impossible to improve their efficiency by more than a constant factor. The derivation of our upper and lower bound results reveals significant insight into the characteristics of the underlying problem. Extensive experiments confirm the proposed techniques work very well on all the real datasets examined.Comment: VLDB201

Experience-Learning Inspired Two-Step Reward Method for Efficient Legged Locomotion Learning Towards Natural and Robust Gaits

Multi-legged robots offer enhanced stability in complex terrains, yet autonomously learning natural and robust motions in such environments remains challenging. Drawing inspiration from animals' progressive learning patterns, from simple to complex tasks, we introduce a universal two-stage learning framework with two-step reward setting based on self-acquired experience, which efficiently enables legged robots to incrementally learn natural and robust movements. In the first stage, robots learn through gait-related rewards to track velocity on flat terrain, acquiring natural, robust movements and generating effective motion experience data. In the second stage, mirroring animal learning from existing experiences, robots learn to navigate challenging terrains with natural and robust movements using adversarial imitation learning. To demonstrate our method's efficacy, we trained both quadruped robots and a hexapod robot, and the policy were successfully transferred to a physical quadruped robot GO1, which exhibited natural gait patterns and remarkable robustness in various terrains