Local Protectionism and Regional Specialization: Evidence from China’s Industries

This paper uses a dynamic panel estimation method to investigate the determinants of regional specialization in China’s industries, paying particular attention to local protectionism. Less geographic concentration is found in industries where the past tax-plus-profit margins and the shares of state ownership are high, re- flecting stronger local government protection of these industries. The evidence also supports the scale-economies theory of regional specialization. Finally, the overall time trend of regional specialization of China’s industries is found to have reversed an early drop in the mid 1980s, and registered a significant increase in the later years.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39951/3/wp565.pd

Local Protectionism and Regional Specialization: Evidence from China’s Industries

This paper uses a dynamic panel estimation method to investigate the determinants of regional specialization in China’s industries, paying particular attention to local protectionism. Less geographic concentration is found in industries where the past tax-plus-profit margins and the shares of state ownership are high, re- flecting stronger local government protection of these industries. The evidence also supports the scale-economies theory of regional specialization. Finally, the overall time trend of regional specialization of China’s industries is found to have reversed an early drop in the mid 1980s, and registered a significant increase in the later years.local protectionism, regional specialization, scale economy, external economy.

Nifurtimox Is Effective Against Neural Tumor Cells and Is Synergistic with Buthionine Sulfoximine.

Children with aggressive neural tumors have poor survival rates and novel therapies are needed. Previous studies have identified nifurtimox and buthionine sulfoximine (BSO) as effective agents in children with neuroblastoma and medulloblastoma. We hypothesized that nifurtimox would be effective against other neural tumor cells and would be synergistic with BSO. We determined neural tumor cell viability before and after treatment with nifurtimox using MTT assays. Assays for DNA ladder formation and poly-ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) cleavage were performed to measure the induction of apoptosis after nifurtimox treatment. Inhibition of intracellular signaling was measured by Western blot analysis of treated and untreated cells. Tumor cells were then treated with combinations of nifurtimox and BSO and evaluated for viability using MTT assays. All neural tumor cell lines were sensitive to nifurtimox, and IC50 values ranged from approximately 20 to 210 μM. Nifurtimox treatment inhibited ERK phosphorylation and induced apoptosis in tumor cells. Furthermore, the combination of nifurtimox and BSO demonstrated significant synergistic efficacy in all tested cell lines. Additional preclinical and clinical studies of the combination of nifurtimox and BSO in patients with neural tumors are warranted

On the Mitigation of Single Event Transients on Flash-based FPGAs

Thanks to the immunity against Single Event Upsets in configuration memory, Flash-based FPGA is becoming widely adopted in mission- and safety-critical applications, such as in aerospace field. However, the decreasing of device feature size leads to an increasing of the device sensitivity regarding Single Event Transients (SETs). In this paper, we developed a new workflow to evaluate SET phenomena in a specific convergence case and introduce a new mitigation of SET pulse without introducing any performance penalization to the original netlist

Frequency-Driven Crack Propagation in Ultrasonically-Assisted Bone Cutting

Ultrasonically-assisted bone cutting with high precision has many advantages for orthopedic surgeries. However, irregular crack propagation, large fractured chips, and surface damage may occur during the cutting process due to the brittleness and anisotropy of cortical bone. These can be minimized by optimizing the operating parameters of the cutting tool; cutting frequency, amplitude, speed, depth, and temperature, in consideration of the toughening mechanism of bone. Therefore, the current study is motivated to investigate the effect of varying frequency on crack propagation in ultrasonically-assisted bone cutting through the means of finite element analysis. The pattern of crack propagation in relation to the variation of frequencies was investigated using the extended finite element method (XFEM) in consideration of the bone microstructures. The results showed that crack propagation is effectively controlled when the tool is operated at higher frequencies, but an up-forward crack propagation following the trajectory of tool vibration is only apparent at frequencies higher than 800 Hz. Neglecting the operating outputs at 2400 Hz, the induced force and stress are observed to decrease proportionally with increasing frequency

Frequency-Driven Crack Propagation in Ultrasonically-Assisted Bone Cutting

Ultrasonically-assisted bone cutting with high precision has many advantages for orthopedic surgeries. However, irregular crack propagation, large fractured chips, and surface damage may occur during the cutting process due to the brittleness and anisotropy of cortical bone. These can be minimized by optimizing the operating parameters of the cutting tool; cutting frequency, amplitude, speed, depth, and temperature, in consideration of the toughening mechanism of bone. Therefore, the current study is motivated to investigate the effect of varying frequency on crack propagation in ultrasonically-assisted bone cutting through the means of finite element analysis. The pattern of crack propagation in relation to the variation of frequencies was investigated using the extended finite element method (XFEM) in consideration of the bone microstructures. The results showed that crack propagation is effectively controlled when the tool is operated at higher frequencies, but an up-forward crack propagation following the trajectory of tool vibration is only apparent at frequencies higher than 800 Hz. Neglecting the operating outputs at 2400 Hz, the induced force and stress are observed to decrease proportionally with increasing frequency

SETA-RAY: A New IDE tool for Predicting, Analyzing and Mitigating Radiation-induced Soft Errors on FPGAs

One of the main concern for FPGA adopted in mission critical application such as space and avionic fields is radiationinduced soft errors. Therefore, we propose an IDE including two software tools compatible with commercial EDA tools. Rad-Ray as the first and only developed tool capable to predict the source of the SET phenomena by taking in to account the features of the radiation environment such as the type, LET and interaction angle of the particles, the material and physical layout of the device exposed to the radiation. The predicted source SET pulse in provided to the SETA tool as the second developed tool integrated with the commercial FPGA design tool for evaluating the sensitivity of the industrial circuit implemented on Flash-based FPGA and mitigate the original netlist based on the performed analysis. This IDE is supported by ESA and Thales Alenia Space. It has been applied to the EUCLID space mission project that will be launched in 2021