What impact does workplace accessibility have on housing prices? Sydney 2006 - 2011

Labour markets evolve continually changes in the number and types of jobs, the spatial location of firms, and clustering or dispersion, continually restructure the citys economy. The relative accessibility of those labour markets also evolves, reflecting changing travel patterns and preferences, and changing transportation investments. This paper investigates what impact labour market changes between 2006 and 2011 have had on prices of houses and units in di fferent locations. The data is drawn from a custom property sales dataset, Census 2006 and 2011, and other secondary sources. The analysis uses a repeat sales method and controls for other locational attributes that might contribute to explaining price changes. GIS-based analysis incorporates spatial measures and statistics into the analysis. The paper contributes to our understanding of the urban economy by addressing the question how does employment accessibility affect peoples housing preferences

Entanglement depth for symmetric states

© 2016 American Physical Society. Entanglement depth characterizes the minimal number of particles in a system that are mutually entangled. For symmetric states, there is a dichotomy for entanglement depth: An N-particle symmetric state is either fully separable or fully entangled - the entanglement depth is either 1 or N. We show that this dichotomy property for entangled symmetric states is even stable under nonsymmetric noise. We propose an experimentally accessible method to detect entanglement depth in atomic ensembles based on a bound on the particle number population of Dicke states, and demonstrate that the entanglement depth of some Dicke states, for example the twin Fock state, is very stable even under a large arbitrary noise. Our observation can be applied to atomic Bose-Einstein condensates to infer that these systems can be highly entangled with the entanglement depth that is on the order of the system size (i.e., several thousands of atoms)

Polymorphisms of two neuroendocrine–correlated genes associated with body weight and reproductive traits in Jinghai yellow chicken

In this study, insulin-like growth factor binding protein 2 (IGFBP-2) and signal transducers activators of transcription 5b (STAT5b) gene were studied as candidate gene associated with body weight and reproductive traits of the Jinghai Yellow chicken. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the IGFBP-2 and STAT5b genes were examined in both Jinghai Yellow chicken and three reference chicken populations by PCR-SSCP. Two SNPs (T3746TG and CC3753TT) were detected in the IGFBP-2 gene. One SNP (C8066T) was observed in the STAT5b gene. For primer 1, the general linear model analysis showed that Jinghai yellow chickens with FF genotypes had significant effect on hatch weight, egg weight at 300 days and body weight at 300 days than those of the EF genotype and had significant effect on body weight at 8 weeks of age than those of the EE genotype (P < 0.05). For primer 2, Jinghai yellow chickens with CT genotype had significant effect on hatch weight and age at first egg than CC genotype and TT genotype respectively (P < 0.05). SNPs in both IGFBP-2 and STAT5b genes had significant effect on body weight and reproductive traits of the Jinghai yellow chicken than those with either SNP alone. These SNPs may be served as a potential genetic marker for growth and reproduction traits evaluation of the Jinghai yellow chicken.Key words: Jinghai Yellow chicken, IGFBP-2 gene, STAT5b gene, economic traits, polymorphism

Maternal mental health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China

Background: The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on breastfeeding women and to identify predictors of maternal mental health and coping. Methods: Mothers aged ≥ 18 years with a breast-fed infant ≤ 18 months of age during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China, completed a questionnaire. Descriptive analysis of lockdown consequences was performed and predictors of these outcomes were examined using stepwise linear regression. Results: Of 2233 participants, 29.9%, 20.0% and 34.7% felt down, lonely, and worried, respectively, during the lockdown; however, 85.3% felt able to cope. Poorer maternal mental health was predicted by maternal (younger age, higher education) and infant (older age, lower gestation) characteristics, and social circumstances (husband unemployed or working from home, receiving advice from family, having enough space for the baby, living close to a park or green space). Conversely, better maternal mental health was predicted by higher income, employment requiring higher qualifications, more personal space at home, shopping or walking > once/week and lack of impact of COVID-19 on job or income. Mothers with higher education, more bedrooms, fair division of household chores and attending an online mother and baby group > once/week reported better coping. Conclusion: The findings highlight maternal characteristics and circumstances that predict poorer mental health and reduced coping which could be used to target interventions in any future public health emergencies requiring social restrictions

Biologic stability of plasma ion-implanted miniscrews

published_or_final_versio

LOQUAT: an open-source GPU-accelerated SPH solver for geotechnical modeling

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a meshless method gaining popularity recently in geotechnical modeling. It is suitable to solve problems involving large deformation, free-surface, cracking and fragmentation. To promote the research and application of SPH in geotechnical engineering, we present LOQUAT, an open-source three-dimensional GPU accelerated SPH solver. LOQUAT employs the standard SPH formulations for solids with two geomechnical constitutive models which are the Drucker–Prager model and a hypoplastic model. Three stabilization techniques, namely, artificial viscosity, artificial pressure and stress regularization are included. A generalized boundary particle method is presented to model static and moving boundaries with arbitrary geometry. LOQUAT employs GPU acceleration technique to greatly increase the computational efficiency. Numerical examples show that the solver is convergent, stable and highly efficient. With a mainstream GPU, it can simulate large scale problems with tens of millions of particles, and easily performs more than one thousand times faster than serial CPU code

Associations between usual glycated haemoglobin A1c and Cardiovascular Disease in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A 10‐year Diabetes cohort study

Aims: The long‐term effect of glycated haemoglobin A1c(HbA1c) level on cardiovascular disease(CVD) risks among patients with type 2 diabetes remains controversial. The aim of this study was to investigate their associations. / Materials and methods: This retrospective cohort study conducted in Hong Kong selected patients aged 45‐84 years old with type 2 diabetes mellitus and without CVD in primary care clinics within 2008‐2010. The usual HbA1c measurement was calculated using a mixed effects model to minimize regression dilution bias. The association between usual HbA1c and CVD risk was assessed by Cox regression with adjustment of baseline covariates. Subgroup analyses by patient characteristics were also conducted. / Results: After a median follow‐up period of 8.4years (1.4 million person‐years), 174,028 patients with 34,074 CVD events were observed. Curvilinear association was found between the usual HbA1c and total CVD, stroke, heart failure and CVD mortality risk. No significant difference was found among patients with usual HbA1c7%(53mmol/mol) was 21% (HR: 1.21; 95%C.I. (Confidence Interval): 1.18‐1.23). Similar pattern was identified in patient's subgroups analysis, but the effect of usual HbA1c in younger patients were more prominent than the others. / Conclusions: Increment in usual HbA1c level >7.0% (53mmol/mol) was associated with elevated CVD risk, but no difference was found in population with usual HbA1c<7.0% (53mmol/mol) irrespective of the patients' characteristics. For the CVD prevention, a strict adherence of HbA1c <7% (53 mmol/mol) should apply to patients with younger age

The ‘credibility paradox’ in China’s science communication: Views from scientific practitioners

In contrast to increasing debates on China’s rising status as a global scientific power, issues of China’s science communication remain under-explored. Based on 21 in-depth interviews in three cities, this article examines Chinese scientists’ accounts of the entangled web of influence which conditions the process of how scientific knowledge achieves (or fails to achieve) its civic authority. A main finding of this study is a ‘credibility paradox’ as a result of the over-politicisation of science and science communication in China. Respondents report that an absence of visible institutional endorsements renders them more public credibility and better communication outcomes. Thus, instead of exploiting formal channels of science communication, scientists interviewed were more keen to act as ‘informal risk communicators’ in grassroots and private events. Chinese scientists’ perspectives on how to earn public support of their research sheds light on the nature and impact of a ‘civic epistemology’ in an authoritarian state

Physical origins of ruled surfaces on the reduced density matrices geometry

© 2016, Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. The reduced density matrices (RDMs) of many-body quantum states form a convex set. The boundary of low dimensional projections of this convex set may exhibit nontrivial geometry such as ruled surfaces. In this paper, we study the physical origins of these ruled surfaces for bosonic systems. The emergence of ruled surfaces was recently proposed as signatures of symmetry-breaking phase. We show that, apart from being signatures of symmetry-breaking, ruled surfaces can also be the consequence of gapless quantum systems by demonstrating an explicit example in terms of a two-mode Ising model. Our analysis was largely simplified by the quantum de Finetti’s theorem—in the limit of large system size, these RDMs are the convex set of all the symmetric separable states. To distinguish ruled surfaces originated from gapless systems from those caused by symmetry-breaking, we propose to use the finite size scaling method for the corresponding geometry. This method is then applied to the two-mode XY model, successfully identifying a ruled surface as the consequence of gapless systems

Reaching out to the poorest of the poor - a 4-week outreach programme at the Missionaries of Charity : a pilot outreach service programme to enable professionalism development in medical students

Poster Presentation: no. PP21Conference Theme: Learner Wellbeing Across the ContinuumINTRODUCTION: Service learning allows medical students to integrate course material with meaningful community services, which in turn enriches their learning experience and social responsibility. This study explored attitudes towards service learning of medical students who participated in a 4-week elective attachment to a shelter home in Hong Kong …published_or_final_versio