How Individual Characters Affect the Ex ante Moral Hazard of Basic Medical Insurance: Evidence from China

How individual characters affect the ex ante moral hazard of basic medical insurance still remain academically debatable. This paper based on divergent individual characters of insurers to analyze the roles of basic health insurance on the ex ante moral hazard. It found health level, marital status, income level and age are the key individual factors affecting ex ante moral hazard of basic health insurance. But the roles of rural-urban difference and gender are not obvious. It gives supplementary explanations to the medical service expenditure, waste of medical resources and other issues, and also put forward the corresponding policy recommendations

Design of a multiple bloom filter for distributed navigation routing

Unmanned navigation of vehicles and mobile robots can be greatly simplified by providing environmental intelligence with dispersed wireless sensors. The wireless sensors can work as active landmarks for vehicle localization and routing. However, wireless sensors are often resource scarce and require a resource-saving design. In this paper, a multiple Bloom-filter scheme is proposed to compress a global routing table for a wireless sensor. It is used as a lookup table for routing a vehicle to any destination but requires significantly less memory space and search effort. An error-expectation-based design for a multiple Bloom filter is proposed as an improvement to the conventional false-positive-rate-based design. The new design is shown to provide an equal relative error expectation for all branched paths, which ensures a better network load balance and uses less memory space. The scheme is implemented in a project for wheelchair navigation using wireless camera motes. © 2013 IEEE

A mosaic of eyes

Autonomous navigation is a traditional research topic in intelligent robotics and vehicles, which requires a robot to perceive its environment through onboard sensors such as cameras or laser scanners, to enable it to drive to its goal. Most research to date has focused on the development of a large and smart brain to gain autonomous capability for robots. There are three fundamental questions to be answered by an autonomous mobile robot: 1) Where am I going? 2) Where am I? and 3) How do I get there? To answer these basic questions, a robot requires a massive spatial memory and considerable computational resources to accomplish perception, localization, path planning, and control. It is not yet possible to deliver the centralized intelligence required for our real-life applications, such as autonomous ground vehicles and wheelchairs in care centers. In fact, most autonomous robots try to mimic how humans navigate, interpreting images taken by cameras and then taking decisions accordingly. They may encounter the following difficulties

Glycine- and Alanine-Intercalated Layered Double Hydroxides as Highly Efficient Adsorbents for Phosphate with Kinetic Advantages

Phosphate is the main cause of eutrophication. Layered double hydroxides (LDH) are considered to be promising phosphate adsorbents due to their high affinity and large capacity. In this study, we partially intercalated zwitterionic glycine and alanine into Cl-LDH (corresponding to MgAl-LDH with interlayer anion Cl−) and synthesized efficient inorganic–organic nanohybrids for phosphate removal with kinetic advantages. Gly-Cl-LDH, Ala-Cl-LDH and Cl-LDH were characterized, and their phosphate adsorption performances under the influence of environment factors (e.g., solution pH, coexisting anions, contact time and phosphate concentration) were investigated. The results show that Gly-Cl-LDH and Ala-Cl-LDH had larger specific surface areas and larger interlayer spaces than Cl-LDH, and exhibited better adsorption performance at a lower pH and better adsorption selectivity against SO42−. Kinetic experiments indicated that Gly-Cl-LDH and Ala-Cl-LDH can reduce phosphate concentrations to a lower level in a shorter time. The pseudo-second-order kinetic constants of Gly-Cl-LDH and Ala-Cl-LDH were 1.27 times and 3.17 times of Cl-LDH, respectively (R2 > 0.996). The maximum adsorption capacities derived from a Langmuir model of Cl-LDH, Gly-Cl-LDH and Ala-Cl-LDH are 63.2 mg-P/L, 55.8 mg-P/L and 58.2 mg-P/L, respectively, which showed superiority over the prevailing phosphate adsorbents. This research provides highly efficient adsorbents for removing phosphate from aqueous solutions

Investigation of Leakage and Heat Transfer Properties of the Labyrinth Seal on Various Rotation Speed and Geometric Parameters

To investigate the influence of the variation of geometric parameters on the leakage and heat transfer characteristics of labyrinth seals at various rotational speeds, the labyrinth seal models with different geometric parameters were numerically simulated based on the control variable methods. Results show the aerodynamic mechanism of leakage characteristics changing with rotational speed, as well as the leakage characteristics of labyrinth seals under the coupling action of geometric parameters and rotating speeds. When the characteristic scale changes along the direction of centrifugal force, the variation trend of labyrinth seal leakage characteristics is consistent at different rotational speeds. However, the leakage characteristics of labyrinth seals show the difference of rotational speed when the feature scale changes along the axis. At the same time, the laws of convective heat transfer on the surface of the rotor and stator are shown by the results of the studies, which provides reference for the thermodynamic analysis of labyrinth seals

Biology of Peptide Transporter 2 in Mammals: New Insights into Its Function, Structure and Regulation

Peptide transporter 2 (PepT2) in mammals plays essential roles in the reabsorption and conservation of peptide-bound amino acids in the kidney and in maintaining neuropeptide homeostasis in the brain. It is also of significant medical and pharmacological significance in the absorption and disposing of peptide-like drugs, including angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, β-lactam antibiotics and antiviral prodrugs. Understanding the structure, function and regulation of PepT2 is of emerging interest in nutrition, medical and pharmacological research. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of the structure, substrate preferences and localization of PepT2 in mammals. As PepT2 is expressed in various organs, its function in the liver, kidney, brain, heart, lung and mammary gland has also been addressed. Finally, the regulatory factors that affect the expression and function of PepT2, such as transcriptional activation and posttranslational modification, are also discussed