Does Health Insurance Coverage Lead to Better Health and Educational Outcomes? Evidence from Rural China

Using 2006 China Agricultural Census (CAC), we examine whether the introduction of the New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) has affected child mortality, maternal mortality, and school enrollment of the 6-16 years olds. Our data cover 5.9 million people living in eight low-income rural counties, of which four adopted the NCMS by 2006 and four did not adopt it until 2007. Raw data suggest that enrolling in NCMS is associated with better school enrollment and lower mortality of young children and pregnant women. However, using a difference-in-difference propensity score method, we find most of these differences are driven by the endogenous introduction and take-up of NCMS, and out method overcomes classical propensity score matching's failure to address the selection bias. While the NCMS does not affect child mortality and maternal mortality, it does help improve the school enrollment of six-year-olds.

太陽光エネルギーを活用した貧困削減プログラムの評価 －中国金寨県の事例を中心に－

学位プログラム名: 京都大学大学院思修館京都大学新制・課程博士博士(総合学術)甲第24948号総総博第30号京都大学大学院総合生存学館総合生存学専攻(主査)教授 IALNAZOV Dimiter Savov, 教授 長山 浩章, 准教授 関山 健学位規則第4条第1項該当Doctor of PhilosophyKyoto UniversityDGA

Collaborative Feature Learning from Social Media

Image feature representation plays an essential role in image recognition and related tasks. The current state-of-the-art feature learning paradigm is supervised learning from labeled data. However, this paradigm requires large-scale category labels, which limits its applicability to domains where labels are hard to obtain. In this paper, we propose a new data-driven feature learning paradigm which does not rely on category labels. Instead, we learn from user behavior data collected on social media. Concretely, we use the image relationship discovered in the latent space from the user behavior data to guide the image feature learning. We collect a large-scale image and user behavior dataset from Behance.net. The dataset consists of 1.9 million images and over 300 million view records from 1.9 million users. We validate our feature learning paradigm on this dataset and find that the learned feature significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art image features in learning better image similarities. We also show that the learned feature performs competitively on various recognition benchmarks

ℓ1\ell_1-minimization method for link flow correction

A computational method, based on $\ell_1$-minimization, is proposed for the problem of link flow correction, when the available traffic flow data on many links in a road network are inconsistent with respect to the flow conservation law. Without extra information, the problem is generally ill-posed when a large portion of the link sensors are unhealthy. It is possible, however, to correct the corrupted link flows \textit{accurately} with the proposed method under a recoverability condition if there are only a few bad sensors which are located at certain links. We analytically identify the links that are robust to miscounts and relate them to the geometric structure of the traffic network by introducing the recoverability concept and an algorithm for computing it. The recoverability condition for corrupted links is simply the associated recoverability being greater than 1. In a more realistic setting, besides the unhealthy link sensors, small measurement noises may be present at the other sensors. Under the same recoverability condition, our method guarantees to give an estimated traffic flow fairly close to the ground-truth data and leads to a bound for the correction error. Both synthetic and real-world examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method

Does Price Reveal Poor-Quality Drugs? Evidence from 17 Countries

Focusing on 8 drug types on the WHO-approved medicine list, we constructed an original dataset of 899 drug samples from 17 low- and median-income countries and tested them for visual appearance, disintegration, and analyzed their ingredients by chromatography and spectrometry. Fifteen percent of the samples fail at least one test and can be considered substandard. After controlling for local factors, we find that failing drugs are priced 13.6-18.7% lower than non-failing drugs but the signaling effect of price is far from complete, especially for non-innovator brands. The look of the pharmacy, as assessed by our covert shoppers, is weakly correlated with the results of quality tests. These findings suggest that consumers are likely to suspect low quality from market price, non-innovator brand and the look of the pharmacy, but none of these signals can perfectly identify substandard and counterfeit drugs. Indeed, many cheaper non-innovator products pass all quality tests, and are genuine generic drugs.

渦電流非破壊探傷試験における高信号ノイズ比のための直列強磁性トンネル接合センサの開発

要約のみTohoku University安藤康夫課

A gene related study with a review of current osteoporosis medications and a comparison between two kinds of BMP-2

학위논문(박사)--서울대학교 대학원 :의과대학 의학과,2019. 8. 이재협.Osteoporosis is caused by an imbalance between bone formation and bone resorption that results in low bone mass and deteriorated bone microstructure and finally elevates the risk of low-trauma fracture. For developing new therapies for managing osteoporosis, this study compromised 3 stages as follows: 1, the bone formation efficacy of recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein 2 (rhBMP-2) was investigated since bone substitute is necessary for osteoporosis patients; 2, the efficacy of currently available medications was analyzed via meta-analysis; 3, the impact brought by the mutation in Drg2 in bone homeostasis was researched. Their methods and results were as follow. In the first part, we compared the osteoinductivity of Escherichia coli rhBMP-2 (ErhBMP-2) with Chinese hamster ovary cell-derived rhBMP-2 (CrhBMP-2) with human mesenchymal stem cells and rat calvarial defect. In the second part, we systematically reviewed the effect of current osteoporosis medications on preventing secondary osteoporotic vertebral and non-vertebral fractures from randomized controlled studies and synthesized their result via meta-analysis. In the third part, we compared the transcription level of DRG2 in osteoporosis and non-osteoporosis subjects, and furtherly fabricated Drg2 knockout mice and analyzed the difference in bone phenotype of wild type and Drg2 knockout mice. At the end of this part, we investigated the possible mechanisms and signals Drg2 involved in osteoblastic differentiation. The results from the first part showed ErhBMP-2 could have comparable osteoinductivity with Chinese hamster ovary cell-derived BMP-2 while using the demineralized bone matrix as the carrier. In the second part, we found the medications could have a consistent effect on osteoporosis patients, regardless of their fracture history. And in the third part, we found osteoporosis patients had higher expression level of Drg2 and knocking out of Drg2 in mice significantly improved bone mass and mineral density even if mice were ovariectomized. The bone marrow-derived macrophage in Drg2 knockout mice showed lower osteoclastogenesis while the bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell concurrently showed higher osteoblastogenesis than wild type mice. Furtherly, inhibition of Drg2 expression in mouse MC3T3-E1 cells elevated its osteogenicity via canonical and non-canonical BMP pathway. In summary, we found the ErhBMP-2 might have the potential of being used as an anabolic agent for osteoporosis fracture; currently available medications could have a significant effect on preventing secondary osteoporotic fracture; and Drg2 as an important regulator in bone remodeling, which suggested Drg2 inhibitor could be a potential anabolic for treating osteoporosis.골다공증은 골량 감소와 골 미세구조 이상을 야기하는 질환으로 골형성과 골흡수간 불균형에 의해 발생하며, 저손상 골절의 위험을 증가시키는 질환이다. 새로운 골다공증 치료법을 개발하기 위하여 다음 3단계의 연구를 진행하였다. 골다공증 환자는 골대체제가 필요하기 때문에 재조합 골형성단백질 제2형(rhBMP-2) 의 골형성 효능 연구, 현재 사용되는 골다공증 치료제의 2차 골절예방 효능에 관한 메타 분석 연구와 함께, developmentally regulated GTP binding protein 2 (Drg2) 의 골 항상성에 미치는 영향을 연구하였다. 첫번째 연구에서는, 대장균 유래 골형성 단백질 제2형(ErhBMP-2)과 동물세포 유래 골 형성 단백질 제2형(CrhBMP-2)의 골유도성을 인간 간엽줄기세포 및 랫드 두개골 결손모델에서 비교하였고 두번째 연구에서는, 기존 골다공증 치료제가 골다공증성 척추 및 비척추 골절을 예방하는 효과에 대하여 메타분석을 시행하였으며 세번째 연구에서는, 골다공증이 있는 환자군과 정상 대조군의 골수 유래 간엽줄기세포 에서 DRG2의 발현을 비교하였고, Drg2 결손 마우스를 제작하여 대조군과 골 표현형의 차이를 분석하였다. 또한 Drg2 가 조골세포의 분화에 관여하는 기전과 신호전달 연구를 수행하였다. 첫번째 연구에서 ErhBMP-2가 탈회골기질을 담체로 사용할 때 CrhBMP-2와 유사한 골 유도능력을 가질 수도 있음을 확인하였으며 두번째 연구에서는 골다공증 환자의 골절 병력과 무관하게 약물치료가 지속적인 영향이 있을 수 있다는 것을 알 수 있었습니다. 세번째 연구에서 골다공증 환자는 Drg2 mRNA 발현 정도가 정상 대조군보다 더 높았고, Drg2 결손마우스는 난소절제술을 시행하였을 때 골량 보호 효과가 관찰되었다. Drg2 결손 마우스에서 얻은 골수유래 대식세포를 대조군과 비교했을 때, 파골세포 분화력이 낮았으며 골수유래 줄기세포의 조골세포 분화력은 높았다. 또한 마우스 MC3T3-E1 세포에서의 Drg2 발현을 억제시키면 정식 및 비정식 BMP 경로를 통하여 조골세포의 분화가 증가하였다. 결론적으로, 본 연구에서는 ErhBMP-2가 골다공증성 골절에서 동화제제로서 사용 될 수 있는 가능성과 Drg2 유전자가 골 재형성에 있어 중요한 조절 인자임을 확인하였다.Abstract I Table of Contents: IV List of Tables VI List of Figures VII Introduction 1 Methods 5 Osteoinductive treatment of human mesenchymal stem cells 5 ALP staining and and ALP activity assay 5 Calcium staining and assay 6 Real-time PCR 7 Rat calvarial defect model 7 Micro-CT evaluation 8 Hematoxylin and eosin staining 9 Search for studies 10 Selection of studies 10 Data extraction and risk of bias 11 Data analysis and quality of evidence 12 Extraction of mesenchymal stem cells from human 13 Fabrication of DRG2 knock out mouse 13 Genomic typing and gender determination 14 Primary culture of BMMCs and bone marrow MSC 14 TRAP staining 15 shRNA transfection of MC3T3-E1 cell 15 Inducing osteoblastic differentiation in MC3T3-E1 cells 16 Western blot 16 Semiquantitative RT-PCR 17 Feeding and maintaining 17 Serum P1NP and CTX measurement 18 Ovariectomy 18 Calcein labeling 19 Statistics 19 Results 20 ALP assay 20 ALP staining 20 Calcium assay 20 Alizarin red staining 21 Real-time PCR 21 Animal experiments 21 Characteristics of included studies and risk of bias 22 Comparison with control group 24 Comparison between interventions 29 Higher DRG2 expression correlates with lower BMD 30 Knocking out of Drg2 affects mice postnatal bone formation 30 Inhibition of DRG2 improves bone architecture and BMD even in ovariectomized mice 31 Results of the GO enrichment and KEGG pathway analysis 33 Inhibiting the expression of DRG2 inhibits the osteoclastic differentiation of BMMCs and elevates osteoblastic differentiation of bone marrow MSCs 33 Inhibiting the expression of DRG2 elevates osteogenicity of MC3T3-E1 cells 34 Inhibition of DRG2 elevates OB differentiation via canonical and non-canonical BMP signaling 35 Discussion 37 The first section 38 The second section 41 The third section 46 References 50 Figures 61 Table 90 Supplementary material 104 논 문 초 록 123 Acknowledgments 126Docto