The Adjusted Measure of Body Mass Index and its Impact on Health

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of socio-economic status (SES) on the Body Mass Index (BMI), a formula based on the ratio of height to weight, linked to health, using a four-year (1991, 1993, 1997 and 2000) panel data set which comes from the Physical Examination in China Health and Nutrition Survey. To an extent we confirm the results with respect to the linkage between SES and the documented healthy BMI found for other developing countries. Furthermore, apart from using the existing specification of BMI, we develop a little further the issue on how to define BMI with respect to the adjustment of gender and age. This leads to a slightly different formulation for the BMI and a substantially different healthy range based on self-reported health. We also find that the healthy BMI has a significant impact on health together with SES.

The Adjusted Measure of Body Mass Index for the Chinese and its Impact on Health

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of socio-economic status (SES) on the Body Mass Index (BMI), a formula based on the ratio of height to weight, linked to health, using a four-year (1991, 1993, 1997 and 2000) panel data set which comes from the Physical Examination in China Health and Nutrition Survey. To an extent we confirm the results with respect to the linkage between SES and the documented healthy BMI found for other developing countries. Furthermore, apart from using the existing specification of BMI, we develop a little further the issue on how to define BMI with respect to the adjustment of gender and age. This leads to a slightly different formulation for the BMI and a substantially different healthy range based on self-reported health. We also find that variables such as income can modify the impact of an adverse BMI on health.Body Mass Index; Health; China

Perturbations of bounce inflation scenario from f(T)f(T) modified gravity revisited

In this work, we revisit the perturbations that are generated in the bounce inflation scenario constructed within the framework of $f(T)$ theory. It has been well known that pure $f(T)$ theory cannot give rise to bounce inflation behavior, so aside from the gravity part, we also employ a canonical scalar field for minimal extension. We calculate the perturbations in $f(T)$ theory using the well-established ADM formalism, and find various conditions to avoid their pathologies. We find that it is indeed very difficult to obtain a healthy model without those pathologies, however, one may find a way out if a potential requirement, say, to keep every function continuous, is abandoned.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figures. Comments are welcom

Essays on Race and Finance

In my first chapter, I show a positive municipal financing shock has heterogeneous effects on academic achievement. White students show meaningful improvement, but Black and Hispanic students do not. Consequently, the achievement racial gap widens following the shock. Changes in school funding do not explain this phenomenon; rather, it is explained by heterogeneous outcomes in household Socioeconomic Status (SES). These results highlight the possibility that a credit shock-induced increase in government spending could unexpectedly increase the local racial disparity. The second chapter examines the role of race and racial concordance between financial advisors and their local community. There are significant differences in stock market participation based on community racial composition as well as differences in the characteristics of communities served by minority advisors. Notably, minority advisors are more likely to serve racially concordant communities. We find that racial concordance has only a modest relation with local stock market participation. However, while minority advisors are more likely to drop out of the industry, this relation is mitigated among advisors located in more concordant communities

Kinesthetic Haptics Sensing and Discovery with Bilateral Teleoperation Systems

In the mechanical engineering field of robotics, bilateral teleoperation is a classic but still increasing research topic. In bilateral teleoperation, a human operator moves the master manipulator, and a slave manipulator is controlled to follow the motion of the master in a remote, potentially hostile environment. This dissertation focuses on kinesthetic perception analysis in teleoperation systems. Design of the controllers of the systems is studied as the influential factor of this issue. The controllers that can provide different force tracking capability are compared using the same experimental protocol. A 6 DOF teleoperation system is configured as the system testbed. An innovative master manipulator is developed and a 7 DOF redundant manipulator is used as the slave robot. A singularity avoidance inverse kinematics algorithm is developed to resolve the redundancy of the slave manipulator. An experimental protocol is addressed and three dynamics attributes related to kineshtetic feedback are investigated: weight, center of gravity and inertia. The results support our hypothesis: the controller that can bring a better force feedback can improve the performance in the experiments