External Shocks, Structural Breaks and Unemployment Hysteresis in China

This paper aims to investigate the unemployment hysteresis hypothesis, in which the endogenously determined break points are incorporated, by using annual data of actual urban unemployment rates during 1978-2009 in China. We treat the break date as unknown and utilize recursive, rolling and sequential tests to determine the endogenous structural breaks which are caused by external shocks. Our empirical findings show that three structural breaks existed in the time series of China’s actual urban unemployment rates and we can not reject the unit-root hypothesis, which is consistent with the hysteresis hypothesis of unemployment. Key words: Structural breaks; Unemployment hysteresis; External shock

Photoswitchable Nanoparticles for Triggered Drug Delivery

Controlled release technology is expected to have a profound impact in many medical fields including oncology. The incorporation of chemotherapeutic agents in nanoparticle delivery vehicles has improved drug solubility, reduced clearance, reduced drug resistance and enhanced therapeutic effectiveness. With controlled release nanoparticle systems, a single dose can sustain drug levels within the desired therapeutic range for long periods in various diseases (e.g., diabetes or cancer). However, currently approved nanomedicines provide modest survival benefits for patients, in part because of poor tumor penetration. In fact, physiological barriers, such as the dense interstitial matrix, hinder the delivery of drugs throughout the entire tumor. Another significant drawback of commercially available drug delivery particles is that drugs are released at a predetermined rate irrespective of patient needs or changing physiological circumstances. A triggerable drug delivery system that allows repeated on-demand dosing and multiple dosages from a single administration is thus desirable. It might also help address the potential importance of timing on therapeutic effect in the treatment of cancer and other diseases. In this talk, I will present a photo-switching nanoparticulate system that uses light as the remote means of triggering both on-demand drug release and reversible changes in particle volume (from 130 to 40 nm) to enhance tissue penetration. The photo-switching allows particles to fluoresce and release drugs inside cells when illuminated with light. These particles provide spatio-temporal control of drug release and enhanced tissue penetration, useful properties in many disease states including cancer and ocular diseases. For the first time, the remotely light triggered nanoparticulate drug delivery system shows preclinical benefits that enables repetitive dosing from a single administration with improved delivery efficacy throughout tumors

Pronunciation Modeling of Foreign Words for Mandarin ASR by Considering the Effect of Language Transfer

One of the challenges in automatic speech recognition is foreign words recognition. It is observed that a speaker's pronunciation of a foreign word is influenced by his native language knowledge, and such phenomenon is known as the effect of language transfer. This paper focuses on examining the phonetic effect of language transfer in automatic speech recognition. A set of lexical rules is proposed to convert an English word into Mandarin phonetic representation. In this way, a Mandarin lexicon can be augmented by including English words. Hence, the Mandarin ASR system becomes capable to recognize English words without retraining or re-estimation of the acoustic model parameters. Using the lexicon that derived from the proposed rules, the ASR performance of Mandarin English mixed speech is improved without harming the accuracy of Mandarin only speech. The proposed lexical rules are generalized and they can be directly applied to unseen English words.Comment: Published by INTERSPEECH 201