China has reached the lewis turning point

In the past several years, labor shortages in China have become an issue. However, there is heated debate as to whether China has passed the Lewis turning point and moved from a period of unlimited supply to a new era of labor shortage. Most empirical studies on this topic focus on estimation of total labor supply and demand. Yet the poor quality of China’s labor statistics leaves the debate open. In this paper, China’s position along the Lewis continuum is examined though primary surveys of wage rates, which offer a more reliable statistic than employment data. Our results show a clear rising trend in real wage rates since 2003. The acceleration of real wages even in slack seasons indicates that the era of surplus labor is over. This finding has important policy implications for China’s future development.dual economy, employment data, Labor market, Lewis model, Supply and demand, surplus labor, wage rates,

Hydraulic Road Binder (HRB) and Its Use for Subgrade Stabilization in Ontario, Canada

The term “subgrade” refers to the in-situ material composed of natural soil located underneath the pavement structural layers. The quality of natural subgrade is highly influenced by soil type, moisture content, and organic content. Furthermore, the failure of subgrade soils may lead to severe pavement distresses including rutting, potholes, and cracking. In order to enhance the subgrade engineering properties, a variety of stabilization methods have been developed. One of the most popular and cost-effective methods is in-situ subgrade soil stabilization using hydraulic binders. In-field soil modification and stabilization frequently use Portland cement as the chemical additive. Such method significantly enhances the engineering characteristics of soils in terms of plasticity, strength, stiffness, and durability. Despite the advantages, the chemical mixing also brings some disadvantages including rapid setting, drying shrinkage cracking, and higher cost. Recently, Supplementary Cementitious Materials (SCMs) made of by-products and industrial secondary materials (e.g. granulated blast furnace slag, cement kiln dust and fly ash) have been studied extensively to reduce the use of cement. Hydraulic Road Binder (HRB) is a European specified material designed for treatment of road bases, subbases as well as earthworks. HRB contains both cement clinker and a substantial amount of SCMs. Therefore, the use of HRBs has the potential to be more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than Portland cement. However, the research and application of HRB is new in Canada. The study started with an investigation of cement and different formulated HRBs in the form of paste and mix (mortar). Then, selected HRBs were used to evaluate their impacts on the chemical and physical properties of three local subgrade soils. In addition, a field application of weak subgrade stabilization using cement was introduced. Lastly, a study aiming to predict the long-term pavement performance was conducted in order to simulate the impact of stabilized subgrade in pavement design. The research findings are summarized as follows: • HRBs were found to reduce the setting time, reduce the speed of hydration, and the hydration temperature compared to Portland cement. The hydration products in hydrated HRBs and Portland cements were generally the same, but their contents were different. In addition, a reduction of drying shrinkage was observed in HRB mortars especially in those containing substantial SCMs. Regarding the strength, several HRB mortars had equivalent strength as cement mortars after 28 days of curing. Furthermore, a linear correlation was found between the compressive strength and flexible strength. Statistical analysis further revealed that the strength of HRB mix highly correlated to the content of GU, GUL, and GGBFS. • All the three subgrade soils (named Dresden, Blenheim, and Niagara) were fine-grained soils with substantial silt- and clay- sized particles. Ignition test indicated that all the three soils include high content of organic matters. In particular, Niagara soil with high plasticity, high organic material content had lower strength and modulus compared to the other two soils. Using the stabilizers, the soil’s pH values increased to around 12 and above. In addition, significant improvement had been observed in stabilized soils in terms of strength, durability, and resilient modulus. Nevertheless, the clay particles and organic matters inhibited the treatment. Increase of stabilizer content further promoted improvement. In particular, HRB-4LS had the best stabilization effect followed by GU, HRB-4LF, and HRB-3S. On the other hand, HRB-2S and HRB-3C treated soils had lower strength and modulus values. Finally, statistical analysis indicated that soil’s UCS values correlated with binder strength, binder content, curing, and untreated soil’s strength. • Field testing indicated that the workability and conditions of subgrade were significantly improved by hydraulic binder. Moreover, the modulus of subgrade surface further increased with curing time. After one year of service, the conditions of roads were good in most test sections. Furthermore, long-term pavement performance prediction (LTPP) revealed the feasibility of using cement and HRB stabilized subgrade to reduce the thickness of subbase layer. In terms of international roughness index and subgrade deformation, pavements constructed with HRB stabilized subgrade materials had equivalent performance as cement treated one over their design life. To summarize, this study focused on evaluating the used of Hydraulic Road Binders formulated in Canada for pavement subgrade stabilization. The research showed that HRB mortars have similar or slightly better strength compared to Portland cement alone with sufficient curing time. Moreover, The HRB improved subgrade soils were shown to perform adequately using several HRB types. In addition, the use of HRB-stabilized subgrade in pavement structure would improve the LTPP of pavement. Therefore, the use of HRB in the subgrade stabilization could be a promising solution in pavement construction due to its equivalent performance and with the potential environmental and cost advantages

MiR 206 inhibits reorganization of the cytoskeleton in melanoma cells by targeting DDX5

Purpose: To investigate the role and mechanism of microRNA-206 (miR-206) in cytoskeleton reorganization in melanoma cells. Methods: MiR-206 and RNA helicase p68 (DDX5) expression levels were measured in A375, A875, and HEM-M cells by quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). A DDX5 overexpression cell line was constructed, and DDX5 overexpression, A375, and A875 cells were transfected with miR-206 mimic or DDX5 small interfering RNA (siRNA). Transwell assay was used to assess cell migration and invasion of A375 and A875 cells, while Luciferase reporter assay was used to determine the putative target of miR-206. DDX5, miR-206, vinculin, coronin3, and ezrin expression levels were evaluated by qRT-PCR. Protein expressions of DDX5, vinculin, coronin3, and ezrin were evaluated by western blot analysis. Results: DDX5 expression was higher and miR-206 expression lower in A375 and A875 cells when compared to HEM-M cells (p < 0.05). Knockdown of DDX5 and overexpression of miR-206 repressed invasion and migration, and inhibited expression of vinculin, coronin3, and ezrin in A375 and A875 cells (p < 0.05). However, overexpression of DDX5 reversed the effect of miR-206 on cytoskeletal protein expression. Luciferase reporter assay data confirmed that DDX5 is a direct target of miR-206 (p < 0.05). Conclusion: MiR-206 suppresses reorganization of the cytoskeleton in melanoma cells by targeting DDX5, and is thus, a promising target for the treatment of melanoma

Out-of-distribution Object Detection through Bayesian Uncertainty Estimation

The superior performance of object detectors is often established under the condition that the test samples are in the same distribution as the training data. However, in many practical applications, out-of-distribution (OOD) instances are inevitable and usually lead to uncertainty in the results. In this paper, we propose a novel, intuitive, and scalable probabilistic object detection method for OOD detection. Unlike other uncertainty-modeling methods that either require huge computational costs to infer the weight distributions or rely on model training through synthetic outlier data, our method is able to distinguish between in-distribution (ID) data and OOD data via weight parameter sampling from proposed Gaussian distributions based on pre-trained networks. We demonstrate that our Bayesian object detector can achieve satisfactory OOD identification performance by reducing the FPR95 score by up to 8.19% and increasing the AUROC score by up to 13.94% when trained on BDD100k and VOC datasets as the ID datasets and evaluated on COCO2017 dataset as the OOD dataset

Heterogeneous ice nucleation correlates with bulk-like interfacial water

Establishing a direct correlation between interfacial water and heterogeneous ice nucleation (HIN) is essential for understanding the mechanism of ice nucleation. Here, we study the HIN efficiency of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) surfaces with different densities of hydroxyl groups. We find that the HIN efficiency increases with the decrease of the hydroxyl group density. By explicitly considering that interfacial water molecules of PVA films consist of ‘tightly bound water’, ‘bound water’ and ‘bulk-like water’, we reveal that ‘bulk-like water’ can be correlated directly to the HIN efficiency of surfaces. As the density of hydroxyl groups decreases, ‘bulk-like water’ molecules can rearrange themselves with a reduced energy barrier into ice due to the diminishing constraint by the hydroxyl groups on the PVA surface. Our study not only provides a new strategy on experimentally controlling HIN efficiency but also gives another perspective in understanding the mechanism of ice nucleation, i.e., the phase change efficiency of ‘bulk-like’ interfacial water of a film is a predictor for the HIN efficiency of that film

Generative Modeling in Structural-Hankel Domain for Color Image Inpainting

In recent years, some researchers focused on using a single image to obtain a large number of samples through multi-scale features. This study intends to a brand-new idea that requires only ten or even fewer samples to construct the low-rank structural-Hankel matrices-assisted score-based generative model (SHGM) for color image inpainting task. During the prior learning process, a certain amount of internal-middle patches are firstly extracted from several images and then the structural-Hankel matrices are constructed from these patches. To better apply the score-based generative model to learn the internal statistical distribution within patches, the large-scale Hankel matrices are finally folded into the higher dimensional tensors for prior learning. During the iterative inpainting process, SHGM views the inpainting problem as a conditional generation procedure in low-rank environment. As a result, the intermediate restored image is acquired by alternatively performing the stochastic differential equation solver, alternating direction method of multipliers, and data consistency steps. Experimental results demonstrated the remarkable performance and diversity of SHGM.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

Astragaloside IV Ameliorates Airway Inflammation in an Established Murine Model of Asthma by Inhibiting the mTORC1 Signaling Pathway

Astragaloside IV (AS-IV), a main active constituent of Astragalus membranaceus, has been confirmed to have antiasthmatic effects. However, it remained unclear whether the beneficial effects of AS-IV on asthma were attributed to the mTOR inhibition; this issue was the focus of the present work. BALB/c mice were sensitized and challenged with ovalbumin followed with 3 weeks of rest/recovery and then reexposure to ovalbumin. AS-IV was administrated during the time of rest and reexposure. The characteristic features of allergic asthma, including airway hyperreactivity, histopathology, cytokines (IL-4, IL-5, IL-13, IL-17, and INF-γ), and CD4+CD25+Foxp3+Treg cells in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF), and downstream proteins of mTORC1/2 signaling were examined. AS-IV markedly suppressed airway hyperresponsiveness and reduced IL-4, IL-5, and IL-17 levels and increased INF-γ levels in the BALF. Histological studies showed that AS-IV markedly decreased inflammatory infiltration in the lung tissues. Notably, AS-IV inhibited mTORC1 activity, whereas it had limited effects on mTORC2, as assessed by phosphorylation of mTORC1 and mTORC2 substrates S6 ribosomal protein, p70 S6 Kinase, and Akt, respectively. CD4+CD25+Foxp3+Treg cells in BALF were not significantly changed by AS-IV. Together, these results suggest that the antiasthmatic effects of AS-IV were at least partially from inhibiting the mTORC1 signaling pathway

Concentration- and time-dependent response of human gingival fibroblasts to fibroblast growth factor 2 immobilized on titanium dental implants

Qianli Ma1*, Wei Wang1*, Paul K Chu2, Shenglin Mei1,2, Kun Ji3, Lei Jin4, Yumei Zhang11Department of Prosthetic Dentistry, School of Stomatology, Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an, People's Republic of China; 2Department of Physics and Materials Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China; 3Department of Pediatric Dentistry, School of Stomatology, Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an, People's Republic of China; 4Stomatology Department, Jinling Hospital, School of Medicine, Southern Medical University, Nanjing, People's Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workBackground: Titanium (Ti) implants are widely used clinically, but peri-implantitis remains one of the most common and serious complications. Healthy integration between gingival tissue and the implant surface is critical to long-term success in dental implant therapy. The objective of this study was to investigate how different concentrations of immobilized fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) on the titania nanotubular surface influence the response of human gingival fibroblasts (HGFs).Methods: Pure Ti metal was anodized at 20 V to form a vertically organized titanium dioxide nanotube array on which three concentrations of FGF2 (250 ng/mL, 500 ng/mL, or 1000 ng/mL) were immobilized by repeated lyophilization. Surface topography was observed and FGF2 elution was detected using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The bioactivity changes of dissolvable immobilized FGF2 were measured by methyl-thiazolyl-tetrazolium assay. Behavior of HGFs was evaluated using adhesion and methyl-thiazolyl-tetrazolium bromide assays.Results: The FGF2 remained for several days on the modified surface on which HGFs were cultured. Over 90% of the dissolvable immobilized FGF2 had been eluted by Day 9, whereas the FGF2 activity was found to diminish gradually from Day 1 to Day 9. The titania nanotubular surface with an optimal preparing concentration (500 ng/mL) of FGF2 immobilization exhibited improved HGF functions such as cellular attachment, proliferation, and extracellular matrix-related gene expression. Moreover, significant bidirectional as well as concentration- and time-dependent bioactivity was observed.Conclusion: Synergism of the FGF2-impregnated titanium dioxide nanotubular surface revealed good gingival-implant integration, indicating that these materials might have promising applications in dentistry and other biomedical devices.Keywords: dental implants, titanium dioxide nanotube, fibroblast growth factor 2, extracellular matrix, real-time polymerase chain reactio

Multiplexed Serum Biomarkers for the Detection of Lung Cancer

AbstractCurrently, there is no available biomarker for lung cancer diagnosis. Here we recruited 844 lung cancer patients and 620 healthy participants from six hospitals. A total of four serum proteins was identified and subsequently assessed in the training and validation cohorts. The concentrations of four serum proteins were found to be significantly higher in lung cancer patients compared with healthy participants. The area under the curve (AUC) for the 4-biomarker were 0.86 in the training cohort, and 0.87 in the validation cohort. The classification improved to a corrected AUC of 0.90 and 0.89 respectively following addition of sex, age and smoking status. Similar results were observed for early-stage lung cancer. Remarkably, in a blinded test with a suspicious pulmonary nodule, the adjusted prediction model correctly discriminated the patients with 86.96% sensitivity and 98.25% specificity. These results demonstrated the 4-biomarker panel improved lung cancer prediction beyond that of known risk factors. Moreover, the biomarkers were valuable in differentiating benign nodules which will remain indolent from those that are likely to progress and therefore might serve as an adjuvant diagnosis tool for LDCT scanning

CR Cistrome: a ChIP-Seq database for chromatin regulators and histone modification linkages in human and mouse

Diversified histone modifications (HMs) are essential epigenetic features. They play important roles in fundamental biological processes including transcription, DNA repair and DNA replication. Chromatin regulators (CRs), which are indispensable in epigenetics, can mediate HMs to adjust chromatin structures and functions. With the development of ChIP-Seq technology, there is an opportunity to study CR and HM profiles at the whole-genome scale. However, no specific resource for the integration of CR ChIP-Seq data or CR-HM ChIP-Seq linkage pairs is currently available. Therefore, we constructed the CR Cistrome database, available online at http://compbio.tongji.edu.cn/cr and http://cistrome.org/cr/, to further elucidate CR functions and CR-HM linkages. Within this database, we collected all publicly available ChIP-Seq data on CRs in human and mouse and categorized the data into four cohorts: the reader, writer, eraser and remodeler cohorts, together with curated introductions and ChIP-Seq data analysis results. For the HM readers, writers and erasers, we provided further ChIP-Seq analysis data for the targeted HMs and schematized the relationships between them. We believe CR Cistrome is a valuable resource for the epigenetics community