On the Consumption Insurance Effects of Long-term Care Insurance in Japan: Evidence from Micro-level Household Data

Using micro-level household data in the 2001 Comprehensive Survey of the Living Conditions of the People on Health and Welfare compiled by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, this paper examines how having a household member in need of long-term nursing care can result in welfare losses measured in terms of consumption. In so doing, this study evaluates the role of the public long-term care insurance scheme implemented in Japan in April 2000. The results indicate that when households include a disabled family member, household consumption net of long-term care costs do not decrease as much as before the introduction of long-term care insurance. Further, when compared with the surveys conducted in 1998, theadverse effects on consumption net of long-term care costs have become much weaker. These findings suggest that the introduction of social insurance in 2000 helped Japanese households to reduce the welfare losses associated with a disabled family member.social insurance, consumption insurance, long-term care insurance

"On the Consumption Insurance Effects of Long-term Care Insurance In Japan: Evidence from Micro Household Data"

Using micro-level household data in the 2001 Comprehensive Survey of the Living Conditions of the People on Health and Welfare as compiled by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, this paper examines how having a household member in need of long-term nursing care can result in welfare losses measured in terms of consumption. In doing so, the study evaluates the role of the public long-term care insurance scheme implemented in Japan in April 2000. The results indicate that when households included a disabled family member, household consumption net of long-term care costs did not decrease as much as before the introduction of long-term care insurance. When compared with the surveys conducted in 1995 and 1998, the adverse effects on consumption net of long-term care costs have became much weaker. These findings suggest that the introduction of social insurance in 2000 helped to reduce the welfare loss associated with having a disabled family member.

Optimistic replication

Data replication is a key technology in distributed data sharing systems, enabling higher availability and performance. This paper surveys optimistic replication algorithms that allow replica contents to diverge in the short term, in order to support concurrent work practices and to tolerate failures in low-quality communication links. The importance of such techniques is increasing as collaboration through wide-area and mobile networks becomes popular. Optimistic replication techniques are different from traditional “pessimistic ” ones. Instead of synchronous replica coordination, an optimistic algorithm propagates changes in the background, discovers conflicts after they happen and reaches agreement on the final contents incrementally. We explore the solution space for optimistic replication algorithms. This paper identifies key challenges facing optimistic replication systems — ordering operations, detecting and resolving conflicts, propagating changes efficiently, and bounding replica divergence — and provides a comprehensive survey of techniques developed for addressing these challenges

Study on Probiotic Lactic Acid Bacteria and Their Applications to New Functional Foods

In the present mini review, we describe 1) a new screening system for selecting probiotic strains from lactic acid bacteria (LAB), mainly Lactobacillus acidophilus group bacteria, with strong adhesion to the human intestinal tract, 2) characteristics of immunostimulative oligo DNA motifs in LAB (L. gasseri) strains and a new evaluation system with a transfectant expressing porcine Toll-1ike receptor 9 for selection of immunostimulative LABs, and 3) characteristics of antimicrobial peptides (bacteriocins), especially gasericin A from L. gasseri LA39. In the future, it is expected that superior functional foods containing more effective probiotic LAB will be developed by the use of our proposed mass screening system

Functional and histopathologic correlation in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy: An integrated evaluation by multivariate analysis

To correlate left ventricular function and histologic features in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy, precise indexes of hemodynamics and semiquantitative histologic data were combined for multivariate analysis. Right endomyocardial biopsy was performed at the time of cardiac catheterization. Five hemodynamic indexes were used for functional assessment: 1) ejection fraction, 2) ratio of end-systolic stress to volume index, 3) end-dia-stolic stress, 4) time constant (T) of left ventricular pressure fall, and 5) end-systolic stress. Six histologic findings (disarray of myofibers, hypertrophy of myofibers, scarcity of myofibrils, nuclear changes of myofibers, vacuolization of myofibers and proliferation of collagen fibers) were graded from (−) to (4 + ). Each finding was assigned to category ( − ) or ( + ) according to the absence or presence of significant abnormality.Ordinary statistical analysis revealed that, although ejection fraction was lower in category ( + ) for proliferation of collagen fibers, ratio of end-systolic to volume index was reduced for category ( + ) of hypertrophy of myofibers. A significant correlation was present between hypertrophy of myofibers and proliferation of collagen fibers by Spearman rank correlation. When principal component analysis was applied to the hemodynamic data, two principal components could be extracted. Fisher's discriminant analysis could clearly differentiate two categories ( − ) and ( + ) in the semiquantitative histologic finding of proliferation of collagen fibers. The analysis indicated that contractility was reduced with elevated afterload in that category ( + ). Thus, proliferation of collagen fibers may play a pivotal role in deteriorating contractility in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy

Image Enhancement for High frame-rate Neutron Radiography

Proceedings of the 10th World Conference on Neutron Radiography (WCNR-10) Grindelwald, Switzerland October 5–10, 2014High frame rate neutron radiography has been utilized to investigate two-phase flow in a metallic duct. However, images obtained by high frame-rate neutron radiography suffered from severe statistical noise due to its short exposure time. In this study, a spatio-temporal filter was applied to reduce the noise in the sequence images obtained by high frame-rate neutron radiography. Experiments were performed at the B4-port of the Research Reactor Institute, Kyoto University, which has a thermal neutron flux of 5.0×10[7] n/cm[2]s. Results were also compared with those obtained at the JRR-3, the Japan Atomic Energy Institute, with athermal neutron flux of 1.6×10[8]n/cm[2]s

Characteristic Scales of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Perturbation Theory: Non-linearity and Redshift-Space Distortion Effects

An acoustic oscillation of the primeval photon-baryon fluid around the decoupling time imprints a characteristic scale in the galaxy distribution today, known as the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale. Several on-going and/or future galaxy surveys aim at detecting and precisely determining the BAO scale so as to trace the expansion history of the universe. We consider nonlinear and redshift-space distortion effects on the shifts of the BAO scale in $k$-space using perturbation theory. The resulting shifts are indeed sensitive to different choices of the definition of the BAO scale, which needs to be kept in mind in the data analysis. We present a toy model to explain the physical behavior of the shifts. We find that the BAO scale defined as in Percival et al. (2007) indeed shows very small shifts ($\lesssim$ 1%) relative to the prediction in {\it linear theory} in real space. The shifts can be predicted accurately for scales where the perturbation theory is reliable.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, references and supplementary sections added, accepted for publication in PAS