The Political Economy of Health Care Reforms

A leading group of health care economists propose solutions to problems related to Medicare, managed care, health insurance, coverage for the uninsured, and the role of tax policy in health care.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1184/thumbnail.jp

Dragon versus Eagle: The Chinese Economy and U.S.-China Relations

This book contains a group of papers that examine the complex and evolving economic relationship between China and the United States.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1237/thumbnail.jp

DeMoN: Depth and Motion Network for Learning Monocular Stereo

In this paper we formulate structure from motion as a learning problem. We train a convolutional network end-to-end to compute depth and camera motion from successive, unconstrained image pairs. The architecture is composed of multiple stacked encoder-decoder networks, the core part being an iterative network that is able to improve its own predictions. The network estimates not only depth and motion, but additionally surface normals, optical flow between the images and confidence of the matching. A crucial component of the approach is a training loss based on spatial relative differences. Compared to traditional two-frame structure from motion methods, results are more accurate and more robust. In contrast to the popular depth-from-single-image networks, DeMoN learns the concept of matching and, thus, better generalizes to structures not seen during training.Comment: Camera ready version for CVPR 2017. Supplementary material included. Project page: http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ummenhof/depthmotionnet

The Impacts of China\u27s Rise on the Pacific and the World

This book provides the perspectives of a group of noted China experts on how China’s economic expansion and internal reforms are impacting its neighbors in the Pacific region as well as the United States and the rest of the world.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1267/thumbnail.jp

Age-related response of forest floor biogenic volatile organic compound fluxes to boreal forest succession after wildfires

The amplification of global warming in the Northern regions results in a higher probability of wildfires in boreal forests. On the forest floor, wildfires have long-term effects on vegetation composition as well as soil and its microbial communities. A large variety of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) such as isoprene, monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes have been observed to be emitted from soil and understory vegetation of boreal forest floor. Ultimately, the fire-induced changes in the forest floor affect its BVOC fluxes, and the recovery of the forest floor determines the quantity and quality of BVOC fluxes. However, the effects of wildfires on forest floor BVOC fluxes are rarely studied. Here we conducted a study of the impacts of post-fire succession on forest floor BVOC fluxes along a 158-year fire chronosequence in boreal Scots pine stands near the northern timberline in north-eastern Finland throughout a growing season. We determined the forest floor BVOC fluxes and investigated how the environmental and ground vegetation characteristics, soil respiration rates, and soil microbial and fungal biomass are associated with the BVOC fluxes during the post-fire succession. The forest floor was a source of diverse BVOCs. Monoterpenes (MTs) were the largest group of emitted BVOCs. We observed forest age-related differences in the forest floor BVOC fluxes along the fire chronosequence. The forest floor BVOC fluxes decreased with the reduction in ground vegetation coverage resulted from wildfire, and the decreased fluxes were also connected to a decrease in microbial activity as a result of the loss of plant roots and soil organic matter. The increase in BVOC fluxes was associated with the recovery of aboveground plant coverage and soils. Our results suggested taking into consideration the implications of BVOC flux variations on the atmospheric chemistry and climate feedbacks.Peer reviewe

Virus-induced gene complementation reveals a transcription factor network in modulation of tomato fruit ripening

Plant virus technology, in particular virus-induced gene silencing, is a widely used reverse- and forward-genetics tool in plant functional genomics. However the potential of virus technology to express genes to induce phenotypes or to complement mutants in order to understand the function of plant genes is not well documented. Here we exploit Potato virus X as a tool for virus-induced gene complementation (VIGC). Using VIGC in tomato, we demonstrated that ectopic viral expression of LeMADS-RIN, which encodes a MADS-box transcription factor (TF), resulted in functional complementation of the non-ripening rin mutant phenotype and caused fruits to ripen. Comparative gene expression analysis indicated that LeMADS-RIN up-regulated expression of the SBP-box (SQUAMOSA promoter binding protein-like) gene LeSPL-CNR, but down-regulated the expression of LeHB-1, an HD-Zip homeobox TF gene. Our data support the hypothesis that a transcriptional network may exist among key TFs in the modulation of fruit ripening in tomato

Newborn Screening for Methylmalonic Acidemia in a Chinese Population: Molecular Genetic Confirmation and Genotype Phenotype Correlations

Background: Methylmalonic acidemia (MMA) incidence was evaluated based on newborn screening in Xuzhou from November 2015 to December 2017, and the clinical, biochemical and molecular characteristics of patients with MMA harboring MMACHC and MUT mutations were summarized.Methods: During the study, 236,368 newborns were screened for MMA by tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) in the Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital of Xuzhou. C3, C3/C2 and methionine, and tHcy if necessary, were measured during the first screening. Blood samples from the infants and/or their family members were used for DNA analysis. The entire coding regions of the MMACHC and MUT genes associated with MMA were sequenced by DNA MassARRAY and next-generation sequencing (NGS).Results: Eleven patients with MMACHC mutations and three with MUT mutations were identified among the 236,368 screened newborns; the estimated total incidence of MMA was 1:16,883. Among the MMA patients, two died of infection-triggered metabolic crisis approximately 3 months after birth. All the patients identified had two mutant alleles except for one individual with early-onset disease. The most common MMACHC mutation was c.609G > A. The laboratory levels of C3 and C3/C2 were elevated in MMA individuals compared to other infants. Importantly, we demonstrate that accelerated C2 degradation is related to air temperature and humidity.Conclusion: Our study reports the clinical characteristics of MMA and diagnosis through MS/MS and NGS. There was a higher incidence of MMA with homocysteinemia than of isolated MMA in Xuzhou. Insight from this study may help explain the high false-positive rate of MMA in summer

The Notion of Transparency Order, Revisited

We revisit the definition of Transparency Order (TO) and that of Modified Transparency Order (MTO) as well, which were proposed to measure the resistance of an S-box against Differential Power Analysis (DPA). We spot a definitional flaw in original TO, which is proved to have significantly affected the soundness of TO and hinder it to be a good quantitative security criterion. Regretfully, the flaw itself remains virtually undiscovered in MTO, either. Surprisingly, MTO overlooks this flaw and yet it happens to incur no bad effects on the correctness of its formulation, even though the start point of this formulation is highly questionable. It is also this neglect of the flaw that made MTO take a variant of multi-bit DPA attack into consideration, which was mistakenly thought to appropriately serve as an alternative powerful attack. Based on this observation, we also find that MTO introduces such an alternative adversary that it might overestimate the resistance of an S-box in some cases, as the variant of multi-bit DPA attack considered in MTO is not that powerful as one may think. This implies the soundness of MTO is also more or less arguable. Consequently, we fix this definitional flaw, and provide a revised definition in which a powerful adversary is also involved. For demonstrating validity and soundness of our revised TO (RTO), we adopt both optimal $4\times4$ S-boxes and $8\times8$ S-boxes as study cases, and present simulated and practical DPA attacks as well on implementations of those S-boxes. The results of our attacks verify our findings and analysis as well. Furthermore, as a concrete application of the revised TO, we also present the distribution of RTO values for sixteen optimal affine equivalence classes of $4\times4$ S-boxes. Finally, we give some recommended guidelines on how to select optimal $4\times4$ S-boxes in practical implementations