Two Essays in Labor Economics

The first essay studies the long term trend of internal migration in the United States. Over the last forty years, there has only been a modest change in the overall interstate migration rate in the United States. However, different demographic groups have seen very different patterns of changes. The migration rate for families with two college graduate spouses dropped from 5.66% in 1965-1970 to 2.82% in 2000-2005. As for the families with college-graduate husband, it dropped from 4.05% to 2.15% during the same time frame. Interstate migration rates for other types of families or singles have seen little change. This paper extends Mincer’s family migration model into a search framework and directly estimates the effects of female labor force participation, spousal earnings ratio, correlation of earnings from job offers, and home ownership on the migration propensity by using the Current Population Survey (CPS) data in the period of 1982-2005. Endogeniety issues of these variables are appropriately addressed. According to the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis, we find that the increasing female labor force participation rate and earnings ratio of wife to husband are the primary determinants for the decline in the interstate migration rate of families with two college-graduate spouses and families with a college-graduate husband in the 1980s-1990s. The rising home ownership accounts for a large portion of the decrease in the migration rate of highly educated families, in the 1990s-2000s. The second essay studies the impact of changing youth cohort size on the unemployment rate. Although an increase in youth cohort size is often found to exert an upward pressure on the aggregate unemployment rate, it has been provided some empirical evidences and a theoretical model to the contrary. We find that the estimated elasticity of unemployment rate is quite sensitive in a fixed effect model, with the inclusion of year dummies, when there is a strong temporal correlation between the youth cohort size and the unemployment rate. Both the sign and magnitude of the estimates vary significantly when using data from different time periods. We propose an alternative way to control for the fixed effects and obtain consistent estimates across the time periods in the United States. Our results support the conventional wisdom of positive correlation between youth cohort size and aggregate unemployment rate. This positive effect of the youth cohort size is strongest for the youngest workers and gradually diminishes for older workers, which implies that the young and the prime age workers are not perfect substitutes to the employers

UbiPhysio: Support Daily Functioning, Fitness, and Rehabilitation with Action Understanding and Feedback in Natural Language

We introduce UbiPhysio, a milestone framework that delivers fine-grained action description and feedback in natural language to support people's daily functioning, fitness, and rehabilitation activities. This expert-like capability assists users in properly executing actions and maintaining engagement in remote fitness and rehabilitation programs. Specifically, the proposed UbiPhysio framework comprises a fine-grained action descriptor and a knowledge retrieval-enhanced feedback module. The action descriptor translates action data, represented by a set of biomechanical movement features we designed based on clinical priors, into textual descriptions of action types and potential movement patterns. Building on physiotherapeutic domain knowledge, the feedback module provides clear and engaging expert feedback. We evaluated UbiPhysio's performance through extensive experiments with data from 104 diverse participants, collected in a home-like setting during 25 types of everyday activities and exercises. We assessed the quality of the language output under different tuning strategies using standard benchmarks. We conducted a user study to gather insights from clinical experts and potential users on our framework. Our initial tests show promise for deploying UbiPhysio in real-life settings without specialized devices.Comment: 27 pages, 14 figures, 5 table

Transcription factor ZBTB42 is a novel prognostic factor associated with immune cell infiltration in glioma

Background: ZBTB42 is a transcription factor that belongs to the ZBTB transcript factor family and plays an important role in skeletal muscle development. Dysregulation of ZBTB42 expression can lead to a variety of diseases. However, the function of ZBTB42 in glioma development has not been studied by now.Methods: We analyzed the expression of ZBTB42 in LGG and GBM via the The Cancer Genome Atlas CGA and Chinese Glioma Genome Atlas database. Gene Ontology, KEGG, and GSVA analyses were performed to illustrate ZBTB42-related pathways. ESTIMATE and CIBERSORT were applied to calculate the immune score and immune cell proportion in glioma. One-class logistic regression OCLR algorithm was used to study the stemness of glioma. Multivariate Cox analysis was employed to detect the prognostic value of five ZBTB42-related genes.Results: Our results show that ZBTB42 is highly expressed in glioma and may be a promising prognostic factor for Low Grade Glioma and GBM. In addition, ZBTB42 is related to immune cell infiltration and may play a role in the immune suppression microenvironment. What’s more, ZBTB42 is correlated with stem cell markers and positively associated with glioma stemness. Finally, a five genes nomogram based on ZBTB42 was constructed and has an effective prognosis prediction ability.Conclusion: We identify that ZBTB42 is a prognostic biomarker for Low Grade Glioma and GBM and its function is related to the suppressive tumor microenvironment and stemness of glioma

Two Strains of Lactobacilli Effectively Decrease the Colonization of VRE in a Mouse Model

Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) infection is a serious challenge for clinical management and there is no effective treatment at present. Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) and probiotic intervention have been shown to be promising approaches for reducing the colonization of certain pathogenic bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, however, no such studies have been done on VRE. In this study, we evaluated the effect of FMT and two Lactobacillus strains (Y74 and HT121) on the colonization of VRE in a VRE-infection mouse model. We found that both Lactobacilli strains reduced VRE colonization rapidly. Fecal microbiota and colon mRNA expression analyses further showed that mice in FMT and the two Lactobacilli treatment groups restored their intestinal microbiota diversity faster than those in the phosphate buffer saline (PBS) treated group. Administration of Lactobacilli restored Firmicutes more quickly to the normal level, compared to FMT or PBS treatment, but restored Bacteroides to their normal level less quickly than FMT did. Furthermore, these treatments also had an impact on the relative abundance of intestinal microbiota composition from phylum to species level. RNA-seq showed that FMT treatment induced the expression of more genes in the colon, compared to the Lactobacilli treatment. Defense-related genes such as defensin α, Apoa1, and RegIII were down-regulated in both FMT and the two Lactobacilli treatment groups. Taken together, our findings indicate that both FMT and Lactobacilli treatments were effective in decreasing the colonization of VRE in the gut

Role of inflammation and immunity in vascular calcification: a bibliometric and visual analysis, 2000–2022

BackgroundIn recent years, a great deal of research has been done on vascular calcification (VC), and inflammation and immunity have been displayed to play important roles in the mechanism of VC. However, to date, no comprehensive or systematic bibliometric analyses have been conducted on this topic.MethodsArticles and reviews on the roles of inflammation and immunity in VC were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection on August 5, 2022. Four scientometric software packages—HistCite, CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and R-bibliometrix—were used for the bibliometric and knowledge mapping analyses.ResultsThe obtained 1,868 papers were published in 627 academic journals by 9,595 authors of 2,217 institutions from 69 countries. The annual number of publications showed a clear growth trend. The USA and China were the most productive countries. Karolinska Institutet, Harvard University, and the University of Washington were the most active institutions. Stenvinkel P published the most articles, whereas Demer LL received the most citations. Atherosclerosis published the most papers, while Circulation was the most highly cited journal. The largest cluster among the 22 clusters, based on the analysis of co-citations, was osteo-/chondrogenic transdifferentiation. “Vascular calcification,” “inflammation,” “chronic kidney disease,” and “expression” were the main keywords in the field. The keyword “extracellular vesicle” attracted great attention in recent years with the strongest citation burst.ConclusionsOsteo-/chondrogenic transdifferentiation is the primary research topic in this field. Extracellular vesicles are expected to become a new research focus for exploring the inflammatory and immune mechanisms of VC

The TOP-SCOPE Survey of Planck Galactic Cold Clumps : Survey Overview and Results of an Exemplar Source, PGCC G26.53+0.17

The low dust temperatures (<14 K) of Planck Galactic cold clumps (PGCCs) make them ideal targets to probe the initial conditions and very early phase of star formation. "TOP-SCOPE" is a joint survey program targeting similar to 2000 PGCCs in J = 1-0 transitions of CO isotopologues and similar to 1000 PGCCs in 850 mu m continuum emission. The objective of the "TOP-SCOPE" survey and the joint surveys (SMT 10 m, KVN 21 m, and NRO 45 m) is to statistically study the initial conditions occurring during star formation and the evolution of molecular clouds, across a wide range of environments. The observations, data analysis, and example science cases for these surveys are introduced with an exemplar source, PGCC G26.53+0.17 (G26), which is a filamentary infrared dark cloud (IRDC). The total mass, length, and mean line mass (M/L) of the G26 filament are similar to 6200 M-circle dot, similar to 12 pc, and similar to 500 M-circle dot pc(-1), respectively. Ten massive clumps, including eight starless ones, are found along the filament. The most massive clump as a whole may still be in global collapse, while its denser part seems to be undergoing expansion owing to outflow feedback. The fragmentation in the G26 filament from cloud scale to clump scale is in agreement with gravitational fragmentation of an isothermal, nonmagnetized, and turbulent supported cylinder. A bimodal behavior in dust emissivity spectral index (beta) distribution is found in G26, suggesting grain growth along the filament. The G26 filament may be formed owing to large-scale compression flows evidenced by the temperature and velocity gradients across its natal cloud.Peer reviewe

Identity Formation of Chinese Canadian Women in Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe

Sky Lee is one of ethnic writers who dare to challenge the long-run silence of marginalized group, by the means of writing in English about historical experience of her community. Her book, Disappearing Moon Café which was published in Vancouver in 1990, immediately caught the public attention and won the City of Vancouver Book Award while being nominated the Governor General’s Literary Award. Lee, as a female writer, cares very much about females’ struggle for identity from one generation to the next. With the influence of postcolonialism and women’s movements, identity became more and more concerned by the minority groups. Postcolonialists hold that women from the Third World countries are under the dual oppressions. On the one hand, they are subjected to racial and cultural discrimination under Euro-American dominated society; on the other hand, they suffer from gender prejudice in both white hegemony and patriarchal doctrines. For more than one century of racial discrimination and segregation, Chinese Canadians have been on the brink of mainstream society. Whereas the females have a crueler condition as they are the victims of being marginalized from racism and gender prejudice simultaneously. In Disappearing Moon Cafe, all female characters have suffered self-loss to some extent. Therefore, how to construct its own identity becomes an urgent problem that needs to be solved. This thesis will introduce the living conditions of Chinese Canadian women and the identity crisis they encounter by the means of rereading the novel Disappearing Moon Cafe. Based on the theories of postcolonialism, feminism and other identity theories, this thesis will conduct a multi-dimensional study on the self-identification of Chinese Canadian women through the in-depth analysis and study of the novel Disappearing Moon Cafe. Mainly divided into two parts, it focuses on how Chinese Canadian women form their own identities in terms of cultural and gender perspectives. First of all, being aware of the conditions they are in, Chinese Canadians have to trace back to their origin and gain power from their own profound traditional culture while challenging and resisting the cultural hegemony in Canadian society. They should rediscover the silent history of its own ethnic culture and aware the great contribution the ancestors made to the development of Canada. Canadian born ethnic Chinese are easy to get confused for self-identity as they are not accepted by white race on account of physical appearance while being considered as not pure Chinese at the same time. Thus, they have to find a comfort in the marginalized state and establish the unique hybrid culture. Secondly, the prejudice toward females demands for a solution. This thesis summarizes three necessary approaches for the establishment of female identity by analyzing the image of women in Disappearing Moon Café: gaining for political, vocational and educative rights while awakening of female consciousness as well as breaking silence through female discourse. Nowadays, equality between races and sexuality is becoming increasingly important. While marginalized groups are receiving more attention in literature field, it is of great historical and practical significance to study the Chinese Canadian women’s experiences in the mainstream culture of Canada while to explore their identity formation in both cultural and sexual perspective

Characterization of phenolics and antioxidant abilities of red navel orange “Cara Cara” harvested from five regions of China

Red-flesh navel orange “Cara Cara” is attractive for customers with its bright red color and has been widely planted in China. In this study, phenolic compounds in “Cara Cara” harvested from five different regions were identified and quantified by ultra high performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) coupled with Quadrupole-Time of Flight -Electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (Q-TOF-ESI-MSn). Their antioxidant abilities were evaluated by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and oxygen radical absorption capacity (ORAC) assays. Twenty phenolics were detected in crude extraction, with hesperidin (29.36–44.06%) as the dominant component, followed by narirutin (13.44–17.03%) and apigenin-6,8-di-C-glucoside (8.28–12.38%). No free phenolic acid was found in crude extracts and three free phenolic acids (FPA) were determined through alkaline hydrolysis, wherein ferulic acid (86.22–90.49%) existed dominantly. Fujian “Cara Cara” showed the highest total phenolic index (TPI) and total flavonoid index (TFI) values, while the lowest TPI and TFI values were detect in Chongqing “Cara Cara”. DPPH value showed positive correlation with TPC value (r2 = 0.921), while no correlation was found between ORAC and phenolic contents