Sensitivity of Capital Stock and Multifactor Productivity Estimates to Depreciation Assumptions: A Canada-U.S. Comparison

This article provides consistent estimates for capital stock and multifactor productivity (MFP) for Canada and the United States across major industries for the 1987-2007 period. For this purpose, capital stock estimates are developed for Canadian and U.S. industries using the same asset depreciation rates (either from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis or from Statistics Canada) for the two countries. The results show that on an hours worked basis Canadian industries invest more in total capital than their U.S. counterparts. This situation reflects much greater investment in structures, with less in machinery and equipment (including information and communications technologies). The results imply that all of the Canada-U.S. labour productivity gap arises from the multifactor productivity gap.multifactor productivity, capital stock, depreciation rate, labour productivity

Productivity Growth in Service Industries: A Canadian Success Story

The Canadian service sector has performed well in recent years in terms of labour and multifactor productivity growth, both in absolute terms and relative to the United States, offsetting much of the poorer performance of the manufacturing sector. Service sector labour productivity growth has also shown a marked acceleration in both Canada and the United States in recent years relative to earlier periods. The objective of this paper is to identify the factors behind this relative Canadian success story. The sources of the acceleration in service sector labour productivity growth were different in the two countries. In Canada, increased multifactor productivity growth was responsible for 70 per cent of the labour productivity growth acceleration. In the United States, on the other hand, increased capital intensity and intermediate input intensity were the most important contributors to the service sector labour productivity growth acceleration. In Canada, the contribution of capital intensity growth to service sector labour productivity growth actually fell between 1981-1995 and 1995-2000. The factor driving Canada’s superior service sector labour productivity growth has been better multifactor productivity growth, suggesting a productivity convergence to the U.S. level. A faster pace of human capital accumulation relative to the United States, as measured by growth in the proportion of workers with a university degree, fostered the catch-up process of Canadian service industries.Service Sector, Service Industries, Services, Productivity, Productivity Growth, Labour Productivity, Multifactor Productivity, Total Factor Productivity, Growth, Acceleration, Canada, United States

Research on Product Conceptual Design Based on Integrated of TRIZ and HOQ

Abstract. The conceptual design determines the success of the final product quality and competition of market. The determination of design parameters and the effective method to resolve parameters contradiction are the key to success. In this paper, the concept of HOQ products designed to determine the parameters, then using the TRIZ contradiction matrix and inventive principles of design parameters to solve the problem of contradictions. Facts have proved that the effective method is to obtain the product concept design parameters and to resolve contradictions line parameters

Modeling redistribution of α-HCH in Chinese soil induced by environment factors

This study explores long-term environmental fate of alpha-HCH in China from 1952 to 2007 using ChnGPERM (Chinese Gridded Pesticide Emission and Residue Model). The model captures well the temporal and spatial variations of alpha-HCH concentration in Chinese soils by comparing with a number of measured data across China in different periods. The results demonstrate alpha-HCH grasshopping effect in Eastern China and reveal several important features of the chemical in Northeast and Southeast China. It is found that Northeast China is a prominent sink region of alpha-HCH emitted from Chinese sources and alpha-HCH contamination in Southwest China is largely attributed to foreign sources. Southeast China is shown to be a major source contributing to alpha-HCH contamination in Northeast China, incurred by several environmental factors including temperature, soil organic carbon content, wind field and precipitation. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This study explores long-term environmental fate of alpha-HCH in China from 1952 to 2007 using ChnGPERM (Chinese Gridded Pesticide Emission and Residue Model). The model captures well the temporal and spatial variations of alpha-HCH concentration in Chinese soils by comparing with a number of measured data across China in different periods. The results demonstrate alpha-HCH grasshopping effect in Eastern China and reveal several important features of the chemical in Northeast and Southeast China. It is found that Northeast China is a prominent sink region of alpha-HCH emitted from Chinese sources and alpha-HCH contamination in Southwest China is largely attributed to foreign sources. Southeast China is shown to be a major source contributing to alpha-HCH contamination in Northeast China, incurred by several environmental factors including temperature, soil organic carbon content, wind field and precipitation. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Joint Communication and Computation Design in Transmissive RMS Transceiver Enabled Multi-Tier Computing Networks

In this paper, a novel transmissive reconfigurable meta-surface (RMS) transceiver enabled multi-tier computing network architecture is proposed for improving computing capability, decreasing computing delay and reducing base station (BS) deployment cost, in which transmissive RMS equipped with a feed antenna can be regarded as a new type of multi-antenna system. We formulate a total energy consumption minimization problem by a joint optimization of subcarrier allocation, task input bits, time slot allocation, transmit power allocation and RMS transmissive coefficient while taking into account the constraints of communication resources and computing resources. This formulated problem is a non-convex optimization problem due to the high coupling of optimization variables, which is NP-hard to obtain its optimal solution. To address the above challenging problems, block coordinate descent (BCD) technique is employed to decouple the optimization variables to solve the problem. Specifically, the joint optimization problem of subcarrier allocation, task input bits, time slot allocation, transmit power allocation and RMS transmissive coefficient is divided into three subproblems to solve by applying BCD. Then, the decoupled three subproblems are optimized alternately by using successive convex approximation (SCA) and difference-convex (DC) programming until the convergence is achieved. Numerical results verify that our proposed algorithm is superior in reducing total energy consumption compared to other benchmarks

CEDNet: A Cascade Encoder-Decoder Network for Dense Prediction

Multi-scale features are essential for dense prediction tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. The prevailing methods usually utilize a classification backbone to extract multi-scale features and then fuse these features using a lightweight module (e.g., the fusion module in FPN and BiFPN, two typical object detection methods). However, as these methods allocate most computational resources to the classification backbone, the multi-scale feature fusion in these methods is delayed, which may lead to inadequate feature fusion. While some methods perform feature fusion from early stages, they either fail to fully leverage high-level features to guide low-level feature learning or have complex structures, resulting in sub-optimal performance. We propose a streamlined cascade encoder-decoder network, dubbed CEDNet, tailored for dense \mbox{prediction} tasks. All stages in CEDNet share the same encoder-decoder structure and perform multi-scale feature fusion within the decoder. A hallmark of CEDNet is its ability to incorporate high-level features from early stages to guide low-level feature learning in subsequent stages, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of multi-scale feature fusion. We explored three well-known encoder-decoder structures: Hourglass, UNet, and FPN. When integrated into CEDNet, they performed much better than traditional methods that use a pre-designed classification backbone combined with a lightweight fusion module. Extensive experiments on object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/zhanggang001/CEDNet.Comment: Technical report; Code: https://github.com/zhanggang001/CEDNe

Invasive Lobular Carcinomas Do Not Express Basal Cytokeratin Markers CK5/6, CK14 and CK17

The expression of basal cytokeratin markers CK5/6 in breast carcinomas has been associated with high histological grade and poor clinical outcome. A previous study has shown that CK5/6 can be detected in up to 17% of invasive lobular carcinomas (ILC). Here we study the expression of three basal cytokeratin markers (CK5/6, CK14, and CK17) in 53 ILC cases diagnosed by histology and lack of E-cadherin expression. Among them, 42 were classic lobular carcinomas, 6 were tubular-lobular carcinoma, and 5 were pleomorphic lobular carcinomas. There was no significant difference among these three groups in patients’ age, tumor size, uni- and multi-focality, expression of ER and PR, lymphovascular invasion, perineural invasion and lymph node metastasis. The only statistically different factor was HER2 over-expression, which was observed only in pleomorphic ILC (P = 0.0073). None of the 53 cases expressed CK5/6, CK14 or CK17; and 51/53 cases expressed luminal markers CK8 and CK18, and the two negative cases were both classic lobular carcinoma, with positivity for ER and PR. In conclusion, all 53 cases of ILC failed to show expression by any of the three basal CK markers, suggesting that very few ILC will demonstrate a basal phenotype when assessed by immunohistochemistry (IHC). More studies are needed to investigate molecular classification in lobular carcinoma of the breast

Regulatory T Cell in Stroke: A New Paradigm for Immune Regulation

Stroke is a common, debilitating trauma that has an incompletely elucidated pathophysiology and lacks an effective therapy. FoxP3+CD25+CD4+ regulatory T cells (Tregs) suppress a variety of normal physiological and pathological immune responses via several pathways, such as inhibitory cytokine secretion, direct cytolysis induction, and antigen-presenting cell functional modulation. FoxP3+CD25+CD4+ Tregs are involved in a variety of central nervous system diseases and injuries, including axonal injury, neurodegenerative diseases, and stroke. Specifically, FoxP3+CD25+CD4+ Tregs exert neuroprotective effects in acute experimental stroke models. These beneficial effects, however, are difficult to elucidate. In this review, we summarized evidence of FoxP3+CD25+CD4+ Tregs as potentially important immunomodulators in stroke pathogenesis and highlight further investigations for possible immunotherapeutic strategies by modulating the quantity and/or functional effects of FoxP3+CD25+CD4+ Tregs in stroke patients