Impacts of China’s One-child Policy on Public Health in China: An Overview

AbstractIn 2015, China lifted its one-child policy and replaced it with a universal two-child policy that became effective on January 1, 2016.  The one-child policy, introduced in 1979 to strictly reduce population growth in the country, had profound impacts not only on population growth control, but also on public health and many other aspects affecting population health. In this article, we review its positive impacts on public health in China, such as greatly improved health status in the country, most likely due to the combination of the one-child policy and the economic reform that started approximately the same time. We also discussed several undesirable outcomes, such as skewed sex ratio and aging population. Finally, we proposed potential strategies to compliment the newly implemented two-child policy. 摘要: 2015年底， 中国宣布取消独生子女政策，并于2016年一月一日开始实施二孩政策。自从1979，独生子女政策在过去30多年减缓了中国的人口增长， 同时也在公共卫生和人口健康有深远的影响。这篇概述回顾独生子女政策在公共卫生方面的积极影响，也讨论了一些政策的负面影响，比如偏倚的男女比例和加速老龄化。 最后，本篇概述提出一些让二孩政策更好实施的策略。 关键词：中国，独生子女政策，公共卫生，妇幼健康，性别比，老龄化社

Response of Vertical Velocities in Extratropical Precipitation Extremes to Climate Change

Precipitation extremes intensify in most regions in climate-model projections. Changes in vertical velocities contribute to the changes in intensity of precipitation extremes but remain poorly understood. Here, we find that mid-tropospheric vertical velocities in extratropical precipitation extremes strengthen overall in simulations of 21st-century climate change. For each extreme event, we solve the quasi-geostrophic omega equation to decompose this strengthening into different physical contributions. We first consider a dry decomposition in which latent heating is treated as an external forcing of upward motion. Much of the positive contribution to upward motion from increased latent heating is offset by negative contributions from increases in dry static stability and changes in the horizontal length scale of vertical velocities. However, taking changes in latent heating as given is a limitation when the aim is to understand changes in precipitation, since latent heating and precipitation are closely linked. Therefore, we also perform a moist decomposition of the changes in vertical velocities in which latent heating is represented through a moist static stability. In the moist decomposition, changes in moist static stability play a key role and contributions from other factors such as changes in the depth of the upward motion increase in importance. While both dry and moist decompositions are self-consistent, the moist dynamical perspective has greater potential to give insights into the causes of the dynamical contributions to changes in precipitation extremes in different regions

Semantic Image Segmentation via Deep Parsing Network

This paper addresses semantic image segmentation by incorporating rich information into Markov Random Field (MRF), including high-order relations and mixture of label contexts. Unlike previous works that optimized MRFs using iterative algorithm, we solve MRF by proposing a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), namely Deep Parsing Network (DPN), which enables deterministic end-to-end computation in a single forward pass. Specifically, DPN extends a contemporary CNN architecture to model unary terms and additional layers are carefully devised to approximate the mean field algorithm (MF) for pairwise terms. It has several appealing properties. First, different from the recent works that combined CNN and MRF, where many iterations of MF were required for each training image during back-propagation, DPN is able to achieve high performance by approximating one iteration of MF. Second, DPN represents various types of pairwise terms, making many existing works as its special cases. Third, DPN makes MF easier to be parallelized and speeded up in Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). DPN is thoroughly evaluated on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, where a single DPN model yields a new state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy.Comment: To appear in International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 201

A New Multiple Hypothesis Tracker Using Validation Gate with Motion Direction Constraint.

In multi-target tracking scenarios with dense and heterogeneous clutter, there is a substantial increase in the false measurements that originated from the clutter within the validation gate, and consequently, the number of measurement-to-track association hypothesis grows rapidly in traditional multiple hypothesis tracker (MHT), leading to a sharp decrease in data association accuracy and tracking performance. A new multiple hypothesis tracker using validation gate with motion direction constraint (MHT-MDC) is proposed to solve these problems. In the MHT-MDC, a motion direction constraint (MDC) gate is designed by considering the prior target maneuvering information, which effectively reduces the volume of validation gate and, thus, diminishes the number of false measurements in the gate when the innovation covariance is large. Subsequently, the clutter density in the MDC gate is adaptively estimated by the conditional mean estimator of clutter density (CMECD), based on which the score functions in the MDC gate can be calculated. The MHT-MDC is compared with the MHT algorithm in simulations, and the experimental results demonstrate its superior tracking performance for weakly maneuvering targets in high clutter density scenarios