Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Value of Life and the Rise in Health Spending

Health care extends life. Over the past half century, Americans spent a rising share of total economic resources on health and enjoyed substantially longer lives as a result. Debate on health policy often focuses on limiting the growth of health spending. We investigate an issue central to this debate: Is the growth of health spending the rational response to changing economic conditions - notably the growth of income per person? We develop a model based on standard economic assumptions and argue that this is indeed the case. Standard preferences - of the kind used widely in economics to study consumption, asset pricing, and labor supply - imply that health spending is a superior good with an income elasticity well above one. As people get richer and consumption rises, the marginal utility of consumption falls rapidly. Spending on health to extend life allows individuals to purchase additional periods of utility. The marginal utility of life extension does not decline. As a result, the optimal composition of total spending shifts toward health, and the health share grows along with income. This effect exists despite sharp diminishing returns in the technology of life extension. In projections based on the quantitative analysis of our model, the optimal health share of spending seems likely to exceed 30 percent by the middle of the century.
The optical properties and longwave radiative forcing in the lateral boundary of cirrus cloud

Through observations from the Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization onboard the Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation, we detected a common feature of narrow and subvisible lateral boundary layer in cirrus cloud. In this layer the lidar backscatter, the depolarization ratio, the ice water content, the effective radius of ice particles, and the cloud optical depth all decrease sharply toward the cloud edge. In general, the width of this layer (6.4 ± 3.1 km over land) decreases with increasing ambient temperature. The estimated longwave radiative forcing associated with the layer is about 10 W/m2. Due to its extremely small optical depth (less than 0.3), such lateral boundary layer may be missed by conventional satellite passive optical sensors. As a consequence, the mentioned radiative forcing has not been credited with its deserved share in the Earth's radiative energy budget.
Seismic imaging of a possible paleoarc in the Izu‐Bonin intraoceanic arc and its implications for arc evolution processes

Crustal evolution processes in intraoceanic arcs, including crustal accretion and rifting, have been long discussed. To examine crustal evolution in the Izu‐Bonin intraoceanic island arc, we conducted an active‐source wide‐angle seismic study along a north‐south profile (500 km long) within a possible paleoarc in the rear arc (i.e., the Nishi‐shichito ridge) about 150 km west of the present‐day volcanic front. In this study, the seismic velocity and reflectivity images are obtained using the wide‐angle seismic data. For the seismic velocity imaging, we applied refraction tomography in which 93,535 picks were used. The overall root‐mean‐square (rms) misfit calculated from the initial model of the refraction tomography was 483.1 ms, and those calculated from the final model were reduced to 66.7 ms. The resultant seismic image shows marked variations of crustal thickness along the seismic profile: thin crust (10–15 km thick) in the northern part, three discrete thick crustal segments (20–25 km thick) in the central part, and a moderately thick crust (∼15 km thick) in the southern part. These variations are mainly attributed to thickness variations of the middle crust having seismic velocity of 6.0–6.8 km/s. This variation of crustal thickness does not correlate with seafloor topography, which is characterized by post‐Miocene across‐arc seamount chains. It does correlate well with crustal variations observed along the present‐day volcanic front of the Izu‐Bonin arc. These findings suggest that the magmatic activity that created the across‐arc seamount chains had little effect on the rear‐arc crust and that the main part of the rear‐arc crust was created before the rear arc separated from the volcanic front. By correlating the structural variations along the rear arc (i.e., the variation of the average seismic velocity as well as the thickness of the middle crust) and those along the present‐day volcanic front, we found that the direction of rifting to separate the rear arc (paleoarc) from the present‐day volcanic front was north‐northeast.
A workstation based image acquisition and processing instrument for spatial analysis of vegetation

Measured changes in vegetation indicate the dynamics of ecological processes and can identify the impacts from disturbance. Traditional methods of vegetation analysis tend to be slow because they are labor intensive; as a result, these methods are often confined to small local area measurements. Scientists need new algorithms and instruments that will allow them to efficiently study environmental dynamics across a range of different spatial scales. Presented is a new methodology that addresses this problem. This methodology includes the acquisition, processing and presentation of near ground level (NGL) image data and its corresponding spatial characteristics. The systematic approach taken encom- passes a feature extraction process, a supervised and unsupervised classification process, and a region labeling process yielding spatial information.
Care and Community in Modern Society: Passing on the Tradition of Service to Future Generations

Introduction: Gentle as Doves and Wise as Serpents: The Philosophy of Care and the Sociology of Transmission Part One: The Role of Family and Community in Transmitting the Tradition of Care 1. Key Factors Influencing Caring, Involvement, and Community(Virginia A. Hodgkinson) 2. How People Learn to Care(Ervin Staub) 3. Children of the Left: Sharing Values Across Generations(Martin Halpern) 4. Passing It On: The Transmission of Wealth and Financial Care(Paul G. Schervish) Part Two: Children as Givers and Receivers of Care 5. Children as Philantrhopists: The Younger, the Better(Sylvia Blitzer Golombek) 6. Children as Volunteers: Learning by Doing(Virginia A. Walter) 7. The Effect of Boys and Girls Clubs on Promoting Caring in Public Housing(Steven Schinke, Roxanne Spillett) Part Three: Civic and Religious Traditions of Care 8. A History of Leadership Education in the United States(Peter Dobkin Hall) 9. The Role of Free Loan Association in Jewish Communities(Eliezer David Jaffe) 10. Islamic Nonprofit Organizations: In the Process of Promoting a Caring Society(Amani Kandil) 11. The Catholic Ethic and the Protestant Ethic(John E. Tropman) Part Four: Social and Political Environments of Care 12. How Institutions Shape a Caring Society(Emmet D. Carson) 13. Strengthening the Democratic Process(Michael K. Briand, Jennifer Alstad) 14. Corporate Concern for Racial and Ethnic Populations(Steven L. Paprocki, Robert O. Bothwell) 15. Improving Welfare: The Public Role in Caring for Poor Families with Children(Heidi Hartmann, Roberta Splater-Roth) 16. Caring Sector or Caring Society: Discovering the Nonprofit Sector Cross-Nationally(Lester M. Salamon, Helmut K. Anheier) Part Five: Mobilizing Care Through Mutual Self-Interest 17. The Role of Self-Help Groups in Fostering a Caring Society(Thomasina Borkman, Maria Parisi) 18. How Volunteers Help Bosnian Refugees in Slovenia(Anica Mikus Kos) 19. The Activist and the Alienated: Participation TrAnds in Community Service(John Bell) 20. Fragmentation in America's Nonprofit Sector(Julian Wolpert) Conclusion: Reflections on Caring and Community.
The Permanent Effects of Transportation Revolutions in Poor Countries: Evidence from Africa

Abstract We exploit the construction and eventual demise of the colonial railroads in Ghana, and most of the rest of Africa, to study the impact of transportation investments in poor countries. Using new data on railroads and cities spanning over one century, we find that railroads had large effects on the distribution of economic activity during the colonial period and these effects have persisted to date, although railroads collapsed and road networks expanded considerably after independence. Initial transportation investments may thus have large effects in poor countries. As countries develop, increasing returns solidify their spatial distribution, and subsequent investments may have smaller effects.
Interannual variability of the carbon dioxide system in the southern Indian Ocean (20°S–60°S): The impact of a warm anomaly in austral summer 1998

The interannual variations of the carbon dioxide system and air‐sea CO2 fluxes are analyzed in the southwestern Indian Ocean from both in situ (Océan Indien Service d'Observations cruises in 1998 and 2000) and simulated oceanic CO2 fugacity dissolved inorganic carbon, total alkalinity, and nutrients. During austral summer of 1998, the ocean was warmer from 20°S to 60°S. In the Subtropical Zone (20°S–37°S), the warming, associated with the subtropical dipole pattern, creates an oceanic CO2 source around 2 mmol m−2 d−1 in January 1998 where all previous observations, included in 2000, indicated that this region was a small sink in summer. In the Sub‐Antarctic and Polar Front Zones (37°S–50°S), the interannual signal is not clearly detected because of the complex coupling between the horizontal and vertical dynamics and the biological activity that creates very high mesoscale variability in each summer. For the austral region, south of the Polar Front, we observe large variability in the CO2 sources and sinks between summer 1998 and 2000. In the Seasonal Ice Zone (south of 58°S) the interannual variation of the CO2 flux was mainly controlled by a warmer ocean, from 1.1°C, in summer 1998 (CO2 source of 3.2 mmol m−2 d−1) and an enhanced primary production occurring during summer 2000 (CO2 sink of −3.8 mmol m−2 d−1). In the Permanent Open Ocean Zone (POOZ, latitude 50°S–57°S), despite the half‐degree warmer sea surface in 1998, we observe lower (−15 μatm (1 atm = 105 × 1.01325 N m−2) on average) during this period, and consequently, we estimate a double of the oceanic CO2 sink in this region in 1998 than 2000, from −3.2 mmol m−2 d−1 in 1998 to −1.3 mmol m−2 d−1 in 2000. The strong oceanic CO2 sink in 1998 is associated with a dramatic decrease of nutrients (silicates less than 2 μmol kg−1). The enhanced biological activity in summer 1998, probably diatoms bloom, is also apparent in Sea‐viewing Wide Field‐of‐view Sensor (SeaWiFS) chlorophyll a estimates. Using a one‐dimensional biogeochemical model applied in the POOZ and SeaWIFS time series, we predict a stronger oceanic sink during summer season than the winter, which is contrary to previous studies. The model suggests that biological activity controls most of the sink anomaly in summer 1998 (for about 70%) and dominates the warming effect.
ON THE GENERATION OF P AND S WAVE ENERGY IN CRYSTALLINE ROCKS

A seismic source consisting of a 700 kg weight that could be dropped vertically or projected down a ramp inclined at 45° to the vertical was tested as a source of P, SV and SH waves within a crystalline rock body at Chalk River, Ontario. The seismic energy was recorded by arrays of both horizontal and vertical-component geophones at distances between 30 and 600 m from the source, which was operated over glacial overburden varying in thickness from less than a meter to a few tens of meters. Seismic energy was more efficiently generated when the overburden thickness was at least several meters. The signals identified visually as S are generally true S, though some may be the converted wave PS. The SV amplitudes are generally larger than those of P, regardless of the type of shot, while the signal frequencies are roughly 60 Hz and 90 Hz, respectively. The horizontal-component seismograms for the inclined shots showed no evidence of SH polarization, and the SH amplitudes were only rarely enhanced relative to P and SV amplitudes on changing from vertical to inclined shots. These unexpected results are attributed to the combined effect of the high velocity and density contrasts and the irregularity of the boundary between the glacial overburden and the rock body.
Travel times of P and S from the global digital seismic networks: Implications for the relative variation of P and S velocity in the mantle

We present new data sets of P and S arrival times which have been handpicked from long-period vertical and transverse component recordings of the various global seismic networks. Using events which occurred from 1976 to 1994 results in ∼38,000 globally well-distributed measurements of teleseismic P and ∼41,000 measurements of S. These data are particularly useful for looking at the relative variation of S and P velocities in the lower mantle. We describe both the measurement techniques and the gross characteristics of the data sets. The size of our data sets allows us to exploit the internal consistency of the data to identify outliers using a summary ray analysis. Since the polarity of each arrival is also known, we can construct fault plane solutions and/or compare with polarities predicted by the Harvard centroid moment tensor solutions to further diagnose phase misidentification. This analysis results in ∼5% of the data being identified as outliers. An analysis of variance indicates that the S residual travel times are dominated by the effects of three-dimensional structure but the P data have comparable contributions from noise and source mislocation effects. The summary ray analysis reveals the basic character of lower mantle structure, and there are large-scale patterns in both the S and P data sets that correlate quite well with each other. This analysis suggests that on average, d In v S /d In v P is an increasing function of depth in the mantle going from a value of ∼1.7 at the top of the lower mantle to an apparent value of 4 near the base of the mantle. This latter extreme value of R seems to result mainly from data which sample one region in the lowermost mantle under the central Pacific, where large positive S residuals are associated with very small P residuals. Such an anomaly cannot be thermal in origin.
Evidence for the seasonal variation of photochemical activity of tropospheric ozone: Continuous observation of ozone and CO at Happo, Japan

Ground based measurements of ozone as well as carbon monoxide have been carried out at Happo station. Annual cycles of ozone and CO concentration were obtained. Monthly means of ozone show maximum of ca. 65 ppbv in April or May and minimum of ca. 45 ppbv in December or January. The annual behaviour of CO is somewhat similar to that of ozone showing maximum of 225 ppbv in April and minimum of 151 ppbv in December. A positive correlation was obtained between ozone and CO during spring and summer. This fact indicates that photochemical ozone production in the troposphere is active in spring and summer. It should be noted that the highest correlation was obtained in April and May which corresponds to the month giving the ozone maximum concentration. The comparison between ozone and humidity in late spring revealed that although many events showing dry air parcels reaching the site were observed, simultaneous increase of ozone was not observed at all. This fact clearly indicates that the sporadic high concentration of ozone in spring is caused by the photochemical ozone formation in the troposphere rather than the intrusion of stratospheric air.
Source location using time‐reverse imaging

We present the chain of time‐reverse modeling, image space wavefield decomposition and several imaging conditions as a migration‐like algorithm called time‐reverse imaging. The algorithm locates subsurface sources in passive seismic data and diffractors in active data. We use elastic propagators to capitalize on the full waveforms available in multicomponent data, although an acoustic example is presented as well. For the elastic case, we perform wavefield decomposition in the image domain with spatial derivatives to calculate P and S potentials. To locate sources, the time axis is collapsed by extracting the zero‐lag of auto and cross‐correlations to return images in physical space. The impulse response of the algorithm is very dependent on acquisition geometry and needs to be evaluated with point sources before processing field data. Band‐limited data processed with these techniques image the radiation pattern of the source rather than just the location. We present several imaging conditions but we imagine others could be designed to investigate specific hypotheses concerning the nature of the source mechanism. We illustrate the flexible technique with synthetic 2D passive data examples and surface acquisition geometry specifically designed to investigate tremor type signals that are not easily identified or interpreted in the time domain.
Update: Interim Guidelines for Health Care Providers Caring for Infants and Children with Possible Zika Virus Infection--United States, February 2016.

CDC has updated its interim guidelines for U.S. health care providers caring for infants born to mothers who traveled to or resided in areas with Zika virus transmission during pregnancy and expanded guidelines to include infants and children with possible acute Zika virus disease. This update contains a new recommendation for routine care for infants born to mothers who traveled to or resided in areas with Zika virus transmission during pregnancy but did not receive Zika virus testing, when the infant has a normal head circumference, normal prenatal and postnatal ultrasounds (if performed), and normal physical examination. Acute Zika virus disease should be suspected in an infant or child aged <18 years who 1) traveled to or resided in an affected area within the past 2 weeks and 2) has ≥2 of the following manifestations: fever, rash, conjunctivitis, or arthralgia. Because maternal-infant transmission of Zika virus during delivery is possible, acute Zika virus disease should also be suspected in an infant during the first 2 weeks of life 1) whose mother traveled to or resided in an affected area within 2 weeks of delivery and 2) who has ≥2 of the following manifestations: fever, rash, conjunctivitis, or arthralgia. Evidence suggests that Zika virus illness in children is usually mild. As an arboviral disease, Zika virus disease is nationally notifiable. Health care providers should report suspected cases of Zika virus disease to their local, state, or territorial health departments to arrange testing and so that action can be taken to reduce the risk for local Zika virus transmission. As new information becomes available, these guidelines will be updated: http://www.cdc. gov/zika/.
Cultivation effects on soil carbon and nitrogen contents at depth in the Russian Chernozem.

Little is known about changes in soil organic C (SOC) and total N with depth and wilh land use. We conducted this study to determine the depth of changes in SOC and total N under different management regimes in the chernozem soil. Four sites were sampled: a native grassland field (not cultivated for at least 300 yr), an adjacent 50-yr continuous-fallow field, a yearly cut hay field in the V.V. Alekhin Central-Chernozem Biosphere State Reserve in the Kursk region of Russia, and a continuously cropped field in the Experimental Station of the Kursk Institute of Agronomy and Soil Erosion Control. All sampled soils were classified as fine-silty, mixed, frigid Pachic Hapludolls. Soil organic C, total N contents, and bulk densities with depth were compared. Significant reductions in SOC and total N concentrations were detected to a depth of 120 to 130 cm in the 50-yr continuous-fallow field and to a depth of 80 cm in the continuously cropped field. Highest reductions were observed in the top 10 cm of soil, where reduction in SOC ranged from 38 to 43% and reduction in total N ranged from 45 to 53%. Significant losses of SOC and total N per equivalent soil mass on an area basis were observed to a depth of 60 cm in the continuously cropped field and to a depth of 100 cm in the 50-yr continuous-fallow field.
Personal, societal, and ecological values of wilderness: Sixth World Wilderness Congress proceedings on research, management, and allocation, Volume II

The papers contained in Volume II of these Proceedings represent a combination of papers originally scheduled for the delayed 1997 meeting of the World Wilderness Congress and those submitted in response to a second call for papers when the Congress was rescheduled for October 24-29, 1998, in Bangalore, India. Just as in Volume I, the papers are divided into seven topic areas: protected area systems: challenges, solutions, and changes; understanding and protecting biodiversity; human values and meanings of wilderness; wilderness for personal growth; understanding threats and services related to wilderness resources; the future of wilderness: challenges of planning, management, training, and research; and international cooperation in wilderness protection.
Policy to promote bicycle use or bicycle to promote politicians? Bicycles in the imagery of urban mobility in Brazil

During the last 15 years an increasing number of presidents, prime ministers, governors and mayors in developed and developing countries have been riding bicycles to promote a more sustainable and friendly form of urban mobility. We believe that these images also reveal and influence the image of contemporary urban mobility – the way in which people see what urban mobility is and how it should be. In this paper we discuss how the image of the bicycle has changed in Brazil and how this may influence an increase in its actual 1% bicycle modal share in big cities. We conclude that the importance of the bicycle in the image of urban mobility has been changing cyclically, and what seems to be a positive trend today might end up as being just an ephemeral positive image, with the risk of having no further practical consequences.
Australia's Solomon Island Commitment: How Is It Progressing?

The Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) has been deployed for a period of over 28 months at the request of the Solomon Islands Government and with the support of the vast majority of Solomon Islanders. A brief overview of the progress of the mission, the challenges facing the mission, and the lessons learnt during the mission is presented.
Analysis of regional zoobenthos status in the Huai River Basin, China, using two new ecological niche clustering approaches

Two new ecological niche clustering approaches are presented in this paper: first, an importance/dominance evaluation model, based on both density and biomass, is devised to evaluate the importance (contribution) of a specific species in its community; second, an integrated index encoding approach is constructed to spatially cluster all dominant species at a sampling site. Two approaches are employed to study ecological niche clustering of the Huai River Basin zoobenthos in order to identify key regions for ecosystem restoration. Results show that habitat changes will significantly impact Corbicula fluminea (Müller), whereas influences on Corbicula nitens (Philippi) will be the least significant. Total phosphorus has the greatest impact on zoobenthos, and high‐concentrated ammonia nitrogen is also detrimental. Decreasing the discharge of both phosphorus and ammonia nitrogen in the Huai River Basin is therefore required to facilitate restoration. Changing habitat parameters has only a limited effect on alteration of zoobenthos structure. The application of these niche clustering approaches has identified priority locations for ecological restoration in the Huai River Basin. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.