Substitution Probabilities Research Articles

Robots, labor markets, and universal basic income

Automation is a big concern in modern societies in view of its widespread impact on many socioeconomic issues including income, jobs, and productivity. While previous studies have concentrated on determining the effects on jobs and salaries, our aim is to understand how automation affects productivity, and how some policies, such as taxes on robots or universal basic income, moderate or aggravate those effects. To this end, we have designed an experiment where workers make productive effort decisions, and managers can choose between workers and robots to do these tasks. In our baseline treatment, we measure the effort made by workers who may be replaced by robots, and also elicit firm replacement decisions. Subsequently, we carry out treatments in which workers have a universal basic income of about a fifth of the workers’ median wages, or where there is a tax levy on firms who replace workers by robots. We complete the picture of the impact of automation by looking into the coexistence of workers and robots with part-time jobs. We find that the threat of a robot substitution does not affect the amount of effort exerted by workers. Also, neither universal basic income nor a tax on robots decrease workers’ effort. We observe that the robot substitution tax reduces the probability of worker substitution. Finally, workers that benefit from managerial decisions to not substitute them by more productive robots do not increase their effort level. Our conclusions shed light on the interplay of policy and workers behavior under pervasive automation.

Dynamic Inventory Control with Stockout Substitution and Demand Learning

We consider an inventory control problem with multiple products and stockout substitution. The firm knows neither the primary demand distribution for each product nor the customers’ substitution probabilities between products a priori, and it needs to learn such information from sales data on the fly. One challenge in this problem is that the firm cannot distinguish between primary demand and substitution (overflow) demand from the sales data of any product, and lost sales are not observable. To circumvent these difficulties, we construct learning stages with each stage consisting of a cyclic exploration scheme and a benchmark exploration interval. The benchmark interval allows us to isolate the primary demand information from the sales data, and then this information is used against the sales data from the cyclic exploration intervals to estimate substitution probabilities. Because raising the inventory level helps obtain primary demand information but hinders substitution demand information, inventory decisions have to be carefully balanced to learn them together. We show that our learning algorithm admits a worst-case regret rate that (almost) matches the theoretical lower bound, and numerical experiments demonstrate that the algorithm performs very well. This paper was accepted by J. George Shanthikumar, big data analytics.

Enrichment in conservative amino acid changes among fixed and standing missense variations in slowly evolving proteins.

The process of molecular evolution has many elements that are not yet fully understood. Evolutionary rates are known to vary among protein coding and noncoding DNAs, and most of the observed changes in amino acid or nucleotide sequences are assumed to be non-adaptive by the neutral theory of molecular evolution. However, it remains unclear whether fixed and standing missense changes in slowly evolving proteins are more or less neutral compared to those in fast evolving genes. Here, based on the evolutionary rates as inferred from identity scores between orthologs in human and Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta), we found that the fraction of conservative substitutions between species was significantly higher in their slowly evolving proteins. Similar results were obtained by using four different methods of scoring conservative substitutions, including three that remove the impact of substitution probability, where conservative changes require fewer mutations. We also examined the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) by using the 1000 Genomes Project data and found that missense SNPs in slowly evolving proteins also had a higher fraction of conservative changes, especially for common SNPs, consistent with more non-conservative substitutions and hence stronger natural selection for SNPs, particularly rare ones, in fast evolving proteins. These results suggest that fixed and standing missense variants in slowly evolving proteins are more likely to be neutral.

Impacts of digitization on real estate sector jobs

PurposePrevious research on automation and job disruption is only marginally related to the real estate industry and its characteristics. This study investigates the effects of digitization on jobs in German real estate sector, in order to assess the proportion of jobs threatened to be replaced by automation. Since Germany is the largest EU economy insights for the German real estate market allow a first approximation for Europe.Design/methodology/approachAn extensive database of the German Federal Employment Agency containing job definitions and occupation titles is matched with real estate criteria to create a subset with the relevant real estate occupations. This data is combined with a database of the German Institute of Employment Research reflecting to what extent tasks within jobs can be automated by current technical capabilities.FindingsFor the 286 identified occupations within the real estate sector a weighted average of 47 percent substitution probability through current technological capabilities is derived for tasks within the examined occupations.Practical implicationsThis contribution indicates the extent of the structural change the real estate sector has to face due to digitization: One out of two real estate jobs will have to be re-created.Originality/valueThis research quantifies the magnitude of the job killer aspect of digitization in the real estate sector.

АМЕРИКАНОЦЕНТРИЗМ И МНОГОПОЛЯРНОСТЬ В ГЛОБАЛЬНОЙ ЭКОНОМИКЕ (ТОРГОВО-ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИЙ И ФИНАНСОВЫЙ АСПЕКТЫ)

More global multipolarity has not diminished up to now the US influence in the world economy. On the contrary American possibilities for maneuvering have increased. For example this can be observed in the case of the trade negotiations and exterritorial sanctions policy. Turbulences in international trade during last years are partially the result of objective factors such as increasing global competition, the appearance of new important actors at world markets, malfunctions of multilateral trade system. But the situation was seriously aggravated by the US disturbing unilateral actions in economic relations with main trade partners including Canada, Mexico, China and the European Union. The reasons for these actions were both economic and geopolitical. Especially it is seen in the case of US-China trade dispute in which the main goal for the US seems to be hampering China’s economic development. The US foreign economic policy may have long-term negative effects in particular increasing probability of substitution the WTO rules by bilateral and regional agreements. This would be equal to a sort of the global market fragmentation. Strengthening global multilateral trade system fully responds to the interests of Russia. As well as more commercial motivation of Russia’s economic relations with all countries including Eurasian Economic Union. There is no sense in confronting the US on economic issues at the expense of losses for Russian companies and for the economy on the whole. Even without our interference Americanocentrism in the global economy will inevitably be decreasing.

Computing the Pathogenicity of Wilson's Disease ATP7B Mutations: Implications for Disease Prevalence.

Genetic variations in the gene encoding the copper-transport protein ATP7B are the primary cause of Wilson's disease. Controversially, clinical prevalence seems much smaller than the prevalence estimated by genetic screening tools, causing fear that many people are undiagnosed, although early diagnosis and treatment is essential. To address this issue, we benchmarked 16 state-of-the-art computational disease-prediction methods against established data of missense ATP7B mutations. Our results show that the quality of the methods varies widely. We show the importance of optimizing the threshold of the methods used to distinguish pathogenic from nonpathogenic mutations against data of clinically confirmed pathogenic and nonpathogenic mutations. We find that most methods use thresholds that predict too many ATP7B mutations to be pathogenic. Thus, our findings explain the current controversy on Wilson's disease prevalence because meta-analysis and text search methods include many computational estimates that lead to higher disease prevalence than clinically observed. As proteins and diseases differ widely, a one-size-fits-all threshold cannot distinguish pathogenic and nonpathogenic mutations efficiently, as shown here. We also show that amino acid changes with small evolutionary substitution probability, mainly due to amino acid volume, are more associated with the disease, implying a pathological effect on the conformational state of the protein, which could affect copper transport or adenosine triphosphate recognition and hydrolysis. These findings may be a first step toward a more quantitative genotype-phenotype relationship of Wilson's disease.

The effect of artificial intelligence on China’s labor market

ABSTRACTAutomation and artificial intelligence technology have played a pivotal role in today’s economic and social development. They represent a labor-substituted technological progress, featuring more and more jobs to be replaced by AI. Based on the adoption rate calculated in our paper and theoretical substitution probability estimated by existing studies, our research estimates the actual substitution probability by AI for various occupations in China. By using this actual substitution probability on occupation level, we also explore the substitution effects on labor force with different characteristics and find that AI has larger substitution impacts on labors of female, old age, low education and low income. We also predict the number of employed people that would be replaced by AI in each industry, and the results show that China will have 278 million labors (201 ~ 333 million under different adoption rates) replaced by AI by 2049, representing 35.8% of the current employment in China.Abbreviation: Artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)

Flanking heterozygosity influences the relative probability of different base substitutions in humans.

Understanding when, where and which mutations are mostly likely to occur impacts many areas of evolutionary biology, from genetic diseases to phylogenetic reconstruction. Africans and non-African humans differ in the mutability of different triplet base combinations. Africans and non-Africans also differ in mutation rate, possibly because heterozygosity is mutagenic, such that diversity lost when humans expanded out of Africa also lowered the mutation rate. I show that these phenomena are linked: as flanking heterozygosity increases, some triplets become progressively more mutable while others become less so. Africans and non-African show near-identical patterns of dependence on heterozygosity. Thus, the striking differences in triplet mutation frequency between Africans and non-Africans, at least in part, seem to be an emergent property, driven by the way changes in heterozygosity ‘out of Africa’ have differentially impacted the mutability of different triplets. As heterozygosity decreased, the mutation spectrum outside Africa became enriched for triplet mutations that are favoured by low heterozygosity while those favoured by high heterozygosity became relatively rarer.

An Authentication Code over Galois Rings with Optimal Impersonation and Substitution Probabilities

Two new systematic authentication codes based on the Gray map over a Galois ring are introduced. The first introduced code attains optimal impersonation and substitution probabilities. The second code improves space sizes, but it does not attain optimal probabilities. Additionally, it is conditioned to the existence of a special class of bent maps on Galois rings.

Assortment Optimization with Product Level Demand and Substitution Information

This article presents a mathematical model for jointly optimizing base stock levels for the multiple items subject to service level goals. The proposed model uses the expected demand and substitution probabilities between products as inputs and has been used to analyze the effects of demand variability on profitability under service level constraint. The results of the analysis demonstrate that neglecting customer-driven substitution or excluding the impacts of variability and correlations in demand leads to significantly inefficient assortments.

Cooperative nest‐defence behaviour and territory quality in a resident and socially monogamous passerine

AbstractNest defence is a fundamental aspect of parental care in secondary cavity‐nesting birds, and predation or competition for nesting sites can involve different defensive behaviours. Because habitat quality determines breeding success, we were interested in whether breeding pairs of the Eurasian nuthatch, Sitta europaea, established in more favourable environment also manifest higher probability of cooperative behaviour during their nest‐site defence. To explore this relationship, we quantified behavioural displays of both parents and analysed activity budget ethogram data from simulated territorial intrusions performed in the chick‐feeding phase with one conspecific and two different heterospecific stimuli (dummies of nuthatch, starling and woodpecker). We found that paired individuals shared their roles during nest‐site defence to a considerable extent. Males had a significantly higher number of attacks on intruders than females, and females performed more threat displays and controls of the brood than males. Multinomial analysis of the cooperative behaviour suggested that pairs in a high‐quality territory had higher probability of reciprocal substitution of different roles towards a balance between attacks, threat displays and nest controls. Contrary to this, pairs in a low‐quality territory had less likely pairwise combinations of simultaneous behavioural states that are associated with effective nest‐site defence. The difference in response probability according to territory quality was, however, highly variable in view of the stimulus that was used in simulated territorial intrusion. Because individual roles and the complex behavioural repertoire of pairs altered in response to territory quality and potential nest‐site competitor or brood predator, our results suggest that the cooperative nest‐defence behaviour could be linked to the breeding success of this year‐round territorial species living in a heterogeneous forest habitat.

NPBSS: a new PacBio sequencing simulator for generating the continuous long reads with an empirical model

BackgroundPacBio sequencing platform offers longer read lengths than the second-generation sequencing technologies. It has revolutionized de novo genome assembly and enabled the automated reconstruction of reference-quality genomes. Due to its extremely wide range of application areas, fast sequencing simulation systems with high fidelity are in great demand to facilitate the development and comparison of subsequent analysis tools. Although there are several available simulators (e.g., PBSIM, SimLoRD and FASTQSim) that target the specific generation of PacBio libraries, the error rate of simulated sequences is not well matched to the quality value of raw PacBio datasets, especially for PacBio’s continuous long reads (CLR).ResultsBy analyzing the characteristic features of CLR data from PacBio SMRT (single molecule real time) sequencing, we developed a new PacBio sequencing simulator (called NPBSS) for producing CLR reads. NPBSS simulator firstly samples the read sequences according to the read length logarithmic normal distribution, and choses different base quality values with different proportions. Then, NPBSS computes the overall error probability of each base in the read sequence with an empirical model, and calculates the deletion, substitution and insertion probabilities with the overall error probability to generate the PacBio CLR reads. Alignment results demonstrate that NPBSS fits the error rate of the PacBio CLR reads better than PBSIM and FASTQSim. In addition, the assembly results also show that simulated sequences of NPBSS are more like real PacBio CLR data.ConclusionNPBSS simulator is convenient to use with efficient computation and flexible parameters setting. Its generating PacBio CLR reads are more like real PacBio datasets.

A Reference Point Logit Model for Estimating Substitution Probabilities Using Point of Sale Data

This article presents a practical approach to estimate the substitution probabilities between products at a retail store by using the store's point of sale data and prospect theory based structural restrictions on the consumer choice behavior. The prospect theory-based reference dependent preference structure imposed on the consumer choice behavior (a) accounts for how consumers make their original choice as well as how they substitute, (b) eliminates the IIA and IPS assumptions that the standard utility theory based models impose on consumer choice, and (c) alleviates the need for inventory information for estimating the substitution probabilities. Simulations and empirical studies have been used to show that the estimates of the substitution probabilities are efficient and are robust to stock-out rates.

Embeddability of Kimura 3ST Markov matrices

In this note, we characterize the embeddability of generic Kimura 3ST Markov matrices in terms of their eigenvalues. As a consequence, we are able to compute the volume of such matrices relative to the volume of all Markov matrices within the model. We also provide examples showing that, in general, mutation rates are not identifiable from substitution probabilities. These examples also illustrate that symmetries between mutation probabilities do not necessarily arise from symmetries between the corresponding mutation rates.

Chemical-looping combustion of plastic wastes for in situ inhibition of dioxins

Polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and dibenzofurans (PCDFs) as toxic by-products are inevitably emitted during conventional air incineration processes of chlorine containing wastes (typically, plastic wastes). The presence of O2 in the conventional waste incineration not only participates in carbon gasification and rearrangement as an oxygen source during the de novo synthesis process of PCDD/Fs, but also promotes chlorination through generating more active Cl2 via Deacon reaction. Chemical looping combustion (CLC), which creates an O2-free atmosphere in the fuel reactor, was proposed to dispose plastic wastes. Comparative experiments [conventional PW incineration vs. in situ gasification-chemical looping combustion (iG-CLC) using CaO-decorated Fe2O3/Al2O3 as oxygen carrier] were conducted to measure the distribution properties of 17 toxic PCDD/Fs congeners. The total amount and toxic equivalency quantity of PCDD/Fs have been reduced by 94 % and 89 %, respectively, in iG-CLC. The absence of O2 in fuel reactor and lower Cl2 yield (due to the restriction of Deacon reaction and effective dechlorination by CaO) lead to the significant inhibition of the PCDD/Fs formation. Chlorine substitution modelling also demonstrated that the chlorine substitution probabilities for the formation of 7 toxic congeners of PCDDs and 10 toxic congeners of PCDFs are significantly reduced in iG-CLC.

Dynamic Inventory Control with Stockout Substitution and Demand Learning

We consider an inventory control problem with multiple products and stockout substitution. The firm knows neither the primary demand distribution for each product nor the customers' substitution probabilities between products a priori, and needs to learn such information from sales data on the fly. A main challenge in this problem is that the firm cannot distinguish between primary demand and substitution (overflow) demand from the sales data of any product, and due to data censoring, lost customers from either demand sources cannot be observed. To circumvent these difficulties, we construct learning stages with each stage including a cyclic testing scheme and a benchmark exploration interval. The benchmark interval allows us to isolate the primary demand information from the sales data, that is used against the sales data from a cyclic exploration interval to estimate substitution probabilities. Since raising inventory level helps obtain primary demand information but hinders substitution demand information, inventory decisions have to be carefully balanced to learn both of them. We design learning algorithms for both stationary and dynamically changing environments, and show that their regret rates (almost) match the theoretical lower bounds. Numerical experiments reveal that the proposed algorithms perform very well.

On the δ-service level for demand substitution in inventory control

In retail, it is usual to measure the performance of inventory control by a so-called service level which measures the number of days (probability) that demand is fulfilled for a certain product, i.e. the product is not out of stock. Part of the customers that do not encounter the product in stock will look for a substitute. To measure the performance, we introduce a so-called δ-service level which measures the availability of the substitute. We investigate the effect of safety levels and substitution probability on the δ-service level and illustrate them based on the case of poisson demand.

A new parameter-rich structure-aware mechanistic model for amino acid substitution during evolution.

Improvements in the description of amino acid substitution are required to develop better pseudo-energy-based protein structure-aware models for use in phylogenetic studies. These models are used to characterize the probabilities of amino acid substitution and enable better simulation of protein sequences over a phylogeny. A better characterization of amino acid substitution probabilities in turn enables numerous downstream applications, like detecting positive selection, ancestral sequence reconstruction, and evolutionarily-motivated protein engineering. Many existing Markov models for amino acid substitution in molecular evolution disregard molecular structure and describe the amino acid substitution process over longer evolutionary periods poorly. Here, we present a new model upgraded with a site-specific parameterization of pseudo-energy terms in a coarse-grained force field, which describes local heterogeneity in physical constraints on amino acid substitution better than a previous pseudo-energy-based model with minimum cost in runtime. The importance of each weight term parameterization in characterizing underlying features of the site, including contact number, solvent accessibility, and secondary structural elements was evaluated, returning both expected and biologically reasonable relationships between model parameters. This results in the acceptance of proposed amino acid substitutions that more closely resemble those observed site-specific frequencies in gene family alignments. The modular site-specific pseudo-energy function is made available for download through the following website: https://liberles.cst.temple.edu/Software/CASS/index.html.

Does the Cl + CH4 → H + CH3Cl Reaction Proceed via Walden Inversion?

We report a chemically accurate global ab initio full-dimensional potential energy surface (PES) for the Cl(2P3/2) + CH4 reaction improving the high-energy region of our previous PES [Czakó, G.; Bowman, J. M. Science 2011, 334, 343-346]. Besides the abstraction (HCl + CH3) and the Walden-inversion substitution (H + CH3Cl) channels, the new PES accurately describes novel substitution pathways via retention of configuration. Quasiclassical trajectory simulation on this PES reveals that the substitution channel opens around 40 kcal/mol collision energy via Walden inversion and the retention cross sections raise from ∼50 kcal/mol. At collision energy of 80 kcal/mol, the retention pathways provide nearly 40% of the substitution cross section, and retention substitution may become the dominant mechanism of the Cl + CH4 reaction at superhigh collision energies. The substitution probability can be as high as ∼70% at zero impact parameter (b) and decreases rapidly with increasing b, whereas the abstraction opacity function is broad having 5-10% probability over a larger b-range. The high-energy angular distributions show scattering into forward and backward directions for the abstraction (direct stripping) and face-attack Walden-inversion substitution (direct rebound) channels, respectively. Retention can proceed via edge- and vertex-attack pathways producing dominant sideways scattering because the breaking C-H or Cl-H bond is usually at a side position of the forming Cl-C bond.

Substitution priority of Eu2+ in multi-cation compound Sr0.8Ca0.2Al2Si2O8 and energy transfer**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51672066 and 50902042), Funds for Distinguished Young Scientists of Hebei Province, China (Grant No. A2015201129), and Personnel Training Project of Hebei Province, China (Grant No. A2016002013).

A blue phosphor was obtained by doping Eu2+ into a multi-cation host Sr0.8Ca0.2Al2Si2O8 through high temperature solid state reaction. The emission spectra show a continuous red-shift behavior from 413 nm to 435 nm with Eu2+ concentration increasing. The substitution priority of Eu2+ in Sr0.8Ca0.2Al2Si2O8 was investigated via x-ray diffraction (XRD) and temperature properties in detail: the Ca2+ ions are preferentially substituted by Eu2+at lower doping, and with the Eu2+ concentration increasing, the probability of substitution for Sr2+ is greater than that of replacing Ca2+. Accordingly, we propose the underlying method of thermal property to determine the substitution of Eu2+ in the multi-cation hosts. Moreover, the abnormal increase of emission intensity with increasing temperature was studied by the thermoluminescence spectra. The energy transfer mechanism between the Eu2+ ions occupying different cation sites was studied by the lifetime decay curves. A series of warm white light emitting diodes were successfully fabricated using the blue phosphors Sr0.8Ca0.2Al2Si2O8: Eu2+ with commercial red phosphor (Ca Sr)SiAlN3: Eu2+ and green phosphor (Y Lu)3Al5O12: Ce3+, and the luminescent efficiency can reach 45 lm/W.