A Flexible Functional Form Approach To Mortality Modeling: Do We Need Additional Cohort Dummies?

The increasing amount of attention paid to longevity risk and funding for old age has created the need for precise mortality models and accurate future mortality forecasts. Orthogonal polynomials have been widely used in technical fields and there have also been applications in mortality modeling. In this paper we adopt a flexible functional form approach using two‐dimensional Legendre orthogonal polynomials to fit and forecast mortality rates. Unlike some of the existing mortality models in the literature, the model we propose does not impose any restrictions on the age, time or cohort structure of the data and thus allows for different model designs for different countries' mortality experience. We conduct an empirical study using male mortality data from a range of developed countries and explore the possibility of using age–time effects to capture cohort effects in the underlying mortality data. It is found that, for some countries, cohort dummies still need to be incorporated into the model. Moreover, when comparing the proposed model with well‐known mortality models in the literature, we find that our model provides comparable fitting but with a much smaller number of parameters. Based on 5‐year‐ahead mortality forecasts, it can be concluded that the proposed model improves the overall accuracy of the future mortality projection. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A kinetic approach to evaluate salinity effects on carbon mineralization in a plant residue-amended soil

The interaction of salinity stress and plant residue quality on C mineralization kinetics in soil is not well understood. A laboratory experiment was conducted to study the effects of salinity stress on C mineralization kinetics in a soil amended with alfalfa, wheat and corn residues. A factorial combination of two salinity levels (0.97 and 18.2 dS/m) and four levels of plant residues (control, alfalfa, wheat and corn) with three replications was performed. A first order kinetic model was used to describe the C mineralization and to calculate the potentially mineralizable C. The CO₂-C evolved under non-saline condition, ranged from 814.6 to 4842.4 mg CO₂-C/kg in control and alfalfa residue-amended soils, respectively. Salinization reduced the rates of CO₂ evolution by 18.7%, 6.2% and 5.2% in alfalfa, wheat and corn residue-amended soils, respectively. Potentially mineralizable C (C ₀) was reduced significantly in salinized alfalfa residue-treated soils whereas, no significant difference was observed for control treatments as well as wheat and corn residue-treated soils. We concluded that the response pattern of C mineralization to salinity stress depended on the plant residue quality and duration of incubation.     

Two‐Dimensional Kernel Smoothing of Mortality Surface: An Evaluation of Cohort Strength

Accurate mortality forecasts are of primary interest to insurance companies, pension providers and government welfare systems owing to the rapid increase in life expectancy during the past few decades. Existing mortality models in the literature tend to project future mortality rates by extracting the observed patterns in the mortality surface. Patterns found in the cohort dimension have received a considerable amount of attention and are included in many models of mortality. However, to our knowledge very few studies have considered an evaluation and comparison of cohort patterns across different countries. Moreover, the answer to the question of how the incorporation of the cohort effect affects the forecasting performance of mortality models still remains unclear. In this paper we introduce a new way of incorporating the cohort effect at the beginning of the estimation stage via the implementation of kernel smoothing techniques. Bivariate standard normal kernel density is used and we capture the cohort effect by assigning greater weights along the diagonals of the mortality surface. Based on the results from our empirical study, we compare and discuss the differences in cohort strength across a range of developed countries. Further, the fitting and forecasting results demonstrate the superior performance of our model when compared to some well‐known mortality models in the literature under a majority of circumstances. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cortical representations of olfactory input by trans-synaptic tracing

In the mouse, each class of olfactory receptor neurons expressing a given odorant receptor has convergent axonal projections to two specific glomeruli in the olfactory bulb, thereby creating an odour map. However, it is unclear how this map is represented in the olfactory cortex. Here we combine rabies-virus-dependent retrograde mono-trans-synaptic labelling with genetics to control the location, number and type of 'starter' cortical neurons, from which we trace their presynaptic neurons. We find that individual cortical neurons receive input from multiple mitral cells representing broadly distributed glomeruli. Different cortical areas represent the olfactory bulb input differently. For example, the cortical amygdala preferentially receives dorsal olfactory bulb input, whereas the piriform cortex samples the whole olfactory bulb without obvious bias. These differences probably reflect different functions of these cortical areas in mediating innate odour preference or associative memory. The trans-synaptic labelling method described here should be widely applicable to mapping connections throughout the mouse nervous system.     

Sodium azide,an efficient inhibitor of protein diazotization

Résumé L'azide de sodium est un inhibiteur très efficace de la réaction de diazotation. Il réagit avec l'ion de diazonium à des molarités approximativement égales.