Panax ginseng C.A. MEYER is one of the most popular medicinal herbs in Asia and the chemical constituents are changed by processing methods such as steaming or sun drying. Metabolomic analysis was performed to distinguish age discrimination of four-and six-year-old red ginseng using ultra-performance liquid chromatography quadruple time of flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-QToF-MS) with multivariate statistical analysis. Principal component analysis (PCA) showed clear discrimination between extracts of red ginseng of different ages and suggest totally six discrimination markers (two for four-year-old and four for six-year-old red ginseng). Among these, one marker was isolated and the structure determined by NMR spectroscopic analysis was 13-cis-docosenamide (marker 6-1) from six-year-old red ginseng. This is the first report of a metabolomic study regarding the age differentiation of red ginseng using UPLC-QToF-MS and determination of the structure of the marker. These results will contribute to the quality control and standardization as well as provide a scientific basis for pharmacological research on red ginseng.Key words Panax ginseng; red ginseng; multivariate analysis; ultra-performance liquid chromatography quadruple time of flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-QToF-MS); metabolomics; 13-cis-docosenamide Korean ginseng (Panax ginseng C.A. MEYER) is one of the most widely used and acclaimed herbs in the world.1-3) Traditionally, the root of P. ginseng, the most used and valuable part, is physically subdivided into three groups; the main root, lateral root, and root hairs.1) It has already been reported that the chemical constituents and efficacy of each part of the ginseng root are quite different.1) It has been processed to make white ginseng (by air-drying the roots after peeling or not peeling) and red ginseng (by steaming the roots at 98-100°C without peeling) to enhance its preservation and efficacy. Red ginseng is more common as an herbal medicine, because steaming induces changes in the chemical constituents and enhances the biological activities of ginseng. 4)P. ginseng is generally cultivated for four or six years in the field before harvest. Thus, four and six year cultivated P. ginseng is a common item in the Korean ginseng market. However, six year cultivated P. ginseng and products thereof (including white ginseng and red ginseng) are produced and consumed much more than others. Because the cultivation age and harvest season have a significant effect on the quality and efficacy of ginseng, products of six year cultivated P. ginseng are also more expensive than products of four year cultivated P. ginseng. Additionally, a low survival rate and higher cultivation costs contribute to the expensive price of six year cultivated P. ginseng. The accurate determination of the cultivation age of ginseng is a very important problem in the market, although the cultivation age of ginseng can hardly be determined by the physical appearance alone, such as by the number of stem vestiges in rhizome. 5)In recent years, ...

Welfare spending has grown considerably and is currently a core component of government expenditure in most advanced countries. Although a good deal of scholarship assumes that benefiting from welfare spending increases the likelihood of voting for the incumbent parties, the impact of general welfare spending on incumbent parties’ electoral success has received scant attention. Moreover, we do not have much evidence regarding the conditions under which citizens reward incumbent parties for their generous welfare spending. This article expects that an increase in welfare spending has a positive effect on incumbent vote, but this effect is conditional on the ideology of government and levels of taxation. By examining 197 lower chamber elections in thirty-one OECD countries from approximately 1980 to 2013, this article finds that incumbent parties gain benefits for expansionary welfare spending. However, as the ideology of government moves closer to the right and as levels of taxation increase, the effects of welfare spending on incumbent parties’ vote share become weaker. The conditional effects of government ideology and levels of taxation on welfare voting suggest that right-wing governments can be relatively free from their welfare performance and that high levels of taxation reduce the electoral benefits of generous welfare spending.

Comparative economic voting studies have found great instability in economic voting across countries and over time. In explaining this instability, we highlight the role of welfare systems because strong welfare protection attenuates voters’ incentives to base their vote on government economic performance. By analyzing 174 legislature elections in 31 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1980 to 2010 and by taking into account clarity of responsibility, we find that welfare protection weakens the linkage between macroeconomic outcomes and incumbent electoral fortunes. This result implies that strong welfare protection enables politicians to avoid blame for economic failures.

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This paper presents a novel method for atmospheric transmittance-temperature-emissivity separation (AT2ES) using online midwave infrared hyperspectral images. Conventionally, temperature and emissivity separation (TES) is a well-known problem in the remote sensing domain. However, previous approaches use the atmospheric correction process before TES using MODTRAN in the long wave infrared band. Simultaneous online atmospheric transmittance-temperature-emissivity separation starts with approximation of the radiative transfer equation in the upper midwave infrared band. The highest atmospheric band is used to estimate surface temperature, assuming high emissive materials. The lowest atmospheric band (CO2 absorption band) is used to estimate air temperature. Through onsite hyperspectral data regression, atmospheric transmittance is obtained from the y-intercept, and emissivity is separated using the observed radiance, the separated object temperature, the air temperature, and atmospheric transmittance. The advantage with the proposed method is from being the first attempt at simultaneous AT2ES and online separation without any prior knowledge and pre-processing. Midwave Fourier transform infrared (FTIR)-based outdoor experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed AT2ES method.

Infrared ship-target detection for sea surveillance from the coast is very challenging because of strong background clutter, such as cloud and sea glint. Conventional approaches utilize either spatial or temporal information to reduce false positives. This paper proposes a completely different approach, called carbon dioxide-double spike (CO2-DS) detection in midwave spectral imaging. The proposed CO2-DS is based on the spectral feature where a hot CO2 emission band is broader than that which is absorbed by normal atmospheric CO2, which generates CO2-double spikes. A directional-mean subtraction filter (D-MSF) detects each CO2 spike, and final targets are detected by joint analysis of both types of detection. The most important property of CO2-DS detection is that it generates an extremely low number of false positive caused by background clutter. Only the hot CO2 spike of a ship plume can penetrate atmosphere, and furthermore, there are only ship CO2 plume signatures in the double spikes of different spectral bands. Experimental results using midwave Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) in a remote sea environment validate the extreme robustness of the proposed ship-target detection.

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