The advantage for name -designated characters during reading

When two characters are mentioned in a text, one referred to by a title (e.g., professor) and one referred to by a proper name (e.g., Christopher), the character referred to by the name is more accessible in memory. Although there has been a lot of research documenting the advantages that name-designated characters have over title-designated characters, most of it has done so using very short texts. The experiments reported in this dissertation utilized longer passages of text to examine whether certain variables that are known to affect accessibility, such as order of mention, number of mentions, elaboration, and distance, will affect the advantages that name-designated characters typically have during reading. Participants read passages containing two characters, one referred to by a title and one referred to by a proper name. In all experiments except for the rating studies, reading times were measured for sentences that reinstated either the name- or the title-designated character. Experiment 1b varied which character was introduced first. In Experiment 2b, one character was mentioned more often than the other character. In Experiment 3, the type of elaboration was varied: either the episodic or semantic traits of the title-designated character were emphasized. In Experiment 4, the distance between the last mention of the title- or name-designated character and the reinstatement sentence was varied. In all of the experiments except for Experiment 2b, reading time differences demonstrated that the name-designated character was more accessible than the title-designated character, regardless of the manipulation. In Experiment 2b, when the name-designated character was mentioned the most often, it was reinstated faster than the title-designated. When the title-designated character was mentioned the most often, the advantage that existed for the name-designated character in every other experiment was eliminated. The results are discussed in terms of the memory-based text processing view and an interaction between episodic and semantic memory

Using Steady-State Kinetics to Quantitate Substrate Selectivity and Specificity: A Case Study with Two Human Transaminases

We examined the ability of two human cytosolic transaminases, aspartate aminotransferase (GOT1) and alanine aminotransferase (GPT), to transform their preferred substrates whilst discriminating against similar metabolites. This offers an opportunity to survey our current understanding of enzyme selectivity and specificity in a biological context. Substrate selectivity can be quantitated based on the ratio of the kcat /KM values for two alternative substrates (the ‘discrimination index’). After assessing the advantages, implications and limits of this index, we analyzed the reactions of GOT1 and GPT with alternative substrates that are metabolically available and show limited structural differences with respect to the preferred substrates. The transaminases’ observed selectivities were remarkably high. In particular, GOT1 reacted ~106-fold less efficiently when the side-chain carboxylate of the ’physiological’ substrates (aspartate and glutamate) was replaced by an amido group (asparagine and glutamine). This represents a current empirical limit of discrimination associated with this chemical difference. The structural basis of GOT1 selectivity was addressed through substrate docking simulations, which highlighted the importance of electrostatic interactions and proper substrate positioning in the active site. We briefly discuss the biological implications of these results and the possibility of using kcat /KM values to derive a global measure of enzyme specificity

Accurate statistical performance evaluation of EDC techniques on 10 Gb/s multimode fiber links

Abstract--- We perform a statistical investigation (based on the Cambridge 108-fiber set) of the performance limits of different electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) techniques in terms of their robustness to modal dispersion, considering the impact of connection offsets in 10GBASE-LRM (long reach multimode) systems with connection offsets. We also investigate the effectiveness of an accurate and fast analytical method to take into account any amount of intersymbol interference based on Gaussian quadrature rules, thus allowing a thorough statistical investigation of the performance of different EDC techniques

Social security wealth and retirement decisions in Italy

This paper uses administrative data to study the retirement decisions of Italian privatesector non-agricultural employees during the period 1977—1997. Our analysis tries to assess the importance of the financial incentives built into the social security system. The basic idea is very simple: at any given age, and based on the available information, workers compare theexpected present value of two alternatives: retiring today or working one more year, and then choose the best one. A key role in this kind of comparisons is played by social security wealth, whose level and changes reflect the expectations about the profile of future earnings and the institutional features of the social security system. The various incentive measures that we consider differ in the precise weight given to the social security wealth that workers accrue as they continue to work. Our model does not provide a structural representation of the retirement process. A worker’s decision is modeled here following a “quasi reduced-form” approach, with the incentive measures entering as predictors of the worker’s choice in addition to standard variables. The estimated models are then used to predict retirement probabilities under alternative policies that change social security wealth and derived incentive measures

Accurate Performance Estimationof high-speed Digital Optical Signals

A novel technique allows an easy and accurate estimation of the system BER by collecting the statistical distribution of the analog samples, i.e. before decision. The scheme is confirmed by both simulations and experimental measurements

Bibliometric Evaluation vs. Informed Peer Review:Evidence from Italy

A relevant question for the organization of large scale research assessments is whether bibliometric evaluation and informed peer review where reviewers know where the work was published, yield similar results. It would suggest, for instance, that less costly bibliometric evaluation might - at least partly - replace informed peer review, or that bibliometric evaluation could reliably monitor research in between assessment exercises. We draw on our experience of evaluating Italian research in Economics, Business and Statistics, where almost 12,000 publications dated 2004-2010 were assessed. A random sample from the available population of journal articles shows that informed peer review and bibliometric analysis produce similar evaluations of the same set of papers. Whether because of independent convergence in assessment, or the influence of bibliometric information on the community of reviewers, the implication for the organization of these exercises is that these two approaches are substitutes

Bibliometric Evaluation vs. Informed Peer Review: Evidence from Italy

A relevant question for the organization of large scale research assessments is whether bibliometric evaluation and informed peer review where reviewers know where the work was published, yield similar results. It would suggest, for instance, that less costly bibliometric evaluation might - at least partly - replace informed peer review, or that bibliometric evaluation could reliably monitor research in between assessment exercises. We draw on our experience of evaluating Italian research in Economics, Business and Statistics, where almost 12,000 publications dated 2004-2010 were assessed. A random sample from the available population of journal articles shows that informed peer review and bibliometric analysis produce similar evaluations of the same set of papers. Whether because of independent convergence in assessment, or the influence of bibliometric information on the community of reviewers, the implication for the organization of these exercises is that these two approaches are substitutes

The Length of Working Lives in Europe

In this paper we ask what is the length of working life in Europe, whether it differs by gender, birth cohort, and schooling level, and what are the main differences across countries. We also ask whether there is a trend towards shorter working lives, and to what extent it is due to the delayed entry into the labor force or earlier withdrawal from the labor force