Job search by employed workers : the effects of restrictions

Within the framework of a general equilibrium search model, the authors study the effect of institutional restrictions on workers'job mobility. The model generates endogenuous job searches on the job and off the job with two forms of labor contracts emerging and coexisting in equilibrium. One form of contract involves the workers'long-term commitment to the firm ("reversed tenure"): some firms offer high wages in return for their workers'commitment not to search for better jobs. The other is a short-term contract requiring no such commitment: some firms that cannot afford to pay wages that guarantee lifetime attachment pay lower wages, have lower turn-over costs, but impose no restrictions on searches for better jobs. The authors study the effects on employment of exogenous restrictions on mobility - in the form of a transfer from the quitting worker, made either to the employer or to a third party. These transfers, the separation bonds, are typically the benefits lost by the quitting worker, such as vested pension. Restrictions of this type, by crowding out the firms that allow on-the-job searches for employment directly increase unemployment. When restrictions on workers'mobility take the form of a zero-sum transfer, there is no real effect so long as the transfer is below some bound - the worker loses nothing. When the separation bond is prohibitively large, or when it is forfeited to a third party, employment among all types of workers falls.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Markets

On perfectly secure 2PC in the OT-hybrid model

A well known result by Kilian (ACM 1988) asserts that general secure two computation (2PC) with statistical security, can be based on OT. Specifically, in the client-server model, where only one party -- the client -- receives an output, Kilian’s result shows that given the ability to call an ideal oracle that computes OT, two parties can securely compute an arbitrary function of their inputs with unconditional security. Ishai et al. (EUROCRYPT 2011) further showed that this can be done efficiently for every two-party functionality in $\mathrm{NC}^1$ in a single round. However, their results only achieve statistical security, namely, it is allowed to have some error in security. This leaves open the natural question as to which client-server functionalities can be computed with perfect security in the OT-hybrid model, and what is the round complexity of such computation. So far, only a handful of functionalities were known to have such protocols. In addition to the obvious theoretical appeal of the question towards better understanding secure computation, perfect, as opposed to statistical reductions, may be useful for designing secure multiparty protocols with high concrete efficiency, achieved by eliminating the dependence on a security parameter. In this work, we identify a large class of client-server functionalities $f:\mathcal{X}\times \mathcal{Y}\mapsto \{0,1\}$, where the server\u27s domain $\mathcal{X}$ is larger than the client\u27s domain $\mathcal{Y}$, that have a perfect reduction to OT. Furthermore, our reduction is 1-round using an oracle to secure evaluation of many parallel invocations of $\binom21$-bit-OT, as done by Ishai et al. (EUROCRYPT 2011). Interestingly, the set of functions that we are able to compute was previously identified by Asharov (TCC 2014) in the context of fairness in two-party computation, naming these functions full-dimensional. Our result also extends to randomized non-Boolean functions $f:\mathcal{X}\times \mathcal{Y}\mapsto\{0,\ldots,k-1\}$ satisfying $|\mathcal{X}|>(k-1)\cdot|\mathcal{Y}|$

Utilizing microarray spot characteristics to improve cross-species hybridization results

AbstractCross-species hybridization (CSH), i.e., the hybridization of a (target) species RNA to a DNA microarray that represents another (reference) species, is often used to study species diversity. However, filtration of CSH data has to be applied to extract valid information. We present a novel approach to filtering the CSH data, which utilizes spot characteristics (SCs) of image-quantification data from scanned spotted cDNA microarrays. Five SCs that were affected by sequence similarity between probe and target sequences were identified (designated as BS-SCs). Filtration by all five BS-SC thresholds demonstrated improved clustering for two of the three examined experiments, suggesting that BS-SCs may serve for filtration of data obtained by CSH, to improve the validity of the results. This CSH data-filtration approach could become a promising tool for studying a variety of species, especially when no genomic information is available for the target species

The Medical Necessity for Medicinal Cannabis: Prospective, Observational Study Evaluating the Treatment in Cancer Patients on Supportive or Palliative Care

Background. Cancer patients using cannabis report better influence from the plant extract than from synthetic products. However, almost all the research conducted to date has been performed with synthetic products. We followed patients with a medicinal cannabis license to evaluate the advantages and side effects of using cannabis by cancer patients. Methods. The study included two interviews based on questionnaires regarding symptoms and side effects, the first held on the day the license was issued and the second 6–8 weeks later. Cancer symptoms and cannabis side effects were documented on scales from 0 to 4 following the CTCAE. The distress thermometer was used also. Results. Of the 211 patients who had a first interview, only 131 had the second interview, 25 of whom stopped treatment after less than a week. All cancer or anticancer treatment-related symptoms showed significant improvement (P<0.001). No significant side effects except for memory lessening in patients with prolonged cannabis use (P=0.002) were noted. Conclusion. The positive effects of cannabis on various cancer-related symptoms are tempered by reliance on self-reporting for many of the variables. Although studies with a control group are missing, the improvement in symptoms should push the use of cannabis in palliative treatment of oncology patients

On Perfectly Secure Two-Party Computation for Symmetric Functionalities with Correlated Randomness

A multiparty computation protocol is {\em perfectly secure} for some function $f$ if it perfectly emulates an ideal computation of $f$. Thus, perfect security is the strongest and most desirable notion of security, as it guarantees security in the face of any adversary and eliminates the dependency on any security parameter. Ben-Or et al. [STOC \u2788] and Chaum et al. [STOC \u2788] showed that any function can be computed with perfect security if strictly less than one-third of the parties can be corrupted. For two-party sender-receiver functionalities (where only one party receives an output), Ishai et al. [TCC \u2713] showed that any function can be computed with perfect security in the correlated randomness model. Unfortunately, they also showed that perfect security cannot be achieved in general for two-party functions that give outputs to both parties (even in the correlated randomness model). We study the feasibility of obtaining perfect security for deterministic symmetric two-party functionalities (i.e., where both parties obtain the same output) in the face of malicious adversaries. We explore both the plain model as well as the correlated randomness model. We provide positive results in the plain model, and negative results in the correlated randomness model. As a corollary, we obtain the following results. \begin{enumerate} \item We provide a characterization of symmetric functionalities with (up to) four possible outputs that can be computed with perfect security. The characterization is further refined when restricted to three possible outputs and to Boolean functions. All characterizations are the same for both the plain model and the correlated randomness model. \item We show that if a functionality contains an embedded XOR or an embedded AND, then it cannot be computed with perfect security (even in the correlated randomness model). \end{enumerate

Tumor diversity and the trade-off between universal cancer tasks

Funder: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Swiss National Science Foundation); doi: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001711Funder: Abisch-Frenkel-Stiftung (Abisch-Frenkel Foundation); doi: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100007362Abstract: Recent advances have enabled powerful methods to sort tumors into prognosis and treatment groups. We are still missing, however, a general theoretical framework to understand the vast diversity of tumor gene expression and mutations. Here we present a framework based on multi-task evolution theory, using the fact that tumors need to perform multiple tasks that contribute to their fitness. We find that trade-offs between tasks constrain tumor gene-expression to a continuum bounded by a polyhedron whose vertices are gene-expression profiles, each specializing in one task. We find five universal cancer tasks across tissue-types: cell-division, biomass and energy, lipogenesis, immune-interaction and invasion and tissue-remodeling. Tumors that specialize in a task are sensitive to drugs that interfere with this task. Driver, but not passenger, mutations tune gene-expression towards specialization in specific tasks. This approach can integrate additional types of molecular data into a framework of tumor diversity grounded in evolutionary theory

Bio-potential noise of dry printed electrodes: physiology versus the skin-electrode impedance

Objective. To explore noise characteristics and the effect physiological activity has on the link between impedance and noise. Approach. Dry-printed electrodes are emerging as a new and exciting technology for skin electro-physiology. Such electrode arrays offer many advantages including user convenience, quick placement, and high resolution. Here we analyze extensive electro-physiological data recorded from the arm and the face to study and quantify the noise of dry electrodes, and to characterize the link between noise and impedance. In particular, we studied the effect of the physiological state of the subject (e.g. rapid eye movement sleep) on noise. Main results. We show that baseline noise values extracted from dry electrodes in the arm are in agreement with the Nyquist equation. In the face, on the other hand, the measured noise values were higher than the values predicted by the Nyquist equation. In addition, we studied how different electrode properties affect performances, including electrode size, shape, and material properties. Significance. Altogether, the results presented here provide a basis for understanding dry electrode performances and substantiate their great potential in electro-physiological investigations