Cyclicality of job and worker flows: New data and a new set of stylized facts

We study the relationship between cyclical job and worker flows at the plant level using a new data set spanning from 1976-2006. We find that procyclical labor demand explains relatively little of procyclical worker flows. Instead, all plants in the employment growth distribution increase their worker turnover during booms. We also find that cyclical changes in the employment growth distribution are mostly driven by plants moving from inactivity to a growing labor force during booms. Consequently, increased labor turnover at growing plants is the main quantitative driver behind increased labor turnover during booms. We argue that on the job search models are able to capture non-parallel shifts in the employment growth distribution and procyclical conditional worker flows for a range of the growth distribution. Yet, they fail to rationalize procyclical accession rates for all shrinking and procylical separation rates for all growing plants

Random Teachers are Good Teachers

In this work, we investigate the implicit regularization induced by teacher-student learning dynamics in self-distillation. To isolate its effect, we describe a simple experiment where we consider teachers at random initialization instead of trained teachers. Surprisingly, when distilling a student into such a random teacher, we observe that the resulting model and its representations already possess very interesting characteristics; (1) we observe a strong improvement of the distilled student over its teacher in terms of probing accuracy. (2) The learned representations are data-dependent and transferable between different tasks but deteriorate strongly if trained on random inputs. (3) The student checkpoint contains sparse subnetworks, so-called lottery tickets, and lies on the border of linear basins in the supervised loss landscape. These observations have interesting consequences for several important areas in machine learning: (1) Self-distillation can work solely based on the implicit regularization present in the gradient dynamics without relying on any dark knowledge, (2) self-supervised learning can learn features even in the absence of data augmentation and (3) training dynamics during the early phase of supervised training do not necessarily require label information. Finally, we shed light on an intriguing local property of the loss landscape: the process of feature learning is strongly amplified if the student is initialized closely to the teacher. These results raise interesting questions about the nature of the landscape that have remained unexplored so far. Code is available at https://github.com/safelix/dinopl

Cyclicality of Job and Worker Flows: New Data and a New Set of Stylized Facts

We study the relationship between cyclical job and worker flows at the plant level using a new data set spanning from 1976-2006. We find that procyclical labor demand explains relatively little of procyclical worker flows. Instead, all plants in the employment growth distribution increase their worker turnover during booms. We also find that cyclical changes in the employment growth distribution are mostly driven by plants moving from inactivity to a growing labor force during booms. Consequently, increased labor turnover at growing plants is the main quantitative driver behind increased labor turnover during booms. We argue that on the job search models are able to capture non-parallel shifts in the employment growth distribution and procyclical conditional worker flows for a range of the growth distribution. Yet, they fail to rationalize procyclical accession rates for all shrinking and procylical separation rates for all growing plants

Worker Churn and Employment Growth at the Establishment Level

We find that worker turnover is more procyclical than job turnover. Procyclical worker churn result almost exclusively from job-to-job transitions. The size and cyclical properties of churn are close to uniform along the entire employment growth distribution of establishments. Even shrinking firms churn, i.e., they hire while separating from workers. The cyclical movements in the source of hiring, from employment vs non-employment, are close to uniform across the employment growth distribution

Job and worker flows: New stylized facts for Germany

We study the relationship between cyclical job and worker flows at the establishment level using the new German AWFP dataset spanning from 1975-2014. We find that worker turnover moves more procyclical than job turnover. This procyclical worker churn takes place along the entire employment growth distribution of establishments. We show that these procyclical conditional worker flows result almost exclusively from job-tojob transitions. Growing establishments fuel their employment growth by poaching workers from other establishments as the boom matures. At the same time, non-growing establishments replace these workers by hiring from other establishments and non-employment

Gas exchange calculation may estimate changes in pulmonary blood flow during veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in a porcine model.

BACKGROUND Veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO) is used as rescue for severe cardiopulmonary failure. We tested whether the ratio of CO2 elimination at the lung and the ECMO (VCO2ECMO/VCO2Lung) would reflect the ratio of respective blood flows and could be used to estimate changes in pulmonary blood flow (QLUNG), i. e. native cardiac output. METHODS Four healthy pigs were centrally cannulated for VA-ECMO. We measured blood flows with an ultrasonic flow probes. VCO2ECMO and VCO2Lung were calculated from sidestream capnographs under constant pulmonary ventilation during ECMO weaning with changing sweep gas and/or ECMO blood flow. If ventilation/perfusion (V/Q) ratio of ECMO was not one, the VCO2ECMO was normalized to V/Q=1 (VCO2ECMONORM). Changes in pulmonary blood flow were calculated using the relationship between changes in CO2 elimination and ECMO blood flow. RESULTS QECMO correlated strongly with VCO2ECMONORM (r2 0.95 - 0.99). QLUNG correlated well with VCO2LUNG (r2 0.65 - 0.89, p<=0.002). Absolute QLung could not be calculated in a non-steady state. Calculated pulmonary blood flow changes had a bias of 76 (-266 to 418) ml/min and correlated with measured QLUNG (r2 0.974 - 1.000, p = 0.1 to 0.006) for cumulative ECMO flow reductions. CONCLUSIONS VCO2 of the lung correlated strongly with pulmonary blood flow. Our model could predict pulmonary blood flow changes within clinically acceptable margins of error. The prediction is made possible with a normalization to a V/Q of 1 for ECMO. This approach depends on measurements readily available and may allow immediate assessment of the cardiac output response

Sero-epidemiological survey for alveolar echinococcosis (by Em2-ELISA) of blood donors in an endemic area of Switzerland

Sera from 17 166 blood donors living in 10 cantons of northern Switzerland in an area endemic for Echinococcus multilocularis were investigated by serological survey for alveolar echinococcosis (AE). A highly species-specific antigen (Em2) and a commonly used E. granulosus hydatid fluid antigen (EgHF) were compared for their suitability in seroepidemiology. EgHF showed a degree of nonspecificity which did not allow direct detection of AE cases. Antibody reaction with Em2 resulted in the detection of 2 asymptomatic clinical cases of AE (seroprevalence 0·01%) within this population of blood donors. A further 4 persons were positive in Em2-ELISA. These 4 persons had negative imaging studies and will be followed serologically and clinicall

What is campus bridging and what is XSEDE doing about it?

The term “campus bridging” was first used in the charge given to an NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure task force. That task force developed this description of campus bridging: “Campus bridging is the seamlessly integrated use of cyberinfrastructure operated by a scientist or engineer with other cyberinfrastructure on the scientist’s campus, at other campuses, and at the regional, national, and international levels as if they were proximate to the scientist, and when working within the context of a Virtual Organization (VO) make the ‘virtual’ aspect of the organization irrelevant (or helpful) to the work of the VO.” Campus bridging is more a viewpoint and a set of approaches to usability, software, and information concerns than a particular set of tools or software. We outline here several specific use cases that have been identified as priorities for XSEDE in the next four years. These priorities include documentation, deployment of software used entirely outside of XSEDE, and software that helps bridge from individual researcher to campus to XSEDE cyberinfrastructure. We also describe early pilot tests and means by which the user community may stay informed of campus bridging activities and participate in the implementation of Campus Bridging tools created by XSEDE. Metrics are still being developed, and will include (1) the number of campuses that adopt and use Campus Bridging tools developed by XSEDE and (2) the number of and extent to which XSEDE-developed Campus Bridging tools are adopted among other CI projects.The work described here was supported by National Science Foundation Award Nos. 0932251, 0503697, 1002526, 1059812, 1040777, 0723054, 0521433, and 0504075

High-speed motility originates from cooperatively pushing and pulling flagella bundles in bilophotrichous bacteria.

Funder: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft; FundRef: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004189Funder: IMPRS on Multiscale BiosystemsFunder: French National Research Agency; FundRef: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001665; Grant(s): ANR Tremplin-ERC: ANR-16-TERC-0025-01Bacteria propel and change direction by rotating long, helical filaments, called flagella. The number of flagella, their arrangement on the cell body and their sense of rotation hypothetically determine the locomotion characteristics of a species. The movement of the most rapid microorganisms has in particular remained unexplored because of additional experimental limitations. We show that magnetotactic cocci with two flagella bundles on one pole swim faster than 500 µm·s-1 along a double helical path, making them one of the fastest natural microswimmers. We additionally reveal that the cells reorient in less than 5 ms, an order of magnitude faster than reported so far for any other bacteria. Using hydrodynamic modeling, we demonstrate that a mode where a pushing and a pulling bundle cooperate is the only possibility to enable both helical tracks and fast reorientations. The advantage of sheathed flagella bundles is the high rigidity, making high swimming speeds possible

Overexpression of eIF3a in Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Oral Cavity and Its Putative Relation to Chemotherapy Response

The eukaryotic translation initiation factor eIF3a is one of the core subunits of the translation initiation complex eIF3, responsible for ribosomal subunit joining and mRNA recruitment to the ribosome. It is known to play an important role in general translation initiation as well as in the specific translational regulation of various gene products, among which many influence tumour development, progression, and the therapeutically important pathways of DNA damage repair. Therefore, beyond its role in protein synthesis, eIF3a is emerging as regulator in tumour pathogenesis and therapy response and, therefore, a potential tumor marker. By means of a tissue microarray (TMA) for histopathological and statistical assessment, we here show eIF3a expression in 103 cases of squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity (OSCC), representing tissues from 103 independent patients. A subset of the study cohort was treated with platinum based therapy. Our results show that the 170 kDa protein is upregulated in OSCC and correlates with good overall survival. Overexpressing tumors respond better to platinum-based chemotherapy, suggesting eIF3a as a putative predictive as well as prognostic tumor marker in OSCC