Inflation Perceptions and Expectations in Sweden - Are Media Reports the `Missing Link'?

Using quantitative survey data from the Swedish Consumer Tendency Survey as well as a unique data set on media reports about inflation, we analyze the formation process of inflation perceptions and expectations as well as interrelations between the variables. Throughout the analysis, the role of media reports about inflation is emphasized and results for the low inflation period January 1998 to December 2007 are compared to those including the high inflation year 2008. Rejecting rationality, we find that perceptions, but not expectations, are affected asymmetrically by news, where media effects are generally stronger in times of high and volatile inflation. For the low inflation sample period, inflation expectations are more affected by shocks to perceptions than vice versa, but Granger causality runs from expectations to perceptions. Including more volatile inflation, we find more feed-back between the variables and a strong media effect especially on perceptions.Inflation expectations, inflation perceptions, media reports.

KEGGtranslator: visualizing and converting the KEGG PATHWAY database to various formats

Summary: The KEGG PATHWAY database provides a widely used service for metabolic and nonmetabolic pathways. It contains manually drawn pathway maps with information about the genes, reactions and relations contained therein. To store these pathways, KEGG uses KGML, a proprietary XML-format. Parsers and translators are needed to process the pathway maps for usage in other applications and algorithms

Auf der Suche nach historischen Phrasemen – oder: Wörterbücher als Korpora

The treatment of phrasemes is problematic both in a lexicographic view and a corpus analytic view, even though the efforts of the collocation research provide enormous amounts of output. Finding and automatically extracting phrasemes, that are longer than two or three word collocations, is still not satisfactorily possible, because there are no markers in the text, that indicate the borders of the expressions. If in addition the perspective is an historical one, the problems arise as the amount of available historical texts decreases. For an historical phraseographic analysis realistic examples are extremely help- and needful, so that other sources for assembling examples have to be found. The following text proposes some approaches, how dictionaries can be used as corpora, and shows, which results (examples, illustrations, links etc.) can be expected. The point of origin of the idea is to use dictionaries not in the classical way – that means: searching the headword and reading the related article –, but to use the whole dictionary as a corpus. This inverse use of dictionaries allows us to find a lot of implicit lexikographic information, that in a normal way of using dictionaries could only be found by coincident

The Role of Parental Wealth in Children's Educational Pathways in Germany

In this article, I evaluate whether educational attainment in Germany is stratified by parental wealth and at which transitions stratification emerges. I propose a four-stage model to capture the emergence of stratification in the German education system, which is characterized by early between-school tracking: (i) transition to the tracked secondary school, (ii) attended track in the last year of mandatory schooling, (iii) highest school-leaving certificate, and (iv) transition to vocational or tertiary education. Results suggest that stratification by parental wealth emerges at all four stages, and, therefore, accumulates over the stages. Children living in wealthy households are 20 per cent more likely to attend the highest track in fifth grade and to obtain the highest school-leaving certificate and are 40 per cent more likely to enroll in tertiary education compared to children at the bottom of the wealth distribution. Furthermore, parental wealth seems to be particularly effective in preventing negative outcomes like leaving school without a certificate or not finding a fully qualifying vocational training. Among those who do not obtain the formal requirements to enroll in tertiary education, those with wealthy parents are more likely to start dual vocational training

Perceived Inflation under Loss Aversion

Building on Prospect Theory, we apply the concept of loss aversion to the formation of inflation perceptions and test empirically for non- linearities in the inflation-perceptions relation for a panel of 10 Euro area countries. Specifically, under the assumption of loss aversion, inflation changes above a certain reference rate will be perceived more strongly. Rejecting rationality of inflation perceptions in general under symmetric loss and in a majority of cases under flexible loss functions, panel smooth transition models give evidence of non-linearities in the inflation perception formation regarding both actual inflation and time. This result is confirmed by dynamic fixed effects estimates, where the slope of the estimated value function is significantly steeper in the loss region and the implied average reference inflation rate is found close to 2%.Inflation Perceptions, Loss Aversion, Panel Smooth Tran- sition Models, Dynamic Panel.

The Impact of Statistical Discrimination in Shared Housing Markets: A Correspondence Study on Ethnic Discrimination in Germany

Existing research found strong and convincing evidence of ethnic discrimination in housing markets in almost all Western countries (Pager & Shepherd, 2008). This also holds for Germany, where particularly applicants with Turkish or Arabic names face severe discrimination. In large German cities applicants with Turkish names get up to 16 percentage points fewer responses than applicants with German names (Auspurg, Hinz, & Schmid, 2017). However, almost all of these studies look at "traditional" housing markets, where a landlord rents a flat to a family or individuals. Another segment of the housing market is mostly ignored, even though it has become increasingly common: Shared housing. About five million Germans are currently living in shared flats (Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach, 2017, p. 12). Discrimination in this market likely differs from other housing markets because of differences in the recruiting process and differences in the rationales and composition of tenants

JSBML: a flexible Java library for working with SBML

The specifications of the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) define standards for storing and exchanging computer models of biological processes in text files. In order to perform model simulations, graphical visualizations and other software manipulations, an in-memory representation of SBML is required. We developed JSBML for this purpose. In contrast to prior implementations of SBML APIs, JSBML has been designed from the ground up for the Java™ programming language, and can therefore be used on all platforms supported by a Java Runtime Environment. This offers important benefits for Java users, including the ability to distribute software as Java Web Start applications. JSBML supports all SBML Levels and Versions through Level 3 Version 1, and we have strived to maintain the highest possible degree of compatibility with the popular library libSBML. JSBML also supports modules that can facilitate the development of plugins for end user applications, as well as ease migration from a libSBML-based backend

Deficits in pain medication in older adults with chronic pain receiving home care: A cross-sectional study in Germany

OBJECTIVE: To analyze the pattern and appropriateness of pain medications in older adults receiving home care. METHODS: We performed a prospective cross-sectional study in patients ≥65 years old having chronic pain and receiving home care in Berlin, Germany. Data on prescribed pain medications were collected using self-reported information, nursing documents, and medication plans during interviews at home. Pain intensity was determined with the numeric rating scale (NRS) and the Pain Assessment In Advanced dementia (PAINAD) scale. The Pain Medication Appropriateness Scale score (SPMAS) was applied to evaluate inappropriateness (i.e. a score ≤67) of pain medication. RESULTS: Overall 322 patients with a mean age of 82.1 ± 7.4 years (71.4% females) were evaluated. The average pain intensity scores during the last 24 hours were 5.3 ± 2.1 and 2.3 ± 2.3 on NRS and PAINAD scale (range 0-10, respectively). Sixty (18.6%) patients did not receive any pain medication. Among the treated patients, dipyrone was the most frequently prescribed analgesic (71.4%), while 50.8% and 19.1% received systemic treatment with opioids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, respectively. The observed median SPMAS was 47.6 (range 0-100) with 58 (18.0%) of patients achieving appropriate values. Half of the patients were treated with scheduled, while 29.9% were only treated with on-demand medications. Cognitive status had no effect on appropriateness of pain treatment. CONCLUSIONS: We observed substantial deficits in dosing patterns and appropriateness of pain medication in older adults with pain receiving home care. This applied to both patients with and without severe cognitive impairment

Qualitätsmerkmale von RFID Etiketten

Um die Qualität eines RFID Etiketts objektiv und reproduzierbar bewerten zu können sind entsprechende Qualitätsmerkmale und Prüfverfahren notwendig. In diesem Beitrag wird kurz auf Qualitätsmerkmale im Bezug auf RFID Etiketten eingegangen und die aktuelle Situation bei der Definition von Testkriterien und- verfahren dargestellt