The Prospects of the Baby Boomers: Methodological Challenges in Projecting the Lives of an Aging Cohort

In most industrialized countries, the work and family patterns of the baby boomers characterized by more heterogeneous working careers and less stable family lives set them apart from preceding cohorts. Thus, it is of crucial importance to understand how these different work and family lives are linked to the boomers' prospective material well-being as they retire. This paper presents a new and unique matching-based approach for the projection of the life courses of German baby boomers, called the LAW-Life Projection Model. Basis for the projection are data from 27 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel linked with administrative pension records from the German Statutory Pension In-surance that cover lifecycle pension-relevant earnings. Unlike model-based micro simula-tions that age the data year by year our matching-based projection uses sequences from older birth cohorts to complete the life-courses of statistically similar baby boomers through to retirement. An advantage of this approach is to coherently project the work-life and family trajectories as well as lifecycle earnings. The authors present a benchmark anal-ysis to assess the validity and accuracy of the projection. For this purpose, they cut a signif-icant portion of already lived lives and test different combinations of matching algorithms and donor pool specifications to identify the combination that produces the best fit be-tween previously cut but observed and projected life-course information. Exploiting the advantages of the projected data, the authors compare the returns to education - measured in terms of pension entitlements - across cohorts. The results indicate that within cohorts, differences between individuals with low and high educational attainment increase over time for men and women in East and West Germany. East German boomer women with low educational attainment face the most substantial losses in pension entitlements that put them at a high risk of being poor as they retire

The LHCb upgrade I

The LHCb upgrade represents a major change of the experiment. The detectors have been almost completely renewed to allow running at an instantaneous luminosity five times larger than that of the previous running periods. Readout of all detectors into an all-software trigger is central to the new design, facilitating the reconstruction of events at the maximum LHC interaction rate, and their selection in real time. The experiment's tracking system has been completely upgraded with a new pixel vertex detector, a silicon tracker upstream of the dipole magnet and three scintillating fibre tracking stations downstream of the magnet. The whole photon detection system of the RICH detectors has been renewed and the readout electronics of the calorimeter and muon systems have been fully overhauled. The first stage of the all-software trigger is implemented on a GPU farm. The output of the trigger provides a combination of totally reconstructed physics objects, such as tracks and vertices, ready for final analysis, and of entire events which need further offline reprocessing. This scheme required a complete revision of the computing model and rewriting of the experiment's software

Dispositivo fotorivelatore ultrasensibile con diaframma micrometrico integrato per microscopi confocali

La presente invenzione concerne un dispositivo fotorivelatore comprendente un substrato di semiconduttore di un primo tipo di conducibilità connesso ad un primo elettrodo. Tale substrato comprende un'area attiva formata da diverse regioni di semiconduttore di un secondo tipo di conducibilità, isolate fra loro e connesse a rispettivi secondi elettrodi in modo che ciascuna di esse sia collegabile separatamente dalle altre ad una appropriata tensione di polarizzazione

High sensitivity photodetector device with integrated micrometric diaphragm for confocal microscopes

Photodetector device comprising a semiconductor substrate of a first type of conductivity connected to a first electrode. Said substrate comprises an active area made up of different semiconductor regions of a second type of conductivity insulated from each other and connected to respective second electrodes so that each of them can be connected separately from the others to an appropriate bias voltage. By regulating the bias voltages applied to these regions the function of optic diaphragm of the device can be controlled. The device works without needing any form of optical insulation between the different regions of the active area and always uses the same single output electrode for the signal in all the different situations of diaphragm adjustment