Development and Religious Polarization: The Emergence of Reform and Ultra-Orthodox Judaism

Jewish emancipation in nineteenth century Europe produced drastically different responses. In Germany, a liberal variant known as Reform developed, while ultra-Orthodox Judaism emerged in eastern Europe. We develop a model of religious organization which explains this polarization. In developed regions, religious authorities embrace the prospect of cultural integration by relaxing prohibitions and benefitting from greater financial contributions. In poorer regions, religious authorities adopt a strategy of cultural resistance, enforcing prohibitions to elicit greater contributions of effort. In regions of intermediate development, religious schisms and cycles occur. This analytic narrative sheds light on how economic development can lead to cultural change.club goods, religious polarization, community, Jewish emancipation

Failed Secular Revolutions: Religious Belief, Competition, and Extremism

All advanced economies have undergone secular revolutions in which religious belief and institutions have been subordinated to secular forms of authority. There are, however, numerous examples of failed secular transitions. To understand these failures, we present a religious club model with endogenous entry and cultural transmission of religious beliefs. A spike in the demand for religious belief, due for example to a negative economic shock, induces a new and more extreme organization to enter the religious market and exploit the dissatisfaction of highly religious types with the religious incumbent. The eect is larger where institutional secularization is more advanced, for example where the religious establishment has moderated itself or has been moderated by the political authority. The greater the moderation of the religious incumbent, the more extreme is the position chosen by the religious entrant, and the larger is the rise in religious participation. Hence, unanticipated shifts in religious demand can lead to the emergence of new and more extreme religious organizations, and reverse previous trends toward secularization. Our model sheds light on the causes and consequences of failed secular revolutions and religious revivals in Latin America and Egypt

Resisting Education

We develop a model in which individuals choose education to improve their earnings and regulate the cultural traits they acquire via social transmission. When education makes individuals more receptive to mainstream culture, minority groups underinvest in education as a form of cultural resistance. Economic and cultural incentives interact in surprising ways that increase income inequality. An increase in the skill premium induces low-ability minority types to reduce education-a phenomenon we call resisting education. The model links technological progress, globalization and anti-discrimination policies (e.g. affirmative action, Jewish emancipation) to oppositional attitudes toward education

Resisting Education

We develop a model in which individuals choose education to improve their earnings and regulate the cultural traits they acquire via social transmission. When education makes individuals more receptive to mainstream culture, minority groups underinvest in education as a form of cultural resistance. Economic and cultural incentives interact in surprising ways that increase income inequality. An increase in the skill premium induces low-ability minority types to reduce education-a phenomenon we call resisting education. The model links technological progress, globalization and anti-discrimination policies (e.g. affirmative action, Jewish emancipation) to oppositional attitudes toward education

Evaluating k-NN in the Classification of Data Streams with Concept Drift

Data streams are often defined as large amounts of data flowing continuously at high speed. Moreover, these data are likely subject to changes in data distribution, known as concept drift. Given all the reasons mentioned above, learning from streams is often online and under restrictions of memory consumption and run-time. Although many classification algorithms exist, most of the works published in the area use Naive Bayes (NB) and Hoeffding Trees (HT) as base learners in their experiments. This article proposes an in-depth evaluation of k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) as a candidate for classifying data streams subjected to concept drift. It also analyses the complexity in time and the two main parameters of k-NN, i.e., the number of nearest neighbors used for predictions (k), and window size (w). We compare different parameter values for k-NN and contrast it to NB and HT both with and without a drift detector (RDDM) in many datasets. We formulated and answered 10 research questions which led to the conclusion that k-NN is a worthy candidate for data stream classification, especially when the run-time constraint is not too restrictive.Comment: 25 pages, 10 tables, 7 figures + 30 pages appendi

Effect of age and sex on echocardiographic left ventricular diastolic function parameters in patients with preserved ejection fraction and normal valvular function

Background: We conducted a retrospective study to specify the effect of age and gender on echocardiographic left ventricular diastolic function parameters.Methods: We included echocardiograms done in our institution between 1995 and 2007, for which data on diastolic function were available. In order to target a population as close aspossible to healthy subjects, echocardiograms reporting abnormal contraction, valvulopathy or extreme data were excluded.Results: A total of 14,298 patients (mean age 58.53 years; men 49.1%) were included in the study. Sex did not influence E/A ratio (p = 0.298) but age decreased it significantly (p < 0.001). E/e ratio increased significantly with age (p < 0.001) and was higher in women than in men (p < 0.001). After the age of 40, more than 10% of the patients had an E/e ratio superior than 8.Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the most imposing study — in terms of number of patients from first to tenth decade of life that were included — addressing the effect of age and gender on diastolic function. Our results stress the need for future prospective trials to establishnormal diastolic function parameters according to age and gender, notably for the E/e ratio for which a significant proportion of our population had a ratio superior of what is actually considered normal

State-of-the-art stochastic data assimilation methods for high-dimensional non-Gaussian problems

This paper compares several commonly used state-of-the-art ensemble-based data assimilation methods in a coherent mathematical notation. The study encompasses different methods that are applicable to high-dimensional geophysical systems, like ocean and atmosphere, and provide an uncertainty estimate. Most variants of Ensemble Kalman Filters, Particle Filters and second-order exact methods are discussed, including Gaussian Mixture Filters, while methods that require an adjoint model or a tangent linear formulation of the model are excluded. The detailed description of all the methods in a mathematically coherent way provides both novices and experienced researchers with a unique overview and new insight in the workings and relative advantages of each method, theoretically and algorithmically, even leading to new filters. Furthermore, the practical implementation details of all ensemble and particle filter methods are discussed to show similarities and differences in the filters aiding the users in what to use when. Finally, pseudo-codes are provided for all of the methods presented in this paper

An atypical cyclin-dependent kinase controls Plasmodium falciparum proliferation rate

Malaria parasites multiply in human erythrocytes through schizogony, a process characterised by nuclear divisions in the absence of cytokinesis, leading to the formation of a multinucleated schizont from which individual daughter cells are subsequently generated. Here, we provide evidence that parasites lines lacking Pfcrk-5, an atypical cyclin-dependent kinase, display a reduced parasitemia growth rate linked to a decrease in the number of daughter nuclei produced by each schizont. We show that in vitro activity of recombinant Pfcrk-5 is indeed cyclin-dependent and that the enzyme localises to the nuclear periphery. Thus, Pfcrk-5 is part of a regulatory pathway that mediates the proliferation rate of Plasmodium falciparum through the control of nuclear divisions during schizogony

Public School Choice: An Economic Analysis

Abstract Public school choice programs, also known as open enrollment or intra-district choice programs, give households a free choice of public school and provide public schools with incentives to compete for students. Supporters of these programs argue that by injecting market forces into the public school system, they will improve the quality of the education that public schools provide. Critics counter that because households' perceptions of school quality depend on the composition of the student body as well as the efforts of school personnel (i.e., households have peer preferences), this market logic may not go through. In this paper we advance this debate by developing and analyzing an economic model of public school choice. A distinctive feature of our model is that households have peer preferences. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, we show that public school choice programs have ambiguous effects on welfare. Second, with respect to school quality, we show that public school choice programs generate a type of equity-efficiency trade-off. In particular, in the settings in which these programs generate the largest increases in average quality, they also exacerbate the gap between the quality of advantaged and disadvantaged schools. Third, we show that outcomes under these programs could be improved by auxiliary policies that help disadvantaged students to exercise choice and provide schools with stronger incentives to enroll disadvantaged students. * For helpful comments and discussions, we than

Gardens and Tourism for and beyond economic profit

Gardens and Tourism for and beyond economic profit é o segundo volume da Collection of Gardens and Landscape Studies, coordenada por Ana Duarte Rodrigues. Conta com textos de Alexandra Gago da Câmara, Ana Duarte Rodrigues, António Lamas, Antonio Perla de las Parras, Celso Mangucci, Desidério Batista, Filipe Benjamim, Ignacio Rodriguez Somovilla, Jean-Paul Brigand, Maria Isabel Donas Botto, Nuno Oliveira, Paulo Carvalho, Susana Silva e Victoria Soto Caba. Assumindo uma perspectiva multidisciplinar das áreas da história da arte, arquitectura paisagista, literatura e geografia, e reunindo académicos e profissionais que operam na área do Garden Tourism, este livro constitui um trabalho inaugural nos estudos de jardins e paisagem. Certamente que constitui um balanço baseado em casos de estudo das potencialidades do turismo de jardins em Portugal, mas também aponta caminhos e hipóteses de trabalho num futuro próximo. Constitui um convite a que todos os interessados na preservação e promoção deste património se unam para criar as ferramentas necessárias à sua dinamização e salvaguarda para o futuro