Influence of aggregation level on yield risk measures

The paper is dedicated to the relationship of data aggregation level and yield variability. For that purpose yields of the major crop plants in Poland are analysed i.e.: winter wheat, triticale, rye, barley, oat, mixed cereals, rape and sugar beet. The research are based on data from Polish FADN from years 2004 – 2009. The samples’ size ranged from 531 to 2893, depending on the plant crop. In the paper six levels of data aggregation are examined, that is: farm, district, powiat1, voivodship, region and country. It was found out that the degree of yield variability reduction (observed with data aggregation) is crop specific. Nevertheless, the relationship between aggregation level and yield variability can be approximated by the same formula for all of the investigated crop plants: ... , where MUA is the average production area in the administrative unite.yield risk, aggregation level, Risk and Uncertainty,

Domain Control for Neural Machine Translation

Machine translation systems are very sensitive to the domains they were trained on. Several domain adaptation techniques have been deeply studied. We propose a new technique for neural machine translation (NMT) that we call domain control which is performed at runtime using a unique neural network covering multiple domains. The presented approach shows quality improvements when compared to dedicated domains translating on any of the covered domains and even on out-of-domain data. In addition, model parameters do not need to be re-estimated for each domain, making this effective to real use cases. Evaluation is carried out on English-to-French translation for two different testing scenarios. We first consider the case where an end-user performs translations on a known domain. Secondly, we consider the scenario where the domain is not known and predicted at the sentence level before translating. Results show consistent accuracy improvements for both conditions.Comment: Published in RANLP 201

Decomposition of Bivariate Inequality Indices by Attributes Revisited

Decomposability of multidimensional inequality indices by attributes is considered a highly desired property. Naga and Geoffard (2006) provided for it in case of three bivariate indices. To this end, they introduced the notion of a copula function into inequality measurement theory which, as a measure of association, is a natural concept for the study of decomposability. We show that the decomposition obtained is unrelated to copulas, and prove that two indices do not admit decomposition if association is indeed measured via copula. Most notably, the proof reveals a necessary property of indices decomposable via copulas which is similar to well-known separability property.multidimensional inequality; decomposition by attributes; copula function

The European Social Fund's influence on labour supply in Poland

The article analyses the use and distribution of the European Social Fund's resources among the Polish regions and identifies the target groups of their beneficiaries. Operations undertaken by offices on labor market are very important not only locally but also regionally. Available forms support creation of work places, help people without professional experience to get or develop new qualification. It is proper to continue mention effects and encourage potential assigns for participation in projects.Wstąpienie Polski do Unii Europejskiej i pozyskanie środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego umożliwiło wojewódzkim i powiatowym urzędom pracy realizację projektów ukierunkowanych na aktywną walkę z bezrobociem. Mimo, iż EFS jest jednym z najstarszych funduszy Unii Europejskiej, to nadal pozostaje jednym z najistotniejszych narzędzi ułatwiającym osobom poszukującym pracę nabycie lub poszerzenie potrzebnych do jej znalezienia umiejętności. Wspiera projekty skierowane do tych, którzy po raz pierwszy poszukują pracy, a także tych, którzy długotrwale pozostają bez pracy

Economic Studies on Public Facility Use

Rietveld, P. [Promotor]Ommeren, J.N. van [Promotor

On Meritocratic Inequality Indices

We establish a Theorem on Structural Inequality Indices which provides fundamental link between inequality measurement and a concept of social justice embedded in meritocracy framework by taking axiomatic approach and redefining standard properties of inequality indices in a way that incorporates meritocracy, in particular equality of opportunity concept of Roemer (1998). Taking into account recent proof Benabou(2000) that meritocracy contributes positively to growth, which break the conventional trade off between equity and efficiency, the theorem provides for their connection with the theory of inequality measurement. If an index is to be both an inequality index and meritocratic it has to be of a form given in our theorem. We then propose a two-dimensional measure of meritocratic inequality index and discuss its advantages over standard Gini index and in reflecting better the nature of inequality in a society.inequality measurement, equality of opportunity, meritocracy, social welfare

Digital PCR as a tool to measure HIV persistence

Although antiretroviral therapy is able to suppress HIV replication in infected patients, the virus persists and rebounds when treatment is stopped. In order to find a cure that can eradicate the latent reservoir, one must be able to quantify the persisting virus. Traditionally, HIV persistence studies have used real-time PCR (qPCR) to measure the viral reservoir represented by HIV DNA and RNA. Most recently, digital PCR is gaining popularity as a novel approach to nucleic acid quantification as it allows for absolute target quantification. Various commercial digital PCR platforms are nowadays available that implement the principle of digital PCR, of which Bio-Rad's QX200 ddPCR is currently the most used platform in HIV research. Quantification of HIV by digital PCR is proving to be a valuable improvement over qPCR as it is argued to have a higher robustness to mismatches between the primers-probe set and heterogeneous HIV, and forfeits the need for a standard curve, both of which are known to complicate reliable quantification. However, currently available digital PCR platforms occasionally struggle with unexplained false-positive partitions, and reliable segregation between positive and negative droplets remains disputed. Future developments and advancements of the digital PCR technology are promising to aid in the accurate quantification and characterization of the persistent HIV reservoir

The potential of combining MATISSE and ALMA observations: Constraining the structure of the innermost region in protoplanetary discs

In order to study the initial conditions of planet formation, it is crucial to obtain spatially resolved multi-wavelength observations of the innermost region of protoplanetary discs. We evaluate the advantage of combining observations with MATISSE/VLTI and ALMA to constrain the radial and vertical structure of the dust in the innermost region of circumstellar discs in nearby star-forming regions. Based on a disc model with a parameterized dust density distribution, we apply 3D radiative-transfer simulations to obtain ideal intensity maps. These are used to derive the corresponding wavelength-dependent visibilities we would obtain with MATISSE as well as ALMA maps simulated with CASA. Within the considered parameter space, we find that constraining the dust density structure in the innermost $5\,$au around the central star is challenging with MATISSE alone, whereas ALMA observations with reasonable integration times allow us to derive significant constraints on the disc surface density. However, we find that the estimation of the different disc parameters can be considerably improved by combining MATISSE and ALMA observations. For example, combining a 30-minute ALMA observation (at 310 GHz with an angular resolution of 0.03$^{\prime\prime}$) for MATISSE observations in the L and M bands (with visibility accuracies of about $3\,\%$) allows the radial density slope and the dust surface density profile to be constrained to within $\Delta \alpha=0.3$ and $\Delta (\alpha-\beta)=0.15$, respectively. For an accuracy of ${\sim 1\%}$ even the disc flaring can be constrained to within $\Delta \beta=0.1$. To constrain the scale height to within $5\,$au, M band accuracies of $0.8\,\%$ are required. While ALMA is sensitive to the number of large dust grains settled to the disc midplane we find that the impact of the surface density distribution of the large grains on the observed quantities is small.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, accepted by A&