School attendance of children and the work of mothers: a joint multilevel model for India.

This paper investigates the determinants of school attendance of children and their mother’s working status when the mother decides how to allocate her time and that of her children. A multilevel random effects model is applied to study the mother’s participation and the schooling status of her children in a joint framework. Using the second National Family Health Survey (NFHS-2) for India, we find that, controlling for many covariates among which wealth is the most powerful predictor, children of working mothers have a lower probability of attending school. This, together with the result that only illiterate and poor mothers with unskilled or unemployed partners have a high probability of working, points to the need for decent labour market opportunities for females. An implication of our findings is that any policy aiming both at enhancing women’s empowerment through labour and increasing children’s welfare should also target improvements in women’s conditions in the labour market

Implementing Mindfulness in General Life and Organizations. Validation of the Time Flow Mindfulness Questionnaire for Effective Health Management

The primary purpose of the current research was to examine the psychometric properties of the Time Flow Mindfulness Questionnaire (TFMQ), a new self-report scale designed to measure cognitive, emotional, bodily, context-related, and action-related distracting inputs experienced by the mind during three different time windows of mindfulness practice (preliminary moments, during-the-practice, after-the-practice). The 42-item scale assesses the following second-order and first-order factors: Practice (preliminary, during), Benefits (short-term, long-term) and Benefits at work. Three studies were conducted. The first study assessed the factor structure and internal consistency on a sample of 141 mindfulness practitioners. Using a two-wave lagged design on a different sample of 46 trainees attending MBSR courses, the second study examined concurrent validity by performing correlations between the TFMQ and Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ). The third study (same sample as study 1) examined criterion validity by testing a structural equation model wherein mindfulness practice predicts job burnout, both directly and indirectly through mindfulness benefits at work. All studies relied on anonymous surveys. Our findings suggest that the TFMQ: a) has a factor structure consistent with the hypothesized conceptual dimensions; b) has good concurrent validity as demonstrated by significant correlations with the FFMQ dimensions; and c) consists of mindfulness dimensions that predict job burnout in organizations (i.e., criterion validity). The TFMQ is a valid and reliable mindfulness measure that may help a) practitioners gain awareness of different types of inputs that potentially distract the mind and mindfulness beneficial consequences, and b) organizations implement mindfulness in work-settings

A Framework for QoS- Enabled Semantic Routing in Industrial Networks: Overall Architecture and Primary Protocols

The manufacturing sector represents a notable use case of the Industry 4.0 revolution, heavily stressing the capability of plants to ensure the desired QoS. Currently, manufacturing plants are characterized by an increasing amount of non-mission-critical traffic, in addition to traditional mission-critical safety-related traffic, which is negligible in comparison. Since computing and networking capabilities are no longer as abundant as in the past, there is the need to properly manage available resources. To ensure challenging QoS requirements, we propose a novel protocol suite specifically designed for our QoS-enabled semantic routing framework. Such a framework adopts an architecture that fits the characteristics of modern manufacturing environments and exploits an overlay networking solution providing a semantic routing substrate that operates both at the application and network layers

Evaluation of vision in gnathological and orthodontic patients with temporomandibular disorders: a prospective experimental observational cohort study

Objectives: Temporomandibular disorders (TMDs), orthodontic diseases, and vision dysfunctions seem to be strictly related. The purpose of this study was to prove the relationship, to evaluate the prevalence and the distribution of vision defects in dysfunctional and orthodontic patients, and to establish the type of the relationship. Materials and Methods: A total of 100 patients with TMDs were selected and studied through epidemiological analyses of the following factors: gnathological parameters (temporomandibular joint pathologies according to Diagnostic Criteria for Temporomandibular Disorders); occlusal and skeletal parameters (overjet, overbite, dental class, transversal discrepancies, and mandibular asymmetry); and orthoptic parameters (refractive defects and oculomotor diseases). A prospective experimental observational cohort study was conducted. A comparison with the average frequency of vision defects of the Italian population was performed. The prevalence of vision defects was evaluated. All gnathological and orthodontic parameters were associated with the orthoptic ones. A descriptive and statistical analysis of the data was carried out with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences software; z test (P 0.05), frequency analysis (frequency 50%), chi-square test, and Student's t test (P 0.05) were performed. The scientific consistency was evaluated by using the scientific criteria of Bradford Hill. Results: The comparison with the Italian population showed a higher frequency of refractive defects in the study sample (P 0.001). The most frequent vision defects were phorias (92%) and tropia (3%). The increased frequency of ocular convergence reduction in the presence of disc displacement with reduction was significant (n = 28; 60%; P 0.05). In the presence of asymmetry, low frequencies of astigmatism (n = 18; 30%) were observed compared to its absence (n = 22; 54%) (P 0.05) and high frequencies of motor ocular deviations (n = 59; 100%) were observed compared to its absence (n = 36; 88%) (P 0.05). In the presence of headache, low frequencies of emmetropia (n = 13; 22%) and higher frequencies of hyperopia (n = 18; 30%) were observed (P 0.05). Two of five scientific criteria of Bradford Hill were met. Conclusion: It seems to emerge a possible positive relationship between TMD and vision defects. In particular, the most interesting associations were found between functional or skeletal orthognathic alterations and oculomotor dysfunctions. However, it was not possible to establish the type of relationship

A tutorial on optimal control and reinforcement learning methods for quantum technologies

Quantum Optimal Control is an established field of research which is necessary for the development of Quantum Technologies. In recent years, Machine Learning techniques have been proved useful to tackle a variety of quantum problems. In particular, Reinforcement Learning has been employed to address typical problems of control of quantum systems. In this tutorial we introduce the methods of Quantum Optimal Control and Reinforcement Learning by applying them to the problem of three-level population transfer. The jupyter notebooks to reproduce some of our results are open-sourced and available on github1