Education promoted secularization

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of advanced-school enrollment and Protestant church attendance in German cities between 1890 and 1930. Our cross-sectional estimates replicate a positive association. By contrast, in panel models where fixed effects account for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, education – but not income or urbanization – is negatively related to church attendance. In panel models with lagged explanatory variables, educational expansion precedes reduced church attendance

Education and religious participation : city-level evidence from Germany’s secularization period 1890–1930

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of advanced-school enrollment and Protestant church attendance in German cities between 1890 and 1930. Our cross-sectional estimates replicate a positive association. By contrast, in panel models where fixed effects account for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, education—but not income or urbanization—is negatively related to church attendance. In panel models with lagged explanatory variables, educational expansion precedes reduced church attendance, while the reverse is not true. Dynamic panel models with lagged dependent variables and instrumental-variable models using variation in school supply confirm the results. The pattern of results across school types is most consistent with a mechanism of increased critical thinking in general rather than specific knowledge of natural sciences

Weak Markets, Strong Teachers: Recession at Career Start and Teacher Effectiveness

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide the first causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess teacher quality with value-added measures of impacts on student test scores, using administrative data on 33,000 teachers in Florida public schools. Consistent with a Roy model of occupational choice, teachers entering the profession during recessions are significantly more effective in raising student test scores. Results are supported by placebo tests and not driven by differential attrition

How Antitrust Enforcement Can Spur Innovation

We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having foreclosed the market for telecommunications equipment. The terms of the decree allowed Bell to remain a vertically integrated monopolist in the telecommunications industry, but as a remedy, Bell had to license all its existing patents royalty-free. Thus, the path-breaking technologies developed by the Bell Laboratories became freely available to all US companies. We show that in the first five years compulsory licensing increased follow-on innovation building on Bell patents by 17%. This effect is driven mainly by young and small companies. Yet, innovation increased only outside the telecommunications equipment industry. The lack of a positive innovation effect in the telecommunications industry suggests that market foreclosure impedes innovation and that compulsory licensing without structural remedies is ineffective in ending it. The increase of follow-on innovation by small and young companies is in line with the hypothesis that patents held by a dominant firm act as a barrier to entry for start-ups. We show that the removal of this barrier increased long-run U.S. innovation, corroborating historical accounts

Disclosure and subsequent innovation: evidence from the patent depository library program

How important is access to patent documents for subsequent innovation? We examine the expansion of the USPTO Patent Library system after 1975. Patent libraries provided access to patents before the Internet. We find that after patent library opening, local patenting increases by 8–20 percent relative to similar regions. Additional analyses suggest that disclosure of technical information drives this effect: inventors increasingly take up ideas from outside their region, and the effect is strongest in technologies where patents are more informative. We thus provide evidence that disclosure plays an important role in cumulative innovation.SES-1564368 and SES-1564381 - National Science FoundationPublished versio

Direct observation of the band gap transition in atomically thin ReS2_2

ReS$_2$ is considered as a promising candidate for novel electronic and sensor applications. The low crystal symmetry of the van der Waals compound ReS$_2$ leads to a highly anisotropic optical, vibrational, and transport behavior. However, the details of the electronic band structure of this fascinating material are still largely unexplored. We present a momentum-resolved study of the electronic structure of monolayer, bilayer, and bulk ReS$_2$ using k-space photoemission microscopy in combination with first-principles calculations. We demonstrate that the valence electrons in bulk ReS$_2$ are - contrary to assumptions in recent literature - significantly delocalized across the van der Waals gap. Furthermore, we directly observe the evolution of the valence band dispersion as a function of the number of layers, revealing a significantly increased effective electron mass in single-layer crystals. We also find that only bilayer ReS$_2$ has a direct band gap. Our results establish bilayer ReS$_2$ as a advantageous building block for two-dimensional devices and van der Waals heterostructures

Applied system analysis and technology of designing the software

An analogy is made between the stages of applied system analysis and the stages of software Engineerin

An instructive role for Interleukin-7 receptor α in the development of human B-cell precursor leukemia

© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Kinase signaling fuels growth of B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (BCP-ALL). Yet its role in leukemia initiation is unclear and has not been shown in primary human hematopoietic cells. We previously described activating mutations in interleukin-7 receptor alpha (IL7RA) in poor-prognosis "ph-like" BCP-ALL. Here we show that expression of activated mutant IL7RA in human CD34+ hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells induces a preleukemic state in transplanted immunodeficient NOD/LtSz-scid IL2Rγnull mice, characterized by persistence of self-renewing Pro-B cells with non-productive V(D)J gene rearrangements. Preleukemic CD34+CD10highCD19+ cells evolve into BCP-ALL with spontaneously acquired Cyclin Dependent Kinase Inhibitor 2 A (CDKN2A) deletions, as commonly observed in primary human BCP-ALL. CRISPR mediated gene silencing of CDKN2A in primary human CD34+ cells transduced with activated IL7RA results in robust development of BCP-ALLs in-vivo. Thus, we demonstrate that constitutive activation of IL7RA can initiate preleukemia in primary human hematopoietic progenitors and cooperates with CDKN2A silencing in progression into BCP-ALL.This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (# 1178/12 to S.I.), Children with Cancer (UK) (S.I. and T.E.), Swiss Bridge Foundation (S.I.), WLBH Foundation (S.I.), Waxman Cancer Research Foundation (S.I.), US–Israel Binational Science Foundation, Israeli health ministry ERA-NET program (#CANCER11-FP-127 to S.I.), Hans Neufeld Stiftung, the International Collaboration Grant from the Jacki and Bruce Barron Cancer Research Scholars’ Program, a partnership of the Israel Cancer Research Fund and City of Hope (S.I. grants # 00161), the Nevzlin Genomic Center for Precision Medicine in Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, The European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813091 (S.I.) and the Israel Childhood Cancer Foundation (S.I.). I.G. was partially supported by Israeli ministry of Immigrant Absorption.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio