A simple statistical method for measuring how life events affect happiness

Background Life events—like illness, marriage, or unemployment—have important effects on people. But there is no accepted way to measure the different sizes of these events upon human happiness and psychological health. By using happiness regression equations, economists have recently developed a method. Methods We estimate happiness regressions using large random samples of individuals. The relative coefficients of income and life events on happiness allow us to calculate a monetary ‘compensating amount’ for each kind of life event. Results The paper calculates the impact of different life events upon human well-being. Getting married, for instance, is calculated to bring each year the same amount of happiness, on average, as having an extra £70 000 of income per annum. The psychological costs of losing a job greatly exceed those from the pure drop in income. Health is hugely important to happiness. Widowhood brings a degree of unhappiness that would take, on average, an extra £170 000 per annum to offset. Well-being regressions also allow us to assess one of the oldest conjectures in social science—that well-being depends not just on absolute things but inherently on comparisons with other people. We find evidence for comparison effects. Conclusion We believe that the new statistical method has many applications. In principle, it can be used to value any kind of event in life

The curved relationship between subjective well-being and age

This article is concerned with a body of work on happiness and age represented by important papers such as Mroczek and Kolarz (1998) and Mroczek and Spiro (2005). Using a large British data set, the paper presents new longitudinal evidence. It also points out that, perhaps unknown to many psychologists, a parallel literature on this topic exists in economics journals. The paper shows that subjective well-being follows a U-shape through the life course. We argue that eventually the two literatures will have to be made consistent with one another, and suggest that, although it is not easy to live in both worlds, with their different styles and conventions, economists and psychologists still have much to learn from one another.happiness ; ageing ; well-being

Optical Characterisation of MOVPE Grown Vertically Correlated InAs/GaAs Quantum Dots

Structures with self-organised InAs quantum dots in a GaAs matrix were grown by the low pressure metal-organic vapour phase epitaxy (LP-MOVPE) technique. Photoluminescence in combination with photomodulated reflectance spectroscopy were used as the main characterisation methods for the growth optimisation. Results show that photoreflectance spectroscopy is an excellent tool for characterisation of QD structures wetting layers (thickness and composition) and for identification of spacers in vertically stacked QDs structures.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions (http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions

The curved relationship between subjective well-being and age

This article is concerned with a body of work on happiness and age represented by important papers such as Mroczek and Kolarz (1998) and Mroczek and Spiro (2005). Using a large British data set, the paper presents new longitudinal evidence. It also points out that, perhaps unknown to many psychologists, a parallel literature on this topic exists in economics journals. The paper shows that subjective well-being follows a U-shape through the life course. We argue that eventually the two literatures will have to be made consistent with one another, and suggest that, although it is not easy to live in both worlds, with their different styles and conventions, economists and psychologists still have much to learn from one another.Cet article réagit à un courant de recherche récent sur le bien-être et l'âge, dont deux exemples importants sont Mroczek et Kolarz (1998) et Mroczek et Spiro (2005). Nous présentons de nouveaux résultats, à partir de données de panel britanniques. Nous signalons aussi, peut être à l'insu de nombreux de psychologues, l'existence d'une importante littérature en économie montrant une relation en forme de U entre bien-être subjectif et âge. Les résultats de cet article confirment cette relation en forme de U. Notre conclusion générale est que nous devrions essayer de rendre cohérentes les conclusions des travaux économiques et psychologiques; malgré des différences de style, économistes et psychologues ont beaucoup à apprendre les uns des autres

Relationship between hippocampal structure and memory function in elderly humans

With progressing age, the ability to recollect personal events declines, whereas familiarity-based memory remains relatively intact. It has been hypothesized that age-related hippocampal atrophy may contribute to this pattern because of its critical role for recollection in younger humans and after acute injury. Here, we show that hippocampal volume loss in healthy older persons correlates with gray matter loss (estimated with voxel-based morphometry) of the entire limbic system and shows no correlation with an electrophysiological (event-related potential [ERP]) index of recollection. Instead, it covaries with more substantial and less specific electrophysiological changes of stimulus processing. Age-related changes in another complementary structural measure, hippocampal diffusion, on the other hand, seemed to be more regionally selective and showed the expected correlation with the ERP index of recollection. Thus, hippocampal atrophy in older persons accompanies limbic atrophy, and its functional impact on memory is more fundamental than merely affecting recollection

Estimating novel potential drug targets of Plasmodium falciparum by analysing the metabolic network of knock-out strains in silico

Malaria is one of the world’s most common and serious diseases causing death of about 3 million people each year. Its most severe occurrence is caused by the protozoan Plasmodium falciparum. Biomedical research could enable treating the disease by effectively and specifically targeting essential enzymes of this parasite. However, the parasite has developed resistance to existing drugsmaking it indispensable to discover new drugs. We have established a simple computational tool which analyses the topology of the metabolic network of P. falciparum to identify essential enzymes as possible drug targets.Weinvestigated the essentiality of a reaction in the metabolic network by deleting (knocking-out) such a reaction in silico. The algorithmselected neighbouring compounds of the investigated reaction that had to be produced by alternative biochemical pathways. Using breadth first searches, we tested qualitatively if these products could be generated by reactions that serve as potential deviations of the metabolic flux. With this we identified 70 essential reactions. Our results were compared with a comprehensive list of 38 targets of approved malaria drugs. When combining our approach with an in silico analysis performed recently [Yeh, I., Hanekamp, T., Tsoka, S., Karp, P.D., Altman, R.B., 2004. Computational analysis of Plasmodium falciparum metabolism: organizing genomic information to facilitate drug discovery. Genome Res. 14, 917–924] we could improve the precision of the prediction results. Finally we present a refined list of 22 new potential candidate targets for P. falciparum, half of which have reasonable evidence to be valid targets against micro-organisms and cancer

Exploring Parallelism to Improve the Performance of FrodoKEM in Hardware

FrodoKEM is a lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism, currently a semi-finalist in NIST’s post-quantum standardisation effort. A condition for these candidates is to use NIST standards for sources of randomness (i.e. seed-expanding), and as such most candidates utilise SHAKE, an XOF defined in the SHA-3 standard. However, for many of the candidates, this module is a significant implementation bottleneck. Trivium is a lightweight, ISO standard stream cipher which performs well in hardware and has been used in previous hardware designs for lattice-based cryptography. This research proposes optimised designs for FrodoKEM, concentrating on high throughput by parallelising the matrix multiplication operations within the cryptographic scheme. This process is eased by the use of Trivium due to its higher throughput and lower area consumption. The parallelisations proposed also complement the addition of first-order masking to the decapsulation module. Overall, we significantly increase the throughput of FrodoKEM; for encapsulation we see a 16 × speed-up, achieving 825 operations per second, and for decapsulation we see a 14 × speed-up, achieving 763 operations per second, compared to the previous state of the art, whilst also maintaining a similar FPGA area footprint of less than 2000 slices.</p

Sensing Subjective Well-being from Social Media

Subjective Well-being(SWB), which refers to how people experience the quality of their lives, is of great use to public policy-makers as well as economic, sociological research, etc. Traditionally, the measurement of SWB relies on time-consuming and costly self-report questionnaires. Nowadays, people are motivated to share their experiences and feelings on social media, so we propose to sense SWB from the vast user generated data on social media. By utilizing 1785 users' social media data with SWB labels, we train machine learning models that are able to "sense" individual SWB from users' social media. Our model, which attains the state-by-art prediction accuracy, can then be used to identify SWB of large population of social media users in time with very low cost.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figures, 2 tables, 10th International Conference, AMT 2014, Warsaw, Poland, August 11-14, 2014. Proceeding

Hierarchy of stratigraphic forcing: Example from Middle Pennsylvanian shelf carbonates of the Paradox basin

Middle Pennsylvanian (Desmoinesian) shelf carbonates in the southwestern Paradox basin display three superimposed orders of stratigraphic cyclicity with a systematic vertical succession of facies, cycle, and sequence stacking patterns. Fifth-order cycles [34 cycles in a 645-ft (197-m) section; average 20 ft (6.1 m) thick; mean period 29,000 years] are grouped into fourth-order sequences [average 100 ft (30 m) thick; mean period 257,000 years], which in turn stack vertically to define a third-order sequence [650+ ft (200+ m) thick; 2-3 m.y. duration]. Fifth-order cycles are composed of shallow ing-upward packages of predominantly subtidal shelf carbonates with sharp cycle boundaries (either exposure or flooding surfaces). Fifth-order cycles are packaged into fourth-order sequences bounded by regionally correlative subaerial exposure surfaces. These type 1 sequences contain a downdip, restricted lowstand wedge of evaporites and quartz clastics in topographic lows on the Paradox shelf (intrashelf depressions). The lowstand systems tract is overlain by a regionally correlative transgressive shaly mudstone (condensed section) and a highstand systems tract composed of thinning-upward, aggradational fifth-order cycles. Systematic variation in the thickness of fourth-order sequences (thinning upward followed by thickening upward) and systematic variations in the number of fifth-order cycles and fourth-order sequences (decreasing followed by increasing number) defines a third-order accommodation trend that is also regionally correlative. High-frequency cycles and sequences are interpreted as predominantly aggradational allocycles generated in response to composite fourth- and fifth-order glacio-eustatic sea-level fluctuations. Two different orbital forcing (Milankovitch) scenarios are evaluated to explain the composite stratigraphic cyclicity of the Paradox sequences, each of which is plausible given Desmoinesian age estimates. The cycle, sequence, and facies stacking patterns have been replicated by means of computer modeling by superimposing composite high-frequency glacio-eustasy atop regional subsidence using depth-dependent, sedimentation