Lessons of the Wage Dynamics Network

The Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) is a temporary research network with the main objective of identifying the characteristics of wage dynamics and drawing conclusions from them in monetary policy terms. The paper presents the main findings of this research work. Notably, the intersectoral wage differential can be partly attributed to differences in profitability and the degree of competition to which the sectors are exposed. Nominal wages are adjusted less frequently than prices and adjustments generally tend to be made at regular intervals rather than in response to the economic climate. Wage rigidity not only affects existing workers, but also new recruits. The euro area, and Belgium in particular, is marked more by rigid real wages than nominal wages. Real wage rigidity implies a low optimal inflation rate and tends to complicate the conduct of monetary policy since it triggers greater fluctuations in output and employment and makes inflation more persistent. Furthermore, in a monetary union, countries with higher real wage rigidity suffer a loss of competitiveness in the event of negative productivity shocks. Institutions underlying wagesetting generally play an important role in the way in which firms and economies react to shocks. The heterogeneity of these institutions within the euro area therefore presents a real challenge for monetary policy.firms’ behavior, wage rigidity, employment, monetary policy, labour market flexibility, labour market institutions, economic shocks

Looking backward: From Euler to Riemann

We survey the main ideas in the early history of the subjects on which Riemann worked and that led to some of his most important discoveries. The subjects discussed include the theory of functions of a complex variable, elliptic and Abelian integrals, the hypergeometric series, the zeta function, topology, differential geometry, integration, and the notion of space. We shall see that among Riemann's predecessors in all these fields, one name occupies a prominent place, this is Leonhard Euler. The final version of this paper will appear in the book \emph{From Riemann to differential geometry and relativity} (L. Ji, A. Papadopoulos and S. Yamada, ed.) Berlin: Springer, 2017

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Ethnicity and sexuality

This paper explores the connections between ethnicity and sexuality. Racial, ethnic, and national boundaries are also sexual boundaries. The borderlands dividing racial, ethnic, and national identities and communities constitute ethnosexual frontiers, erotic intersections that are heavily patrolled, policed, and protected, yet regularly are penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic "others." Normative heterosexuality is a central component of racial, ethnic, and nationalist ideologies; both adherence to and deviation from approved sexual identities and behaviors define and reinforce racial, ethnic, and nationalist regimes. To illustrate the ethnicity/sexuality nexus and to show the utility of revealing this intimate bond for understanding ethnic relations, I review constructionist models of ethnicity and sexuality in the social sciences and humanities, and I discuss ethnosexual boundary processes in several historical and contemporary settings: the sexual policing of nationalism, sexual aspects of US-American Indian relations, and the sexualization of the black-white color line

Differential effect of immune cells on non-pathogenic Gram-negative bacteria-induced nuclear factor-κB activation and pro-inflammatory gene expression in intestinal epithelial cells

We have previously shown that non-pathogenic Gram negative bacteria induce RelA phosphorylation, nuclear factor (NF)-κB transcriptional activity and pro-inflammatory gene expression in intestinal epithelial cells (IEC) in vivo and in vitro. In this study, we investigated the molecular mechanism of immune-epithelial cell cross-talk on Gram-negative enteric bacteria-induced NF-κB signalling and pro-inflammatory gene expression in IEC using HT-29/MTX as well as CaCO-2 transwell cultures Interestingly, while differentiated HT-29/MTX cells are unresponsive to non-pathogenic Gram negative bacterial stimulation, interleukin-8 (IL-8) mRNA accumulation is strongly induced in Escherichia coli- but not Bacteroides vulgatus-stimulated IEC cocultured with peripheral blood (PBMC) and lamina propria mononuclear cells (LPMC). The presence of PBMC triggered both E. coli- and B. vulgatus-induced mRNA expression of the Toll-like receptor-4 accessory protein MD-2 as well as endogenous IκBα phosphorylation, demonstrating similar capabilities of these bacteria to induce proximal NF-κB signalling. However, B. vulgatus failed to trigger IκBα degradation and NF-κB transcriptional activity in the presence of PBMC. Interestingly, B. vulgatus- and E. coli-derived lipopolysaccharide-induced similar IL-8 mRNA expression in epithelial cells after basolateral stimulation of HT-29/PBMC cocultures. Although luminal enteric bacteria have adjuvant and antigenic properties in chronic intestinal inflammation, PBMC from patients with active ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease differentially trigger epithelial cell activation in response to E. coli and E. coli-derived LPS. In conclusion, this study provides evidence for a differential regulation of non-pathogenic Gram-negative bacteria-induced NF-κB signalling and IL-8 gene expression in IEC cocultured with immune cells and suggests the presence of mechanisms that assure hyporesponsiveness of the intestinal epithelium to certain commensally enteric bacteria