The life expectancy gains from pharmaceutical drugs: a critical appraisal of the literature

Several studies suggest that, on the basis of life expectancy (LE) regressions, new pharmaceutical drugs are responsible for some of the marked gains in LE observed over the last 50 years. We critically appraise these studies. We point out several modeling issues, including disentangling the contribution of new drugs from advances in disease management, changes in the distribution of health care and other confounding factors. We suggest that the studies estimates of pharmaceutical productivity are implausibly high. Some of the models have very large forecast errors. Finally, the models that we replicated were found to be sensitive to seemingly innocuous changes in specification. We conclude that it is difficult to estimate the bio-medical determinants of LE using aggregate data. Analyses using individual level data or perhaps disease specific data will likely produce more compelling results.pharmaceuticals, life expectancy, health production, treatment effects

PyHST2: an hybrid distributed code for high speed tomographic reconstruction with iterative reconstruction and a priori knowledge capabilities

We present the PyHST2 code which is in service at ESRF for phase-contrast and absorption tomography. This code has been engineered to sustain the high data flow typical of the third generation synchrotron facilities (10 terabytes per experiment) by adopting a distributed and pipelined architecture. The code implements, beside a default filtered backprojection reconstruction, iterative reconstruction techniques with a-priori knowledge. These latter are used to improve the reconstruction quality or in order to reduce the required data volume and reach a given quality goal. The implemented a-priori knowledge techniques are based on the total variation penalisation and a new recently found convex functional which is based on overlapping patches. We give details of the different methods and their implementations while the code is distributed under free license. We provide methods for estimating, in the absence of ground-truth data, the optimal parameters values for a-priori techniques

Déterminants de la décision de consolider les filiales de financement : le cas de la France

International audienceCes dernières années, le problème du financement hors bilan a été une préoccupation constante pour les organismes de normalisation de la comptabilité. L'objet de cette recherche est de comprendre les motivations des dirigeants d'entreprises par rapport à un certain type de financement hors bilan que constitue l'exclusion des filiales de financement du périmètre de consolidation. Nous étudions un échantillon de sociétés françaises cotées en Bourse pour lequel 39% des entreprises n'ont pas consolidé leurs filiales de financement. Cette pratique comptable est toujours permise dans plusieurs pays européens. Nos résultats montrent que le niveau d'endettement de l'entreprise, de même que sa taille et la structure de l'actionnariat sont déterminants dans la décision d'exclure les filiales de financement du périmètre de consolidation

Déterminants de la décision de consolider les filiales de financement : le cas de la France

Ces dernières années, le problème du financement hors bilan a été une préoccupation constante pour les organismes de normalisation de la comptabilité. L'objet de cette recherche est de comprendre les motivations des dirigeants d'entreprises par rapport à un certain type de financement hors bilan que constitue l'exclusion des filiales de financement du périmètre de consolidation. Nous étudions un échantillon de sociétés françaises cotées en Bourse pour lequel 39% des entreprises n'ont pas consolidé leurs filiales de financement. Cette pratique comptable est toujours permise dans plusieurs pays européens. Nos résultats montrent que le niveau d'endettement de l'entreprise, de même que sa taille et la structure de l'actionnariat sont déterminants dans la décision d'exclure les filiales de financement du périmètre de consolidation.Consolidation; filiales de financement; théorie politico-contractuelle de la comptabilité; financement hors bilan; coûts d'information

Virtual Interactive Tablet to Support Vocational Training in Immersive Environment

International audienceThis paper presents a tool designed to assist a virtual reality learner in a vocational training context. The benefits of VR are spreading outside the video-games and research field, leading the vocational education institutions to consider using this technology for training purposes. By simulating emblematic professional situations, teachers can train students in good conditions regarding safety, logistics and financial resources. In the French vocational training system, VR is just at its beginnings and the lack of experiments with this training context highlighted the need for new tools allowing teachers to use VR with their students. The work presented in this paper is part of a global project aiming to create, design and assess new VR tools and methodologies for this specific context. In order to guide, inform and assist the user, we are presenting a generic tool that can ease VR sessions by proposing embedded tools within easy reach of the immersed user, such as a camera, an inventory, a printer or stock management. This tool is a virtual tablet that can be grabbed by the immersed user allowing her/him to interact efficiently with the virtual environment

Simulation Tools for the Design of Virtual Training Environments

International audienceVirtual Reality (VR) for Education is spreading around and more and more training centers want to provide digital training, especially using VR technologies. The VR market is in full growth and many companies, startups and research teams are working on developing VR for Education on a large scale. Many domains are concerned by this learning digitalization, like science (Oliveira et al., 2019), military (Taupiac, 2018) and so on. The benefits of VR for education are numerous (Mano, 2019) and deeply investigated since the beginning of VR. There are many approaches in the process of training with VR, particularly since the commercialization of new VR headsets like HTC Vive™ and Oculus Rift™. Those headsets allow room scale tracking and are shipped with 3D space tracked controllers, granting a better user experience and a higher diversity in virtual training situations. New headsets are also affordable and so not only reserved for industrials, research or military, leading to new use of VR. In the VR industry, we have noticed some approaches used for the design of scenario. One classic approach is "serious game" that mainly consists in cloning classical educational games to VR, like point and clicks, 360° videos (Rupp et al., 2016) or dialog tree situations. The main interest of this category relies on existing projects and previous experiences with "standard serious games". The drawback is about the freshness of VR: it may not be suitable for those existing projects that were working nicely on a 2D screen. This kind of transposition could lead to atrocious user experiences and the underuse of the potential of VR. For educational purposes, other developers have followed another path: replicate reality. The main purpose is to provide situations that mimic real life situations. With this, training users with a high degree of realism eases skills transfer from VR to real situations. Realism can be achieved i

Betting on the Lord: Lotteries and Religiosity in Haiti

We conducted an experimental study in Haiti testing for the relationship between religious belief and individual risk taking behavior. 774 subjects played lotteries in a standard neutral protocol and subsequently with reduced endowments but in the presence of religious images of Catholic, Protestant and Voodoo tradition. Subjects chose between paying to play a lottery with an image of their choice, and saving their money to play with no image. Those who chose the former are dened as image buyers and those who chose the latter as non-buyers. Image buyers, who tend to be less educated, more rural, and to exhibit greater religiosity, bet more than non-buyers in all games. In addition, in the presence of religious images all participants took more risk, and buyer took more risk when playing in the presence of their chosen images than when playing with other images. We develop a theoretical model calibrated with our experimental data to explore the channels through which religious images might aect risk-taking. Our results suggest that the presence of images tends to increase individuals' subjective probability of winning the lottery, and that subjects therefore believe in a god who intervenes actively in the world in response to their requests

Betting on the Lord: Lotteries and Religiosity in Haiti

We conducted an experimental study in Haiti testing for the relationship between religious belief and individual risk taking behavior. 774 subjects played lotteries in a standard neutral protocol and subsequently with reduced endowments but in the presence of religious images of Catholic, Protestant and Voodoo tradition. Subjects chose between paying to play a lottery with an image of their choice, and saving their money to play with no image. Those who chose the former are dened as image buyers and those who chose the latter as non-buyers. Image buyers, who tend to be less educated, more rural, and to exhibit greater religiosity, bet more than non-buyers in all games. In addition, in the presence of religious images all participants took more risk, and buyer took more risk when playing in the presence of their chosen images than when playing with other images. We develop a theoretical model calibrated with our experimental data to explore the channels through which religious images might aect risk-taking. Our results suggest that the presence of images tends to increase individuals' subjective probability of winning the lottery, and that subjects therefore believe in a god who intervenes actively in the world in response to their requests

A Privacy Preserving Distributed Reputation Mechanism

International audienceReputation systems allow to estimate the trustworthiness of entities based on their past behavior. Electronic commerce, peer-to-peer routing and collaborative environments, just to cite a few, highly benefit from using reputation systems. To guarantee an accurate estimation, reputation systems typically rely on a central authority, on the identification and authentication of all the participants, or both. In this paper, we go a step further by presenting a distributed reputation mechanism which is robust against malicious behaviors and that preserves the privacy of its clients. Guaranteed error bounds on the estimation are provided