The Long-Run Effects of Unemployment Monitoring and Work-Search Programs: Some Experimental Evidence from the U.K.

In this paper we examine the long-term effects of the Restart unemployment program introduced in the U.K. in 1987. The program was aimed at the long-term unemployed and involved a combination of tighter monitoring of benefit eligibility rules and increased job search assistance. We compare employment behaviour over a five-year period for members of a treatment group who participated in the scheme with those of a randomly chosen control group for whom participation was delayed. We find that those who participated in Restart had significantly shorter unemployment durations than those excluded from the program. However, our results also show that the long-run effect of postponing participation in the scheme differs by gender. While there is little evidence of a long-term benefit for women in our sample, the unemployment rate among males in the treatment group was six percentage points lower than that for males in the control group five years after the initial experiment.unemployment

Testing Observational Techniques with 3D MHD Jets in Clusters

Observations of X-ray cavities formed by powerful jets from AGN in galaxy cluster cores are commonly used to estimate the mechanical luminosity of these sources. We test the reliability of observationally measuring this power with synthetic X-ray observations of 3-D MHD simulations of jets in a galaxy cluster environment. We address the role that factors such as jet intermittency and orientation of the jets on the sky have on the reliability of observational measurements of cavity enthalpy and age. An estimate of the errors in these quantities can be made by directly comparing ``observationally'' derived values with values from the simulations. In our tests, cavity enthalpy, age and mechanical luminosity derived from observations are within a factor of two of the simulation values.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; to appear in proceedings of The Monster's Fiery Breath: Feedback in Galaxies, Groups, and Clusters (AIP conference series

Far-infrared absorption and dispersion studies on methyl iodide solutions

A far-infrared dispersive liquid cell has been developed in collaboration with the National Physical Laboratory. This New Liquid Cell enables both the absorption coefficient and refractive index of a liquid to be accurately determined over the complete far-infrared frequency range. The New Liquid Cell has been used to make dispersive measurements of methyl iodide liquid and methyl iodide in a range of non-polar solvents. These were: carbon disulphide; carbon tetrachloride; n-heptane; n-decane; n-hexadecane and Santotrac 40 (an industrial traction fluid). This data has been combined with microwave measurements, enabling the total orientational correlation functions and the band moments to be determined. Results have also been obtained on the rates of reorientation and static angular correlations of methyl iodide molecules. This information on the liquid dynamics of methyl iodide has been used to elucidate the molecular environment of the solvents using methyl iodide as a probe molecule, which has given evidence for the presence of discrete solute 'pools' within the solvent environment for the longer chain length n-alkanes. Two theoretical models for molecular reorientation have been fitted to the experimental data. The first, a second order truncation of the Mori formalism though giving a good fit to the experimental far-infrared absorption coefficient and refractive index spectra, gave values for the molecular torques that did not agree with measured values. The second, a physically more meaningful model is based on the motion of a molecule which is described by a gaussian distribution of librational frequencies within a molecular cage, gives molecular torque values that agree well with experimental results

NPI-1, the human homolog of SRP-1, Interacts with influenza virus nucleoprotein

AbstractWe used the yeast interactive trap system to identify a cellular protein which interacts with the nucleoprotein of influenzaA viruses. This protein, nucleoprotein interactor 1 (NPI-1) is the human homolog of the yeast protein SRP1. SRP1 was previously identified as a suppressor of temperature-sensitive RNA polymerase I mutations (R. Yano, M. Oakes, M. Yamaghishi, J. Dodd, and M. Nomura, Mol. Cell. Biol. 12, 5640–5651, 1992). A full-length cDNA clone of NPI-1 was generated from HeLa cell poly A+ RNA. The viral nucleoprotein, which had been partially purified from influenza A/PR/8/34 virus-infected embryonated eggs, could be coprecipitated from solution by glutathione agarose beads complexed with a bacterially expressed glutathione-S-transferase-NPI-1 fusion protein, confirming the' results of the yeast genetic system. Antisera raised against NPI-1 identified a 60-kDa polypeptide from total cellular extracts of both HeLa and MDBK cells. The viral nucleoprotein was coimmunoprecipitated from influenza A/WSN/33 virus-infected MDBK cells by anti-NPI-1 sera, demonstrating an interaction of these two proteins in infected cells. Similarly, NPI-1 was coimmunoprecipitated from MDBK cells by anti-NP sera. These experiments suggest that NPI-1 plays a role during influenza virus replication

The B subunit of Escherichia coli heat-labile toxin alters the development and antigen-presenting capacity of dendritic cells

Escherichia coli’s heat-labile enterotoxin (Etx) and its non-toxic B subunit (EtxB) have been characterized as adjuvants capable of enhancing T cell responses to co-administered antigen. Here, we investigate the direct effect of intravenously administered EtxB on the size of the dendritic and mye-loid cell populations in spleen. EtxB treatment appears to enhance the development and turnover of dendritic and myeloid cells from precursors within the spleen. EtxB treatment also gives a dendritic cell (DC) population with higher viability and lower activation status based on the reduced expression of MHC-II, CD80 and CD86. In this respect, the in vivo effect of EtxB differs from that of the highly inflammatory mediator lipopolysaccharide. In in vi-tro bone marrow cultures, EtxB treatment was also found to enhance the development of DC from precursors dependent on Flt3L. In terms of the in vivo effect of EtxB on CD4 and CD8 T cell responses in mice, the interaction of EtxB directly with DC was demonstrated following conditional deple-tion of CD11c+ DC. In summary, all results are consistent with EtxB displaying adjuvant ability by enhancing the turnover of DC in spleen, leading to newly mature myeloid and DC in spleen, thereby increasing DC capacity to perform as antigen-presenting cells on encounter with T cells

A generating function approach to the automated evaluation of sums of exponentiated multiples of generalized Catalan number linear combinations.

Based on a previous technique deployed in some specific low order cases, we develop an automated computational procedure to evaluate instances within a class of infinite series comprising exponentiated multiples of generalized linear combinations of Catalan numbers. The methodology is explained, and new results given.N/

Adaptive context tree weighting

We describe an adaptive context tree weighting (ACTW) algorithm, as an extension to the standard context tree weighting (CTW) algorithm. Unlike the standard CTW algorithm, which weights all observations equally regardless of the depth, ACTW gives increasing weight to more recent observations, aiming to improve performance in cases where the input sequence is from a non-stationary distribution. Data compression results show ACTW variants improving over CTW on merged files from standard compression benchmark tests while never being significantly worse on any individual file