The Exhaustion of Unemployment Benefits in Belgium. Does it Enhance the Probability of Employment ?

In Belgium unemployment insurance benefits can only exhaust for one category of workers : partners of workers with (replacement) labour income (mostly women) may loose their entitlement after an unemployment duration ranging from two to eight years, depending on individual characteristics. We contrast three propensity score matching estimators of the impact of benefit exhaustion on the probability of employment : a standard, a before-after and a IV matching estimator. We conclude that benefit expiration is anticipated as from the moment at which the worker is notified, three months in advance, and that it gradually increases the employment rate up to 25 percentage points 14 months after benefit withdrawal.Unemployment insurance, benefit exhaustion, programme evaluation, before-after estimator, nonparametric methods

Quel avenir pour l’article 80?

L’article 80 impose, sous certaines conditions, une fin de droit à l’indemnité aux chômeurs cohabitants de longue durée. A l’heure où il est question de le supprimer, ce numéro présente les résultats d’une étude qui a évalué l’efficacité de l’article 80 par rapport à son effet sur les chances de retrouver un emploi

Quel avenir pour l'article 80 ?

L’article 80 impose, sous certaines conditions, une fin de droit à l’indemnité aux chômeurs cohabitants de longue durée. A l’heure où il est question de le supprimer, ce numéro présente les résultats d’une étude qui a évalué l’efficacité de l’article 80 par rapport à son effet sur les chances de retrouver un emploi.

GPS Multipath Detection in the Frequency Domain

Multipath is among the major sources of errors in precise positioning using GPS and continues to be extensively studied. Two Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based detectors are presented in this paper as GPS multipath detection techniques. The detectors are formulated as binary hypothesis tests under the assumption that the multipath exists for a sufficient time frame that allows its detection based on the quadrature arm of the coherent Early-minus-Late discriminator (Q EmL) for a scalar tracking loop (STL) or on the quadrature (Q EmL) and/or in-phase arm (I EmL) for a vector tracking loop (VTL), using an observation window of N samples. Performance analysis of the suggested detectors is done on multipath signal data acquired from the multipath environment simulator developed by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) as well as on multipath data from real GPS signals. Application of the detection tests to correlator outputs of scalar and vector tracking loops shows that they may be used to exclude multipath contaminated satellites from the navigation solution. These detection techniques can be extended to other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou.Comment: 2016 European Navigation Conference (ENC 2016), May 2016, Helsinki, Finland. Proceedings of the 2016 European Navigation Conference (ENC 2016

Placental α-microglobulin-1 to detect uncertain rupture of membranes in a European cohort of pregnancies

Purpose: We evaluated the performance of the placental alpha-microglobulin-1 immunoassay (AmniSure®, AT) in cervicovaginal secretions in patients with uncertain rupture of membranes (ROM) and investigated the influence of the examiners experience. Methods: This prospective cohort study was performed in pregnant women (17-42weeks of gestation) with signs of possible ROM. Evaluation included clinical assessment, examination for cervical leakage, Nitrazine test and measurement of the amniotic fluid index by ultrasound and AT. ROM occurrence was based on review of the medical records after delivery. Results: 199 women were included. AT had a sensitivity of 94.4%; specificity of 98.6%; positive predictive value, 96.2%; negative predictive value, 98.0%. Clinical assessment showed a sensitivity of 72.2%; specificity of 97.8%; positive predictive value, 92.9%; negative predictive value, 90.6%. AT was more sensitive for diagnosing ROM (p=0.00596) compared to clinical assessment, independent of the examiners experience. Furthermore, the sole use of AT reduced costs by 58.4% compared to clinical assessment. Conclusions: AT was more sensitive compared to clinical assessment, independent of the examiners experience and gestational age. Our data extend its use in patients with uncertain ROM. Moreover, AT seems to be a cost-effective approach in the assessment of these patient

Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody, and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of 35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling changed

A tessellation-based colocalization analysis approach for single-molecule localization microscopy

International audienceMulticolor single-molecule localization microscopy (λSMLM) is a powerful technique to reveal the relative nanoscale organization and potential colocalization between different molecular species. While several standard analysis methods exist for pixel-based images, λSMLM still lacks such a standard. Moreover, existing methods only work on 2D data and are usually sensitive to the relative molecular organization, a very important parameter to consider in quantitative SMLM. Here, we present an efficient, parameter-free colocalization analysis method for 2D and 3D λSMLM using tessellation analysis. We demonstrate that our method allows for the efficient computation of several popular colocalization estimators directly from molecular coordinates and illustrate its capability to analyze multicolor SMLM data in a robust and efficient manner

Structural Basis for Inhibition Promiscuity of Dual Specific Thrombin and Factor Xa Blood Coagulation Inhibitors

AbstractBackground: A major current focus of pharmaceutical research is the development of selective inhibitors of the blood coagulation enzymes thrombin or factor Xa to be used as orally bioavailable anticoagulant drugs in thromboembolic disorders and in the prevention of venous and arterial thrombosis. Simultaneous direct inhibition of thrombin and factor Xa by synthetic proteinase inhibitors as a novel approach to antithrombotic therapy could result in potent anticoagulants with improved pharmacological properties.Results: The binding mode of such dual specific inhibitors of thrombin and factor Xa was determined for the first time by comparative crystallography using human α-thrombin, human des-Gla (1–44) factor Xa and bovine trypsin as the ligand receptors. The benzamidine-based inhibitors utilize two different conformations for the interaction with thrombin and factor Xa/trypsin, which are evoked by the steric requirements of the topologically different S2 subsites of the enzymes. Compared to the unliganded forms of the proteinases, ligand binding induces conformational adjustments of thrombin and factor Xa active site residues indicative of a pronounced induced fit mechanism.Conclusion: The structural data reveal the molecular basis for a desired unselective inhibition of the two key components of the blood coagulation cascade. The 4-(1-methyl-benzimidazole-2-yl)-methylamino-benzamidine moieties of the inhibitors are able to fill both the small solvent accessible as well as the larger hydrophobic S2 pockets of factor Xa and thrombin, respectively. Distal fragments of the inhibitors are identified which fit into both the cation hole/aromatic box of factor Xa and the hydrophobic aryl binding site of thrombin. Thus, binding constants in the medium-to-low nanomolar range are obtained against both enzymes

The bacterial cell envelope as delimiter of anti-infective bioavailability - An in vitro permeation model of the Gram-negative bacterial inner membrane.

Gram-negative bacteria possess a unique and complex cell envelope, composed of an inner and outer membrane separated by an intermediate cell wall-containing periplasm. This tripartite structure acts intrinsically as a significant biological barrier, often limiting the permeation of anti-infectives, and so preventing such drugs from reaching their target. Furthermore, identification of the specific permeation-limiting envelope component proves difficult in the case of many anti-infectives, due to the challenges associated with isolation of individual cell envelope structures in bacterial culture. The development of an in vitro permeation model of the Gram-negative inner membrane, prepared by repeated coating of physiologically-relevant phospholipids on Transwell(®) filter inserts, is therefore reported, as a first step in the development of an overall cell envelope model. Characterization and permeability investigations of model compounds as well as anti-infectives confirmed the suitability of the model for quantitative and kinetically-resolved permeability assessment, and additionally confirmed the importance of employing bacteria-specific base materials for more accurate mimicking of the inner membrane lipid composition - both advantages compared to the majority of existing in vitro approaches. Additional incorporation of further elements of the Gram-negative bacterial cell envelope could ultimately facilitate model application as a screening tool in anti-infective drug discovery or formulation development