Identifying causal paths between health and socio-economic status: Evidence from European older workforce surveys

relationship. In addition, such a relationship takes place early in life and keeps on evolving over time so that both one’s health and SES at a given point in time result from the cumulative effects of this spiral. Thus, only by simultaneously accounting for both pathways as well as for their dynamics would one be able to provide a clear picture of both the process of health accumulation and the dynamics of SES formation. We estimate a structural model where a variety of causal paths between different health dimensions and SES measures as well as their dynamics are simultaneously accounted for. This allows distinction between significant causal paths and insignificant ones, while accounting for endogeneity as well as for cofounders. We use the SOCIOLD survey where the targeted population is that of the older workforce (50 and older) from six EU countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, the Netherlands and the UK). Our results show that (i) reverse causality is indeed a crucial issue: one’s previous socio-economic status influences current health and previous health influences current socioeconomic status, (ii) there are cumulative effects in the sense that both health and socio-economic statuses depend on their past values and (iii) the results are sensitive to whether simultaneity is explicitly accounted for or not.Health status; Socio-economic status; Causal paths; Asymptotic least squares

A magneto-viscoelasticity problem with a singular memory kernel

The existence of solutions to a one-dimensional problem arising in magneto-viscoelasticity is here considered. Specifically, a non-linear system of integro-differential equations is analyzed, it is obtained coupling an integro-differential equation modeling the viscoelastic behaviour, in which the kernel represents the relaxation function, with the non-linear partial differential equations modeling the presence of a magnetic field. The case under investigation generalizes a previous study since the relaxation function is allowed to be unbounded at the origin, provided it belongs to $L^1$; the magnetic model equation adopted, as in the previous results [21,22, 24, 25] is the penalized Ginzburg-Landau magnetic evolution equation.Comment: original research articl

Knowledge Transfer for Melanoma Screening with Deep Learning

Knowledge transfer impacts the performance of deep learning -- the state of the art for image classification tasks, including automated melanoma screening. Deep learning's greed for large amounts of training data poses a challenge for medical tasks, which we can alleviate by recycling knowledge from models trained on different tasks, in a scheme called transfer learning. Although much of the best art on automated melanoma screening employs some form of transfer learning, a systematic evaluation was missing. Here we investigate the presence of transfer, from which task the transfer is sourced, and the application of fine tuning (i.e., retraining of the deep learning model after transfer). We also test the impact of picking deeper (and more expensive) models. Our results favor deeper models, pre-trained over ImageNet, with fine-tuning, reaching an AUC of 80.7% and 84.5% for the two skin-lesion datasets evaluated.Comment: 4 page

Fusariose de la vanille. Un danger planétaire

La fusariose est une maladie très préoccupante pour la production mondiale de vanille naturelle. e lle est responsable d'importantes pertes dans toutes les zones de production. i l n'existe pas de moyen de lutte efficace. La solution semble s'acheminer par une combinaison de différentes méthodes, à commencer par la prévention

Les PECO devant la tentation de l'euro

Les pays d'Europe centrale ont restructure leur industrie vers les marches exterieurs. Ce redeploiement n'aurait pas pu se faire sans une relative stabilite macroeconomique en depit des crises financieres dans d'autres regions du monde. Les entrees d'investissements directs et la limitation de l'endettement exterieur y ont largement contribue. En reduisant la vulnerabilite aux capitaux speculatifs, les gouvernements ont pu gerer le taux de change en s'ecartant des extremes de la fixite absolue et du flottement integral.Convergence; endettement exterieur; regimes de change