257 research outputs found
Nominal or Real? The Impact of Regional Price Levels on Satisfaction with Life
According to economic theory, real income, i.e., nominal income adjusted for purchasing power, should be the relevant source of life satisfaction. Previous work, however, has only studied the impact of inflation adjusted nominal income and not taken into account regional differences in purchasing power. Therefore, we use a novel data set to study how regional price levels affect satisfaction with life. The data set comprises about 7 million data points that are used to construct a price level for each of the 428 administrative districts in Germany. We estimate pooled OLS and ordered probit models that include a comprehensive set of individual level, time-varying and time-invariant control variables as well as control variables that capture district heterogeneity other than the price level. Our results show that higher price levels significantly reduce life satisfaction. Furthermore, we find that a higher price level tends to induce a larger loss in life satisfaction than a corresponding decrease in nominal income. A formal test of neutrality of money, however, does not reject neutrality of money. Our results provide an argument in favor of regional indexation of government transfer payments such as social welfare benefits
Cosmoglobe DR1. III. First full-sky model of polarized synchrotron emission from all WMAP and Planck LFI data
We present the first model of full-sky polarized synchrotron emission that is
derived from all WMAP and Planck LFI frequency maps. The basis of this analysis
is the set of end-to-end reprocessed Cosmoglobe Data Release 1 sky maps
presented in a companion paper, which have significantly lower instrumental
systematics than the legacy products from each experiment. We find that the
resulting polarized synchrotron amplitude map has an average noise rms of
at 30 GHz and FWHM, which is 30% lower than
the recently released BeyondPlanck model that included only LFI+WMAP Ka-V data,
and 29% lower than the WMAP K-band map alone. The mean -to- power
spectrum ratio is , with amplitudes consistent with those measured
previously by Planck and QUIJOTE. Assuming a power law model for the
synchrotron spectral energy distribution, and using the -- plot method,
we find a full-sky inverse noise-variance weighted mean of
between Cosmoglobe DR1 K-band and 30 GHz, in
good agreement with previous estimates. In summary, the novel Cosmoglobe DR1
synchrotron model is both more sensitive and systematically cleaner than
similar previous models, and it has a more complete error description that is
defined by a set of Monte Carlo posterior samples. We believe that these
products are preferable over previous Planck and WMAP products for all
synchrotron-related scientific applications, including simulation, forecasting
and component separation.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures, submitted to A&
Cosmoglobe: Towards end-to-end CMB cosmological parameter estimation without likelihood approximations
We implement support for a cosmological parameter estimation algorithm as
proposed by Racine et al. (2016) in Commander, and quantify its computational
efficiency and cost. For a semi-realistic simulation similar to Planck LFI 70
GHz, we find that the computational cost of producing one single sample is
about 60 CPU-hours and that the typical Markov chain correlation length is
100 samples. The net effective cost per independent sample is 6 000
CPU-hours, in comparison with all low-level processing costs of 812 CPU-hours
for Planck LFI and WMAP in Cosmoglobe Data Release 1. Thus, although
technically possible to run already in its current state, future work should
aim to reduce the effective cost per independent sample by at least one order
of magnitude to avoid excessive runtimes, for instance through multi-grid
preconditioners and/or derivative-based Markov chain sampling schemes. This
work demonstrates the computational feasibility of true Bayesian cosmological
parameter estimation with end-to-end error propagation for high-precision CMB
experiments without likelihood approximations, but it also highlights the need
for additional optimizations before it is ready for full production-level
analysis.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to A&
Cosmoglobe DR1 results. II. Constraints on isotropic cosmic birefringence from reprocessed WMAP and Planck LFI data
Cosmic birefringence is a parity-violating effect that might have rotated the
plane of linearly polarized light of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by
an angle since its emission. This has recently been measured to be
non-zero at a statistical significance of in the official Planck
PR4 and 9-year WMAP data. In this work, we constrain using the
reprocessed BeyondPlanck LFI and Cosmoglobe DR1 WMAP polarization maps. These
novel maps have both lower systematic residuals and a more complete error
description than the corresponding official products. Foreground
correlations could bias measurements of , and while thermal dust
emission has been argued to be statistically non-zero, no evidence for
synchrotron power has been reported. Unlike the dust-dominated Planck HFI
maps, the majority of the LFI and WMAP polarization maps are instead dominated
by synchrotron emission. Simultaneously constraining and the
polarization miscalibration angle, , of each channel, we find a
best-fit value of with LFI and WMAP data
only. When including the Planck HFI PR4 maps, but fitting separately
for dust-dominated, , and synchrotron-dominated
channels, , we find . This differs from zero with a
statistical significance of , and the main contribution to this
value comes from the LFI 70 GHz channel. While the statistical significances of
these results are low on their own, the measurement derived from the LFI and
WMAP synchrotron-dominated maps agrees with the previously reported
HFI-dominated constraints, despite the very different astrophysical and
instrumental systematics involved in all these experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to A&
Fear of crime on the rail networks: Perceptions of the UK public and British Transport Police
Counter-terrorism on the rail network is vital to the security of the United Kingdom. The British Transport Police (BTP) employ covert and overt security measures to prevent crime, which includes: closed circuit television, armed police, unarmed polisce, police community support officers, police dogs, stops and searches and awareness campaigns. All security measures aim to deter crime while importantly reassuring the public. We surveyed both members of the public and BTP officers about the perceived effectiveness of current security measures, specifically with regards to fear of terrorism. Feelings of reassurance and the perceived effectiveness of security measures were positively related. The most effective and reassuring security measure was the use of armed police; whereas the least effective and reassuring was the use of awareness campaigns. However, interestingly, qualitative analyses suggested that an increase in armed police without informed awareness campaigns would have a negative impact on public reassurance by increasing fear
From BeyondPlanck to Cosmoglobe: Preliminary -band analysis
We present the first application of the Cosmoglobe analysis framework by
analyzing 9-year time-ordered observations using similar
machinery as BeyondPlanck utilizes for LFI. We analyze only
the -band (41 GHz) data and report on the low-level analysis process
from uncalibrated time-ordered data to calibrated maps. Most of the existing
BeyondPlanck pipeline may be reused for analysis with minimal
changes to the existing codebase. The main modification is the implementation
of the same preconditioned biconjugate gradient mapmaker used by the
team. Producing a single 1-band
sample requires 22 CPU-hrs, which is slightly more than the cost of a
44 GHz sample of 17 CPU-hrs; this demonstrates that full
end-to-end Bayesian processing of the data is computationally
feasible. In general, our recovered maps are very similar to the maps released
by the team, although with two notable differences. In
temperature we find a quadrupole difference that most
likely is caused by different gain modeling, while in polarization we find a
distinct signal that has been previously called
poorly-measured modes by the team. In the Cosmoglobe
processing, this pattern arises from temperature-to-polarization leakage from
the coupling between the CMB Solar dipole, transmission imbalance, and
sidelobes. No traces of this pattern are found in either the frequency map or
TOD residual map, suggesting that the current processing has succeeded in
modelling these poorly measured modes within the assumed parametric model by
using information to break the sky-synchronous degeneracies
inherent in the scanning strategy.Comment: 11 figures, submitted to A&A. Includes updated instrument model and
changes addressing referee comment
Cosmoglobe DR1 results. I. Improved Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe maps through Bayesian end-to-end analysis
We present Cosmoglobe Data Release 1, which implements the first joint
analysis of WMAP and Planck LFI time-ordered data, processed within a single
Bayesian end-to-end framework. This framework builds directly on a similar
analysis of the LFI measurements by the BeyondPlanck collaboration, and
approaches the CMB analysis challenge through Gibbs sampling of a global
posterior distribution, simultaneously accounting for calibration, mapmaking,
and component separation. The computational cost of producing one complete
WMAP+LFI Gibbs sample is 812 CPU-hr, of which 603 CPU-hrs are spent on WMAP
low-level processing; this demonstrates that end-to-end Bayesian analysis of
the WMAP data is computationally feasible. We find that our WMAP posterior mean
temperature sky maps and CMB temperature power spectrum are largely consistent
with the official WMAP9 results. Perhaps the most notable difference is that
our CMB dipole amplitude is , which is $11\
\mathrm{\mu K}2.5\ {\sigma}$ higher than
BeyondPlanck; however, it is in perfect agreement with the HFI-dominated Planck
PR4 result. In contrast, our WMAP polarization maps differ more notably from
the WMAP9 results, and in general exhibit significantly lower large-scale
residuals. We attribute this to a better constrained gain and transmission
imbalance model. It is particularly noteworthy that the W-band polarization sky
map, which was excluded from the official WMAP cosmological analysis, for the
first time appears visually consistent with the V-band sky map. Similarly, the
long standing discrepancy between the WMAP K-band and LFI 30 GHz maps is
finally resolved, and the difference between the two maps appears consistent
with instrumental noise at high Galactic latitudes. All maps and the associated
code are made publicly available through the Cosmoglobe web page.Comment: 65 pages, 61 figures. Data available at cosmoglobe.uio.no. Submitted
to A&
On the Relation between Income Inequality and Happiness: Do Fairness Perceptions Matter
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