Pharmaceutical-embodied technical progress, longevity, and quality of life: drugs as "equipment for your health"

Several econometric studies have concluded that technical progress embodied in equipment is a major source of manufacturing productivity growth. Other research has suggested that, over the long run, growth in the U.S. economy's 'health output' has been at least as large as the growth in non-health goods and services. One important input in the production of health pharmaceuticals is even more R&D- intensive than equipment. In this paper we test the pharmaceutical-embodied technical progress hypothesis the hypothesis that newer drugs increase the length and quality of life and estimate the rate of progress. To do this, we estimate health production functions, in which the dependent variables are various indicators of post-treatment health status (such as survival, perceived health status, and presence of physical or cognitive limitations), and the regressors include drug vintage (the year in which the FDA first approved a drug's active ingredient(s)) and indicators of pre-treatment health status. We estimate these relationships using extremely disaggregated prescription- level cross-sectional data derived primarily from the 1997 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. We find that people who used newer drugs had better post-treatment health than people using older drugs for the same condition, controlling for pre-treatment health, age, sex, race, marital status, education, income, and insurance coverage: they were more likely to survive, their perceived health status was higher, and they experienced fewer activity, social, and physical limitations. The estimated cost of the increase in vintage required to keep a person alive is lower than some estimates of the value of remaining alive for one month. One estimate of the cost of preventing an activity limitation is $1745, and the annual rate of technical progress with respect to activity limitations is 8.4%. People consuming newer drugs tend to experience greater increases (or smaller declines) in physical ability than people consuming older drugs. Most of the health measures indicate that the effect of drug vintage on health is higher for people with low initial health than it is for people with high initial health. Therefore in contrast to equipment-embodied technical progress economic inequality, pharmaceutical-embodied technical progress has a tendency to reduce inequality as well as promote economic growth, broadly defined.

Design of Control Systems with Multiple Backlash Nonlinearities Subject to Inputs Restricted in Magnitude and Slope

This paper develops a computational method for designing a control system that is an interconnection of transfer functions and multiple decoupled backlash nonlinearities where each backlash is modelled as an uncertain band containing multi-valued functions. The design objective is to ensure that the system outputs and the nonlinearity inputs always stay within their prescribed bounds in the presence of all inputs whose magnitude and whose slope are bounded by respective numbers. By using a known technique, each backlash is decomposed as a linear gain and a bounded disturbance. Essentially, the original design problem is replaced by a surrogate design problem that is related to a linear system and thereby can readily be solved by tools available in previous work. Moreover, as a result of using the convolution algebra A, the method developed here is applicable to rational and nonrational transfer functions. To illustrate the usefulness of the method, linear decentralized controllers are designed for a binary distillation column where valve stiction characteristics are taken into account

Stability of Control Systems with Multiple Sector-Bounded Nonlinearities for Inputs Having Bounded Magnitude and Bounded Slope

This paper considers the input-output stability of a control system that is composed of a linear time-invariant multivariable system interconnecting with multiple decoupled time-invariant memoryless nonlinearities. The objectives of the paper are twofold. First and foremost, we prove (under certain assumptions) that if the multivariable Popov criterion is satisfied, then the system outputs and the nonlinearity inputs are bounded for any exogeneous input having bounded magnitude and bounded slope, and for all the nonlinearities lying in given sector bounds. As a consequence of using the convolution algebra, the obtained result is valid for rational and nonrational transfer functions. Second, for the case in which the transfer functions associated with the Popov criterion are rational functions, we develop a useful inequality for stabilizing the system by numerical methods. This is achieved by means of the positive real lemma and known results on linear matrix inequalities. To illustrate the usefulness of the inequality, a numerical example is provided

Interlanguage Pragmatics

Treballs Finals del Grau d'Estudis Anglesos, Facultat de Filologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2018-2019, Tutora: M. Luz Celaya[eng] This dissertation aims to highlight the importance of pragmatics when learning a language by reviewing previous research on pragmatics. This paper defends that being competent in pragmatics is as important as learning vocabulary, spelling, pronunciation and grammar of a language. It contains theoretical elements on pragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics and also, research on pragmatics in classrooms. The review of different studies will provide information on the possible effects of teaching pragmatics and how pragmatics can be taught. The goal is to promote competence in pragmatics and the benefits of learning pragmatics of a given language.[spa] La finalidad de este trabajo es resaltar la importancia de la pragmática cuando se aprende una lengua teniendo en cuenta las investigaciones previas sobre la pragmática. Este artículo defiende que ser competente en la pragmática es igual de importante como aprender el vocabulario, la ortografía, la pronunciación y la gramática de una lengua. Este trabajo contiene elementos teóricos sobre la pragmática, la interlengua pragmática y también, investigación de la pragmática en las clases. La selección de diferentes estudios va a ofrecer los posibles efectos de la enseñanza de la pragmática y como la pragmática puede ser enseñada. El objetivo es promover la aptitud en la pragmática y los beneficios de aprender la pragmática en un lenguaje

Time Waits for No One! Analysis and Challenges of Temporal Misalignment

When an NLP model is trained on text data from one time period and tested or deployed on data from another, the resulting temporal misalignment can degrade end-task performance. In this work, we establish a suite of eight diverse tasks across different domains (social media, science papers, news, and reviews) and periods of time (spanning five years or more) to quantify the effects of temporal misalignment. Our study is focused on the ubiquitous setting where a pretrained model is optionally adapted through continued domain-specific pretraining, followed by task-specific finetuning. We establish a suite of tasks across multiple domains to study temporal misalignment in modern NLP systems. We find stronger effects of temporal misalignment on task performance than have been previously reported. We also find that, while temporal adaptation through continued pretraining can help, these gains are small compared to task-specific finetuning on data from the target time period. Our findings motivate continued research to improve temporal robustness of NLP models.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 3 table