ETLAnow: A Model for Forecasting with Big Data

Abstract de la ponencia[EN] In this paper we document the ETLAnow project. ETLAnow is a model for forecasting with big data. At the moment, it predicts the unemployment rate in the EU-28 countries using Google search data. The model is publicly available at the ETLAnow’s website, http://www.etlanow.eu. The forecast model is based on the idea that volumes of Google searches could be associated with the current and future level of an economic index. And these data are available earlier than official statistics. The motivation for our approach is that big data could help produce more accurate economic forecasts. Those forecasts would inform better policy and decisions, and help real people—especially during an economic crisis.Tuhkuri, J. (2016). ETLAnow: A Model for Forecasting with Big Data. En CARMA 2016: 1st International Conference on Advanced Research Methods in Analytics. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 116-116. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2016.2015.4224OCS11611

Essays on Technology and Work

This thesis consists of four papers on technology, work, skills, and personality using novel large-scale data and methods. The first paper (Chapter 1, with Johannes Hirvonen and Aapo Stenhammar) presents novel evidence on the effects of advanced technologies on employment, skill demand, and firm performance. The main finding is that advanced technologies led to increases in employment and no change in skill composition. Our main research design focuses on a technology subsidy program in Finland that induced sharp increases in technology investment in manufacturing firms. Our data directly measure multiple technologies and skills and track firms and workers over time. We demonstrate novel text analysis and machine learning methods to perform matching and to measure specific technological changes. To understand our findings, we outline a theoretical framework that contrasts two types of technological change: process versus product. We document that the firms used new technologies to produce new types of output rather than replace workers with technologies within the same type of production. The results contrast with the ideas that technologies necessarily replace workers or are skill biased. The second paper (Chapter 2, with Ramin Izadi) investigates which personality traits and skills help workers to deal with a changing environment. Labor markets are in constant change. This paper documents how responses to labor-market shocks vary by individuals’ psychological traits. We construct measures of cognitive ability, extraversion, and conscientiousness using standardized personality and cognitive tests administered during military service to 79% of Finnish men born 1962–1979. We analyze establishment closures and mass layoffs between 1995–2010 and document heterogeneous responses to the shock. Extraversion is the strongest predictor of adaptation: the negative effect of a mass layoff on earnings is 20% smaller for those with one standard deviation higher scores of extraversion. Conscientiousness appears to have no differential impact conditional on other traits. Cognitive ability and education predict a significantly smaller initial drop in earnings but have no long-term advantage. Our findings appear to be driven directly by smaller dis-employment effects: extraverted and high cognitive-ability individuals find re-employment faster in a similar occupation and industry they worked in before. Extraversion’s adaptive value is robust to controlling for pre-shock education, occupation, and industry, which rules out selection into different careers as the driving mechanism. Extraverts are slightly more likely to retain employment in their current establishment during a mass layoff event, but the retention effect is not large enough to explain the smaller earnings drop. The third paper (Chapter 3, with Ramin Izadi) explores how different dimensions of personality predict school vs. labor-market performance, and how the value of these traits changed over time. We answer these questions using data that includes multidimensional personality and cognitive test scores from mandatory military conscription for approximately 80% of Finnish men. We document that some dimensions of noncognitive skills are productive at school, and some dimensions are counterproductive at school but still valued in the labor market. Action-oriented traits (activity, sociability, and masculinity) predict low school performance but high labor market performance. School-oriented traits, such as dutifulness, deliberation, and achievement striving, predict high school performance but are not independently valued in the labor market after controlling for school achievement. We further document that the labor-market premium to action-oriented personality traits has rapidly increased over the past two decades. To interpret the empirical results, we outline a model of multidimensional skill specialization. The model and evidence highlight two paths to labor-market success: one through school-oriented traits and formal skills, and one through action-oriented traits and informal skills. The fourth paper (Chapter 4) analyzes the impact of manufacturing decline on children. To do so, it considers local employment structure—characterizing lost manufacturing jobs and left-behind places—high-school dropout rates, and college access in the US over 1990–2010. To establish a basis for causal inference, the paper uses variations in trade exposure from China, following its entry to the WTO, as an instrument for manufacturing decline in the US. While the literature on job loss has emphasized negative effects on children, the main conclusion of this research is that the rapid US manufacturing decline decreased high-school dropout rates and possibly increased college access. The magnitudes of the estimates suggest that for every 3-percentage-point decline in manufacturing as a share of total employment, the high-school dropout rate declined by 1 percentage point. The effects are largest in the areas with high racial and socioeconomic segregation and in those with larger African American populations. The results are consistent with the idea that the manufacturing decline increased returns and decreased opportunity costs of education, and with sociological accounts linking the working-class environment and children’s education

Papillary adenocarcinoma in submandibular region

Lateral ectopic thyroid is a rare event and even more uncommon is a primary malignancy in lateral ectopic thyroid. We present a case of papillary adenocarcinoma in lateral ectopic thyroid in submandibular space in a 55-year old male. To our knowledge this is the third case documented in the world and the first one in Europe. Lateral ectopic thyroid in this region is easily masqueraded as a submandibular gland swelling and so was our patients' tumor preliminarily diagnosed as a submandibular gland tumor. Furthermore, in the preoperative computed tomography (CT) scan the tissue was misinterpreted being adjacent to the submandibular gland. The diagnosis was revealed during the surgery and confirmed by the histology. This report demonstrates the difficulty in the differential diagnosis of neck masses. Although rare, ectopic tissue should be remembered as a possible diagnosis of all neck masses and the relevant preoperative examination should be performed by skilled professionals.Peer reviewe

Limit mechanisms for ice loads: FEM-DEM and simplified load models

This work summarizes our recent findings on mechanisms and limits for the ice loads on wide inclined Arctic marine structures, like drilling platforms or harbour structures. The fresults presented are based on hundreds of two-dimensional combined finite-discrete element method (FEM-DEM) simulations on ice-structure interaction pro- cess. In such processes, a floating sea ice cover, driven by winds and currents, fails against a structure and fragments into a myriad of ice blocks which interact with each other and the structure. The ice load is the end result of this interaction process. Using the simu- lation data, we have studied the loading process, analysed the statistic of ice loads, and recently introduced a buckling model [1] and extended it to a simple probabilistic limit load model and algorithm [2], which predict the peak ice load values with good accuracy. These models capture and quantify the effect of two factors that limit the values of peak ice loads in FEM-DEM simulations: The buckling of force chains and local ice crush- ing in ice-to-ice contacts. The work here describes the models and demonstrates their applicability in the analysis of ice-structure interaction

Big Data : Do Google Searches Predict Unemployment?

There are over 100 billion searches on Google every month. This thesis examines whether Google search queries can be used to predict the present and the near future unemployment rate in the US. Predicting the present and near future is of interest, as the official records of the state of the economy are published with a delay. To assess the information contained in Google search queries, the thesis compares a simple predictive model of unemployment to a model that contains a variable, Google Index, constructed from Google data. In addition, descriptive cross-correlation analysis and Granger non-causality tests are performed. To study the robustness of the results, the thesis considers state-level variation in the unemployment rate and Google Index using a fixed effects model. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the results is studied with regard to different search terms. The results suggest that Google searches contain useful information on the present and the near future unemployment rate. The value of Google data for forecasting purposes, however, tends to be time specific, and the predictive power of Google searches appear to be limited to short-term predictions. The results demonstrate that big data can be utilized to forecast economic indicators.Google-hakuja tehdään kuukausittain yli 100 miljardia. Tämä tutkielma selvittää, voiko Google-hauilla ennustaa nykyhetken ja lähitulevaisuuden työttömyyttä Yhdysvalloissa. Nykyhetken ja lähitulevaisuuden ennustaminen on kiinnostavaa, sillä viralliset tiedot talouden tilasta julkaistaan viiveellä. Google-hakujen sisältämän informaation arvioimiseksi tutkielmassa vertaillaan yksinkertaista työttömyyttä kuvaavaa mallia sellaiseen malliin, johon on lisätty Google-aineistosta muodostettu muuttuja, Google Index. Tämän lisäksi tarkastellaan muuttujien välisiä ristikorrelaatioita ja suoritetaan Granger-kausaalisuustesti. Tulosten herkkyyden tarkastelemiseksi tutkielmassa tarkastellaan osavaltiotason vaihtelua työttömyydessä ja Google Indexin arvoissa hyödyntäen kiinteiden vaikutusten mallia. Tämän lisäksi tarkastellaan tulosten herkkyyttä valittujen hakusanojen suhteen. Tuloksen viittaavat siihen, että Google-haut sisältävät hyödyllistä informaatiota nykyhetken ja lähitulevaisuuden työttömyydestä. Google-hakujen sisältämän informaation arvo vaikuttaa kuitenkin vaihtelevan ajanhetkestä riippuen ja sen ennustekyky näyttää rajoittuvan lyhyen aikavälin ennusteisiin. Tulokset kuitenkin osoittavat että big dataa voidaan hyödyntää taloudellisten indikaattorien ennustamiseksi

Ship resistance when operating in floating ice floes: a combined CFD&DEM approach

Whilst climate change is transforming the Arctic into a navigable ocean where small ice floes are floating on the sea surface, the effect of such ice conditions on ship performance has yet to be understood. The present work combines a set of numerical methods to simulate the ship-wave-ice interaction in such ice conditions. Particularly, Computational Fluid Dynamics is applied to provide fluid solutions for the floes and it is incorporated with the Discrete Element Method to govern ice motions and account for ship-ice/ice-ice collisions, by which, the proposed approach innovatively includes wave effects in the interaction. In addition, this work introduces two algorithms that can implement computational models with natural ice-floe fields, which takes randomness into consideration thus achieving high-fidelity modelling of the problem. Following validation against experiments, the model is shown accurate in predicting the ice-floe resistance of a ship, and then a series of simulations are performed to investigate how the resistance is influenced by ship speed, ice concentration, ice thickness and floe diameter. This paper presents a useful approach that can provide power estimates for Arctic shipping and has the potential to facilitate other polar engineering purposes.Comment: 26 pages 18 figures, submitted journal pape

Suomi globaaleissa arvoketjuissa

Tässä tutkimuksessa analysoidaan Suomen asemaa globaaleissa arvoketjuissa kansainvälisen panos-tuotos aineiston avulla. Tulosten mukaan välituotteiden osuus Suomen viennistä, noin kolmeneljäsosaa, on suurempi kuin useimmissa muissa maissa. Ulkomaisen arvonlisäyksen osuus Suomen vientituotannossa on kansainvälistä keskitasoa, mutta on kasvanut keskimääräistä nopeammin. Ulkomaisen arvonlisäyksen suurempi osuus merkitsee, että viennin kyky synnyttää talouskasvua on keskimäärin heikentynyt. Kotimaisen arvonlisän osuus on alentunut erityisen voimakkaasti polttoaineita jalostavassa teollisuudessa. sekä metallinjalostuksessa ja metallituotteiden valmistuksessa. Kotimaisen arvonlisäyksen osuus on Suomen teollisuudessa supistunut enemmän kuin Ruotsissa. Arvonlisäpohjainen analyysin muuttaa kuvaa Suomen tärkeimmistä kauppakumppaneista ja taloutemme kansainvälistä riippuvuussuhteista. Analyysin perusteella Suomen talouskasvu on vahvasti riippuvainen Kiinan ja Yhdysvaltain loppukysynnästä. Runsaat 10 prosenttia Suomen arvonlisäpohjaisesti mitatusta viennistä päätyy lopulta Kiinaan ja lähes saman verran USA:n. EU-28 maiden yhteenlaskettu loppukysyntä on kuitenkin edelleen näitä yksittäisiä maita merkittävämpi

A comprehensive approach to scenario-based risk management for Arctic waters

While society benefits from Arctic shipping, it is necessary to recognize that ship operations in Arctic waters pose significant risks to people, the environment, and property. To support the management of those risks, this article presents a comprehensive approach addressing both short-term operational risks, as well as risks related to long-term extreme ice loads. For the management of short-term operational risks, an extended version of the Polar Operational Limit Assessment Risk Indexing System (POLARIS) considering the magnitude of the consequences of potential adverse events is proposed. For the management of risks related to long-term extreme ice loads, guidelines are provided for using existing analytical, numerical, and semi-empirical methods. In addition, to support the design of ice class ship structures, the article proposes a novel approach that can be used in the conceptual design phase for the determination of preliminary scantlings for primary hull structural members.Peer reviewe

A model for the consolidation of rafted sea ice

Rafting is one of the important deformation mechanisms of sea ice. This process is widespread in the north Caspian Sea, where multiple rafting produces thick sea ice features, which are a hazard to offshore operations. Here we present a one-dimensional, thermal consolidation model for rafted sea ice. We consider the consolidation between the layers of both a two-layer and a three-layer section of rafted sea ice. The rafted ice is assumed to be composed of layers of sea ice of equal thickness, separated by thin layers of ocean water. Results show that the thickness of the liquid layer reduced asymptotically with time, such that there always remained a thin saline liquid layer. We propose that when the liquid layer is equal to the surface roughness the adjacent layers can be considered consolidated. Using parameters representative of the north Caspian, the Arctic, and the Antarctic, our results show that for a choice of standard parameters it took under 15 h for two layers of rafted sea ice to consolidate. Sensitivity studies showed that the consolidation model is highly sensitive to the initial thickness of the liquid layer, the fraction of salt release during freezing, and the height of the surface asperities. We believe that further investigation of these parameters is needed before any concrete conclusions can be drawn about rate of consolidation of rafted sea ice features