Different but Equal: Total Work, Gender and Social Norms in the EU and US Time Use.

Overall, the issue of whether Europeans are lazy or Americans are crazy seems of second-order importance relative to understanding the determinants of individual behavior. Amore useful, scientific approach is to assume that underlying tastes are common to both continents, while technologies, institutions, or interpersonal influences like norms or externalities may differ and evolve differently. The fact that Americans work on weekends or more often at odd hours of the day may simply represent a bad equilibrium that no individual agent can improve upon—and would certainly not wish to deviate from, given what all others are doing. Especially if norms and other externalities are important, one should recognize that the invisible hand may lead agents to places like this.

Different but Equal: Total Work, Gender and Social Norms in EU and US Time Use.

Using time-diary data from 27 countries, we demonstrate a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time—the sum of work for pay and work at home. We also show that in rich non-Catholic countries on four continents men and women do the same amount of total work on average. Our survey results demonstrate that labor economists, macroeconomists, sociologists and the general public consistently believe that women perform more total work. The facts do not arise from gender differences in the price of time nor from differences in intra-family bargaining: Gender equality is not associated with marital status, and most of the variance in gender total work differences arises from within-couple differences. A theory of social norms could account for within-education group and within-region gender differences being smaller than inter-group differences. It is consistent with cross-national evidence from the World Values Surveys and various sets of microeconomic data.time use;gender differences;household production;paid work;

Prostate cancer treatment with Irreversible Electroporation (IRE): Safety, efficacy and clinical experience in 471 treatments.

BackgroundIrreversible Electroporation (IRE) is a novel image-guided tissue ablation technology that induces cell death via very short but strong pulsed electric fields. IRE has been shown to have preserving properties towards vessels and nerves and the extracellular matrix. This makes IRE an ideal candidate to treat prostate cancer (PCa) where other treatment modalities frequently unselectively destroy surrounding structures inducing severe side effects like incontinence or impotence. We report the retrospective assessment of 471 IRE treatments in 429 patients of all grades and stages of PCa with 6-year maximum follow-up time.Material and findingsThe patient cohort consisted of low (25), intermediate (88) and high-risk cancers (312). All had multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging, and 199 men had additional 3D-mapping biopsy for diagnostic work-up prior to IRE. Patients were treated either focally (123), sub-whole-gland (154), whole-gland (134) or for recurrent disease (63) after previous radical prostatectomy, radiation therapy, etc. Adverse effects were mild (19.7%), moderate (3.7%) and severe (1.4%), never life-threatening. Urinary continence was preserved in all cases. IRE-induced erectile dysfunction persisted in 3% of the evaluated cases 12 months post treatment. Mean transient IIEF-5-Score reduction was 33% within 12-month post IRE follow-up and 15% after 12 months. Recurrences within the follow-up period occurred in 10% of the treated men, 23 in or adjacent to the treatment field and 18 outside the treatment field (residuals). Including residuals for worst case analysis, Kaplan Maier estimation on recurrence rate at 5 years resulted in 5.6% (CI95: 1.8-16.93) for Gleason 6, 14.6% (CI95: 8.8-23.7) for Gleason 7 and 39.5% (CI95: 23.5-61.4) for Gleason 8-10.ConclusionThe results indicate comparable efficacy of IRE to standard radical prostatectomy in terms of 5-year recurrence rates and better preservation of urogenital function, proving the safety and suitability of IRE for PCa treatment. The data also shows that IRE, besides focal therapy of early PCa, can also be used for whole-gland ablations, in patients with recurrent PCa, and as a problem-solver for local tumor control in T4-cancers not amenable to surgery and radiation therapy anymore

Study of the local field distribution on a single-molecule magnet-by a single paramagnetic crystal; a DPPH crystal on the surface of an Mn12-acetate crystal

The local magnetic field distribution on the subsurface of a single-molecule magnet crystal, SMM, above blocking temperature (T >> Tb) detected for a very short time interval (~ 10-10 s), has been investigated. Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectroscopy using a local paramagnetic probe was employed as a simple alternative detection method. An SMM crystal of [Mn12O12(CH3COO)16(H2O)4].2CH3COOH.4H2O (Mn12-acetate) and a crystal of 2,2- diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) as the paramagnetic probe were chosen for this study. The EPR spectra of DPPH deposited on Mn12-acetate show additional broadening and shifting in the magnetic field in comparison to the spectra of the DPPH in the absence of the SMM crystal. The additional broadening of the DPPH linewidth was considered in terms of the two dominant electron spin interactions (dipolar and exchange) and the local magnetic field distribution on the crystal surface. The temperature dependence of the linewidth of the Gaussian distribution of local fields at the SMM surface was extrapolated for the low temperature interval (70-5 K)

Déficit de la mémoire à court terme chez des enfants sourds munis d’un implant cochléaire : analyse des erreurs d’items et d’ordre

International audienc

Les capacités verbales et visuo-spatiales en mémoire de travail des enfants sourds munis d’un implant cochléaire

International audienc

Les capacités verbales et visuo-spatiales en mémoire de travail d’enfants sourds munis d’un implant cochléaire comparés à leurs pairs entendants

This research aims to study the verbal and visuo-spatial working memory of deaf children with IC. Deaf children with cochlear implant (CI) and hearing children had to memorize pictures (verbal modality) or locations of points in a grid (visuo-spatial modality) presented in various conditions: alone, with sound and / or Cued Speech. For the two groups, recall in visuo-spatial modality is higher than in verbal modality. Surprisingly, Cued Speech, and more especially in the verbal modality- doesn’t give any help to improve the deaf children performances. Individual performances of deaf children show diverse patterns. Keywords: Cochlear Implant, Verbal and visuo-spatial working memory, Cued Speech, deaf and hearing children

Verbal and visuo-spatial working memory capacities of deaf children with a cochlear implant compared with their hearing peers

The Cochlear Implant (CI) is a recent electroacoustic device. We still have few information on the development it has for the deaf child and even less on the nature of the representations used by the deaf child to memorize verbal or visuo-spatial information. The CI generally gives excellent results, especially if the child was early implanted. However, being cochlear implanted does not allow acquiring the oral language immediately. Even when the implantation is early, visual information (lip reading and keys of the Cued Speech) improve the perception of the oral language. They provide a phonetic complement in the impoverished signal sent by the implant. This study, implying 14 deaf children with cochlear implant (CI) and 14 hearing children (mated on the real age) , has been made to know better the use of the verbal and visuo-spatial working memory and to compare their results to those of Hearing children. The method used to estimate assess the working memory is adapted from the procedure of Cleary, Pisoni and Geers (2001). The children had to memorize series of images or series of locations of points in a grid with various conditions. The series were presented one at a time, with sound and / or Cued Speech (that is with the visual input of the language spoken completed. We have tried to know which condition is the most favourable to memorize a verbal or a visuo-spatial information and which type of information (verbal or visuo-spatial) is the best memorized. We have observed for the 2 groups a difference of performances with the verbal or the visuo-spatial modality, the second one being better/ giving better results. What is surprising is that the results also show that Cued Speech for this type of memorizing task, and more especially with the verbal modality, doesn’t give any help to improve the deaf children performances. For the hearing children, we notice that the more information they have the better their scores are with the verbal modality.  The best successful condition for the deaf children with the 2 modalities I the one with only images or only points in a grid without any use of audition and / or Cued Speech. These results can be discussed considering the limits of the study (Number of children, age of the pose of the cochlear implant, school level)

Cosmological Evolution of Supergiant Star-Forming Clouds

In an exploration of the birthplaces of globular clusters, we present a careful examination of the formation of self-gravitating gas clouds within assembling dark matter haloes in a hierarchical cosmological model. Our high-resolution smoothed particle hydrodynamical simulations are designed to determine whether or not hypothesized supergiant molecular clouds (SGMCs) form and, if they do, to determine their physical properties and mass spectra. It was suggested in earlier work that clouds with a median mass of several 10^8 M_sun are expected to assemble during the formation of a galaxy, and that globular clusters form within these SGMCs. Our simulations show that clouds with the predicted properties are indeed produced as smaller clouds collide and agglomerate within the merging dark matter haloes of our cosmological model. We find that the mass spectrum of these clouds obeys the same power-law form observed for globular clusters, molecular clouds, and their internal clumps in galaxies, and predicted for the supergiant clouds in which globular clusters may form. We follow the evolution and physical properties of gas clouds within small dark matter haloes up to z = 1, after which prolific star formation is expected to occur. Finally, we discuss how our results may lead to more physically motivated "rules" for star formation in cosmological simulations of galaxy formation.Comment: Accepted to The Astrophysical Journal; 17 pages, 8 figure