Government intervention would be justified to prevent a potential epidemic of food disorders

Joan Costa-Font and Mireia Jofre-Bonet argue that distorted perceptions of self-image influence health-related behaviours. Through their empirical research, they find that social pressure is a determinant of eating disorders and policy should compensate against damaging peer-effects and counter the spread of this epidemi

Anorexia, Body Image and Peer Effects: Evidence from a Sample of European Women

Excessive preoccupation with self-image (or identity) is regarded as a factor contributing to the proliferation of food disorders, especially among young women. This paper models how self-image and peer effects influence health-related behaviours, specifically food disorders. We empirically test our claims using data from the European survey. Our findings suggest that the larger the peers' body-mass, the lower the likelihood of being anorexic. Self-image is correlated with body weight. We use several definitions of peers' body mass and we find that all are negatively associated with the likelihood of women being thin or extremely thin.self-image, identity, body image, eating disorders, anorexia, European women

Body Image and Food Disorders: Evidence from a Sample of European Women

Excessive preoccupation for self-image has been pointed out as an essential factor explaining food disorders. This paper draws upon Akerlof and Kranton (2000) to model how ’self-image’ and others’ appearances influence health related behaviours. We estimate the influence of ’peers’ image’ on the likelihood of anorexia and self-image using data from a cross sectional European representative survey for 2004. We follow a two-step empirical strategy. First, we estimate the probability that a woman is extremely thin and, at the same time, she sees herself as too fat. Our findings reveal that peers’ average Body Mass Index decreases the likelihood of being anorexic. Second, we take apart the two processes and estimate a recursive probit model of being very thin and perceiving one self as being too fat. Although peers’ Body Mass Index decreases the likelihood of being very thin but increases that of seeing one self as too fat, the unobservables explaining both processes are significantly correlated.self-image, identity, body image, eating disorders, anorexia

NFC extension for Catrobat

“How does our daily routine look like nowadays? We wake up to an alarm set on Amazon Alexa, get a ride to work with Uber, message our team through Slack, buy a coffee and pay for it using Apple Pay, organize a to-do list on Trello, order food through Foodler, chat with employees via Google Hangouts, book our vacation through Kayak and Airbnb and load up Netflix and watch TV on demand before heading to bed.”1 All those tasks didn’t exist or would have been performed in a very different way ten years ago, and that’s the best way to realise the world of software technology is growing really fast and so the need of people with programming skills and software developers. The aim of Catrobat project is to bring this programming first contact to kids and to make learning enjoyable for them. The goals of this thesis are to widen the big amount of extensions that Catrobat already has, by adding the capabilities of Near Field Communication (NFC) so Catrobat users can learn something about NFC and its usage, and to ensure the automatise testing of the hardware features that cannot be tested on an emulated device. Within the implemented features, users should be able to read the content and the ID of NFC tags, as well as using them to handle conditions in the program logic and developers should be able to test these hardware features automatically

Devoció per la cultura popular : Entrevista a Josefina Roma

Seguint endavant amb el Projecte Entrevistes. El 25 de febrer de 2016 vam entrevistar a la Dra. Josefina Roma, que es va jubilar com a professora de la Universitat de Barcelona el juny de 2015. Al llarg de la conversa coneixem les dificultats per a una dona jove per fer antropologia a Espanya en el tardofranquisme i encara més combinar-ho amb una maternitat múltiple. Però sobretot ens impregnem de l'entusiasme de la Dra. Roma per la cultura popular a Catalunya i Aragó, que l'ha convertit en la més gran experta en goigs i altres elements de la religiositat popular.El Projecte Entrevistes continúa. El 25 de febrero de 2016 entrevistamos a la Dra. Josefina Roma, quien se jubiló como profesora de la Universitat de Barcelona en junio de 2015. A lo largo de la conversación conoceremos las dificultades para una mujer joven para ejercer la antropología en la España del tardofranquismo, combinada además con una maternidad múltiple. Pero sobretodo nos impregnaremos del entusiasmo de la Dra. Roma por la cultura popular en Cataluña y Aragón, que le ha convertido en la más gran experta en los gozos, a elementos de la religiosidad popular

Not All Incentives Wash Out the Warm Glow: The Case of Blood Donation Revisited

The issue of the nature of the altruism inherent in blood donation and the perverse effects of financial rewards for blood and/or organ donation has been recently revisited in the economic literature with limited consensus. As Titmuss (1970) famously pointed out, providing monetary incentives to blood donors may crowd out blood supply as purely altruistic donors may feel less inclined to donate if a reward is involved - in addition to having the effect of reducing blood quality. In this paper we take a different approach by focusing on the nature of the rewards. That is, we examine how favouring different types of incentives are related to the likelihood of donating blood by exploiting a large sample representative of 15 European countries in 2002. Our results show that donors are less likely to favour monetary rewards for blood donation but are more likely to favour non-monetary ones. This is consistent with the idea that while monetary rewards may crowd out blood donation, non-monetary rewards do not.altruism, blood donation, incentives, nudging, recursive system, warm glow

Research news: Anorexia and distorted self image of younger women, Joan Costa-Font and Mireia Jofre-Bonet

Policy interventions to curb the parallel epidemics of excessive preoccupation with self-image and food disorders, such as bulimia and anorexia, are increasingly being used, including the regulation of the fashion industry and advertisements, as well as support campaigns through social networks and the media. In some European countries, there has been increasing debate over the conditions, especially since the Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston died from anorexia in 2006

Devoció per la cultura popular: Entrevista a Josefina Roma

Seguint endavant amb el Projecte Entrevistes. El 25 de febrer de 2016 vam entrevistar a la Dra. Josefina Roma, que es va jubilar com a professora de la Universitat de Barcelona el juny de 2015. Al llarg de la conversa coneixem les dificultats per a una dona jove per fer antropologia a Espanya en el tardofranquisme i encara més combinar-ho amb una maternitat múltiple. Però sobretot ens impregnem de l'entusiasme de la Dra. Roma per la cultura popular a Catalunya i Aragó, que l’ha convertit en la més gran experta en goigs i altres elements de la religiositat popular.Seguint endavant amb el Projecte Entrevistes. El 25 de febrer de 2016 vam entrevistar a la Dra. Josefina Roma, que es va jubilar com a professora de la Universitat de Barcelona el juny de 2015. Al llarg de la conversa coneixem les dificultats per a una dona jove per fer antropologia a Espanya en el tardofranquisme i encara més combinar-ho amb una maternitat múltiple. Però sobretot ens impregnem de l'entusiasme de la Dra. Roma per la cultura popular a Catalunya i Aragó, que l’ha convertit en la més gran experta en goigs i altres elements de la religiositat popular.El Projecte Entrevistes continúa. El 25 de febrero de 2016 entrevistamos a la Dra. Josefina Roma, quien se jubiló como profesora de la Universitat de Barcelona en junio de 2015. A lo largo de la conversación conoceremos las dificultades para una mujer joven para ejercer la antropología en la España del tardofranquismo, combinada además con una maternidad múltiple. Pero sobretodo nos impregnaremos del entusiasmo de la Dra. Roma por la cultura popular en Cataluña y Aragón, que le ha convertido en la más gran experta en los gozos, a elementos de la religiosidad popular.Seguint endavant amb el Projecte Entrevistes. El 25 de febrer de 2016 vam entrevistar a la Dra. Josefina Roma, que es va jubilar com a professora de la Universitat de Barcelona el juny de 2015. Al llarg de la conversa coneixem les dificultats per a una dona jove per fer antropologia a Espanya en el tardofranquisme i encara més combinar-ho amb una maternitat múltiple. Però sobretot ens impregnem de l'entusiasme de la Dra. Roma per la cultura popular a Catalunya i Aragó, que l’ha convertit en la més gran experta en goigs i altres elements de la religiositat popular

Towards human linguistic machine translation evaluation

When evaluating machine translation outputs, linguistics is usually taken into account implicitly. Annotators have to decide whether a sentence is better than another or not, using, for example, adequacy and fluency criteria or, as recently proposed, editing the translation output so that it has the same meaning as a reference translation, and it is understandable. Therefore, the important fields of linguistics of meaning (semantics) and grammar (syntax) are indirectly considered. In this study, we propose to go one step further towards a linguistic human evaluation. The idea is to introduce linguistics implicitly by formulating precise guidelines. These guidelines strictly mark the difference between the sub-fields of linguistics such as: morphology, syntax, semantics, and orthography. We show our guidelines have a high inter-annotation agreement and wide-error coverage. Additionally, we examine how the linguistic human evaluation data correlate with: among different types of machine translation systems (rule and statistical-based); and with adequacy and fluency.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version