Evaluating Labor Market Reforms: A General Equilibrium Approach

Job security provisions are commonly invoked to explain the high and persistent European unemployment rates. This belief has led several countries to reform their labor markets and liberalize the use of fixed-term contracts. Despite how common such contracts have become after deregulation, there is a lack of quantitative analysis of their impact on the economy. To fill this gap, we build a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and firing costs in the tradition of Hopenhayn and Rogerson (1993). We calibrate our model to Spanish data, choosing in part parameters estimated with firm-level longitudinal data. Spain is particularly interesting, since its labor regulations are among the most protective in the OECD, and both its unemployment and its share of fixed-term employment are the highest. We find that fixed term contracts increase unemployment, reduce output, and raise productivity. The welfare effects are ambiguous.Fixed-term contracts, Firing costs, General equilibrium, Heterogeneous agents

Local detection of enzymatic ion generation with polycrystalline silicon interdigitated electrodes and its application to biosensing

Chips containing polycrystalline silicon interdigitated electrodes are modified with the enzyme urease. The sensors are able to detect changes in the resitivity of the solution near their surface, where the enzymatic reaction generates charged species. The electrodes are also grafted with an antigen and queried with different amounts of urease labeled antibody. The response of the modified electrodes is proportional to the amount of enzyme attached to the surface by the biorecognition event, thus validating the assay for biosensing applications

EVALUATING LABOR MARKET REFORMS: A GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM APPROACH

Job security provisions are commonly invoked to explain the high and persistent European unemployment rates. This belief has led several countries to reform their labor markets and liberalize the use of fixed-term contracts. Despite how common such contracts have become after deregulation, there is a lack of quantitative analysis of their impact on the economy. To fill this gap, we build a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and firing costs in the tradition of Hopenhayn and Rogerson (1983). We calibrate our model to Spanish data, choosing in part parameters estimated with firm-level longitudinal data. Spain is particularly interesting, since its labor regulations are among the most protective in the OECD, and both its unemployment and its share of fixed-term employment are the highest. We find that fixedterm contracts increase unemployment, reduce output, and raise productivity. The welfare effects are ambiguous.

Description of the CLISSA application: climatology module for semi-automatic and automatic systems

Comunicación presentada en: 3ª Conferencia Internacional sobre Experiencias con Estaciones Meteorológicas Automáticas celebrada en 2003 en Torremolinos, Málaga.This software has been developed for the purpose of processing incoming data from the main climatological stations according to the current standards in force at the Spanish National Meteorology Institute (INM) and for the progressive replacement of traditional observation systems through automatic stations, in addition to providing support for climatological elements such as cloudiness, evaporation in Piche evaporimeter, etc., and weather phenomena (storm, dew, mist, dust clouds,...), not susceptible to automation as yet

Biofunctionalized all-polymer photonic lab on a chip with integrated solid-state light emitter

A photonic lab on a chip (PhLOC), comprising a solid-state light emitter (SSLE) aligned with a biofunctionalized optofluidic multiple internal reflection (MIR) system, is presented. The SSLE is obtained by filling a microfluidic structure with a phenyltrimethoxysilane (PhTMOS) aqueous sol solution containing a fluorophore organic dye. After curing, the resulting xerogel solid structure retains the emitting properties of the fluorophore, which is evenly distributed in the xerogel matrix. Photostability studies demonstrate that after a total dose (at l = 365 nm) greater than 24 J/cm2, the xerogel emission decay is only 4.1%. To re-direct the emitted light, the SSLE includes two sets of air mirrors that surround the xerogel. Emission mapping of the SSLE demonstrates that alignment variations of 150 mm (between the SSLE and the external pumping light source) provide fluctuations in emitted light smaller than 5%. After this verification, the SSLE is monolithically implemented with a MIR, forming the PhLOC. Its performance is assessed by measuring quinolone yellow, obtaining a limit of detection (LOD) of (0.60 +/- 0.01) mM. Finally, the MIR is selectively biofunctionalized with horseradish peroxidase (HRP) for the detection of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) target analyte, obtaining a LOD of (0.7 +/- 0.1) mM for H2O2, confirming, for the first time, that solid-state xerogel-based emitters can be massively implemented in biofunctionalized PhLOCs

Métodos simplificados de evaluación del riesgo de inhalación a agentes químicos en prácticas de laboratorio docente de bromatología descriptiva

La creación de la cultura de la seguridad en las instituciones académicas en Estados Unidos viene motivada por los incidentes en los laboratorios docentes de universidades y colegios de graduados (ACS, 2012). La cultura de la prevención en instituciones académicas es un reflejo de las acciones, actitudes y comportamientos de sus miembros con respecto a la seguridad. Los incidentes graves en laboratorios de instituciones de educación superior coinciden en USA con una débi cultura de la seguridad de las mismas (University of California, 2011; Kemsley y Baum, 2010; Van Noorden, 2011).Control Banding (CB) es una estrategia cualitativa sistemática para evaluar y gestionar los riesgos asociada a productos químicos en el laboratorio. Es una técnica que se utiliza para guiar la evaluación y gestión de los riesgos químicos en el laboratorio de investigación, centrándose en un número limitado de medidas de control específicas

Clima escolar y logro de aprendizajes en estudiantes del 5° de secundaria de la IE 0670, Tocache – 2022

La presente investigación tuvo por objetivo determinar la relación entre el clima escolar y el logro de aprendizajes de estudiantes del 5to de Secundaria de la I. E. 0670, Tocache - 2022, la metodología utilizó un tipo de investigación básica, con diseño no experimental, orientada a determinar la relación entre el clima escolar y el logro de aprendizajes; la muestra estuvo constituida por 60 estudiantes del 5to de secundaria; los instrumentos fueron el cuestionario y ficha de observación. De acuerdo con los datos obtenidos los resultados fueron que el clima escolar es percibido 65% negativo dentro de la institución educativa, además las dimensiones a veces o nunca ser perciben adecuados, mientras que el nivel de logro alcanzó un nivel de inicio del 40% y el proceso del 34%, de esta manera mediante la aplicación del estadístico se encontró que el χ2 = 33.60 y el p valor fue =. 000; en ese sentido se concluyó que, existe una relación directa y significativa entre las variables, permitiendo de esta manera la contrastación de la hipótesis de investigación respectivamente

MIRACLE’s hybrid approach to bilingual and monolingual Information Retrieval

The main goal of the bilingual and monolingual participation of the MIRACLE team at CLEF 2004 was testing the effect of combination approaches to information retrieval. The starting point is a set of basic components: stemming, transformation, filtering, generation of n-grams, weighting and relevance feedback. Some of these basic components are used in different combinations and order of application for document indexing and for query processing. Besides this, a second order combination is done, mainly by averaging or by selective combination of the documents retrieved by different approaches for a particular query

Combining Syntactic Information and Domain-Specific Lexical Patterns to Extract Drug-Drug Interactions from Biomedical Texts

Proceeding at: 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowdledge Management. Took place October, 26-30 2010, in Toronto, Canada. The event Web site is http://www.yorku.ca/cikm10/A drug-drug interaction (DDI) occurs when one drug influences the level or activity of another drug. The increasing volume of the scientific literature overwhelms health care professionals trying to be kept up-to-date with all published studies on DDI. Information Extraction (IE) techniques can provide an interesting way of reducing the time spent by health care professionals on reviewing the literature. Nevertheless, no approach has been carried out to extract DDI from texts. To the best of our knowledge, this work proposes the first integral solution for the automatic extraction of DDI from biomedical texts.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish research projects: MA2VICMR consortium (S2009/TIC-1542, www.mavir.net), a network of excellence funded by the Madrid Regional Government and TIN2007-67407-C03-01 (BRAVO: Advanced Multimodal and Multilingual Question Answering).Publicad

Using a shallow linguistic kernel for drug-drug interaction extraction

A drug–drug interaction (DDI) occurs when one drug influences the level or activity of another drug. Information Extraction (IE) techniques can provide health care professionals with an interesting way to reduce time spent reviewing the literature for potential drug–drug interactions. Nevertheless, no approach has been proposed to the problem of extracting DDIs in biomedical texts. In this article, we study whether a machine learning-based method is appropriate for DDI extraction in biomedical texts and whether the results provided are superior to those obtained from our previously proposed pattern-based approach [1]. The method proposed here for DDI extraction is based on a supervised machine learning technique, more specifically, the shallow linguistic kernel proposed in Giuliano et al. (2006) [2]. Since no benchmark corpus was available to evaluate our approach to DDI extraction, we created the first such corpus, DrugDDI, annotated with 3169 DDIs. We performed several experiments varying the configuration parameters of the shallow linguistic kernel. The model that maximizes the F-measure was evaluated on the test data of the DrugDDI corpus, achieving a precision of 51.03%, a recall of 72.82% and an F-measure of 60.01%. To the best of our knowledge, this work has proposed the first full solution for the automatic extraction of DDIs from biomedical texts. Our study confirms that the shallow linguistic kernel outperforms our previous pattern-based approach. Additionally, it is our hope that the DrugDDI corpus will allow researchers to explore new solutions to the DDI extraction problem.This study was funded by the Projects MA2VICMR (S2009/TIC-1542) and MULTIMEDICA (TIN2010-20644-C03-01).Publicad