Synergies and non-discriminatory access pricing

According to the new European telecom regulation, incumbent operators are required to provide access to such bottlenecks on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. We explore different interpretations of this general rule in a model in which the bottleneck can be used by external (to the bottleneck firm) as well as internal service providers, and also derive some properties of the solution to the bottleneck owner’s maximization problem as well as that of a welfare-maximizing regulator. In particular, we derive an ECPR rule that also corrects for synergies. Next, by imposing certain symmetry requirements we establish a benchmark in which the external service provider is a competitive fringe and internal and external end-users face identical prices and buy identical quantities of the two services. This, we argue, can be dubbed a non-discrimination benchmark. We then show that introducing certain synergies makes the bottleneck want to favour external supply, while making the fringe less competitive has the opposite implication.access regulation; discrimination; ECPR; synergies

Postulater om deltagelse, demokrati og arbeidsmiljø— historien om et forsøk på å praktisere en teori

Det teoretiske utgangspunktet i denne artikkelen er et sett av postulater fremført innen norsk og skandinavisk arbeidslivsforskning om sammenhenger mellom deltagelse, demokrati og arbeidsmiljø. Basert på data fra forskningsprogrammet BU 2000, hvor denne typen postulater er blitt forsøkt satt ut i praksis, drøftes spørsmålet om hvorvidt deltagelse, demokrati og arbeidsmiljø kan betraktes som tre sider av samme sak. Det konkluderes bla. med at økt deltagelse ikke nødvendigvis virker demokratiserende og at deltagelse ikke blir oppfattet som en arbeidsmiljøfaktor i seg selv. Til tross for at det påvises sammenhenger mellom de tre begrepene kan de ikke oppfattes som tre sider av samme sak1

Pre-vaccination care-seeking in females reporting severe adverse reactions to HPV vaccine. A registry based case-control study

BACKGROUND:Since 2013 the number of suspected adverse reactions to the quadrivalent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine reported to the Danish Medicines Agency (DMA) has increased. Due to the resulting public concerns about vaccine safety, the coverage of HPV vaccinations in the childhood vaccination programme has declined. The aim of the present study was to determine health care-seeking prior to the first HPV vaccination among females who suspected adverse reactions to HPV vaccine. METHODS:In this registry-based case-control study, we included as cases vaccinated females with reports to the DMA of suspected severe adverse reactions. We selected controls without reports of adverse reactions from the Danish vaccination registry and matched by year of vaccination, age of vaccination, and municipality, and obtained from the Danish National Patient Registry and The National Health Insurance Service Register the history of health care usage two years prior to the first vaccine. We analysed the data by logistic regression while adjusting for the matching variables. RESULTS:The study included 316 cases who received first HPV vaccine between 2006 and 2014. Age range of cases was 11 to 52 years, with a peak at 12 years, corresponding to the recommended age at vaccination, and another peak at 19 to 28 years, corresponding to a catch-up programme targeting young women. Compared with 163,910 controls, cases had increased care-seeking in the two years before receiving the first HPV vaccine. A multivariable model showed higher use of telephone/email consultations (OR 1.9; 95% CI 1.2-3.2), physiotherapy (OR 2.1; 95% CI 1.6-2.8) and psychologist/psychiatrist (OR 1.9; 95% CI 1.3-2.7). Cases were more likely to have a diagnosis in the ICD-10 chapters of diseases of the digestive system (OR 1.6; 95% CI 1.0-2.4), of the musculoskeletal system (OR 1.6; 95% CI 1.1-2.2), symptoms or signs not classified elsewhere (OR 1.8; 95% CI 1.3-2.5) as well as injuries (OR 1.5; 95% CI 1.2-1.9). CONCLUSION:Before receiving the first HPV vaccination, females who suspected adverse reactions has symptoms and a health care-seeking pattern that is different from the matched population. Pre-vaccination morbidity should be taken into account in the evaluation of vaccine safety signals

Seasonal Web Search Query Selection for Influenza-Like Illness (ILI) Estimation

Influenza-like illness (ILI) estimation from web search data is an important web analytics task. The basic idea is to use the frequencies of queries in web search logs that are correlated with past ILI activity as features when estimating current ILI activity. It has been noted that since influenza is seasonal, this approach can lead to spurious correlations with features/queries that also exhibit seasonality, but have no relationship with ILI. Spurious correlations can, in turn, degrade performance. To address this issue, we propose modeling the seasonal variation in ILI activity and selecting queries that are correlated with the residual of the seasonal model and the observed ILI signal. Experimental results show that re-ranking queries obtained by Google Correlate based on their correlation with the residual strongly favours ILI-related queries

Time-Series Adaptive Estimation of Vaccination Uptake Using Web Search Queries

Estimating vaccination uptake is an integral part of ensuring public health. It was recently shown that vaccination uptake can be estimated automatically from web data, instead of slowly collected clinical records or population surveys. All prior work in this area assumes that features of vaccination uptake collected from the web are temporally regular. We present the first ever method to remove this assumption from vaccination uptake estimation: our method dynamically adapts to temporal fluctuations in time series web data used to estimate vaccination uptake. We show our method to outperform the state of the art compared to competitive baselines that use not only web data but also curated clinical data. This performance improvement is more pronounced for vaccines whose uptake has been irregular due to negative media attention (HPV-1 and HPV-2), problems in vaccine supply (DiTeKiPol), and targeted at children of 12 years old (whose vaccination is more irregular compared to younger children)

The reactions of trimethylamineoxide and urea during storage of marine elasmobranchs and teleosts

Ved undersøkelser over holdbarheten av brugde, håbrand og laks ved temperaturer like ved 0° C (- 1° C og den temperatur som oppnås ved dekking med is) kunne påvises at der omsettes større mengder urinstoff og trimetylaminoksyd enn der kan redegjøres for ved den mengde ammoniakk og trimetylamin som dannes. Ved pigghå, håkjerring, skate og torsk kunne slike omsetninger ikke påvises. Årsaken til disse omsettinger hos brugde og håbrand og laks er foreløpig ukjent, men vi vil gjøre oppmerksom på fenomenet, da det såvidt oss bekjent, ikke er iakttatt tidligere. ENGLISH Storage experiments performed with muscles of porbeagle, basking shark and salmon at temperatures near 0° C indicated that more urea and more trimethylamineoxide were splitted than could be estimated by analyses of ammonia and trimethylamine. The same phænomenon did not take place with muscles of cod, greenland shark, skatewings and dogfish

Investigations on Analytical Methods for Estimation of Ammonia and Methylamines in Fish

Nesten alle som anvender en objektiv bedømmelsesmetode som støtte for organoleptiske iakttagelser av fisks ferskhet har valgt bestemmelse av flyktig N. Dette er et samlebegrep for ammoniakk og metylderivatene av denne. En av dem: trimetylamin, synes særlig egnet for øyemedet da mengden av den stiger svært langsomt så lenge fisken er god menneskeføde og deretter tiltar i stadig økende målestokk. Man får en glatt og karakteristisk kurve for trimetylamin, mens ammoniakkkurven forløper på en måte som gjør den lite egnet. De øvrige, mono og dimetylamin er kvantitativt sett av mindre interesse, om enn dimetylamin tillegges en viss betydning. ENGLISH In all countries interested in the transport and storage of fresh fish and processed fish products an objective method of controlling the freshness of the fish, viz. the estimated content of volatile N or one of its components, especially trimethylamine N, has now generally been adopted. Owing to different methods of sampling and performing analyses, comparison between the results of different investigators can not be easily drawn. We therefore decided to make some research concerning the volatile forms of nitrogen appearing as decomposition products in the bacterial breakdown of fish, and with special respect to analytical procedure. The results of this work are laid down in this paper

Osmotically driven pipe flows and their relation to sugar transport in plants

In plants, osmotically driven flows are believed to be responsible for translocation of sugar in the pipe-like phloem cell network, spanning the entire length of the plant. In this paper, we present an experimental and theoretical study of transient osmotically driven flows through pipes with semipermeable walls. We extend the experimental work of Eschrich, Evert and Young \cite[]{Eschrich:1972} by providing a more accurate version of their experiment allowing for better comparison with theory. In the experiments we measure the dynamics and structure of a "sugar front", i.e. the transport and decay of a sudden loading of sugar in a pipe which is closed in both ends. We include measurements of pressure inside the membrane tube allowing us to compare the experiments directly with theory and, in particular, to confirm quantitatively the exponential decay of the front in a closed tube.In a novel setup we are able to measure the entire concentration profile as the sugar front moves. In contrast to previous studies we find very good agreement between experiment and theory. In the limit of low axial resistance (valid in our experiments as well as in many cases in plants) we show that the equations can be solved exactly by the method of characteristics yielding, in general, an implicit solution. Further we show that under more general conditions the equations of motion can be rewritten as a single integro-differential equation, which can be readily solved numerically. The applicability of our results to plants is discussed and it is shown that it is probable that the pressure-flow hypothesis can account for short distance transport of sugar in plants.Comment: 34 pages, Submitted to Journal of Fluid Mechanics on May 28, 200

Four cases on market orientation of value chains in agribusiness and fisheries

This working paper presents results from the project ‘Supra-company level determinants of degree of market orientation of value chains in agriculture and fisheries’, which is carried out in cooperation between MAPP – Centre for Research on Customer Relations in the Food Sector, Aarhus School of Business, Denmark, the Norwegian College of Fisheries Science, University of Tromsø, Norway, and the Department of Marketing, University of Stirling, Scotland. It has benefited from grants from the Danish Social Science Research Council and from the Norwegian Research Council. The present working paper is the ‘long’ version of the empirical work in the first major phase of the project, where we study four examples of food value chains to get insight into their degree of market orientation and possible determinants. The insights gained here have been used in subsequent empirical work that is currently underwayMarket orientation;

Complete genome sequence analysis of the thermoacidophilic verrucomicrobial methanotroph “Candidatus Methylacidiphilum kamchatkense” strain Kam1 and comparison with its closest relatives

Background: The candidate genus “Methylacidiphilum” comprises thermoacidophilic aerobic methane oxidizers belonging to the Verrucomicrobia phylum. These are the first described non-proteobacterial aerobic methane oxidizers. The genes pmoCAB, encoding the particulate methane monooxygenase do not originate from horizontal gene transfer from proteobacteria. Instead, the “Ca. Methylacidiphilum” and the sister genus “Ca. Methylacidimicrobium” represent a novel and hitherto understudied evolutionary lineage of aerobic methane oxidizers. Obtaining and comparing the full genome sequences is an important step towards understanding the evolution and physiology of this novel group of organisms. Results: Here we present the closed genome of “Ca. Methylacidiphilum kamchatkense” strain Kam1 and a comparison with the genomes of its two closest relatives “Ca. Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum” strain SolV and “Ca. Methylacidiphilum infernorum” strain V4. The genome consists of a single 2,2 Mbp chromosome with 2119 predicted protein coding sequences. Genome analysis showed that the majority of the genes connected with metabolic traits described for one member of “Ca. Methylacidiphilum” is conserved between all three genomes. All three strains encode class I CRISPR-cas systems. The average nucleotide identity between “Ca. M. kamchatkense” strain Kam1 and strains SolV and V4 is ≤95% showing that they should be regarded as separate species. Whole genome comparison revealed a high degree of synteny between the genomes of strains Kam1 and SolV. In contrast, comparison of the genomes of strains Kam1 and V4 revealed a number of rearrangements. There are large differences in the numbers of transposable elements found in the genomes of the three strains with 12, 37 and 80 transposable elements in the genomes of strains Kam1, V4 and SolV respectively. Genomic rearrangements and the activity of transposable elements explain much of the genomic differences between strains. For example, a type 1h uptake hydrogenase is conserved between strains Kam1 and SolV but seems to have been lost from strain V4 due to genomic rearrangements.Conclusions: Comparing three closed genomes of “Ca. methylacidiphilum” spp. has given new insights into the evolution of these organisms and revealed large differences in numbers of transposable elements between strains, the activity of these explains much of the genomic differences between strains.publishedVersio