"Promotion Nationale: Forty-Five Years of Experience of Public Works in Morocco"

Created in 1961, Promotion Nationale (PN) is an autonomous public entity in charge of mobilizing an underemployed or unemployed workforce for the implementation of labor-intensive projects, calling upon a simple technology likely to provide employment to unskilled workers. It is one of the major programs of social protection in Morocco—the oldest, most important, and best-targeted social program in the country. Vis-à-vis the importance of rural underemployment, especially during dry years, estimated per million working days, PN aims to improve employment opportunities by developing collective working methods, and by generating large-scale investment for the realization of public infrastructure projects and rural equipment. This institution aims at limiting rural migration through the permanent improvement of local incomes and living conditions. It thus constitutes a safety net for a large part of the population, especially in rural areas. Forty-five years after its creation, PN has at its credit an important and single assessment regarding the fight against unemployment with minimal management costs, in spite of certain difficulties and limitations that hinder the organization, particularly in terms of the geographical targeting of rural poverty zones.

Why Do You Spread This Message? Understanding Users Sentiment in Social Media Campaigns

Twitter has been increasingly used for spreading messages about campaigns. Such campaigns try to gain followers through their Twitter accounts, influence the followers and spread messages through them. In this paper, we explore the relationship between followers sentiment towards the campaign topic and their rate of retweeting of messages generated by the campaign. Our analysis with followers of multiple social-media campaigns found statistical significant correlations between such sentiment and retweeting rate. Based on our analysis, we have conducted an online intervention study among the followers of different social-media campaigns. Our study shows that targeting followers based on their sentiment towards the campaign can give higher retweet rate than a number of other baseline approaches

Simulation of Gegenbauer Processes using Wavelet Packets

In this paper, we study the synthesis of Gegenbauer processes using the wavelet packets transform. In order to simulate a 1-factor Gegenbauer process, we introduce an original algorithm, inspired by the one proposed by Coifman and Wickerhauser [1], to adaptively search for the best-ortho-basis in the wavelet packet library where the covariance matrix of the transformed process is nearly diagonal. Our method clearly outperforms the one recently proposed by [2], is very fast, does not depend on the wavelet choice, and is not very sensitive to the length of the time series. From these first results we propose an algorithm to build bases to simulate k-factor Gegenbauer processes. Given its practical simplicity, we feel the general practitioner will be attracted to our simulator. Finally we evaluate the approximation due to the fact that we consider the wavelet packet coefficients as uncorrelated. An empirical study is carried out which supports our results