Unemployment Benefits and the Duration of Unemployment in East Germany

This paper studies the impact of unemployment benefits on unemployment duration for East Germany using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. It concentrates on exit from unemployment into employment. Estimation results of a discrete-time hazard rate model imply that moderate cuts in the replacement rate raise the hazards by little. The effect of the replacement rate on the hazards becomes weaker the longer people are unemployed. The threat of periods of benefit sanction could explain this. The hazards are not generally declining in time until exhausting unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, but rise just prior to exhausting UI

The Hungarian Unemployment Insurance Benefit System and Incentives to Return to Work

This paper analyses the impact of the Hungarian unemployment insurance (UI) benefit system on the speed of exit from unemployment to regular employment. The duration analysis relies on unemployment spells from two inflow cohorts, which are administered under distinct UI rules. Thus, it exploits a natural experiment to identify disincentive effects. Kaplan-Meier estimates suggest that the benefit reform did not significantly change the transition rates. Moreover, a semi-parametric analysis cannot find remarkable disincentive effects but an entitlement effect. The hazards of men and women rise somewhat in the last two months before they run out of UI benefit

Scavenging by Jumping Spiders (Araneae: Salticidae)

Jumping spiders are usually considered obligate predators where ingestion is preceded by visual or tactile stimuli which elicit hunting behavior. Hungry females of Salticus scenicus were shown to feed upon dead houseflies

Information Compression, Intelligence, Computing, and Mathematics

This paper presents evidence for the idea that much of artificial intelligence, human perception and cognition, mainstream computing, and mathematics, may be understood as compression of information via the matching and unification of patterns. This is the basis for the "SP theory of intelligence", outlined in the paper and fully described elsewhere. Relevant evidence may be seen: in empirical support for the SP theory; in some advantages of information compression (IC) in terms of biology and engineering; in our use of shorthands and ordinary words in language; in how we merge successive views of any one thing; in visual recognition; in binocular vision; in visual adaptation; in how we learn lexical and grammatical structures in language; and in perceptual constancies. IC via the matching and unification of patterns may be seen in both computing and mathematics: in IC via equations; in the matching and unification of names; in the reduction or removal of redundancy from unary numbers; in the workings of Post's Canonical System and the transition function in the Universal Turing Machine; in the way computers retrieve information from memory; in systems like Prolog; and in the query-by-example technique for information retrieval. The chunking-with-codes technique for IC may be seen in the use of named functions to avoid repetition of computer code. The schema-plus-correction technique may be seen in functions with parameters and in the use of classes in object-oriented programming. And the run-length coding technique may be seen in multiplication, in division, and in several other devices in mathematics and computing. The SP theory resolves the apparent paradox of "decompression by compression". And computing and cognition as IC is compatible with the uses of redundancy in such things as backup copies to safeguard data and understanding speech in a noisy environment