Aging and demographic change in European societies : main trends and alternative policy options

This paper gives an overview on current demographic trends and projected population change in Europe and neighboring regions. The main focus of the analysis is on Western and Central Europe. Today this world region has a total population of 500 million. Available forecasts until the year 2050 project a decline of the population at working age, a subsequent decline of the (native) work force and aparallel increase in the number of retired people. The paper discusses policy options by demonstrating the impact of possible changes in labor force participation, higher retirement age and pro-active recruitment of migrant labor on population size and future labor force.Population Policies,Labor Markets,Demographics,Youth and Governance,International Migration

A portfolio of compositions with commentary

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London

An orbital analysis technique for sharply varying geophysical phenomena

Orbital analysis technique for sharply varying geophysical phenomen

Review of Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices

In Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Catherine Russell explores the impact of Walter Benjamin’s ideas on filmmakers who use archival film footage in their works. With thorough and compelling analysis, Archiveology is a thought-provoking read for any archivist interested in the transformative power of archival material

|Delta F| = 1 Nonleptonic Effective Hamiltonian in a Simpler Scheme

We consider |\Delta F| = 1 (F = S,C or B) nonleptonic effective hamiltonian in a renormalization scheme which allows to consistently use fully anticommuting gamma_5 at any number of loops, but at the leading order in the Fermi coupling G_F. We calculate two-loop anomalous dimensions and one-loop matching conditions for the effective operators in this scheme. Finally, we transform our results to one of the previously used renormalization schemes, and find agreement with the original calculations.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, uses epsf.st

Decentralized Secondary Control Scheme for Frequency Restoration in Inverter-based Islanded Microgrids

Inverter-dominated microgrids are quickly becoming a key building block of future power systems. They rely on centralized controllers that can provide reliability and resiliency in extreme events. Nonetheless, communication failures due to cyber-physical attacks or natural disasters can make autonomous operation of islanded microgrids challenging. This paper examines a unified decentralized secondary control scheme that is robust to inverter clock synchronization errors and can be seamlessly applied to grid-following or grid-forming control architectures. The proposed scheme overcomes the well-known stability problem that arises from parallel operation of local integral controllers. Theoretical guarantees for stability are provided along with criteria to appropriately tune the secondary control gains to achieve good frequency regulation performance while ensuring fair power sharing. The efficacy of our approach in eliminating the steady-state frequency deviation is demonstrated through simulations on a 5-bus microgrid with four grid-forming inverters.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figure

Fórmula Cristal

Relatório (Estágio curricular) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Departamento de Expressão Gráfica. Design.Professora Marília Matos Gonçalve

New Statistical Methods for Phase I Clinical Trials of a Single Agent

The primary goal of phase I clinical trials in oncology is to determine a safe and possibly effective dose of a treatment, and to recommend this dose for further testing in larger trials. With chemotherapeutic treatments, the risk of severe dose-limiting toxicity (DLT) is the primary concern, assuming that the probability of efficacy will necessarily increase with dose. A phase I trial then seeks the highest dose with acceptable risk of DLT, called the maximum tolerated dose (MTD). Increasing the dose beyond the MTD would lead to unacceptable risk, while decreasing the dose would decrease the probability of benefit. In contrast, many newer therapies are molecularly targeted, where the probabilities of DLT and efficacy may plateau or even rise and then fall after some threshold. In this setting, a phase I trial must account for both toxicity and efficacy in identifying an optimal dose. In this dissertation, we present three new approaches to modeling data in phase I trials of a single agent. Our methods improve on current practice by making more use of commonly available data. First, for chemotherapies, we investigate the utility of counting multiple DLTs per patient, in addition to counting lower-level toxicities (LLT). Typically, methods for phase I trials model only binary DLT responses, and ignore LLTs. We find that using event counts and including LLTs increases the probability of correctly identifying the MTD, particularly when the MTD is not among the highest dose levels being considered. Second, we consider chemotherapies that are administered over multiple cycles, where dosage may vary across cycles. Multi-cycle treatments are often analyzed using only DLTs observed in the first cycle, ignoring DLTs from later cycles and thus potentially underestimating the DLT rates. We develop a latent process model, representing a continuous level of toxicity over time, which rises and falls after each administration, but which is only observed discretely in each cycle as either no toxicity, LLT, or DLT. The process is inspired by the pharmacokinetics of drug absorption and clearance. We use our model to re-estimate the MTD at the end of adaptive trials that originally used only first-cycle data, and we find that our model typically increases the probability of correctly identifying the MTD. Our method can also recommend how to adjust a patient's dose mid-treatment, to attain a target DLT rate. Third, we develop a method for molecularly targeted therapies, incorporating both DLTs and efficacy responses and allowing the rates of both responses to vary flexibly with dose. In particular, we adopt the conditional autoregressive model, which allows us to share information between dose levels without imposing any functional form on the dose-response curves. We find that our method can adapt to a variety of dose-toxicity and dose-efficacy patterns, and often performs at least as well as competing methods.PHDBiostatisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140847/1/dmuenz_1.pd

European Migration in the Late Twentieth Century

Migration in Europe is a pressing social and political issue for the policy makers of the 1990s. Drawing upon a wide body of language, expertise and analysis, the book combines an important survey with a series of detailed country studies on migration in Europe. The authoritative overview essay by the editors examines migration to and within Europe. They compare the flow during the last forty years with the present situation, detailing both the magnitude and geography of migration over this period. This is followed by thirteen individual country studies each of which features an historical introduction to emigration and immigration in the featured country, quantitative data sets and a detailed assessment of the social and political implications. These studies- specially prepared by leading scholars- cover the United Kingdom, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, and the former USSR. This comprehensive and scholarly book will be welcomed by teachers and researchers of social sciences and history for presenting new insights into one of the key political, social and economic issues facing modern Europe