Career Planning in Spain: Do temporary contracts delay marriage and motherhood?

The aim of this paper is to find an empirical connection between the impressive increase in the use of temporary contracts in Spain and the observed increase in age at marriage and maternity. Using a pool of the six available waves of individual information from the European Household Panel for Spain, we find that holding temporary contracts rather than permanent ones delays marriage for males, but not for females. Concerning maternity, the labor market situation of both members of the household affects entry into motherhood. In particular, if woman has a temporary contract rather than a permanent one, motherhoods is delayed independently of the husband's contract. As expected, postponement of maternity is not found for non-working women. These results give strong support to the career planning, motive to delay maternity in Spain, given that an unstable labor market situation of female workers is found to be the main deterrent to entry into motherhood.

The cross layer RMPA handover: a reliable mobility pattern aware handover strategy for broadband wireless communication in a high-speed railway domain

Enhancing the handover process in broadband wireless communication deployment has traditionally motivated many research initiatives. In a high-speed railway domain, the challenge is even greater. Owing to the long distances covered, the mobile node gets involved in a compulsory sequence of handover processes. Consequently, poor performance during the execution of these handover processes significantly degrades the global end-to-end performance. This article proposes a new handover strategy for the railway domain: the RMPA handover, a Reliable Mobility Pattern Aware IEEE 802.16 handover strategy "customized" for a high-speed mobility scenario. The stringent high mobility feature is balanced with three other positive features in a high-speed context: mobility pattern awareness, different sources for location discovery techniques, and a previously known traffic data profile. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no IEEE 802.16 handover scheme that simultaneously covers the optimization of the handover process itself and the efficient timing of the handover process. Our strategy covers both areas of research while providing a cost-effective and standards-based solution. To schedule the handover process efficiently, the RMPA strategy makes use of a context aware handover policy; that is, a handover policy based on the mobile node mobility pattern, the time required to perform the handover, the neighboring network conditions, the data traffic profile, the received power signal, and current location and speed information of the train. Our proposal merges all these variables in a cross layer interaction in the handover policy engine. It also enhances the handover process itself by establishing the values for the set of handover configuration parameters and mechanisms of the handover process. RMPA is a cost-effective strategy because compatibility with standards-based equipment is guaranteed. The major contributions of the RMPA handover are in areas that have been left open to the handover designer's discretion. Our simulation analysis validates the RMPA handover decision rules and design choices. Our results supporting a high-demand video application in the uplink stream show a significant improvement in the end-to-end quality of service parameters, including end-to-end delay (22%) and jitter (80%), when compared with a policy based on signal-to-noise-ratio information.

Radio-aware service-level scheduling to minimize downlink traffic delay through Mobile Edge Computing

One of the most challenging problems in mobile broadband networks is how to assign the available radio resources among the different mobile users. Traditionally, research proposals are either speci c to some type of traffic or deal with computationally intensive algorithms aimed at optimizing the delivery of general purpose traffic. Consequently, commercial networks do not incorporate these mechanisms due to the limited hardware resources at the mobile edge. Emerging 5G architectures introduce cloud computing principles to add flexible computational resources to Radio Access Networks. This paper makes use of the Mobile Edge Computing concepts to introduce a new element, denoted as Mobile Edge Scheduler, aimed at minimizing the mean delay of general traffic flows in the LTE downlink. This element runs close to the eNodeB element and implements a novel flow-aware and channel-aware scheduling policy in order to accommodate the transmissions to the available channel quality of end users.

Flight delay forecast due to weather using Data Mining

A Data Mining model that is able to predict if a flight is going to leave late due to a weather delay. It is used, to be able to get a later connection if you have a connecting flight.

Fluidic flow delay by ionogel passive pumps in microfluidicpaper-based analytical devices

[EN] A new concept for fluid flow manipulation in microfluidic paper-based analytical devices ( µPADs) is presented by introducing ionogel materials as passive pumps. µPADs were fabricated using a new doubleside contact stamping process and ionogels were precisely photopolymerised at the inlet of the µPADs.The ionogels remain mainly on the surface of the paper and get absorbed in the superficial paper-fibers allowing for the liquid to flow from the ionogel into the paper easily. As a proof of concept the fluid flow and mixing behaviour of two different ionogels µPADs were compared with the non-treated µPADs.It was demonstrated that both ionogels highly affect the fluid flow by delaying the flow due to their different physical and chemical properties and water holding capacities.

Fluidic flow delay by ionogel passive pumps in microfluidic paper-based analytical devices

[EN] A new concept for fluid flow manipulation in microfluidic paper-based analytical devices (m-PADs) is presented by introducing ionogel materials as passive pumps. m-PADs were fabricated using a new doubleside contact stamping process and ionogels were precisely photopolymerised at the inlet of the m-PADs.The ionogels remain mainly on the surface of the paper and get absorbed in the superficial paper-fibers allowing for the liquid to flow from the ionogel into the paper easily. As a proof of concept the fluid flowand mixing behaviour of two different ionogels mPADs were compared with the non-treated mPADs.It was demonstrated that both ionogels highly affect the fluid flow by delaying the flow due to their different physical and chemical properties and water holding capacities.