Constrained school choice: an experimental study

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects' incentives are drastically affected, as more individuals manipulate their preferences. Including a safety school in the constrained list explains most manipulations. Competitiveness across schools play an important role. Constraining choices increases segregation and affects the stability and efficiency of the final allocation. Remarkably, the constraint reduces significantly the proportion of subjects playing a dominated strategy.

Mass migration of juvenile Biomphalaria glabrata snails bred under semi-natural conditions

For the development of studies on snail interspecific competition special in-door laboratory channels were built. In the all five channels seeded with adult specimens of Biomphalaria glabrata mass migration of juvenile snails outside the water was observed. Most of the migrant snails presented apertural lamellae. Data collected during the period of two years, showed the regression of the migration phenomenon and the disappearance of the lamellate snails.

Cardiopathies congénitales de l'âge adulte: nouvelle population de patients, prise en charge multidisciplinaire [Adults with congenital heart diseases: a growing population, a multidisciplinary approach].

Untill recently, congenital heart disease was considered as a childhood's disease. With improvement in pediatric survival, adults with a congenital heart disease (ACHD) represent an emerging group of patients who need specialized medical care. In 2010, the ESC published newguidelines on global and specific management of adults with congenital heart disease. ACHD centers organize appropriate medical care for these patients, promote specialist training and national scientific research in collaboration with other national ACHD centers.

Pecuniary Externality through Credit Constraints: Two Examples without Uncertainty

This paper is a contribution to the growing literature on constrained inefficiencies in economies with financial frictions. The purpose is to present two simple examples, inspired by the stochastic models in Gersbach-Rochet (2012) and Lorenzoni (2008), of deterministic environments in which such inefficiencies arise through credit constraints. Common to both examples is a pecuniary externality, which operates through an asset price. In the second example, a simple transfer between two groups of agents can bring about a Pareto improvement. In a first best economy, there are no pecuniary externalities because marginal productivities are equalised. But when agents face credit constraints, there is a wedge between their marginal productivities and those of the non-credit-constrained agents. The wedge is the source of the pecuniary externality: economies with these kinds of imperfections in credit markets are not second-best efficient. This is akin to the constrained inefficiency of an economy with incomplete markets, as in Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis (1986).

Budget constrained expenditure multipliers

We show that standard expenditure multipliers capture economy-wide effects of new government projects only when financing constraints are not binding. In actual policy making, however, new projects usually need financing. Under liquidity constraints, new projects are subject to two opposite effects: an income effect and a set of spending substitution effects. The former is the traditional, unrestricted, multiplier effect; the latter is the result of expenditure reallocation to upheld effective financing constraints. Unrestricted multipliers will therefore be, as a general rule, upward biased and policy designs based upon them should be reassessed in the light of the countervailing substitution effects.

Generic optimality conditions for semi-algebraic convex programs

We consider linear optimization over a nonempty convex semi-algebraic feasible region F. Semidefinite programming is an example. If F is compact, then for almost every linear objective there is a unique optimal solution, lying on a unique \active" manifold, around which F is \partly smooth", and the second-order sufficient conditions hold. Perturbing the objective results in smooth variation of the optimal solution. The active manifold consists, locally, of these perturbed optimal solutions; it is independent of the representation of F, and is eventually identified by a variety of iterative algorithms such as proximal and projected gradient schemes. These results extend to unbounded sets F.

Growing up with bilateral hippocampal atrophy: from childhood to teenage.

The respective roles of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures in memory are controversial. Some authors put forward a modular account according to which episodic memory and recollection-based processes are crucially dependent on the hippocampal formation whereas semantic acquisition and familiarity-based processes rely on the adjacent parahippocampal gyri. Others defend a unitary view. We report the case of VJ, a boy with developmental amnesia of most likely perinatal onset diagnosed at the age of 8. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), including quantitative volumetric measurements of the hippocampal formation and of the entorhinal, perirhinal, and temporopolar cortices, showed severe, bilateral atrophy of the hippocampal formation, fornix and mammillary bodies; by contrast, the perirhinal cortex was within normal range and the entorhinal and temporopolar cortex remained within two standard deviations (SDs) from controls' mean. We examined the development of his semantic knowledge from childhood to teenage as well as his recognition and cued recall memory abilities. On tasks tapping semantic memory, VJ increased his raw scores across years at the same rate as children from large standardisation samples, except for one task; he achieved average performance, consistent with his socio-educational background. He performed within normal range on 74% of recognition tests and achieved average to above average scores on 42% of them despite very severe impairment on 82% of episodic recall tasks. Both faces and landscapes-scenes gave rise to above average scores when tested with coloured stimuli. Cued recall, although impaired, was largely superior to free recall. This case supports a modular account of the MTL with episodic, but not semantic memory depending on the hippocampal formation. Furthermore, the overall pattern of findings is consistent with evidence from both brain-damaged and neuroimaging studies indicating that recollection requires intact hippocampal formation and familiarity relies, at least partly, on the adjacent temporal lobe cortex.

An algorithm for semi-infinite polynomial optimization

"Vegeu el resum a l'inici del document del fitxer adjunt."

Semi-supervised segmentation of ultrasound images based on patch representation and continuous min cut.

Ultrasound segmentation is a challenging problem due to the inherent speckle and some artifacts like shadows, attenuation and signal dropout. Existing methods need to include strong priors like shape priors or analytical intensity models to succeed in the segmentation. However, such priors tend to limit these methods to a specific target or imaging settings, and they are not always applicable to pathological cases. This work introduces a semi-supervised segmentation framework for ultrasound imaging that alleviates the limitation of fully automatic segmentation, that is, it is applicable to any kind of target and imaging settings. Our methodology uses a graph of image patches to represent the ultrasound image and user-assisted initialization with labels, which acts as soft priors. The segmentation problem is formulated as a continuous minimum cut problem and solved with an efficient optimization algorithm. We validate our segmentation framework on clinical ultrasound imaging (prostate, fetus, and tumors of the liver and eye). We obtain high similarity agreement with the ground truth provided by medical expert delineations in all applications (94% DICE values in average) and the proposed algorithm performs favorably with the literature.

Discrete time Non-homogeneous Semi-Markov Processes applied to Models for Disability Insurance

In this paper, we present a stochastic model for disability insurance contracts. The model is based on a discrete time non-homogeneous semi-Markov process (DTNHSMP) to which the backward recurrence time process is introduced. This permits a more exhaustive study of disability evolution and a more efficient approach to the duration problem. The use of semi-Markov reward processes facilitates the possibility of deriving equations of the prospective and retrospective mathematical reserves. The model is applied to a sample of contracts drawn at random from a mutual insurance company.

Cutting edge: influence of the TCR Vbeta domain on the selection of semi-invariant NKT cells by endogenous ligands.

Invariant Valpha14 (Valpha14i) NKT cells are a murine CD1d-dependent regulatory T cell subset characterized by a Valpha14-Jalpha18 rearrangement and expression of mostly Vbeta8.2 and Vbeta7. Whereas the TCR Vbeta domain influences the binding avidity of the Valpha14i TCR for CD1d-alpha-galactosylceramide complexes, with Vbeta8.2 conferring higher avidity binding than Vbeta7, a possible impact of the TCR Vbeta domain on Valpha14i NKT cell selection by endogenous ligands has not been studied. In this study, we show that thymic selection of Vbeta7(+), but not Vbeta8.2(+), Valpha14i NKT cells is favored in situations where endogenous ligand concentration or TCRalpha-chain avidity are suboptimal. Furthermore, thymic Vbeta7(+) Valpha14i NKT cells were preferentially selected in vitro in response to CD1d-dependent presentation of endogenous ligands or exogenously added self ligand isoglobotrihexosylceramide. Collectively, our data demonstrate that the TCR Vbeta domain influences the selection of Valpha14i NKT cells by endogenous ligands, presumably because Vbeta7 confers higher avidity binding.

Growing Up in Ireland: National Longitudinal Study of Children. The Infants And Their Families - Infant CohortOther Relevant Documents

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