Drivers and impediments for innovation in Europe

The EU 2020 strategy relies on innovation as the core driver of economic dynamics. The present Forum discusses the strategies established by the European Commission and the member states for the intensifi cation of innovative activities. Analyses of often neglected aspects of innovation policy, such as measurement of intangible investments, service innovation and a regional innovation system complement the picture

Foreign direct investment and the equity home bias puzzle

La extensa literatura macroeconómica que pretende explicar el ampliamente observado equity home bias ignora a las empresas internacionalmente activas. En un modelo DSGE que presenta la elección endógena de las empresas de ser activas internacionalmente —ya sea a través de las exportaciones o por medio de la inversión extranjera directa (IED)—, encontramos que las tenencias de capital óptimas de los agentes están sesgadas hacia las empresas nacionales. Nuestro hallazgo indica que la diversificación internacional no es tan negativa como sugieren las medidas empíricas del equity home bias.The vast macroeconomic literature trying to explain the widely observed equity home bias disregards internationally active firms. In a DSGE model that features the endogenous choice of firms to become internationally active through either exports or foreign direct investment (FDI), we find that the optimal equity holdings of agents are biased towards domestic firms. Our finding indicates that international diversification is not as bad as empirical measures of the equity home bias suggest

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of asthma in ethnically diverse North American populations.

Asthma is a common disease with a complex risk architecture including both genetic and environmental factors. We performed a meta-analysis of North American genome-wide association studies of asthma in 5,416 individuals with asthma (cases) including individuals of European American, African American or African Caribbean, and Latino ancestry, with replication in an additional 12,649 individuals from the same ethnic groups. We identified five susceptibility loci. Four were at previously reported loci on 17q21, near IL1RL1, TSLP and IL33, but we report for the first time, to our knowledge, that these loci are associated with asthma risk in three ethnic groups. In addition, we identified a new asthma susceptibility locus at PYHIN1, with the association being specific to individuals of African descent (P = 3.9 × 10(-9)). These results suggest that some asthma susceptibility loci are robust to differences in ancestry when sufficiently large samples sizes are investigated, and that ancestry-specific associations also contribute to the complex genetic architecture of asthma

Outcomes of Severe Fungal Keratitis Using in vivo Confocal Microscopy and Early Therapeutic Penetrating Keratoplasty

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of early diagnosis using in vivo confocal microscopy and early therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty (TPK) on the outcomes of severe cases of fungal keratitis. Methods: This retrospective single-center study included 38 patients (40 eyes) with fungal keratitis who presented between December 2013 and February 2020. Preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative parameters were recorded to assess the role of early correct diagnosis and early surgical therapy on visual acuity outcome and enucleation rate during follow-up. Results: The mean patient age was 51 years (71% females). The initial external diagnosis was correct in 20 cases (50%). The mean time from symptom onset until admission to our department was 46.8 ± 68.0 (median 28.5) days. The mean time to correct diagnosis after admission to our department was 1 day with in vivo confocal microscopy (IVCM). IVCM was performed in 38 cases, of which 36 (sensitivity: 94.7%) were positive for fungal infection. Twenty-seven out of 40 (67.5%) eyes received a TPK 4.2 ± 3.9 days after admission, with a mean graft size of 8.9 ± 1.9 mm. Three eyes (7.5%) were enucleated. The corrected distance visual acuity of the entire study population increased from 2.0 ± 1.2 LogMAR to 0.96 ± 1.17 LogMAR. Conclusion: In vivo confocal microscopy is a powerful tool for the early detection of fungal organisms in infectious keratitis. An early TPK with a large graft helps to eradicate the infection timely and results in a favorable visual acuity outcome and lower enucleation rate, especially when treating filamentous fungi

Mental status and health-related quality of life in an elderly population 15 years after limited cerebral ischaemia

BACKGROUND: Stroke has a major impact on survivors. Our study was designed to describe the mental status and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in long-term survivors of TIA or minor ischaemic stroke (MIS) and evaluate associations of mental and physical factors with HR-QoL. METHODS: A random sample of the 10-year survivors of the Dutch TI

Learning Extremal Representations with Deep Archetypal Analysis

Archetypes are typical population representatives in an extremal sense, where typicality is understood as the most extreme manifestation of a trait or feature. In linear feature space, archetypes approximate the data convex hull allowing all data points to be expressed as convex mixtures of archetypes. However, it might not always be possible to identify meaningful archetypes in a given feature space. Learning an appropriate feature space and identifying suitable archetypes simultaneously addresses this problem. This paper introduces a generative formulation of the linear archetype model, parameterized by neural networks. By introducing the distance-dependent archetype loss, the linear archetype model can be integrated into the latent space of a variational autoencoder, and an optimal representation with respect to the unknown archetypes can be learned end-to-end. The reformulation of linear Archetypal Analysis as deep variational information bottleneck, allows the incorporation of arbitrarily complex side information during training. Furthermore, an alternative prior, based on a modified Dirichlet distribution, is proposed. The real-world applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated by exploring archetypes of female facial expressions while using multi-rater based emotion scores of these expressions as side information. A second application illustrates the exploration of the chemical space of small organic molecules. In this experiment, it is demonstrated that exchanging the side information but keeping the same set of molecules, e. g. using as side information the heat capacity of each molecule instead of the band gap energy, will result in the identification of different archetypes. As an application, these learned representations of chemical space might reveal distinct starting points for de novo molecular design.Comment: Under review for publication at the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV). Extended version of our GCPR2019 paper "Deep Archetypal Analysis

Automating Enterprise Architecture Documentation using an Enterprise Service Bus

Currently the documentation of Enterprise Architectures (EA) requires manual collection of data resulting in an error prone, expensive, and time consuming process. Recent approaches seek to automate and improve EA documentation by employing the productive system environment of organizations. In this paper, we investigate a specific Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) considered as the nervous system of an enterprise interconnecting business applications and processes as an information source. We evaluate the degree of coverage to which data of a productive system can be used for EA documentation. A vendor-specific ESB data model is reverse-engineered and transformation rules for three representative EA information models are derived. These transformation rules are employed to perform automated model transformations making the first step towards an automated EA documentation. We evaluate our approach using a productive ESB system from a leading enterprise of the fashion industry

The TMS Map Scales with Increased Stimulation Intensity and Muscle Activation

One way to study cortical organisation, or its reorganisation, is to use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to construct a map of corticospinal excitability. TMS maps are reported to be acquired with a wide variety of stimulation intensities and levels of muscle activation. Whilst MEPs are known to increase both with stimulation intensity and muscle activation, it remains to be established what the effect of these factors is on the map's centre of gravity (COG), area, volume and shape. Therefore, the objective of this study was to systematically examine the effect of stimulation intensity and muscle activation on these four key map outcome measures. In a first experiment, maps were acquired with a stimulation intensity of 110, 120 and 130% of resting threshold. In a second experiment, maps were acquired at rest and at 5, 10, 20 and 40% of maximum voluntary contraction. Map area and map volume increased with both stimulation intensity (P 0.09 in all cases). This result indicates the map simply scales with stimulation intensity and muscle activation

Hvordan skaper blogging persepsjon av lederskap?

Bakgrunnen for denne oppgaven baserer seg på vår genuine interesse for påvirkning- og ledelsesfagene. Vi finner det interessant å se nærmere på hvordan andre oppfatter ledere som tar i bruk blogg hvor det publiseres både private og jobbrelaterte innlegg. Oppgaven skal derfor forsøke å bevisstgjøre persepsjonen som finnes om ledere som tar i bruk blogg. For å kunne undersøke dette har vi tatt i bruk Stereotype Content Model (SCM). Modellen er tidligere tatt i bruk av Fiske, Cuddy, Glick og Xu (2002), og har vært en inspirasjon til utformingen av vår oppgave. For å kunne se nærmere på persepsjonen som finnes om ledere som blogger har vi utformet følgende problemstilling som utgangspunkt: ”Hvordan skaper blogging persepsjon av lederskap?” Ettersom denne undersøkelsens formål er å forstå og beskrive et fenomen innebærer dette at vi har valgt en eksplorativ tilnærming som har et fenomenologisk utgangspunkt som forskningsdesign. Vi har derfor gjennomført individuelle dybdeintervjuer av vårt utvalg, som er avgrenset til yngre ledere i norsk næringsliv som befinner seg i Oslo-området. Vår undersøkelse viser at det finnes ulik persepsjon av lederskap, når ledere tar i bruk blogg. Funnene i undersøkelsen indikerer at våre informanter assosierer bloggfenomenet med begrepet rosablogger. Det forekommer tendenser av fordommer og stereotypier til bloggfenomenet, og dette kan sees i sammenheng med horneffekten. Funnene indikerer at ledere som blogger ikke fremstår som varme, men at bruken assosieres med å skape en fasade og fremme seg selv. Det viser seg at våre informanter stiller spørsmålstegn til lederens troverdighet når man tar i bruk blogg, men at autoritetsprinsippet er gjeldende når det kommer til statussymbolet titler. Det kan tenkes at det forekommer en klikk-snurr respondering når man blir presentert for tittelen leder, på bakgrunn av at samtlige informanter beskriver ledere som blogger som kompetente. Det som også kan oppstå er glorieeffekten hvor vi liker mennesker som er like oss selv, og at våre informanter aksentuerer det som passer. I vår undersøkelse viser det seg at ledere med en posisjonsmakt eller en stillingstittel, kan skadeliggjøre sitt eget omdømme men også relasjoner i organisasjonen, ved å bruke blogg til å ytre om sine private holdninger. På en annen side viser det seg derimot at det kan være effektivt å ta lederskap ved hjelp av blogg når man ikke har en konkret posisjonsmakt i en organisasjon, ifølge vår undersøkelse