Does Migration Make You Happy?:A Longitudinal Study of Internal Migration and Subjective Well-Being

The authors acknowledge financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (RES-625-28-0001). This project is part of the ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC). Financial support from the Marie Curie programme under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / Career Integration Grant n. PCIG10-GA-2011-303728 (CIG Grant NBHCHOICE, Neighbourhood choice, neighbourhood sorting, and neighbourhood effects).The majority of quantitative studies on the consequences of internal migration focus almost exclusively on the labour-market outcomes and the material well-being of migrants. We investigate whether individuals who migrate within the UK become happier after the move than they were before, and whether the effect is permanent or transient. Using life-satisfaction responses from twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey and employing a fixed-effects model, we derive a temporal pattern of migrants’ subjective well-being around the time of the migration event. Our findings make an original contribution by revealing that, on average, migration is preceded by a period when individuals experience a significant decline in happiness for a variety of reasons, including changes in personal living arrangements. Migration itself causes a boost in happiness, and brings people back to their initial levels. The research contributes, therefore, to advancing an understanding of migration in relation to set-point theory. Perhaps surprisingly, long-distance migrants are at least as happy as short-distance migrants despite the higher social and psychological costs involved. The findings of this paper add to the pressure to retheorize migration within a conceptual framework that accounts for social well-being from a life-course perspective.PostprintPeer reviewe

Learning from failure

We study decentralized learning in organizations. Decentralization is captured through a symmetry constraint on agents’ strategies. Among such attainable strategies, we solve for optimal and equilibrium strategies. We model the organization as a repeated game with imperfectly observable actions. A fixed but unknown subset of action profiles are successes and all other action profiles are failures. The game is played until either there is a success or the time horizon is reached. For any time horizon, including infinity, we demonstrate existence of optimal attainable strategies and show that they are Nash equilibria. For some time horizons, we can solve explicitly for the optimal attainable strategies and show uniqueness. The solution connects the learning behavior of agents to the fundamentals that characterize the organization: Agents in the organization respond more slowly to failure as the future becomes more important, the size of the organization increases and the probability of success decreases.Game theory

Generation of entangled coherent states via cross phase modulation in a double electromagnetically induced transparency regime

The generation of an entangled coherent state is one of the most important ingredients of quantum information processing using coherent states. Recently, numerous schemes to achieve this task have been proposed. In order to generate travelling-wave entangled coherent states, cross phase modulation, optimized by optical Kerr effect enhancement in a dense medium in an electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) regime, seems to be very promising. In this scenario, we propose a fully quantized model of a double-EIT scheme recently proposed [D. Petrosyan and G. Kurizki, {\sl Phys. Rev. A} {\bf 65}, 33833 (2002)]: the quantization step is performed adopting a fully Hamiltonian approach. This allows us to write effective equations of motion for two interacting quantum fields of light that show how the dynamics of one field depends on the photon-number operator of the other. The preparation of a Schr\"odinger cat state, which is a superposition of two distinct coherent states, is briefly exposed. This is based on non-linear interaction via double-EIT of two light fields (initially prepared in coherent states) and on a detection step performed using a $50:50$ beam splitter and two photodetectors. In order to show the entanglement of a generated entangled coherent state, we suggest to measure the joint quadrature variance of the field. We show that the entangled coherent states satisfy the sufficient condition for entanglement based on quadrature variance measurement. We also show how robust our scheme is against a low detection efficiency of homodyne detectors.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures; extensively revised version; added Section

<i>C-elegans</i> model identifies genetic modifiers of alpha-synuclein inclusion formation during aging

Inclusions in the brain containing alpha-synuclein are the pathological hallmark of Parkinson's disease, but how these inclusions are formed and how this links to disease is poorly understood. We have developed a &lt;i&gt;C-elegans&lt;/i&gt; model that makes it possible to monitor, in living animals, the formation of alpha-synuclein inclusions. In worms of old age, inclusions contain aggregated alpha-synuclein, resembling a critical pathological feature. We used genome-wide RNA interference to identify processes involved in inclusion formation, and identified 80 genes that, when knocked down, resulted in a premature increase in the number of inclusions. Quality control and vesicle-trafficking genes expressed in the ER/Golgi complex and vesicular compartments were overrepresented, indicating a specific role for these processes in alpha-synuclein inclusion formation. Suppressors include aging-associated genes, such as sir-2.1/SIRT1 and lagr-1/LASS2. Altogether, our data suggest a link between alpha-synuclein inclusion formation and cellular aging, likely through an endomembrane-related mechanism. The processes and genes identified here present a framework for further study of the disease mechanism and provide candidate susceptibility genes and drug targets for Parkinson's disease and other alpha-synuclein related disorders

Getting elections right? Measuring electoral integrity

Holding elections has become a global norm. Unfortunately, the integrity of elections varies strongly, ranging from “free and fair” elections with genuine contestation to “façade” elections marred by manipulation and fraud. Clearly, electoral integrity is a topic of increasing concern. Yet electoral integrity is notoriously difficult to measure, and hence taking stock of the available data is important. This article compares cross-national data sets measuring electoral integrity. The first part evaluates how the different data sets (a) conceptualize electoral integrity, (b) move from concepts to indicators, and (c) move from indicators to data. The second part analyses how different data sets code the same elections, seeking to explain the sources of disagreement about electoral integrity. The sample analysed comprises 746 elections in 95 third and fourth wave regimes from 1974 until 2009. I find that conceptual and measurement choices affect disagreement about election integrity, and also find that elections of lower integrity and post-conflict elections generate higher disagreement about election integrity. The article concludes with a discussion of results and suggestions for future research

Energy efficiency considerations in integrated IT and optical network resilient infrastructures

The European Integrated Project GEYSERS - Generalised Architecture for Dynamic Infrastructure Services - is concentrating on infrastructures incorporating integrated optical network and IT resources in support of the Future Internet with special emphasis on cloud computing. More specifically GEYSERS proposes the concept of Virtual Infrastructures over one or more interconnected Physical Infrastructures comprising both network and IT resources. Taking into consideration the energy consumption levels associated with the ICT today and the expansion of the Internet in size and complexity, that incurring increased energy consumption of both IT and network resources, energy efficient infrastructure design becomes critical. To address this need, in the framework of GEYSERS, we propose energy efficient design of infrastructures incorporating integrated optical network and IT resources, supporting resilient end-to-end services. Our modeling results quantify significant energy savings of the proposed solution by jointly optimizing the allocation of both network and IT resources

A wider Europe? The view from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine

On the evidence of national surveys conducted between 2000 and 2006, there is a declining sense of European self-identity in the three Slavic post-Soviet republics of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Attitudes towards the European Union and the possibility of membership are broadly supportive, but with a substantial proportion who find it difficult to express a view, and substantial proportions are poorly informed in comparison with the general public in EU member or prospective member countries. Those who are better informed are more likely to favour EU membership and vice versa. Generally, socioeconomic characteristics (except for age and region) are relatively poor predictors of support for EU membership as compared with attitudinal variables. But ‘Europeanness’ should not be seen as a given, and much will depend on whether EU member countries emphasize what is common to east and west or establish ‘new dividing lines’ in place of those of the cold war

Older Babies - More Active Mothers? How Maternal Labor Supply Changes as the Child Grows

Female labor market activity is dependent on the presence and the age of a child, but how do the determinants develop in magnitude and significance with the child's age? Using German SOEP data from 1991 to 2006 for mothers with young children, the change in maternal labor supply when the child is one, two, and three years old is explicitly addressed. According to the tobit regression results for precise working hours, maternal labor supply becomes increasingly responsive to economic incentives - mainly to imputed wages - as the child grows

Galactose inhibition of the constitutive transport of hexoses in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The relationship between the pathways of glucose and galactose utilization in Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been studied. Galactose (which is transported and phosphorylated by inducible systems) is a strong inhibitor of the utilization of glucose, fructose and mannose (which have the same constitutive transport and phosphorylation systems). Conversely, all these three hexoses inhibit the utilization of galactose, though with poor efficiency. These cross-inhibitions only occur in yeast adapted to galactose or in galactose-constitutive mutants. The efficiency of galactose as inhibitor is even greater than the efficiencies of each of the other three hexoses to inhibit the utilization of each other. Phosphorylation is not involved in the inhibition and transport of sugars is the affected step. The cross-inhibitions between galactose and either glucose, fructose or mannose do not implicate utilization of one hexose at the expense of the other, as it occurs in the mutual interactions between the latter three sugars. it seems that, by growing the yeast in galactose, a protein component is synthesized, or alternatively modified, that once bound to either galactose or any one of the other three hexoses (glucose, fructose or mannose), cross-interacts respectively with the constitutive or the inducible transport systems, impairing their function.This work was supported by a grant (PB87-0206) from the DGICYT, Promoción General del Conocimiento.Peer Reviewe