Unemployment and Subsequent Wages: Does Gender Matter?

Are there any differences in how men and women fare from unemployment in terms of the wages they receive on a new job? This paper addresses that question using the 1991 wave of the Level of Living Survey. The results suggest that men who experience unemployment will suffer a reduction of subsequent wages while no such effect could be found for women. These findings support the interpretation that women invest more in general rather than specific human capital which make them less exposed to career interruptions, at least those of a short duration. Due to the favourable labour market at the time, average unemployment duration was rather short, which may have prevented general capital from depreciating. However, the presence of large negative occurrence effects for men suggests that unemployment, even of a short duration, is associated with considerable loss of human capital.Unemployment; Gender; Human Capital; Wages

Prostate cancer genomics: can we distinguish between indolent and fatal disease using genetic markers?

Prostate cancer is one of the most heritable cancers in men, and recent genome-wide association studies have revealed numerous genetic variants associated with disease. The risk variants identified using case-control designs that compared unaffected individuals with all types of patients with prostate cancer show little or no ability to discriminate between indolent and fatal forms of this disease. This suggests different genetic components are involved in the initiation as compared with the prognosis of prostate cancer. Future studies contrasting patients with more and less aggressive disease, and exploring association with disease progression and prognosis, should be more effective in detecting genetic risk factors for prostate cancer outcome

Effects of in-company quality awards on organizational performance

The relationship between total quality management (TQM) practices and improved performance has been frequently discussed in the literature. In this paper, the costs and the effects of in-company quality awards on performance are discussed and analysed. The paper covers a survey of Swedish companies that use or have used in-company quality awards to stimulate TQM efforts and thereby to improve performance. The study cannot show any strong evidence of improved performance for units that applied for the in-company quality award. However, in contrast to units that have not applied, some units that have applied for the in-company quality award considered that the results related to performance have improved greatly. One large positive effect perceived by the participating units was increased customer orientation while the largest costs were put on the description of activities and the improvement work itself

Investigating the possible causal role of coffee consumption with prostate cancer risk and progression using Mendelian randomization analysis.

Coffee consumption has been shown in some studies to be associated with lower risk of prostate cancer. However, it is unclear if this association is causal or due to confounding or reverse causality. We conducted a Mendelian randomisation analysis to investigate the causal effects of coffee consumption on prostate cancer risk and progression. We used two genetic variants robustly associated with caffeine intake (rs4410790 and rs2472297) as proxies for coffee consumption in a sample of 46,687 men of European ancestry from 25 studies in the PRACTICAL consortium. Associations between genetic variants and prostate cancer case status, stage and grade were assessed by logistic regression and with all-cause and prostate cancer-specific mortality using Cox proportional hazards regression. There was no clear evidence that a genetic risk score combining rs4410790 and rs2472297 was associated with prostate cancer risk (OR per additional coffee increasing allele: 1.01, 95% CI: 0.98,1.03) or having high-grade compared to low-grade disease (OR: 1.01, 95% CI: 0.97,1.04). There was some evidence that the genetic risk score was associated with higher odds of having nonlocalised compared to localised stage disease (OR: 1.03, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.06). Amongst men with prostate cancer, there was no clear association between the genetic risk score and all-cause mortality (HR: 1.00, 95% CI: 0.97,1.04) or prostate cancer-specific mortality (HR: 1.03, 95% CI: 0.98,1.08). These results, which should have less bias from confounding than observational estimates, are not consistent with a substantial effect of coffee consumption on reducing prostate cancer incidence or progression.British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, and the National Institute for Health Research, under the auspices of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration Cancer Research UK. Grant Number: C18281/A19169 RMM and Caroline Relton (Integrative Cancer Epidemiology Programme) Canadian Institutes of Health Research the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme. Grant Numbers: 223175, HEALTH-F2-2009-223175 Cancer Research UK. Grant Numbers: C5047/A7357, C1287/A10118, C5047/A3354, C5047/A10692, C16913/A6135 National Institute of Health (NIH) Cancer Post-Cancer GWAS. Grant Number: 1 U19 CA 148537-01 the GAME-ON initiative the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme. Grant Numbers: 223175, HEALTH-F2-2009-223175 Cancer Research UK. Grant Numbers: C1287/A10118, C1287/A 10710, C12292/A11174, C1281/A12014, C5047/A8384, C5047/A15007, C5047/A10692 the National Institutes of Health. Grant Number: CA128978 Post-Cancer GWAS initiative. Grant Numbers: 1U19 CA148537, 1U19 CA148065, 1U19 CA148112 the GAME-ON initiative the Department of Defence. Grant Number: W81XWH-10-1-0341 the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) CIHR Team in Familial Risks of Breast Cancer Komen Foundation for the Cure Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Grant Number: Ovarian Cancer Research Fund VicHealth and Cancer Council Victoria Australian NHMRC. Grant Numbers: 209057, 251553, 504711 Cancer Council Victoria Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) National Death Index and the Australian Cancer Database U.K. Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme of the NIH Research. Grant Numbers: HTA 96/20/99, ISRCTN20141297 Prodigal study and the ProMPT (Prostate Mechanisms of Progression and Treatment) National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Department of Health, the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK. Grant Number: G0500966/75466 Cancer Research UK. Grant Number: C5047/A7357 NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at The Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust National Institute for Health Research Bristol Nutrition Biomedical Research Unit based at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Bristol FCH, DEN and JLD are NIHR Senior Investigators MRC and the University of Bristol. Grant Numbers: G0600705, MC_UU_12013/6This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Wiley via https://doi.org/10.1002/ijc.3046

Gene and pathway level analyses of germline DNA-repair gene variants and prostate cancer susceptibility using the iCOGS-genotyping array.

BACKGROUND: Germline mutations within DNA-repair genes are implicated in susceptibility to multiple forms of cancer. For prostate cancer (PrCa), rare mutations in BRCA2 and BRCA1 give rise to moderately elevated risk, whereas two of B100 common, low-penetrance PrCa susceptibility variants identified so far by genome-wide association studies implicate RAD51B and RAD23B. METHODS: Genotype data from the iCOGS array were imputed to the 1000 genomes phase 3 reference panel for 21 780 PrCa cases and 21 727 controls from the Prostate Cancer Association Group to Investigate Cancer Associated Alterations in the Genome (PRACTICAL) consortium. We subsequently performed single variant, gene and pathway-level analyses using 81 303 SNPs within 20 Kb of a panel of 179 DNA-repair genes. RESULTS: Single SNP analyses identified only the previously reported association with RAD51B. Gene-level analyses using the SKAT-C test from the SNP-set (Sequence) Kernel Association Test (SKAT) identified a significant association with PrCa for MSH5. Pathway-level analyses suggested a possible role for the translesion synthesis pathway in PrCa risk and Homologous recombination/Fanconi Anaemia pathway for PrCa aggressiveness, even though after adjustment for multiple testing these did not remain significant. CONCLUSIONS: MSH5 is a novel candidate gene warranting additional follow-up as a prospective PrCa-risk locus. MSH5 has previously been reported as a pleiotropic susceptibility locus for lung, colorectal and serous ovarian cancers.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/bjc.2016.5

Разработка гидропривода транспортёра и мотовила жатки самоходной косилки КС-100

We propose a novel method for iterative learning of point correspondences between image sequences. Points moving on surfaces in 3D space are projected into two images. Given a point in either view, the considered problem is to determine the corresponding location in the other view. The geometry and distortions of the projections are unknown as is the shape of the surface. Given several pairs of point-sets but no access to the 3D scene, correspondence mappings can be found by excessive global optimization or by the fundamental matrix if a perspective projective model is assumed. However, an iterative solution on sequences of point-set pairs with general imaging geometry is preferable. We derive such a method that optimizes the mapping based on Neyman's chi-square divergence between the densities representing the uncertainties of the estimated and the actual locations. The densities are represented as channel vectors computed with a basis function approach. The mapping between these vectors is updated with each new pair of images such that fast convergence and high accuracy are achieved. The resulting algorithm runs in real-time and is superior to state-of-the-art methods in terms of convergence and accuracy in a number of experiments.funding agencies|EC|215078247947|ELLIIT||Strategic Area for ICT research||CADICS||Swedish Government||Swedish Research Council||CUAS||FOCUS||Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research||DIPLECSGARNICSELLIITETTCUASFOCUSCADIC