Avec les développements récents en science des données, les chercheurs de toutes disciplines ont maintenant accès à des outils d'analyse autrefois considérés comme très sophistiqués. Ce chapitre donne un exemple en illustrant comment des techniques d'analyse textuelle peuvent être utilisées afin de brosser le portrait des compétences demandées sur le marché du travail à l'aide du contenu d'offres d'emploi obtenues en ligne. La méthode proposée permet de traiter rapidement l'information contenue dans des centaines d'offres sans qu'un lecteur humain ait à lire chacune d'entre elles, et sans avoir de connaissances préalables sur le marché étudié. L'information obtenue est utilisée dans l'estimation d'un modèle économétrique visant à détecter les compétences émergentes. Un tel exercice permet d'obtenir le portrait d'un marché du travail spécifique, apportant un appui important aux décideurs afin d'assurer l'adéquation entre le marché du travail et les formations offertes dans les établissements d'enseignement. Certaines limites del'approche proposées, notamment en ce qui a trait à la sélection dans l'échantillon, sont discutées, et des pistes de recherches futures sont proposées.

Evidence from different sources shows that spouses' retirement decisions are correlated. Retirement policies affecting individuals in couples are therefore also likely to affect behavior of their spouses. It is therefore important to account for joint features in modeling retirement. This paper studies a structural collective model of labor supply and retirement of both partners in a couple with interdependent preferences, imperfect knowledge of preferences of the spouse, and subjective expectations about the future. We propose a novel method to estimate preferences and the intra-household bargaining process, which relies on stated preferences data collected in the Health and Retirement Study. Respondents were asked to choose between hypothetical retirement trajectories describing the retirement ages and replacement rates of both spouses from three perspectives: considering their own preferences only, the preferences of their spouse only, or the most likely decision for the household. With these data, all model parameters are identified and potential sources of joint retirement can be disentangled. Our results suggest that males misperceive their wives' preferences, overestimating their disutility of work. Our estimates correct for this. We find strong positive correlations between preferences for joint leisure (leisure complementarity) of the two partners. Counterfactual simulations with stylized retirement paths suggest that the leisure complementarities explain a substantial part of joint retirement, much more than correlation in unobserved heterogeneity or potential wage rates.

Initially, Escherichia albertii has been described as a non-lactose fermenting bacterium and methods used to isolate it were first based on this phenotypic property. However, a recent study showed a variable lactose fermentation phenotype for E. albertii suggesting that this microorganism could have been underestimated by previous studies using isolation methods based on lactose fermentation. In this study, we present a method for the isolation and identification of both lactose fermenting and non-fermenting-E. albertii cells in stool samples, said method combining culture and isolation on mEA agar, an indole test, as well as an E. albertii-specific PCR assay for formal species identification. The ability of the procedure to detect E. albertii strains was verified using 19 E. albertii strains and 132 non-E. albertii strains representing 88 species of different origins majoritary belonging to the Enterobacteriaceae family. All indole-positive white colonies grown on mEA agar were subjected to E. albertii-specific PCR amplification; all E. albertii strains tested were detected with this assay and none of the non-E. albertii strains tested was detected. To demonstrate the ability of the procedure to directly detect E. albertii in stool samples, E. albertii-inoculated stools were tested and for all inoculated samples, E. albertii colonies were easily detected and identified. The present study provides a method enable to recover both lactose-fermenting and -non-fermenting E. albertii strains from clinical samples. This method could help to provide a better portrait of the prevalence and pathogenicity of E. albertii in clinical samples.

Evidence from different sources shows that spouses' retirement decisions are correlated. Retirement policies affecting individuals in couples are therefore also likely to affect behavior of their spouses. It is therefore important to account for joint features in modeling retirement. This paper studies a structural collective model of labor supply and retirement of both partners in a couple with interdependent preferences, imperfect knowledge of preferences of the spouse, and subjective expectations about the future. We propose a novel method to estimate preferences and the intra-household bargaining process, which relies on stated preferences data collected in the Health and Retirement Study. Respondents were asked to choose between hypothetical retirement trajectories describing the retirement ages and replacement rates of both spouses from three perspectives: considering their own preferences only, the preferences of their spouse only, or the most likely decision for the household. With these data, all model parameters are identified and potential sources of joint retirement can be disentangled. We find that males misperceive their wives' preferences, overestimating their disutility of work. Our estimates correct for this bias. They suggest that correlation in unobserved heterogeneity components of the partners' marginal utility of leisure explains a large share of joint retirement decisions. We also find significant positive complementarities in leisure, but this explains a much smaller part of joint retirement. Pierre-Carl Michaud HEC Montréal 3000 Côte-Sainte-Catherine Road Montréal (Québec), Canada H3T 2A7 and NBER pierre-carl.michaud@hec.ca Arthur van Soest Tilburg University P.O. Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg The Netherlands and Netspar a.h.o.vansoest@uvt.nl Luc Bissonnette Universite Laval Pavillon J.-A.-DeSève 1025 avenue des Sciences-Humaines Quebec G1V0A6 Canada luc.bissonnette@ecn.ulaval.ca

The microbial assessment of potable/drinking water is done to ensure that the resource is free of fecal contamination indicators or waterborne pathogens. Culture-based methods for verifying the microbial safety are limited in the sense that a standard volume of water is generally tested for only one indicator (family) or pathogen.In this work, we describe a membrane filtration-based molecular microbiology method, CRENAME (Concentration Recovery Extraction of Nucleic Acids and Molecular Enrichment), exploiting molecular enrichment by whole genome amplification (WGA) to yield, in less than 4 h, a nucleic acid preparation which can be repetitively tested by real-time PCR for example, to provide multiparametric presence/absence tests (1 colony forming unit or microbial particle per standard volume of 100-1000 mL) for bacterial or protozoan parasite cells or particles susceptible to contaminate potable/drinking water.

Introduction: Rapidity, simplicity, and portability are highly desirable characteristics of tests and devices designed for performing diagnostics at the point of care (POC), either near patients managed in healthcare facilities or to offer bioanalytical alternatives in external settings. By reducing the turnaround time of the diagnostic cycle, POC diagnostics can reduce the dissemination, morbidity, and mortality of infectious diseases and provide tools to control the global threat of antimicrobial resistance.Areas covered: A literature search of PubMed and Google Scholar, and extensive mining of specialized publications, Internet resources, and manufacturers' websites have been used to organize and write this overview of the challenges and requirements associated with the development of portable sample-to-answer diagnostics, and showcase relevant examples of handheld devices, portable instruments, and less mobile systems which may or could be operated at POC.Expert commentary: Rapid (<1h) diagnostics can contribute to control infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistant pathogens. Portable devices or instruments enabling sample-to-answer bioanalysis can provide rapid, robust, and reproducible testing at the POC or close from it. Beyond testing, to realize some promises of personalized/precision medicine, it will be critical to connect instruments to healthcare data management systems, to efficiently link decentralized testing results to the electronic medical record of patients.

Extreme point-of-care (POC) testing for infections, as performed (endured) in low-resource settings, developing countries, tropical areas, or in conditions following emergency crises or natural disasters, must be undertaken under environmental, logistic, and societal conditions which impose a significant deal of stress on local human populations and healthcare providers. For disease diagnostics or management, simple and robust biomedical equipment and reagents are required and needed. This chapter aims to overview some of these stresses (requirements) and intends to describe some of the solutions already engineered at the heart of centripetal (centrifugal) microfluidic platforms such as that of GenePOC Inc. to enable rapid, robust, and reproducible nucleic acid-based diagnostics of infectious diseases, to better control the morbidity and mortality of infections and the expanding threat posed by antimicrobial resistance.

Drinking water of good quality is essential to ensure the health and economical sustainability of human communities worldwide. The assessment of drinking water microbial quality is generally performed by detecting and/or quantifying faecal contamination indicators which may not provide an adequate evaluation of the health risks posed by several waterborne pathogens, for example Norovirus, Vibrio cholerae, and Cryptosporidium. In many instances, decentralized testing done in a mobile or more compact laboratory could increase the speed and capacity of predicting (or determining the source of) waterborne disease outbreaks, while offering unique opportunities to sensitize and train local populations on water and health issues. In this work, we describe the water molecular microbiology programme of the classical and molecular microbiology module of the Atlantis mobile laboratory complex, as well as the scientific, operational and design requirements that served to build a quite unique infrastructure used to study the microbial quality of drinking water in Northern Québec, Bermuda, and the Caribbean islands.

In this article, we highlight how simulation methods can be used to analyze power of economic experiments. We provide the powerBBK package programmed for experimental economists, that can be used to perform simulations in STATA. Power can be simulated using a single command line for various statistical tests (nonparametric and parametric), estimation methods (linear, binary, and censored regression models), treatment variables (binary, continuous, time-invariant or time varying), sample sizes, experimental periods, and other design features (within or between-subjects design). The package can be used to predict minimum sample sizes required to reach a user-specific level of power, to maximize power of a design given the researcher supplied a budget constraint, or to compute power to detect a user-specified treatment order effect in within-subjects designs. The package can also be used to compute the probability of sign errors-the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis in the wrong direction as well as the share of rejections pointing in the wrong direction. The powerBBK package is provided as an. ado file along with a help file, both of which can be downloaded here (http://www.bbktools.org).

When analyzing data on subjective expectations of continuous outcomes, researchers have access to a limited number of reported probabilities for each respondent from which to construct complete distribution functions. Moreover, reported probabilities may be rounded and thus not equal to true beliefs. Using survival expectations elicited from a representative sample from the Netherlands, we investigate what can be learned if we take these two sources of missing information into account and expectations are therefore only partially identified. We find novel evidence for rounding by checking whether reported expectations are consistent with a hazard of death that increases weakly with age. Only 39% of reported beliefs are consistent with this under the assumption that all probabilities are reported precisely, while 92% are if we allow for rounding. Using the available information to construct bounds on subjective life expectancy, we show that the data alone are not sufficiently informative to allow for useful inference in partially identified linear models, even in the absence of rounding. We propose to improve precision by interpolation between rounded probabilities. Interpolation in combination with a limited amount of rounding does yield informative intervals.

Quebecers are living longer than ever before as a result of better health as well as improved educational attainment and economic well-being. Using a dynamic microsimulation model, we show that an aging workforce will not necessarily mean a decline in Quebec employment levels in the coming years. Because future experienced workers will be more educated and more of them will remain in employment for longer, we project that annual growth rates in employment will stay positive, averaging between 0.2 and 0.3 percent over the next two decades. Between 2035 and 2050, employment could contribute nearly 0.3 percentage points to annual economic growth in Quebec.

Nous projetons le niveau d’emploi au Quebec d’ici 2050 a l’aide d’un modele qui simule la demographie et les comportements socio-economiques au niveau individuel. Ces resultats sont contrastes avec les projections effectuees par la Regie des rentes du Quebec en 2013 et avec des projections qui maintiennent le niveau d’education et les comportements d’emploi inchanges. En depit du vieillissement demographique qui fera diminuer la population en âge de travailler, les comportements recents sur le marche du travail suggerent que le Quebec aura droit a une hausse des taux d’emploi, surtout chez les travailleurs experimentes. En consequence, la croissance totale du niveau de l’emploi de 2015 a 2050 devrait etre plus elevee que celle prevue. Nos resultats suggerent que cette croissance permettra d’amoindrir legerement les effets du vieillissement en soutenant la croissance economique.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are released naturally in vivo and in vitro from cells and tissues into biological fluids such as plasma, urine, saliva and amniotic fluid, and into culture medium. EV may contain proteins, lipids, mRNA and miRNA significant of the physiological status or of their cellular origin and affect the functions of neighboring cells. The characterization of EVs present in HIV-1-infected individuals provides insight into pathogenesis, inflammation and disease progression. However, the potential of EVs to become reliable research or diagnostic tools is currently limited by the difficulty of distinguishing apoptotic and plasma membrane EVs, exosomes and virions. In spite of this methodological limitation, EVs are expected to become highly useful tools in biomedicine and uncover a research area expected to lead to innovative R&D.

The expectations of economic agents play a crucial role in almost any inter-temporal economic model. A period of economic crisis may make consumer expectations more pes- simistic and affect their saving or retirement plans and decisions. Using 2009-2012 panel data for a representative sample of the Dutch population, we analyze consumers’ per- ception of the crisis and its expected impact on the household. Second, we analyze the deviations between short run income expectations and realizations, and how they are shaped by how people perceive the crisis. Finally, we study how crisis perceptions affect retirement age and income expectation.

Abstract The expectations of economic agents play a crucial role in almost any inter-temporal economic model. Using 2009–12 panel data for a representative sample of the Dutch population, we analyze consumers’ income and pension expectations. We focus on heterogeneity across socioeconomic groups and associations with how consumers perceive the economic and financial crisis. We find that pension expectations become more pessimistic over the 4 years, in line with pension reforms and the crisis. We find substantial differences across groups that are generally plausible and in line with financial theory.

In January 2015, the Alere™ i Influenza A & B test became the first molecular test to receive a CLIA waiver, thereby leading the way to the detection of nucleic acids at point of care (POC). For the diagnosis and management of infectious diseases, there is an urgent need of such devices for controlling the morbidity and mortality of infections, and the evolution and progression of antimicrobial resistance. This chapter provides a snapshot of CLIA-waived tests marketed for the diagnosis of infectious diseases at POC and offers a mid-to-long overview of biomarkers, technologies, and organisational strategies anticipated to widen the scope of POC diagnostics in developing and industrialised countries.

We compare individual survival curves constructed from objective (actual mortality) and elicited subjective information (probability of survival to a given target age). We develop a methodology to estimate jointly subjective and objective individual survival curves accounting for rounding on subjective reports of perceived survival. We make use of the long follow-up period in the Health and Retirement Study and the high quality of mortality data to estimate individual survival curves that feature both observed and unobserved heterogeneity. This allows us to compare objective and subjective estimates of remaining life expectancy for various groups and compare welfare effects of objective and subjective mortality risk using the life cycle model of consumption. We find that subjective and objective hazards are not the same. The median welfare loss from misperceptions of mortality risk when annuities are not available is 7% of current wealth at age 65 whereas more than 25% of respondents have losses larger than 60% of wealth. When annuities are available and exogenously given, the welfare loss is substantially lower.

This paper discusses the choice of the number of participants for within-subjects (WS) designs and between-subjects (BS) designs based on simulations of statistical power allowing for different numbers of experimental periods. We illustrate the usefulness of the approach in the context of field experiments on gift exchange. Our results suggest that a BS design requires between 4 to 8 times more subjects than a WS design to reach an acceptable level of statistical power. Moreover, the predicted minimal sample sizes required to correctly detect a treatment effect with a probability of 80% greatly exceed sizes currently used in the literature. Our results suggest that adding experimental periods in an experiment can substantially increase the statistical power of a WS design, but have very little effect on the statistical power of the BS design. Finally, we discuss issues relating to numerical computation and present the powerBBK package programmed for STATA. This package allows users to conduct their own analysis of power for the different designs (WS and BS), conditional on user specified experimental parameters (true effect size, sample size, number of periods, noise levels for control and treatment, error distributions), statistical tests (parametric and nonparametric), and estimation methods (linear regression, binary choice models (probit and logit), censored regression models (tobit)).

In this paper, we compare individual survival curves constructed from objective (actual mortality) and elicited subjective information (probability of survival to a given target age). We develop a methodology to estimate jointly subjective and objective individualsurvival curves accounting for rounding on subjective reports of perceived mortality risk. We make use of the long follow-up period in the Health and Retirement Study and the high quality of mortality data to estimate individual survival curves which feature both observed and unobserved heterogeneity. This allows us to compare objective and subjective estimates of remaining life expectancy for various groups, evaluate subjective expectations of joint survival and widowhood by household, and compare objective and subjective mortality with standard life-cycle models of consumption.

As of today, there is no nucleic acid-based testing technology platform that has been a game changer for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. GenePOC, a company stemming from research realized at Université Laval, is one of the front-runners in the race to provide healthcare with a molecular platform enabling this revolution and “A quicker way to diagnose patients.” Despite significant progress in hygiene, pharmacology, and vaccinology, infectious diseases remain global threats associated with approximately 25% of the annual worldwide death toll. In addition to the social and economic losses attributed to this high mortality rate, we cannot underestimate the direct and indirect suffering and costs of the hundreds of millions of infections that annually did not result in death. In contemporary medicine and for a number of reasons, the management of infectious diseases is still crippled by a lengthy diagnostic process that needlessly endangers the life of patients potentially subject to an infection. Since early 2000, the market penetration of molecular microbiology testing has not reached the expectations, and this is mainly due to financial, clinical, and acceptability stumbling blocks (1–5). To curb the morbidity and mortality rate of infectious diseases and especially considering the fact that we may be losing the fight against antibiotic-resistant and multiresistant pathogens (6, 7), it is time that the management of infections should be rightfully regarded as important as that of cardiac arrests or of trauma patients and that a “Change in culture without (microbial) culture” be operated for the benefit of patients (8). A major aspect that is regularly overlooked is the impact of the economic crisis that occurred in 2008–2009. Increasing and hard-to-control global health costs have accelerated a movement toward the centralization of laboratories; although the rationalization of resources is a logical solution, it significantly increased the time required to bring the clinical sample from the patient to the laboratory. Today, it is unlikely that a central laboratory could provide same-day results. Therefore, 24 h is becoming a standard delay that will significantly affect the diagnosis and management of infectious diseases. This delay is definitively inhibiting the positive impact of using molecular methods. For the diagnosis of critical infectious diseases such as respiratory tract infections or neonatal infections, or for the detection of microbes associated with hospital-acquired infections OVERVIEW