The impact of ICT (information and communication technology) on economic performance has been the subject of academic research for several decades, and despite the remarkable and significant innovation in computer technology, usage, and investments, only a small growth in productivity was observed. This observations has been coined the productivity paradox. Usingmeta-analysis, my paper answers ...

In Alzheimer's disease there is abnormal brain copper distribution, with accumulation of copper in amyloid plaques and a deficiency of copper in neighbouring cells. Excess copper inhibits Abeta (amyloid beta-peptide) production, but the effects of deficiency have not yet been determined. We therefore studied the effects of modulating intracellular copper levels on the processing of APP (amyloid...

BACKGROUND Increased circulating glucocorticoids are features of both aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD), and increased glucocorticoids accelerate the accumulation of AD pathologies. Here, we analyzed the effects of the glucocorticoid receptor antagonist mifepristone (RU486) in the 3xTg-AD mouse model at an age where hippocampal damage leads to high circulating corticosterone levels. METHODS ...

The basic concept of multiple imputation is straightforward and easy to understand, but the application to real data imposes many implementation problems. To define useful imputation models for a dataset that consists of categorical and of continuous variables with distributions that are anything but normal, contains skip patterns and all sorts of logical constraints is a challenging task. In t...

We analyse response patterns to an important survey of school children, exploiting rich auxiliary information on respondents and non-respondents cognitive ability that is correlated both with response and the learning achievement that the survey aims to measure. The survey is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which sets response thresholds in an attempt to control data ...

Amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), due to its neurotoxicity. Thus, blocking Aβ generation and aggregation in the brain has been realized as an efficient way for the prevention of AD. The natural product catalpol, isolated from Rehmannia glutinosa, has shown neuroprotective activities through inhibiting soluble Aβ production, degrading Aβ...

Biased Beliefs and Imperfect Information We perform an incentivized experiment designed to assess the accuracy of beliefs about characteristics and decisions. Subjects are asked to declare some specific choices and characteristics with different levels of observability from an external point of view, and typically formed through real world experiences. From the less observable mobile phone purc...

In this paper we focus our attention on the exploitation of the information contained in financial news to enhance the performance of a classifier of bank distress. Such information should be analyzed and inserted into the predictive model in the most efficient way and this task deals with all the issues related to text analysis and specifically analysis of news media. Among the different model...

Satellite RNAs (satRNAs) are sub-viral agents that may interact with their cognate helper virus (HV) and host plant synergistically and/or antagonistically. SatRNAs totally depend on the HV for replication, so satRNAs and HV usually evolve similar secondary or tertiary RNA structures that are recognized by a replication complex, although satRNAs and HV do not share an appreciable sequence homol...

The main objective of this study is to present a two-step approach to generate estimates of economic growth based on agents’ expectations from tendency surveys. First, we design a genetic programming experiment to derive mathematical functional forms that approximate the target variable by combining survey data on expectations about different economic variables. We use evolutionary algorithms t...