Studying Scarring Effects Using Factorial Designs: Rating or Ranking?

Scientific Conference (2016, November 09)

Early job insecurity is a much-discussed topic across European countries. Research overwhelmingly found that being unemployed after graduation affects employment chances and also future wages negatively ... [more ▼]

Early job insecurity is a much-discussed topic across European countries. Research overwhelmingly found that being unemployed after graduation affects employment chances and also future wages negatively, other research, however, did not find such scarring effects. Some of this mixed evidence may be due to the different ways in which data were collected. Evaluating the effects of potentially stigmatizing applicant characteristics on hiring chances, such as previous unemployment spells, is known to be prone to social desirability bias. Factorial survey experiments (FSE) and forced choice experiments (FCE) have been suggested to alleviate some of these problems. In this workshop contribution, we gauge the capability of FSE and FCE to estimate effects of early career unemployment spells on recruiters’ hiring decisions. Using data obtained from a survey with sequentially implemented FSE and FCE with 2000 recruiters in Bulgaria, Greece, Norway, and Switzerland we compare FSE and FCE using multilevel linear regression models and multilevel probit models with random effects. Our preliminary results suggest that FCE may be better suited to gather valid data with minimal social desirability bias. [less ▲]

Die Bedeutung des Tieres in Landwirtschaft und Ernährung (Podiumsdiskussion mit Sarah Wiener, Fernand Etgen, Martin von Mackensen, Camille Müller und Rachel Reckinger)

Speeches/Talks (2016)

Emotion Regulation and Job Burnout: Investigating the relationship between emotion regulation knowledge, abilities and dispositions and their role in the prediction of Job Burnout

Doctoral thesis (2016)

The present thesis has two goals: 1) to understand the relationship between three levels of emotion regulation - knowledge, abilities and dispositions - as proposed by the Three-level model of emotional ... [more ▼]

The present thesis has two goals: 1) to understand the relationship between three levels of emotion regulation - knowledge, abilities and dispositions - as proposed by the Three-level model of emotional competences (Mikolajczak, 2009) and 2) to investigate the role of these three levels in the prediction of job burnout – while accounting for the moderator role of the emotional labor of the job, and by distinguishing these effects in two professional sectors (finance and health-care sector). Methodologically, besides emotion regulation knowledge, specific emotion regulation strategies - reappraisal, suppression, enhancement and expressive flexibility – are considered and assessed both as abilities and as dispositions. Results from goal 1 indicate that: a) knowledge, abilities and dispositions are not hierarchically structured; b) different strategies are independent from each other (both in terms of ability and in terms of disposition); c) the disposition to reappraise and to enhance do not depend on a priori knowledge or ability, while the disposition to suppress decreases as the emotion regulation knowledge and the ability to enhance increase. Results from goal 2 indicate that emotion regulation knowledge, abilities and dispositions are incremental predictors of job burnout. Specifically: a) emotion regulation knowledge decreases emotional exhaustion, and reappraisal ability increases the sense of professional efficacy; b) expressive flexibility increases professional efficacy for workers in high emotional labor jobs, while its effect is detrimental for workers in low emotional labor jobs; c) suppression disposition protects individuals from professional inefficacy while suppression ability is detrimental in this regard. Finally, the results point out that different strategies have different impacts in different professional sectors, notably suppression which appears as a detrimental strategy for finance workers and as a protective strategy for health-care workers. Overall, these results point out that several dimensions of emotion regulation are relevant in the prediction of job burnout. Specifically, knowledge, as well as abilities and dispositions seem to play an incremental role in explaining variability in job burnout symptoms. The effects of the specific strategies should not be analyzed in a simplistic way but instead, are better understood when taking into account the specificities of the job and the professional context. [less ▲]

Crossing the borders of domains. The role of complex problem solving for student learning

Scientific Conference (2016, November 08)

Language Practices in Multilingual Legal Education: A Case Study at the University of Luxembourg

Doctoral thesis (2016)

Abstract in English The effects of globalisation include the internationalisation of universities, executed for the purpose of quality improvement, restructuration or upgrading. At the higher education ... [more ▼]

Abstract in English The effects of globalisation include the internationalisation of universities, executed for the purpose of quality improvement, restructuration or upgrading. At the higher education level, internationalisation may be visible in the outline of the curriculum, the superdiversity of students’ and teachers’ origins and languages, as well as the establishment of student and staff exchange programmes. All these aspects lead to the need for communication in different languages and, in an increasing numbers of cases, the presence of languages of teaching and learning which are not the first languages of the teachers, students and administrative staff involved. Therefore, the trend towards internationalisation of universities around the world goes hand in hand with re-structuring related to language use and language choice. In other words, language being an essential component of education has become a major point in governance. The topic of the present thesis is situated in the area of the role of languages and multilingualism in higher education. The study addresses the problem of using a specific instructional language, French, English or German in our case, to learn content subjects in contexts where some of these languages may be a foreign language to students and teachers and in a field, which in many countries is traditionally considered bound to the nation-state and hence to a national language. With regard to the field of law, the situation in the multilingual country Luxembourg is particular in that the Luxembourgish law is formulated in French, to some extent in German but the national language is Luxembourgish. The study sets out to describe the linguistic practices applied in learning and teaching the law at the trilingual university of Luxembourg and investigating how students and teachers view these practices. Using a range of ethnographic methods, the study examines classroom practices in a specific multilingual context and the way participants view them, rather than assessing the appropriateness of the pedagogical means selected or applied by teachers in a normative sense. However, matters of general and legal pedagogy and legal theory will be accessorily although not thoroughly discussed. We hope that the study will contribute to increase the knowledge on this subject in general and be useful for this specific research terrain (Luxembourg) as well as for other similar contexts worldwide. [less ▲]

Virtual Desktop Infrastructures: architecture, survey and green aspects proof of concept

in 7th INTERNATIONAL GREEN and SUSTAINABLE COMPUTING CONFERENCE (1st RE-HPC workshop), Hangzhou, China (November 2016) (2016, November 07)

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a new generation of cloud service in which users operating systems execute in a cloud data center. Users can access their desktops and applications by using thin ... [more ▼]

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a new generation of cloud service in which users operating systems execute in a cloud data center. Users can access their desktops and applications by using thin client devices. This thin client is consisting of only a screen attached with low power CPU. This new paradigm of delivering remote desktop provides benefits in terms of flexibility, cost reduction, data security and energy saving which are the green benefits from using VDI. VDI becomes an important technology in green computing and energy saving. In this paper, we present and review the green benefits for using VDI in large and small organizations. The usefulness and energy-saving features of VDI are also illustrated by some experiments. [less ▲]

A real-time holding decision rule accounting for passenger travel cost

Scientific Conference (2016, November 04)

Holding has been extensively investigated as a strategy to mitigate the inherently stochastic nature of public transport operations. Holding focuses on either regulating vehicle headways using a rule ... [more ▼]

Holding has been extensively investigated as a strategy to mitigate the inherently stochastic nature of public transport operations. Holding focuses on either regulating vehicle headways using a rule-based approach or minimizing passenger travel cost by employing optimization models. This paper introduces a holding decision rule that explicitly addresses passenger travel cost. The decision to hold relies on the passenger demand distribution along the line. The passenger cost holding rule is tested using simulation for a high frequency bus line in Stockholm, Sweden and is compared with a nocontrol scheme and the currently used headway-based strategy. The results indicate that the new decision rule results in relatively minor reductions of passenger cost compared to the currently adopted strategy, and that it allocates the greatest share of holding time at the beginning of the route. [less ▲]

Science oder Fiction

Article for general public (2016)

Game-Theoretic Framework for Integrity Verification in Computation Outsourcing

Poster (2016, November 03)

n the cloud computing era, in order to avoid computational burdens, many organizations tend to outsource their computations to third-party cloud servers. In order to protect service quality, the integrity ... [more ▼]

n the cloud computing era, in order to avoid computational burdens, many organizations tend to outsource their computations to third-party cloud servers. In order to protect service quality, the integrity of computation results need to be guaranteed. In this paper, we develop a game theoretic framework which helps the outsourcer to maximize its payo while ensuring the desired level of integrity for the outsourced computation. We de ne two Stackelberg games and analyze the optimal se ing’s sensitivity for the parameters of the model. [less ▲]

Tightening the uncertainty principle for stochastic currents

in Physical Review. E ,Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics (2016), 94(052104),

We connect two recent advances in the stochastic analysis of nonequilibrium systems: the (loose) uncertainty principle for the currents, which states that statistical errors are bounded by thermodynamic ... [more ▼]

We connect two recent advances in the stochastic analysis of nonequilibrium systems: the (loose) uncertainty principle for the currents, which states that statistical errors are bounded by thermodynamic dissipation, and the analysis of thermodynamic consistency of the currents in the light of symmetries. Employing the large deviation techniques presented by Gingrich et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 120601 (2016)] and Pietzonka, Barato, and Seifert [Phys. Rev. E 93, 052145 (2016)], we provide a short proof of the loose uncertainty principle, and prove a tighter uncertainty relation for a class of thermodynamically consistent currents J . Our bound involves a measure of partial entropy production, that we interpret as the least amount of entropy that a system sustaining current J can possibly produce, at a given steady state. We provide a complete mathematical discussion of quadratic bounds which allows one to determine which are optimal, and finally we argue that the relationship for the Fano factor of the entropy production rate var σ/mean σ 2 is the most significant realization of the loose bound. We base our analysis both on the formalism of diffusions, and of Markov jump processes in the light of Schnakenberg’s cycle analysis. [less ▲]