Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research's International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related questions. The project employs a harmonized approach to conduct within-country analyses that are combined for meaningful cross-country comparisons. The key lesson is that the choices of policy makers affect the incentive to work at older ages and these incentives have important effects on retirement behavior.

Socioeconomic evaluation of a public investment helps to understand its value for the community, and it also improves an investment by analyzing its different components, and the risks inherent in its completion. The Act of 31 December 2012 about Public Finance Planning makes it mandatory in France for project sponsors to conduct an ex-ante socioeconomic evaluation of all public civil investments made by the State and its public institutions. An independent counter-expert assessment of the ex-ante socioeconomic evaluation is conducted for the largest projects. A permanent committee of experts has been established to specify the methodological rules for socioeconomic evaluation and define the studies and research necessary.

We describe two techniques dedicated to observe and study the heating of structured materials like micro and nanowires and multilayered compounds. The techniques are thermally modulated fluorescence and thermoreflectance. Thermally modulated fluorescence allows mapping the heating of devices with a sub-wavelength lateral resolution. Thermoreflectance allows deeper physical investigations and can be directly used to determine the thermal conductivity and diffusivity of layered structures. In particular, we will show that by thermally modulating a surface by a point-like source, we are able to determine such quantities for several geometries, taking into account the nature of the substrate (conductive or not) as well as the interface quality between the layers. The experimental results, measured on aluminum thin films of variable thickness and on vanadium dioxide layers are corroborated by an analytical model that analyzes both the amplitude and the phase of the lateral heat diffusion in the structure

A polymer blend of an ionomer based on zinc neutralized sulfonated poly(phenylene oxide) or polystyrene with a silicone copolymer containing 6.45% propylamine groups in place of one of the methyl groups on a backbone silicon was prepared. Carbon-13 magic angle spinning spectra show coordination of the amine by the zinc ions. Morphological characterization was made by NMR spectroscopy based on proton spin diffusion, by small angle x-ray scattering and by energy filtered transmission electron microscopy. All experiments show domains in the range of 1 to 1000 nm and domain size can be controlled by the extent of coordination of the amine groups by the zinc ions and by thermal history. The different morphological experiments lead to an apparent hierarchy of domain sizes. The NMR experiment yields the smallest domains, 2 to 10 nm, where contrast is produced by differences in chain mobility. Small angle x-ray scattering indicates domains of 16 nm while electron microscopy indicates domains in the range of 100 to 1000 nm. The variation of the domain size between experiments may reflect the different sources of contrast in each case.

(001) MgO single crystals were implanted with 150 keV krypton ions (Kr+) at a fluence of 5.1016 ions.cm-2 . The implanted surface, observed with an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) exhibits striking features that can be described as undulations with a wavelength of 0.5 [μm. We correlate these features to the decrease in density and the stresses induced by the implantation damage. As a matter of fact, a model of surface instabilities provides a relationship between the wavelength of the ondulations and internal stresses. Using this model, implantation stresses are calculated to 2.2 GPa. This is in good agreement with the value of 2 GPa obtained with the help of the microindentation technique and the literature data. Some effects of an ionizing post-irradiation on stress and surface roughness are described.

A number of butadienes and their thiophene congeners were found to be phototoxic toward the larvae of the mosquito Aedes aegypti and of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Only the first instar larvae of the fruit fly were killed by the chemical treatment in the presence of long wavelength ultraviolet light (UVA), while the mosquito larvae were all affected by a similar treatment which was performed with either UVA or natural daylight. With one exception, the mosquito larvae were all killed within 1 hr of daylight exposure in the presence of an average concentration of 0.8 ppm of the phototoxin. The fruit fly larvae were killed within 20 min of exposure to UVA when in contact with a filter paper disc containing 1.13 × 10−5 g/cm2 of the phototoxin.