1869 research outputs found
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Profit Versus Non Profit: A Third Way? The Case of the Italian Mutual Cooperative Banks.
No full textThe traditional distinction between profit and non profit firms does not necessarily apply to some types of cooperative firms, such as the Italian mutual cooperative banks (MCBs). These MCBs present a peculiar governance structure, a combination between a public company governance model and a non-profit one. Similarly to a “not for profit organization”, the ownership of the MCBs is widely diffused among borrowerowners, but dividends are not typically redistributed. Like in “public company bank”, MCBs have a spread ownership and a board of directors. MCBs work in order to maximise social utility rather than profits, as a social entrepreneurship. MCBs represent a kind of third way governance model in the financial sector. The board of directors of a MCB acts as a public-good administrator in deciding on how to invest, with a deep impact on the local community. However, the governance of these banks is affected by structural problems. The mutual and co-operative nature of these banks is challenged by the increase in the number of members-owners and in the heterogeneity of the member-owners group. This study aims at investigating the democratic voting mechanism of the board (one-head one-vote) and its appropriateness given enlargement of the member’s community. The research would tackle the issue of governance structure and incentive to efficient behavior
Alle origini del copyright e del diritto d’autore: spunti in chiave di diritto e tecnologia = The origins of copyright and droit d’auteur: some insights in the law and technology perspective
No full textNonostante le molte voci critiche alzatesi dalla dottrina giuridica, negli ultimi trent’anni dominati dalla rivoluzione digitale i legislatori occidentali hanno costantemente rafforzato il copyright/droit d’auteur, riducendo significativamente il pubblico dominio. Le leggi sul diritto d’autore si sono trasformate in documenti lunghi, complessi, enigmatici e pieni di sanzioni criminali. In questo scenario, guardare alle origini copyright/droit d’auteur nella prospettiva di “diritto e tecnologia” rappresenta un esercizio fondamentale per comprendere la necessità di limitare il potere di controllo esclusivo dell’informazione e preservare ampia spazi di libero accesso da parte del pubblico. ENGLISH ABSTRACT Despite the warnings of large part of legal scholarship, in the last thirty years dominated by the digital revolution western policy makers has strengthen the copyright/droit d’auteur, reducing dramatically the public domain. Copyright law has become long, complex, puzzling and full of criminal sanctions. In this landscape, looking at the origins of copyright/droit d’auteur in the law and technology perspective is a fundamental excercise in order to understand the need to limit the power of exclusive control over information and preserve large areas of public free access. Questo paper © Copyright 2010 by Roberto Caso è pubblicato con Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale-Non opere derivate 2.5 Italia License. Maggiori informazioni circa la licenza all’URL: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/it/
About an optimal visiting problem
No full textIn this paper we are concerned with the optimal control problem consisting in minimizing the time for reaching (visiting) a fixed number of target sets, in particular more than one target. Such a problem is of course reminiscent of the famous "Traveling Salesman Problem" and brings all its computational diculties. Our aim is to apply the dynamic programming technique in order to characterize the value function of the problem as the unique viscosity solution of a suitable Hamilton-Jacobi equation. We introduce some "external" variables, one per target, which keep in memory whether the corresponding target is already visited or not, and we transform the visiting problem in a suitable Mayer problem. This fact allows us to overcome the lacking of the Dynamic Programming Principle for the originary problem. The external variables evolve with a hysteresis law and the Hamilton-Jacobi equation turns out to be discontinuous
Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2009
No full textOntology matching consists of finding correspondences between ontology entities. OAEI campaigns aim at comparing ontology matching systems on precisely defined test cases. Test cases can use ontologies of different nature (from expressive OWL ontologies to simple directories) and use different modalities, e.g., blind evaluation, open evaluation, consensus. OAEI-2009 builds over previous campaigns by having 5 tracks with 11 test cases followed by 16 participants. This paper is an overall presentation of the OAEI 2009 campaign
ResEval: An Open and Resource-oriented Research Impact Evaluation tool
No full textIn this paper we present the concepts and the architecture of an open and resource-oriented tool for evaluating research impact of individual researchers and groups. The advantages of the tool are that it relies on several sources for computing metrics, freely available on the Internet, and provide an easy way for defining and computing custom metrics for individuals and research groups
Contextual Goal Models
No full textIn emerging computing paradigms, such as mobile, ubiquitous, and pervasive computing, the relation between context and requirements is evident. Context might be a main factor to determine the set of requirements relevant to a system, the alternatives that can be adopted to meet these requirements, and the quality of each of such alternatives. In spite of that, most requirements engineering (RE) research ignores, or presumes a uniform nature of, the context where the system operates. A RE framework specialized for systems reflecting their context is still missing. Before influencing the behavior of software, context influences the behavior of users. It influences user's goals and their choices to reach these goals. Capturing this latest influence is an essential step towards software developed to meet user's requirements in different contexts. In this report, we develop a goal-based RE modeling framework for systems operating in and reflecting varying contexts. We propose the contextual goal model that captures the relation between alternatives for goal salification and context. Moreover, it provides constructs to hierarchically analyze context and identify alternative ways to judge if a context holds. We illustrate our proposed model via a scenario of promotion mobile information system
Cognitively Salient Semantic Relations: Extracting Modifiers of Composite Part Relations
No full textWhen participants are asked to describe concrete concepts, among others they produce descriptions for constitutive parts, of which many of them are composed expressions consisting of a modifier (adjective) and the part noun. This poster discusses first approaches used to automatically collect from web corpora cognitively salient adjectival modifiers for composite expressions for constitutive parts of concrete concepts
Tecnologie belliche e danno al proprio combattente: il ruolo della responsabilità civile in una comparazione fra il caso statunitense dell’Agent Orange e il caso italiano dell’uranio impoverito = War technologies and home soldiers injuries: the role of tort law in a comparison between the american “Agent Orange” and the Italian “depleted uranium” litigations
No full textQuesto lavoro si prefigge di esplorare in che modo la responsabilità civile interagisce con altri strumenti giuridici contemplati dall’ordinamento per assicurare la riparazione dei danni subiti da appartenenti alle forze armate nazionali durante lo svolgimento di attività belliche a causa dell’impiego di particolari tecnologie adottate per aumentare il potenziale offensivo e il livello di afflittività sul nemico delle proprie azioni di guerra. ENGLISH ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to explore how tort law interacts with other legal instruments considered by the legal system in order to guarantee the redress of war damages suffered by the members of the national armed forces during military activities, which included the use of special war technologies. Accordingly, the survey aims to present a range of factors necessary to assess how tort law has carried out this function, within both the American and Italian legal system. This will be accomplished by focusing on the events which followed the use of two lethal, technology-induced substances: the Agent Orange, used by the United States army in Vietnam, and the Depleted Uranium, used in more recent wars scenarios in which Italian soldiers were involved. Questo paper © Copyright 2010 by Federico Rizzetto è pubblicato con Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale-Non opere derivate 2.5 Italia License. Maggiori informazioni circa la licenza all’URL: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/it/
Small noise asymptotic expansions for stochastic pde's.i : The case of a dissipative polynomially bounded non linearity
No full textWe study a reaction-diusion evolution equation perturbed by a Gaussian noise. Here the leading operator is the innitesimal generator of a C0-semigroup of strictly negative type, the nonlinear term has at most polynomial growth and is such that the whole system is dissipative. The corresponding It^o stochastic equation describes a process on a Hilbert space with dissipative nonlinear drift and a Gaussian noise. Under smoothness assumptions on the non-linearity, asymptotics to all orders in a small parameter in front of the noise are given, with uniform estimates on the remainders. Applications to nonlinear SPDEs with a linear term in the drift given by a Laplacian in a bounded domain are included. As a particular example we consider the small noise asymptotic expansions for the stochastic FitzHugh-Nagumo equations of neurobiology around deterministic solutions. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classication. Primary 35K57 , 35R60, 35C20 ; Secondary 92B2
Sanità elettronica, tutela dei dati personali e digital divide generazionale: ruolo e criticità giuridica della delega alla gestione dei servizi di sanità elettronica da parte dell’interessato = E-health, Data Protection and Generational Digital Divide: Empowering the Interested Party with the Faculty of Nominating a Trusted Person Acting as a Proxy when Processing Personal Health Data within an Electronic PHR
No full textGli utenti di Internet sono sempre più abituati ad impiegare portali che sfruttano a pieno le potenzialità del Web 2.0, consentendo elevati livelli di interattività. È divenuto normale gestire i propri conti correnti, i portafogli di investimento, la posta elettronica, le bollette del gas e della luce, le assicurazioni, il traffico con il proprio operatore telefonico e con il proprio fornitore di contenuti audio video digitali e le stesse relazioni sociali (si pensi alla straordinaria affermazione dei c.d. social network) attraverso piattaforme digitali. In tale contesto si vanno affermando nuove esigenze da parte degli utenti, i quali chiedono che il servizio a loro dedicato possa essere profilato con grande elasticità applicativa, per adattarsi al meglio alle caleidoscopiche necessità quotidiane di ciascuno. Poter “delegare” l’accesso alla pagina riservata all’interno del portale che ospita ed eroga il servizio rivolto all’utente di un’amministrazione digitale, nonché la gestione di alcune delle operazioni interattive che all’interno dell’infrastruttura sono destinate a svolgersi, identifica una di queste nuove richieste. Il tema fatalmente incrocia gli sviluppi che la sanità elettronica sta conoscendo dal punto di vista della necessità di regolare le relazioni che i vari attori in essa coinvolti (distinguibili in linea generale in erogatori e destinatari delle prestazioni sanitarie) tendono sempre più ad instaurare sfruttando le potenzialità concesse dall’avvento del bit. Il saggio esplora questo fenomeno e verifica i problemi giuridici che alla luce della vigente normativa sulla tutela dei dati personali sembrano frapporsi alla possibilità di implementare una misura che agevolerebbe grandemente l’accesso ai servizi di sanità elettronica da parte dei cittadini appartenenti alle fasce più anziane della popolazione, realizzando uno degli obiettivi auspicati dalla commissione europea nel programma strategico “Iniziativa europea i2010 sull’e-inclusione - Partecipare alla società dell’informazione”. ENGLISH ABSTRACT Internet users are increasingly getting familiar with the use of portals which take advantage of the full potential of Web 2.0, allowing high levels of interactivity. For a growing number of people it has become an every day routine to manage via digital platforms bank accounts, investment portfolios, energy and electricity bills, insurance contracts, traffic with telephone operators and providers of digital video and audio contents, not to mention the daily social relations (suffice to mention the incredible success of internet social networks). In this scenario, new requirements are adopted by e-government system users, who increasingly advance the expectation that the services dedicated to them could be profiled with great flexibility in order to better fit their daily needs. One of these demands is represented by the possibility of nominating a trusted person who could act as a proxy, easing the interaction of users (who, as elderly people, traditionally tend to suffer from a generational digital divide) with portals providing the e-government services. The trusted person in this way could manage the interactive operations that are intended to be performed within the infrastructure, in order to help the elderly users to overcome their cultural gaps when handling the access to e-health systems. This measure would greatly enhance the achievement of the goals set forth by the European Commission in the European i2010 initiative on e-Inclusion “To be part of the information society”, enabling the elderly people who for cultural reasons do not have (or don’t know how to) access to internet services to benefit of the progress of State-sponsored e-health systems. This paper explores the reasons why the current Italian Data Protection Act seems to hamper this process, providing to the subjects who have interest in their personal health data a very narrow set of powers when it comes to empower a trusted third party with the faculty of treating these sensitive data in their interest. Questo paper © Copyright 2010 by Umberto Izzo e Paolo Guarda è pubblicato con Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale-Non opere derivate 2.5 Italia License. Maggiori informazioni circa la licenza all’URL: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/it/