1,721,193 research outputs found
Measures of wealth and Well-Being. A comparison between GDP and ISEW
No full textIt is well known that, as a measure of well-being, the Gross Domestic Product does not reflect the real wealth of a country but just its monetary counterpart. Thus, it is not fit to differentiate between the costs that enhance welfare and those which, instead, undermine it. For this reason some corrective measures of well-being have been advanced in the literature, one of the most important is the so called Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. The aim of this work is to explore some of the features of this measure and to calculate it for Italy up to year 2006 comparing it with the time series of Gross Domestic Product. In particular our purpose is to analyze whether the ISEW for Italy registered a decreasing trend as well as the ISEW of other countries. This negative trend was not visible in the previous studies because of the lack of recent data which could not allow to register the threshold
point of the index
Reconsidering the Well-Being: the happy planet index and the issue of missing data
No full textThe main aim of this paper is to build up and to analyze a composite indicator, the Happy Planet Index (HPI), as an alternative measure to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in evaluating nations’ well-being. HPI was firstly developed by the New Economic Foundation in July 2006 and it is the first well-being composite indicator that considers in its calculation a subjective measure of well-being: life satisfaction. This work updates the HPI for 178 countries using the most recent available datasets. Due to the lack of country data for some of the variables used to
build up the HPI, it has been necessary to run some missing data estimation procedures. The results obtained show that no country manage to score high in terms of HPI because of countries’ incapacity to maintain high living standards (expressed in terms of happy life years) and at the same time assure sustainability.
Comparing HPI with GDP, no association between the resulting countries’ classification was found, living proof that this indicator does not reflect the same reality that GDP illustrates
Partitioning Meshes into Strips using the Enhanced Tunnelling Algorithm
No full textTriangle meshes are the most used representations for three-dimensional objects, and triangle strips are the organization of triangles mostly used for efficient rendering. Since the problem of optimal strip decomposition of a given mesh is NP-complete, many different heuristics have been proposed; the quality of the stripification is usually evaluated using standard indicators as the total number of strips, the number of isolated triangles, the cache coherence, the number of swap vertices. In this paper we present the Enhanced Tunnelling Algorithm (ETA), a stripification method working on the dual graph of a mesh. The method uses a sophisticated mechanism of dynamical update of identifiers, guided by a localization procedure. The algorithm adopts a modified search approach in the dual graph that accelerated the convergence speed of the algorithm. The ETA results efficient and robust, able to deal with datasets of any dimension. The quality of the stripification is remarkable: very few strips (not seldom just one), no isolated triangles, good cache coherence (ACMR value), good number of vertex per triangle
Rewriting rules for the dual graph of a stripified CLOD mesh
No full textA triangular mesh is the piecewise linear approximation of a sampled or analytical surface, when each patch is a triangle. The connectivity of the mesh can be easily represented using its dual graph. Each node of such a graph has at most three incident edges; if the surface is homeomorphic to a sphere, each node has exactly three incident edges. Several triangular meshes, representing the same surface, with an increasing number of triangles are a representation of the surface at different levels of detail (LOD). When the number of triangles from one LOD to another varies continuously we call such a structure a continuous level of detail (CLOD) approximation of the surface. Given a CLOD data structure we can extract, at each level, the mesh representing the surface and derive its dual graph. If we group the triangles forming each mesh in strips, to accelerate their rendering, we should use two colors for the dual graph's edges to distinguish between the edges linking nodes belonging to the same strip or not. The main goal of this paper is to present a set of rules to recolor the dual graph of the mesh when passing from one LOD to the next and back. The operations used to change the mesh are a Vertex Split (VS) when the resolution increases, and an Edge Collapse (EC) when the resolution decreases. We can, then, use a local topological analysis to derive the rules allowing to recolor the graph, and to show that, under certain conditions, the recoloring is optimal. This allows to keep effectively an optimal triangle strip structure over the mesh, while changing its resolution
Cultural Capital and educational strategies. Shaping boundaries between groups of students with homologous cultural behaviours
No full textRather than assessing its causal effect on educational attainment, the authors of this article aim to use the concept of cultural capital to define a huge, complex and interconnected collection of educational and school strategies adopted by students and families and to examine the way that these strategies are related to school inequalities. Data analysed come from the 2009 Italian survey for the Program for International Student Assessment run by the OECD. A Latent Class Regression Analysis has been applied to categorize four groups of individuals who share specific cultural habits, educational dispositions and choices, and social status; in short, the four groups differentiate individuals with a different endowment of the intangible asset, cultural capital. Moreover, using the socio-economic status as a covariate we link the latent class membership probability with individuals’ social standing and, consequently school choices
Processo per l’inertizzazione di paragoethite proveniente dall’industria dell’idrometallurgia dello zinco
No full textLo Stato di Attività delle Imprese. L'impiego delle fonti amministrative per l'adattamento di un modello probabilistico
No full textThe use of data stored in administrative sources (or for tax purposes) is the best solution to reduce costs and problems relevant to statistical surveys on enterprises. As
pre-requisite aimed to this purpose there is the build-up of a business register (BR) to be used as frame for surveys. What affects quality of the BR for this purpose is the presence of errors due to the inclusion in the register of enterprises not carrying out a real activity or, on the contrary, the exclusion of those units active in economic sense. The present paper presents a probabilistic model to determine the activity status of an enterprise as relevant information to be included in the BR. In absence of specific statistical surveys available to estimate parameters, this paper describes an alternative method based on the use of representative groups of administrative information
The high school effect on students’ mobility choices
Full text linkThis paper looks into the relationship between students’ university choices and their secondary school background. The main aim is to assess the role of secondary schools in steering university applications toward local or non-local institutions, also in the light of the tertiary education supply available in students’ areas of residence. With this aim, we classify students’ mobility choices by using a robust definition of local and non-local universities that accounts for the uncertainty in the definition of students’ local areas and their characteristics. In this framework, we apply a multilevel model to jointly consider the high school effect on the probability of students belonging to one specific category of mobility (local, forced non-local, free non-local) conditional upon students’ macro areas of residence, their chosen university and field of study. The findings highlight that high schools have a relevant role in affecting students’ mobility choices, especially when considering local universities. The magnitude of the effect depends on students’ macro area of residence. In particular, this result highlights that schools may pursue specific guidance policies to address students’ choices toward local universities; furthermore, it suggests that their influence on students is stronger in areas hosting the most important universities
Efficiently Keeping an Optimal Stripification over a CLOD Mesh
No full textIn this paper we present an algorithm of simple implementation but very effective that guarantees to keep an optimal stripification (in term of frames per seconds) over a progressive mesh. The algorithm builds on-the-fly the stripification on a mesh at a selected level-of-details (LOD) using the stripifications built, during a pre-processing stage, at the lowest and highest LODs. To reach this goal the algorithm uses two different operations on the dual graph of the mesh: when the user changes the mesh resolution the mesh+strips local configuration is looked up in a table and, after a vertex split operation, the strips are rearranged accordingly, immediately after a sequence of special topological operation called “tunneling” with short tunnel length are started till the number of isolated triangles in the mesh get under 10% of the total number of strips. Moreover, when the user select a relevant LOD it can trigger a tunnelling with higher tunnel length to optimize the stripification. Using these operations we are able to keep the progressive mesh stripified in a time of the same order of magnitude of the time needed to change the resolution and, only if required, to perform a time-demanding optimization. Only the stripifications generated by explicit user requests are stored to serve as optimal starting points for further inspection. In this way we can always feed the graphics board with a triangle strip representation of the mesh at any LOD.
The results we present demonstrate that we can tightly couple each sequence of vertex splits used to increase the resolution of the progressive mesh with: a simple rearrangement of the strips followed by a very cheap stripification search with a predetermined strategy. A strong feature of the method is that the local rearrangement leads to an implementation that keeps almost constant the execution time. The results of the visualization benchmarks are very good: comparing the rendering of the stripified (using this strategy) and the non stripified meshes we can, on average, double the frames per seconds rate
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