1,721,270 research outputs found
A framework for safe human-humanoid coexistence
Full text linkThis work is focused on the development of a safety framework for Human-Humanoid coexistence, with emphasis on humanoid locomotion. After a brief introduction to the fundamental concepts of humanoid locomotion, the two most common approaches for gait generation are presented, and are extended with the inclusion of a stability condition to guarantee the boundedness of the generated trajectories. Then the safety framework is presented, with the introduction of different safety behaviors. These behaviors are meant to enhance the overall level of safety during any robot operation. Proactive behaviors will enhance or adapt the current robot operations to reduce the risk of danger, while override behaviors will stop the current robot activity in order to take action against a particularly dangerous situation. A state
machine is defined to control the transitions between the behaviors. The behaviors that are strictly related to locomotion are subsequently detailed, and an implementation is proposed and validated. A possible implementation of the remaining behaviors is proposed through the review of related works that can be found in literature
Studying more to vote less. Education and voter turnout in Italy
Full text linkWe use Italian data to estimate the effect of schooling on voter turnout in national elections. We contrast results based on individual self-reported voting with those based on accurate administrative data on voter turnout, by municipality. In both analyses, we find a negative effect of education, stronger in the latter, where misreporting is ruled out. We also find that education especially reduces turnout in the poorer areas, in areas with lower social capital, with more cases of political misconduct and inefficient institutions. We rationalize our findings as an expression of dissatisfaction and civic protest
Economics of social capital and health, the: A conceptual and empirical roadmap
No full textThis book defines the field of social capital and health. Over the last two decades, there has been a recognition of the importance of social capital (usually defined as ties in the community, attachment to the community, and participation in community activities) and its impact on the health of those in that community. The purpose of this book is to show the growth in the field of social capital and health and to expose readers to a variety of approaches in order to think about and model the question of how health can be improved by investments in community social capital as well as by individual social capital. An outstanding set of papers will be presented by authors from the United States, as well as from Europe and Asia. These papers are cutting-edge and explore the mechanisms through which social capital affects health. The papers also present the most recent empirical work and discuss the policy implications of their findings. Without a doubt, this will be a landmark book which will make the study of social capital and its impact on health a major area of research in the coming decade
Education and COVID-19 excess mortality
No full textWe study the role of education during the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy. We compare excess mortality in 2020 and 2021 compared to the pre-pandemic mortality between municipalities with different shares of educated residents. We find that education initially played a strong protective role, which however quickly faded out. After pondering several alternative explanations, we tentatively interpret this finding as the outcome of the interplay between education, information and public health communication, whose availability and coherence varied along the epidemic
Bipartisan Firms
No full textCorporate donations significantly shape the landscape of US presidential elections, yet we have a limited understanding of how firms' internal finances and external political risks influence these contributions. Using a data set that merges firm-level information with campaign records from 1992 to 2020, we analyze the propensity, intensity, and distribution of corporate giving between parties. We find that while companies often employ a bipartisan donation strategy, they consistently exhibit a stronger preference for Republican candidates. We further show that escalating political polarization is associated with a 2% increase in the likelihood of donating and a 21.8% rise in total contributions, especially among non-research-oriented sectors. These patterns underscore the importance of both financial imperatives and broader political incentives in driving firms' campaign finance decisions
The protestant ethic and entrepreneurship: inside the black box
Full text linkWe provide one of the first investigations of the cultural and value dimensions through which Protestantism affects entrepreneurship by focusing on the historically predetermined religious minorities residing in the regions of the former Holy Roman Empire. By exploiting the minorities’ strong attachment to religious ethic, we find that Protestantism significantly affects the probability to be an entrepreneur and that the effect is relatively larger when we consider larger enterprises. A formal mediation analysis suggests that among the rich set of individual characteristics and values typically associated with entrepreneurship available in our data, the dimensions that mediate the effect of Protestantism are education and a taste for individualism. In particular, such mediating factors explain around 26% of the total effect of Protestantism on entrepreneurship
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Book Reviews
Full text linkBook reviews by Waldo Beach, James J. Harrington, Rocco L. Puntureri, George P. McAndrews, and William J. Gerardo
Book Reviews
No full textBook reviews by Waldo Beach, James J. Harrington, Rocco L. Puntureri, George P. McAndrews, and William J. Gerardo
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