1,720,966 research outputs found
The Certification of Employment Contracts: A Legal Instrument for Labour Market Regulation in Italy
No full textIn a perspective of indirect regulation of the labour market, this paper analyses the Italian legal procedure known as ‘certification of employment contracts’ (hereinafter ‘certification’). This procedure consists of an examination of the lawfulness of employment and supply chain contracts. Contracts are submitted to a panel of experts in labour law (civil servants, professionals, academics) who undertake a review of the documentation, perform advisory functions and decide whether to award certification or not. The panel takes into account the key principles underlying certification: fairness, the true nature of the agreement between the parties, and compliance of the contract with objective organizational and productive requirements. Certification seeks to enforce labour standards through the proper use of contractual models, in order to manifest the true intention of the parties and to represent their interests. In this paper the issue is addressed from a regulatory perspective. First, it is noted that all employment and supply chain contracts are eligible for certification. Although apparently different, these contracts share a common matrix: the global process of ‘vertical disintegration’ of the firm. Second, certification is seen as a form of labour market regulation, which is neither a compulsory process, nor a matter of pure self-regulation. Rather, it may be seen as a form of enforced self-regulation, or ‘co-regulation’ undertaken on a voluntary basis by the parties, relying on the competence and expertise of the members of the certification panel, who act impartially. Employers are under no obligation to refer their contracts to a certification panel, but if they do so and receive a positive ruling, the certification gives the contract a legal presumption of fairness, certifying its conformity with legal principles for the purpose of preventing disputes at a later stage
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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Effect of humidity and nanocellulose content on Polyvinylamine-nanocellulose hybrid membranes for CO2capture
No full textIn order to address the need for more efficient technologies for carbon capture applications, a novel type of nanocellulose based hybrid membrane has been successfully prepared by blending the commercial Polyvinylamine solution Lupamin® 9095 (BASF) with Nano Fibrillated Cellulose (NFC) to improve its mechanical and separation capabilities. Self-standing films with different nanocellulose loading (from 30 to 70 wt%) have been prepared and characterized at 35 °C through water vapor sorption experiments and humid gas permeation tests. As expected, membrane permeability consistently increased with increasing water vapor and a higher presence of Lupamin in the film resulted in an increment of both gas permeability and selectivity. In particular blends with a NFC content of 70 wt% Lupamin reached an ideal selectivity of 135 for the separation of CO2/CH4and 218 for CO2/N2, at 60 RH%, while the maximum permeability in the order of 187 Barrer was instead reached at 80% RH. Water vapor solubility was also measured and modeled through Park Model to correlate the gas separation properties with the effective content of water present in the membrane matrix. As expected, a higher content of the hydrophilic polymer resulted in a larger water uptake, which at medium to high humidity appeared to trigger a water clustering phenomenon in the matrix. This fact was accompanied by a substantial relaxation of the polymer network, causing a marked reduction of selectivity, which dropped, at the highest RH investigated, to values in the order of 30 and 80 towards CH4and N2respectively. Despite this loss in performance, most materials tested still showed very interesting properties, well above Robeson's 2008 Upper Bound, making them an interesting alternative for traditional gas separation processes
Special Session: A Model-Driven Design Tool for Modelling, Simulation and Assertion-Based Verification of Hybrid Automata
No full textIn a cyber-physical system (CPS), physical and digital components are deeply intertwined, making its design and verification a challenging process. To manage this complexity, hybrid automata are generally adopted to model CPS, allowing the representation of both its discrete and continuous behaviours, which are implemented in the digital and the physical parts. While some tools exist at the state of the art for either modelling or verifying hybrid automata, they present some drawbacks, specifically in terms of ease of use and lack of a unified tool that makes seamless the integration of design, simulation and verification steps. To fill in the gap, we present a new EDA tool for model-driven design and verification of hybrid automata. It does not require designers to learn domain-specific languages, as automatons are graphically modeled; furthermore, the tool integrates a simulation engine for analyzing the evolution of the automata and detecting design errors through the execution of checkers synthesized from Signal Temporal Logic (STL) assertions. The effectiveness of the proposed tool is demonstrated with a case study
Nanocellulose based facilitated transport membranes for CO2 separation
No full textIn the present work the performance of a new membrane material, based on Microfibrillated Cellulose (MFC), was investigated in view of its use in CO2 separation applications. In particular the membranes were obtained by casting, from a solution of carboxymethylated MFC and Lupamin (a Polyvinylamine produced by BASF), followed by a thermal treatment at 105 °C. Permeability of CO2 and CH4 were measured at 35 °C as a function of relative humidity and water sorption experiments were performed as well to relate the previous results to the actual water content in the membrane. As a reference, pure MFC films have been also prepared and their gas permeability tested in the same conditions. The overall results suggest that both MFC and MFC-Lupamin films have really interesting performance for the CO2/CH4 separation showing very high selectivity values (higher than 400) which place both materials well above the trade-off curve of 2008 Robeson's plot. In particular MFC films showed higher maximum selectivity but lower average CO2 permeability with respect to the MFC-lupamin blends probably because of the different level of water absorbed by the two materials. Pure MFC indeed never exceeded 10% water uptake, while the Polyvinylamine blend showed water sorption very similar to the previous material up to 60% RH; it then definitely increased, reaching a mass uptake higher than 50% at the maximum water activity inspected
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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