The Declining Use of Unskilled Labour in Italian Manufacturing: Is Trade to Blame? CEPS Working Document No. 178, December 2001

As in other industrialised countries, the manufacturing sector in Italy has recently experienced a substantial increase in the use of skilled relative to unskilled workers - skill upgrading. In this paper we estimate a model, based upon the notion of outsourcing, of the relative demand for skilled labour which allows identification of the roles of technological change and trade, the two main culprits, in skill upgrading. Compared to previous studies of Italy the model is applied to highly disaggregated industrial data and in addition the impact of trade is more precisely measured through the separate identification of import flows from low-wage labour abundant countries and those from OECD partners. Furthermore we also introduce a measure of trade variability. Our results show firstly that economic variables played little or no role in determining the relative demand for unskilled workers in the 1970s in Italy, reflecting the nature of Italian labour market institutions in the period. Subsequently, in the 1980s and 1990s, following some labour market reforms, we find that international competition, in terms of import penetration and the variability of trade prices, had a significant effect on the relative demand for blue-collar workers in Italy in skilled intensive sectors. In unskilled intensive sectors, such as textiles and clothing, where the impact of imports from low-wage countries might be expected to be more pronounced, we do not find a significant effect from imports but rather that the most important role has been played by technological change. The result is consistent with previous studies that indicate that Italian textile and clothing firms have remained internationally competitive by increasingly switching to high quality segments of the industry

GenomeVIP: A cloud platform for genomic variant discovery and interpretation

Identifying genomic variants is a fundamental first step toward the understanding of the role of inherited and acquired variation in disease. The accelerating growth in the corpus of sequencing data that underpins such analysis is making the data-download bottleneck more evident, placing substantial burdens on the research community to keep pace. As a result, the search for alternative approaches to the traditional “download and analyze” paradigm on local computing resources has led to a rapidly growing demand for cloud-computing solutions for genomics analysis. Here, we introduce the Genome Variant Investigation Platform (GenomeVIP), an open-source framework for performing genomics variant discovery and annotation using cloud- or local high-performance computing infrastructure. GenomeVIP orchestrates the analysis of whole-genome and exome sequence data using a set of robust and popular task-specific tools, including VarScan, GATK, Pindel, BreakDancer, Strelka, and Genome STRiP, through a web interface. GenomeVIP has been used for genomic analysis in large-data projects such as the TCGA PanCanAtlas and in other projects, such as the ICGC Pilots, CPTAC, ICGC-TCGA DREAM Challenges, and the 1000 Genomes SV Project. Here, we demonstrate GenomeVIP's ability to provide high-confidence annotated somatic, germline, and de novo variants of potential biological significance using publicly available data sets.</jats:p

Therapeutic metaphors in engineering: how to cure a building structure

Cognitive linguistics have conscientiously pointed out the pervasiveness of conceptual mappings, particularly as conceptual blending and integration, that underlie language and that are unconsciously used in everyday speech (Fauconnier 1997, Fauconnier & Turner 2002; Rohrer 2007; Grady, Oakley & Coulson 1999). Moreover, as a further development of this work, there is a growing interest in research devoted to the conceptual mappings that make up specialized technical disciplines. Lakoff & Núñez 2000, for example, have produced a major breakthrough on the understanding of concepts in mathematics, through conceptual metaphor and as a result not of purely abstract concepts but rather of embodiment. On the engineering and architecture front, analyses on the use of metaphor, blending and categorization in English and Spanish have likewise appeared in recent times (Úbeda 2001, Roldán 1999, Caballero 2003a, 2003b, Roldán & Ubeda 2006, Roldán & Protasenia 2007). The present paper seeks to show a number of significant conceptual mappings underlying the language of architecture and civil engineering that seem to shape the way engineers and architects communicate. In order to work with a significant segment of linguistic expressions in this field, a corpus taken from a widely used technical Spanish engineering journal article was collected and analysed. The examination of the data obtained indicates that many tokens make a direct reference to therapeutic conceptual mappings, highlighting medical domains such as diagnosing,treating and curing. Hence, the paper illustrates how this notion is instantiated by the corresponding bodily conceptual integration. In addition, we wish to underline the function of visual metaphors in the world of modern architecture by evoking parts of human or animal anatomy, and how this is visibly noticeable in contemporary buildings and public works structures

Corpus approaches to language in the media

The main aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of research that has adopted the methodology of Corpus Linguistics to study aspects of language use in the media. The overview begins by introducing the key principles and analytical tools adopted in corpus research. To demonstrate the contribution of corpus approaches to media linguistics, a selection of recent corpus studies is subsequently discussed. The final section summarises the strengths and limitations of corpus approaches and discusses avenues for further research

Преношење мотета у оквиру Пастонових рукописа, око 1610. године

The creation and expansion of commercial music printing from around 1500 has normally led to modern editors assigning textual primacy to published copies of music from the period in preference to any equivalent manuscript copies. However, some groups of manuscript sources, such as the Paston collection, from late 16th and early 17th century England, can shed a different light on contemporary music print culture and its relationship to manuscript copying. Edward Paston’s huge private music library, now dispersed in collections in the UK and US, contains many multiple versions of works he already access to in print form, and the choices he or his copyists made with regard to three particular six-voice Latin motets, Byrd’s Memento homo, Ferrabosco’s In monte Oliveti, and Vaet’s Salve Regina, are examined here, and placed within with their collecting context and likely use.Настанак и експанзија комерцијалног штампања музике око 1500. године уобичајено наводи данашње уреднике издања да дају текстуални примат штампаним примерцима музике из овог периода, а науштрб еквивалентних рукописних партитура. Међутим, поједине групе рукописних извора, као што је Пастонова колекција, с краја XVI и почетка XVII века у Енглеској, бацају другачије светло на тадашњу праксу штампања музикалија и њихов однос према ручном преписивању партитура. Велика приватна музичка библиотека Едварда Пастона, данас расута по колекцијама широм Уједињеног Краљевства и Сједињених Америчких Држава, садржи бројне вишеструке верзије дела која су њему већ била доступна у штампаном виду. У овом раду тумачим како су он или његови преписивачи вршили одабир верзија, конкретно у вези са три шестогласна мотета на латинском језику: Memento homo Вилијама Берда, In monte Oliveti Алфонса Ферабоска и Salve Regina Јакоба Ваета; такође ове мотете стављам у контекст колекционарства, као и њихове вероватне употребе.My thanks go especially to Prof John Milsom, who guided much of the first research here, and to the two anonymous journal referees for their very thorough and thoughtful comments and suggestions

Compiling and using input-output frameworks through collaborative virtual laboratories

Compiling, deploying and utilising large-scale databases that integrate environmental and economic data have traditionally been labour- and cost-intensive processes, hindered by the large amount of disparate and misaligned data that must be collected and harmonised. The Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) is a novel, collaborative approach to compiling large-scale environmentally extended multi-region input-output (MRIO) models.The utility of the IELab product is greatly enhanced by avoiding the need to lock in an MRIO structure at the time the MRIO system is developed. The IELab advances the idea of the "mother-daughter" construction principle, whereby a regionally and sectorally very detailed "mother" table is set up, from which "daughter" tables are derived to suit specific research questions. By introducing a third tier - the "root classification" - IELab users are able to define their own mother-MRIO configuration, at no additional cost in terms of data handling. Customised mother-MRIOs can then be built, which maximise disaggregation in aspects that are useful to a family of research questions.The second innovation in the IELab system is to provide a highly automated collaborative research platform in a cloud-computing environment, greatly expediting workflows and making these computational benefits accessible to all users.Combining these two aspects realises many benefits. The collaborative nature of the IELab development project allows significant savings in resources. Timely deployment is possible by coupling automation procedures with the comprehensive input from multiple teams. User-defined MRIO tables, coupled with high performance computing, mean that MRIO analysis will be useful and accessible for a great many more research applications than would otherwise be possible. By ensuring that a common set of analytical tools such as for hybrid life-cycle assessment is adopted, the IELab will facilitate the harmonisation of fragmented, dispersed and misaligned raw data for the benefit of all interested parties. © 2014 Elsevier B.V

Opposing tensions of local and international standards for EAP writing: programmes: who are we assessing for?

In response to recent curriculum changes in secondary schools in Hong Kong including the implementation of the 3e3e4 education structure, with one year less at high school and one year more at university and the introduction of a new school leavers' exam, the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE), universities in the territory have revisited their English language curriculums. At City University a new EAP curriculum and assessment framework was developed to fit the re-defined needs of the new cohort of students. In this paper we describe the development and benchmarking process of a scoring instrument for EAP writing assessment at City University. We discuss the opposing tensions of local (HKDSE) and international (CEFR and IELTS) standards, the problems of aligning EAP needs-based domain scales and standards with the CEFR and the issues associated with attempting to fulfil the institutional expectation that the EAP programme would raise students' scores by a whole CEFR scale step. Finally, we consider the political tensions created by the use of external, even international, reference points for specific levels of writing performance from all our students and suggest the benefits of a specific, locallydesigned, fit-for-purpose tool over one aligned with universal standards