Outsourcing processes and the role of the industrial relations

L’opera analizza i fenomeni di frammentazione del ciclo produttivo dal punto di vista delle relazioni collettive, ponendosi l’obiettivo di verificare l’efficacia degli strumenti contrattuali per “governare” tali processi. Si muove dall’ipotesi per cui sia opportuno valorizzare la contrattazione di secondo livello, stante i minori problemi di applicazione generalizzata e la maggiore sensibilità rispetto agli interessi coinvolti. La parte più rilevante dell’indagine ruota attorno al tema degli appalti, dalle clausole di divieto agli obblighi di informazione e consultazione, sino alle previsioni volte a garantire determinati trattamenti contrattuali o la continuità occupazionale ai lavoratori coinvolti; esperienze apprezzabili che richiedono, tuttavia, uno sviluppo a livello decentrato, anche territoriale o interaziendale. Ci si sofferma altresì sul trasferimento d’azienda, evidenziandosi il fondamentale compito della contrattazione decentrata nel cercare un bilanciamento tra competitività e protezione sociale, oltre che nel vigilare sulla genuinità delle operazioni realizzate. Si passa, poi, agli interventi in tema di somministrazione di lavoro, auspicandosi la realizzazione di un sistema di rappresentanza e contrattazione aziendale integrata, che coinvolga anche i lavoratori somministrati. Da ultimo si guarda al lavoro parasubordinato, con riferimento al quale la contrattazione collettiva è chiamata a sviluppare un sistema di sostegno e protezione che trascenda la tutela dei soli occupati.The work analyses the outsourcing processes on the point of view of industrial relations, with the purpose to verify the effectiveness of the collective bargaining provisions to “manage” these processes. The dissertation moves from the assumption that the second-level agreements should be implemented, considering the applicability to all employees and the greater proximity to the interests concerned. The major part of the analysis revolves around the service contracts and the heterogeneous related provisions of the national collective labour agreements (such as the ban on outsourcing, the information to trade unions, the entitlement to certain treatments or to hold down the employment relationship), which should be developed by company or territorial level agreements. Then the dissertation focuses on the transfer of business, highlighting the role of the second-level bargaining, which could be able to find a compromise between competitiveness and social protection, as well as to control the compliance of the transactions. The work also considers the staff leasing contract, hoping for a system of collective representation and negotiation which includes the temporary workers. Finally, with reference to the so called “working project consulting agreements”, the author observes that the trade unions should give to the consultants a major collective protection

Transcranial evoked potentials can be reliably recorded with active electrodes

Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are usually recorded with passive electrodes (PE). Active electrode (AE) systems have recently become widely available; compared to PE, they allow for easier electrode preparation and a higher-quality signal, due to the preamplification at the electrode stage, which reduces electrical line noise. The performance between the AE and PE can differ, especially with fast EEG voltage changes, which can easily occur with TMS-EEG; however, a systematic comparison in the TMS-EEG setting has not been made. Therefore, we recorded TMS-evoked EEG potentials (TEPs) in a group of healthy subjects in two sessions, one using PE and the other using AE. We stimulated the left primary motor cortex and right medial prefrontal cortex and used two different approaches to remove early TMS artefacts, Independent Component Analysis and Signal Space Projection—Source Informed Recovery. We assessed statistical differences in amplitude and topography of TEPs, and their similarity, by means of the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC). We also tested the capability of each system to approximate the final TEP waveform with a reduced number of trials. The results showed that TEPs recorded with AE and PE do not differ in amplitude and topography, and only few electrodes showed a lower-than-expected CCC between the two methods of amplification. We conclude that AE are a viable solution for TMS-EEG recording

Automatic classification of mice vocalizations using Machine Learning techniques and Convolutional Neural Networks.

Ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) analysis is a well-recognized tool to investigate animal communication. It can be used for behavioral phenotyping of murine models of different disorders. The USVs are usually recorded with a microphone sensitive to ultrasound frequencies and they are analyzed by specific software. Different calls typologies exist, and each ultrasonic call can be manually classified, but the qualitative analysis is highly time-consuming. Considering this framework, in this work we proposed and evaluated a set of supervised learning methods for automatic USVs classification. This could represent a sustainable procedure to deeply analyze the ultrasonic communication, other than a standardized analysis. We used manually built datasets obtained by segmenting the USVs audio tracks analyzed with the Avisoft software, and then by labelling each of them into 10 representative classes. For the automatic classification task, we designed a Convolutional Neural Network that was trained receiving as input the spectrogram images associated to the segmented audio files. In addition, we also tested some other supervised learning algorithms, such as Support Vector Machine, Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptrons, exploiting informative numerical features extracted from the spectrograms. The performance showed how considering the whole time/frequency information of the spectrogram leads to significantly higher performance than considering a subset of numerical features. In the authors' opinion, the experimental results may represent a valuable benchmark for future work in this research field

Frequency of respiratory virus infections and next-generation analysis of influenza A/ H1N1pdm09 dynamics in the lower respiratory tract of patients admitted to the ICU

Recent molecular diagnostic methods have significantly improved the diagnosis of viral pneumonia in intensive care units (ICUs). It has been observed that 222G/N changes in the HA gene of H1N1pdm09 are associated with increased lower respiratory tract (LRT) replication and worse clinical outcome. In the present study, the frequency of respiratory viruses was assessed in respiratory samples from 88 patients admitted to 16 ICUs during the 2014-2015 winter-spring season in Lombardy. Sixty-nine out of 88 (78.4%) patients were positive for a respiratory viral infection at admission. Of these, 57/69 (82.6%) were positive for influenza A (41 A/H1N1pdm09 and 15 A/H3N2), 8/69 (11.6%) for HRV, 2/69 (2.9%) for RSV and 2/69 (2.9%) for influenza B. Phylogenetic analysis of influenza A/H1N1pdm09 strains from 28/41 ICU-patients and 21 patients with mild respiratory syndrome not requiring hospitalization, showed the clear predominance of subgroup 6B strains. The median influenza A load in LRT samples of ICU patients was higher than that observed in the upper respiratory tract (URT) (p<0.05). Overall, a greater number of H1N1pdm09 virus variants were observed using next generation sequencing on partial HA sequences (codons 180-286) in clinical samples from the LRT as compared to URT. In addition, 222G/N/A mutations were observed in 30% of LRT samples from ICU patients. Finally, intra-host evolution analysis showed the presence of different dynamics of viral population in LRT of patients hospitalized in ICU with a severe influenza infection

Frequency distribution of respiratory viruses.

<p>The absolute number of positive patients is reported in brackets.</p