Is religious diversity good for team performance?

Yes, but when equally sized subgroups form, they may become confrontational, write Alessandro Ancarani, Ali A. Ayach, Carmela Di Mauro, Paolo Mancuso and Simone Gitt

Classification Scheme of Heating Risk during MRI Scans on Patients with Orthopaedic Prostheses

Due to the large variety of possible clinical scenarios, a reliable heating-risk assessment is not straightforward when patients with arthroplasty undergo MRI scans. This paper proposes a simple procedure to estimate the thermal effects induced in patients with hip, knee, or shoulder arthroplasty during MRI exams. The most representative clinical scenarios were identified by a preliminary frequency analysis, based on clinical service databases, collecting MRI exams of 11,658 implant carrier patients. The thermal effects produced by radiofrequency and switching gradient fields were investigated through 588 numerical simulations performed on an ASTM-like phantom, considering four prostheses, two static field values, seven MR sequences, and seven regions of imaging. The risk assessment was inspired by standards for radiofrequency fields and by scientific studies for gradient fields. Three risk tiers were defined for the radiofrequency, in terms of whole-body and local SAR averages, and for GC fields, in terms of temperature elevation. Only 50 out of 588 scenarios require some caution to be managed. Results showed that the whole-body SAR is not a self-reliant safety parameter for patients with metallic implants. The proposed numerical procedure can be easily extended to any other scenario, including the use of detailed anatomical models

La valutazione della qualita' del servizio erogato da aziende di pubblici servizi: il caso delle aziende idriche

Dottorato di ricerca in ingegneria economico-gestionale. 12. ciclo. Coordinatore M. Raffa. Correlatore G. CapaldoConsiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Biblioteca Centrale - P.le Aldo Moro, 7, Rome; Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale - P.za Cavalleggeri, 1, Florence / CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle RichercheSIGLEITItal

Forecasting national and regional level intensive care unit bed demand during COVID-19: The case of Italy.

Given the pressure on healthcare authorities to assess whether hospital capacity allows properly responding to outbreaks such as COVID-19, there is a need for simple, data-driven methods that may provide accurate forecasts of hospital bed demand. This study applies growth models to forecast the demand for Intensive Care Unit admissions in Italy during COVID-19. We show that, with only some mild assumptions on the functional form and using short time-series, the model fits past data well and can accurately forecast demand fourteen days ahead (the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the cumulative fourteen days forecasts is 7.64). The model is then applied to derive regional-level forecasts by adopting hierarchical methods that ensure the consistency between national and regional level forecasts. Predictions are compared with current hospital capacity in the different Italian regions, with the aim to evaluate the adequacy of the expansion in the number of beds implemented during the COVID-19 crisis

When does the manufacturing reshoring strategy create value?

Reshoring has gained a lot of attention recently by academics and practitioners alike, and is promising to become even more relevant in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on earlier research on the effects of reshoring announcements on the short-term market value of the firm, this work employs an event-study methodology and aims to understand under which circumstances the market perceives reshoring as potentially more (or less) value-creating. The analysis of a sample of 64 reshoring instances from 2005 to 2019, announced by 54 firms from eight developed economies, suggests that investors are more confident in the firm's future cash-flow potential when: a) it invests in productive activities at home, instead of overseas, i.e. ‘kept-from-offshoring’ (as opposed to actual relocations of activities, i.e. ‘back-reshoring’); b) the reshoring instance is communicated as a ‘plan’ (rather than a fixed ‘decision’); c) no state- or government-induced financial incentives are involved; d) the motivations are primarily ‘cost-efficiency seeking’ (rather than ‘customer perceived value seeking’)

Prior to reshoring: A duration analysis of foreign manufacturing ventures

This paper throws light on the determinants of the duration of manufacturing offshore experiences by US and European firms prior to reshoring. By applying survival analysis to a dataset of 249 offshoring experiences terminated with a relocation to the home country/region, we estimate the effects of different groups of survival determinants. Results highlight that contextual factors such as the industry, the home country, the host country, and the size of the firm significantly affect the duration of offshoring experiences. The likelihood of termination is in fact higher for the electronics and automotive industries, for small firms, for firms headquartered in Europe, and for offshoring to Asia. The analysis of the motivations for reshoring shows that quality issues experienced offshore emerge as the key factor giving rise to shorter offshore stays. Based on these empirical findings, a set of testable propositions is developed. In particular, we conjecture that the likelihood of termination of offshore manufacturing and the return to the home country may be accelerated by technology-based industries, small firm sizes, shrinking cost differentials and the psychic distance between home and host country, the organizational archetypes, and quality related motivations

Role of Oxide/Nitride Interface Traps on the Nanocrystal Memory Characteristics

In this work we are addressing the threshold voltage instability observed in non volatile nanocrystal memories (NCMs) during the retention experiments under constant applied bias. Such instability derives from the charge motion at the oxide/nitride interface traps of the oxide/nitride/oxide stack employed as control dielectric. We also investigated the impact of temperature on the cell retention properties, showing important and original results that could be attributed to the structure of the control dielectric stack