Innovation, Workers Skills and Industrial Relations: Empirical Evidence from Firm-level Italian Data.

The shifting of labour demand towards relatively more skilled workers has been a hot issue in the economic field for many years. A consolidated explanation for the upskilling phenomenon is that technological-organisational changes have driven the labour demand with detrimental consequences for less skilled workers (skill-biased technological-organisational change). In order to upgrade the skill workforce the firm has at least two main channels at its disposal: the external labour market strategy, mainly based on hiring and firing mechanisms; the internal labour market strategies, which improve the skill base of the employees through training activities. The main objective of the present work is to verify the relations between innovative strategies and both the workforce composition and the training activities, within an integrated framework that also leads us to consider the role of specific aspects of the industrial relations system. The firm level analysis is based on original datasets which include data on manufacturing firms for two Italian local production systems, located in the Emilia-Romagna region. The results suggest that the firms use both the two channels to improve their skill base, which is actually related to the innovation activities, although there is weak supporting evidence of the use of external labour markets to upgrade the workforce skills: the upskilling phenomenon seems to be associated to specific innovative activities in the technological sphere, while specific organisational aspects emerge as detrimental for blue collars. On the side of internal labour market strategies the evidence supports the hypothesis that innovation intensity induce the firms to implement internal procedures in order to upskill the workforce, confirming the importance of internal labour market strategies. Moreover, we have recognized the important role of firm level industrial relations in determining the training activities for the blue collar workers.technological change; organisational change; industrial relations; skills

New Ways of Working through Emerging Technologies: A Meta-Synthesis of the Adoption of Blockchain in the Accountancy Domain

In an attempt to deepen how the way of working is changing due to the digital transformation, this research aims at understanding the process by which individuals adopt blockchain technology in accountancy. We conducted a meta-synthesis of the qualitative literature on the topic of blockchain technology adoption in the context of accountancy. Drawing from 10 systematically selected qualitative studies, we analyzed the process of blockchain technology adoption in accountancy, with particular reference to the impacts on accounting professionals, in terms of individual attitudes and behaviors, as well as organizations. Our findings contribute to the existing literature in at least two ways. First, our research explores the topic of blockchain adoption in the accountancy domain and stresses the relevance of the use of that emerging technology by accounting professionals and organizations, as well as the main problems that could limit its adoption and use. Second, we provide an overview of the process of blockchain technology adoption with specific reference to the questions of “why” and “how” blockchain is (or is not) adopted by accounting professionals and organizations, in an effort to shed light on a critical issue that has yet to be explored in accountancy

Legio: Fault Resiliency for Embarrassingly Parallel MPI Applications

Due to the increasing size of HPC machines, the fault presence is becoming an eventuality that applications must face. Natively, MPI provides no support for the execution past the detection of a fault, and this is becoming more and more constraining. With the introduction of ULFM (User Level Fault Mitigation library), it has been provided with a possible way to overtake a fault during the application execution at the cost of code modifications. ULFM is intrusive in the application and requires also a deep understanding of its recovery procedures. In this paper we propose Legio, a framework that lowers the complexity of introducing resiliency in an embarrassingly parallel MPI application. By hiding ULFM behind the MPI calls, the library is capable to expose resiliency features to the application in a transparent manner thus removing any integration effort. Upon fault, the failed nodes are discarded and the execution continues only with the non-failed ones. A hierarchical implementation of the solution has been also proposed to reduce the overhead of the repair process when scaling towards a large number of nodes. We evaluated our solutions on the Marconi100 cluster at CINECA, showing that the overhead introduced by the library is negligible and it does not limit the scalability properties of MPI. Moreover, we also integrated the solution in real-world applications to further prove its robustness by injecting faults

3D BUCKLING ANALYSIS OF MULTIDELAMINATED COMPOSITE SPECIMENS

The behaviour of thin composite laminates (unidirectional, cross-ply and angle-ply) under compressive loads has been examined in cases where multiple delaminations are present. The problem is solved using the Finite Element Method (FEM) both with linear analyses, based on the eigenvalues research problem, and with nonlinear analyses, based on incremental-iterative procedures. In particular, the role of the delamination length, of the angle of the plies and of the stacking sequence on the critical load is investigated. Results are compared with those found in literature derived from experimental or numerical 2D analyses

Supply chain disruptions and sourcing strategies

Supply chain disruptions have recently been at the center of both academic and policy debates. After reviewing some of the emerging literature on supply chain disruptions, we discuss the role of buyers' sourcing strategies in mediating responses to such shocks. We focus on two dimensions of a buyer's sourcing strategy: relationality (the extent to which the buyer concentrates its sourcing in a few core suppliers) and just-in-time. On the one hand, theoretical models of sourcing suggest that these are complementary practices and their adoption should be positively correlated in the data. On the other hand, the two dimensions have opposing implications for supply-chain resilience to shocks. We borrow an empirical proxy for a buyer's relationality from Cajal-Grossi et al. (2023) and introduce a new proxy for a buyer's adoption of just-in-time inventory systems. Using data from the apparel global value chain we compute the two proxies and present three results: (a) the variation in both relationality and just-in-time is mostly explained by across-buyer variation, rather than product or country variation, (b) consistent with the theoretical analysis in Taylor and Wiggins (1997), relationality and just-in-time are highly correlated with each other across buyers, (c) at the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic, buyers' overall sourced values declined relatively less for relational buyers but not for buyers with just-in-time inventory systems

The role of geographic knowledge in sub-city level geolocation

Geolocation of microblog messages has been largely investigated in the literature. Many solutions have been proposed that achieve good results at the city level. Existing approaches are mainly data-driven (i.e., they rely on a training phase). However, the development of algorithms for geolocation at sub-city level is still an open problem. In this paper, we investigate the role that external geographic knowledge can play in geolocation approaches. We show how different geographical data sources can be combined with a semantic layer within a knowledge base to achieve reasonably accurate sub-city level geolocation

Nonlinear asymmetric imaging with AlGaAs metasurface

Nowadays, dielectric metasurfaces are a promising platform in many different research fields such as sensing, lasing, all-optical modulation and nonlinear optics. Among all the different kinds of such thin structures, asymmetric geometries are recently attracting increasing interest. In particular, nonlinear light-matter interaction in metasurfaces constitutes a valid approach for achieving miniaturized control over light. Here, we demonstrate nonlinear asymmetric generation of light in a dielectric metasurface via second harmonic generation. By inverting the illumination direction of the pump, the nonlinear emitted power is modulated by more than one order of magnitude. Moreover, we demonstrate how a properly designed metasurface can generate two completely different images at the second harmonic when the direction of illumination is reversed. Our results may pave the way to important opportunities for the realization of compact nanophotonic devices for imaging applications by densely integrating numerous nonlinear resonators

Assembly and functional analysis of an S/MAR based episome with the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator gene

Improving the efficacy of gene therapy vectors is still an important goal toward the development of safe and efficient gene therapy treatments. S/MAR (scaffold/matrix attached region)-based vectors are maintained extra-chromosomally in numerous cell types, which is similar to viral-based vectors. Additionally, when established as an episome, they show a very high mitotic stability. In the present study we tested the idea that addition of an S/MAR element to a CFTR (cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator) expression vector, may allow the establishment of a CFTR episome in bronchial epithelial cells. Starting from the observation that the S/MAR vector pEPI-EGFP (enhanced green fluorescence protein) is maintained as an episome in human bronchial epithelial cells, we assembled the CFTR vector pBQ-S/MAR. This vector, transfected in bronchial epithelial cells with mutated CFTR, supported long term wt CFTR expression and activity, which in turn positively impacted on the assembly of tight junctions in polarized epithelial cells. Additionally, the recovery of intact pBQ-S/MAR, but not the parental vector lacking the S/MAR element, from transfected cells after extensive proliferation, strongly suggested that pBQ-S/MAR was established as an episome. These results add a new element, the S/MAR, that can be considered to improve the persistence and safety of gene therapy vectors for cystic fibrosis pulmonary disease