Why education matters to employers: a vignette study in Italy, England and the Netherlands

This book presents a comparative study of school-to-work transitions in Italy, England and the Netherlands, with a focus on why education matters to employers during the hiring process. Three possible explanations are discussed: education is a provider of productivity-enhancing skills; education is a signal of expected trainability; education is a legitimized closure practice. These theories are related to various features of educational attainment: level of education, field of study, grades, study duration, credentials, internships. Through a web-based vignette study, 131 employers took part in a simulation of a hiring process. Findings show that Dutch employers are more likely to reward education because it provides job-specific skills. In the Netherlands, educational credentials serve as a closure practice within a labour market strongly segmented by qualifications. Employers in England expect new hires to learn skills on the job and rely on grades to identify the applicants with the lower training costs. Results are less straightforward in Italy, where employers seem to simultaneously reward skills and trainability; closure, by degrees or by networks, is nearly absent. The book also proposes a theoretical model that relates organizational factors (e.g. recruitment practices, training investment and job type) to a continuum between open and closed employment relationships. Results indicate that while moving from open to closed relationships, employers are less likely to reward job-specific skills and more likely to associate education with expected trainability

Meat-Eating, Cognitive Dissonance and Gender Differences

This item is only available electronically.Previous studies have found that exposing meat-eaters to the meat-animal connection can induce cognitive dissonance. However, these studies have only used lamb as the stimulus for the meat-animal connection, and it is unclear whether the results are reproduceable with other animals. Furthermore, consistent gender differences in dissonance have been observed, and there has been little investigation into the possible mechanisms behind them. The present study aimed to reproduce previous findings using a chicken stimulus, to explore empathy and gender role orientation as possible mechanisms for gender differences in dissonance, and to further investigate justifications for eating meat. Recruited meat-eaters (n = 235) were randomly assigned to three conditions: lamb, chicken and control. Those in the lamb and chicken conditions were exposed to the meat-animal connection by reading about the processing of an Australian meat lamb or chicken. Those in the control read about apples. All participants completed a pre- and post-condition affect measure with dissonance-related emotions. A positive difference between pre- and post-condition affect was indicative of cognitive dissonance. Results indicated that, on average, participants in the lamb and chicken conditions experienced greater dissonance than those in the control, indicating that exposure to the meat-animal connection induced dissonance. However, when analysed by gender, an average dissonance effect was found only in women. Small associations were found between cognitive dissonance, empathy and gender role orientation. Justifications for eating meat were also analysed. Implications are discussed. Keywords: meat, animals, cognitive dissonance, meat-paradox, genderThesis (B.PsychSc(Hons)) -- University of Adelaide, School of Psychology, 201

Reasoning about LTL Synthesis over finite and infinite games

In the last few years, research formal methods for the analysis and the verification of properties of systems has increased greatly. A meaningful contribution in this area has been given by algorithmic methods developed in the context of synthesis. The basic idea is simple and appealing: instead of developing a system and verifying that it satisfies its specification, we look for an automated procedure that, given the specification returns a system that is correct by construction. Synthesis of reactive systems is one of the most popular variants of this problem, in which we want to synthesize a system characterized by an ongoing interaction with the environment. In this setting, large effort has been devoted to analyze specifications given as formulas of linear temporal logic, i.e., LTL synthesis. Traditional approaches to LTL synthesis rely on transforming the LTL specification into parity deterministic automata, and then to parity games, for which a so-called winning region is computed. Computing such an automaton is, in the worst-case, double-exponential in the size of the LTL formula, and this becomes a computational bottleneck in using the synthesis process in practice. The first part of this thesis is devoted to improve the solution of parity games as they are used in solving LTL synthesis, trying to give efficient techniques, in terms of running time and space consumption, for solving parity games. We start with the study and the implementation of an automata-theoretic technique to solve parity games. More precisely, we consider an algorithm introduced by Kupferman and Vardi that solves a parity game by solving the emptiness problem of a corresponding alternating parity automaton. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that this algorithm outperforms other algorithms when the game has a small number of priorities relative to the size of the game. In many concrete applications, we do indeed end up with parity games where the number of priorities is relatively small. This makes the new algorithm quite useful in practice. We then provide a broad investigation of the symbolic approach for solving parity games. Specifically, we implement in a fresh tool, called SPGSolver, four symbolic algorithms to solve parity games and compare their performances to the corresponding explicit versions for different classes of games. By means of benchmarks, we show that for random games, even for constrained random games, explicit algorithms actually perform better than symbolic algorithms. The situation changes, however, for structured games, where symbolic algorithms seem to have the advantage. This suggests that when evaluating algorithms for parity-game solving, it would be useful to have real benchmarks and not only random benchmarks, as the common practice has been. LTL synthesis has been largely investigated also in artificial intelligence, and specifically in automated planning. Indeed, LTL synthesis corresponds to fully observable nondeterministic planning in which the domain is given compactly and the goal is an LTL formula, that in turn is related to two-player games with LTL goals. Finding a strategy for these games means to synthesize a plan for the planning problem. The last part of this thesis is then dedicated to investigate LTL synthesis under this different view. In particular, we study a generalized form of planning under partial observability, in which we have multiple, possibly infinitely many, planning domains with the same actions and observations, and goals expressed over observations, which are possibly temporally extended. By building on work on two-player games with imperfect information in the Formal Methods literature, we devise a general technique, generalizing the belief-state construction, to remove partial observability. This reduces the planning problem to a game of perfect information with a tight correspondence between plans and strategies. Then we instantiate the technique and solve some generalized planning problems

Intolerances and food allergies: assessment of the stability of allergenic proteins to gastrointestinal digestion

The objectives of the present PhD project are summarized as follow: A1) evaluation of the digestion stability of major nut allergens (peanuts, hazelnuts, walnuts and almonds) as whole food, using an in vitro static model that simulates the gastrointestinal digestion process, including oral, gastric, duodenal and intestinal (brush border membrane enzymes) phases; A2) determine the stability of nut allergens following gastrointestinal digestion of whole food using proteomic techniques (SDS-PAGE, RP-HPLC, LC- HR-MS/MS); A3) assess the allergenic properties of nuts following gastrointestinal digestion of whole food using immunological methodology (ELISA, western-blot, dot-blot, RBL assay); A4) investigate how in vitro gastro-intestinal digestion affects the immune toxic properties of gliadin from diploid (Triticum monococcum) compared to hexaploid (Triticum aestivum) wheat by an immunological and proteomic approach

Solving parity games: Explicit vs symbolic

In this paper we provide a broad investigation of the symbolic approach for solving Parity Games. Specifically, we implement in a fresh tool, called, four symbolic algorithms to solve Parity Games and compare their performances to the corresponding explicit versions for different classes of games. By means of benchmarks, we show that for random games, even for constrained random games, explicit algorithms actually perform better than symbolic algorithms. The situation changes, however, for structured games, where symbolic algorithms seem to have the advantage. This suggests that when evaluating algorithms for parity-game solving, it would be useful to have real benchmarks and not only random benchmarks, as the common practice has been

Water Control in Cut Stems of Rose and Carnation

This PhD Thesis address, on cut flowers vase life, physiological mechanisms aimed at maintaining and regulating tissues hydration, cellular turgor, water use and senescence phenomena. Specifically we considered the effect of compatible solutes (osmoregulation) on water status, hydration state and vase life of cut stems of rose and carnation (chapter 1). In the second chapter we evaluated the application of anti-transpirant compounds that may act indirectly or directly on rose cut stems transpiration, in order to control the water use and longevity during the vase life. Finally (Chapter 3) we assessed how anti ethylene compounds may delay senescence phenomena of carnation cut stems, with the purpose to evaluate this effect in terms of on water balance, hydration and longevity during the vase life

Solving Parity Games in Scala

Parity games are two-player games, played on directed graphs, whose nodes are labeled with priorities. Along a play, the maximal priority occurring infinitely often determines the winner. In the last two decades, a variety of algorithms and successive optimizations have been proposed. The majority of them have been implemented in PGSolver, written in OCaml, which has been elected by the community as the de facto platform to solve efficiently parity games as well as evaluate their performance in several specific cases. PGSolver includes the Zielonka Recursive Algorithm that has been shown to perform better than the others in randomly generated games. However, even for arenas with a few thousand of nodes (especially over dense graphs), it requires minutes to solve the corresponding game. In this paper, we deeply revisit the implementation of the recursive algorithm introducing several improvements and making use of Scala Programming Language. These choices have been proved to be very successful, gaining up to two orders of magnitude in running time