How sticky are local expenditures in Italy? Assessing the relevance of the “flypaper effect” through municipal data

An extensive literature analyses the impact of upper-tier transfers on the spending behaviour of lower level governments. According to the median voter framework, a transfer from the centre should act as a lump sum grant to residents and thus be spent by jurisdictions in the same proportion as residents are willing to spend their own money on public goods and services. But the actual local expenditure response to central government transfers is stronger than predicted by the theory, giving rise to the “flypaper effect”. Using the database on municipal accounts, and various other information sources, this work aims at assessing the size of the effect for Italian municipalities and the symmetry in the local expenditure response to central government transfers. Our dataset enables us also to investigate the role of some political factors. We find a sizeable effect and a remarkable asymmetric response of municipal expenditures to central government transfers as well as a significant role for political variables.flypaper effect, intergovernmental transfers, fiscal federalism

Fostering Progress in Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking of Robotic and Automation Systems

We have shared benchmarks for many engineering systems and products in the market that can be used to compare solutions and systems. We can compare cars in terms of maximum speed, acceleration, and maximum torque; computers in terms of flops, random access memory, and hard disk capacity; and smartphones in terms of battery life and screen dimensions. We also have shared usability metrics based on human factors, which are used to compare the ease of use of different software interfaces. When we come to the evaluation and the comparison of how intelligent, robust, adaptive, and antifragile the behaviors of robots are in performing a given set of tasks, such as daily life activities with daily life objects such as in a kitchen or a hospital room, we are in trouble

Revisión de una década (2007-2016)

Tesis (Magíster en Comprensión Lectora y Producción de Textos)El propósito de la revisión es ofrecer una síntesis de los avances de investigación de la escritura en la educación básica chilena realizados en la última década, organizada alrededor de dos grandes áreas de estudio: aprendizaje de la escritura y enseñanza de la escritura (prácticas pedagógicas, evaluación y formación docente). La revisión concluye con la identificación de temas pendientes de investigación de la escritura en el contexto chileno de educación básica.The purpose of the review is to provide a synthesis of the progress made over the last decade, organized around two research areas: learning of writing and teaching of writing (pedagogical practice, assessment and teacher education). The review concludes with the identification of pending issues and future lines of research in writing in the Chilean context of basic education

New exactly solvable relativistic models with anomalous interaction

A special class of Dirac-Pauli equations with time-like vector potentials of external field is investigated. A new exactly solvable relativistic model describing anomalous interaction of a neutral Dirac fermion with a cylindrically symmetric external e.m. field is presented. The related external field is a superposition of the electric field generated by a charged infinite filament and the magnetic field generated by a straight line current. In non-relativistic approximation the considered model is reduced to the integrable Pron'ko-Stroganov model.Comment: 20 pages, discussion of the possibility to test the model experimentally id added as an Appendix, typos are correcte

Summarize Dates First: A Paradigm Shift in Timeline Summarization

Timeline summarization aims at presenting long news stories in a compact manner. State-of-the-art approaches first select the most relevant dates from the original event timeline then produce per-date news summaries. Date selection is driven by either per-date news content or date-level references. When coping with complex event data, characterized by inherent news flow redundancy, this pipeline may encounter relevant issues in both date selection and summarization due to a limited use of news content in date selection and no use of high-level temporal references (e.g., the past month). This paper proposes a paradigm shift in timeline summarization aimed at overcoming the above issues. It presents a new approach, namely Summarize Date First, which focuses on first generating date-level summaries then selecting the most relevant dates on top of summarized knowledge. In the latter stage, it performs date aggregations to consider high-level temporal references as well. The proposed pipeline also supports frequent incremental timeline updates more efficiently than previous approaches. We tested our unsupervised approach both on existing benchmark datasets and on a newly proposed benchmark dataset describing the COVID-19 news timeline. The achieved results were superior to state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and competitive against supervised ones

Dangerous liaisons? The role of inflammation and comorbidities in HIV and SARS-CoV-2 infection

In people living with HIV (PLWH), immune activation and inflammation levels are high even when viral suppression is maintained, potentially contributing to several comorbidities, and hampering the immune response to infections such as the recent SARS-CoV-2 disease 2019 (COVID-19)

BRCA Mutations in Prostate Cancer: Prognostic and Predictive Implications

Despite chemotherapy and novel androgen-receptor signalling inhibitors (ARSi) have been approved during the last decades, metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) remains a lethal disease with poor clinical outcomes. Several studies found that germline or acquired DNA damage repair (DDR) defects affect a high percentage of mCRPC patients. Among DDR defects, BRCA mutations show relevant clinical implications. BRCA mutations are associated with adverse clinical features in primary tumors and with poor outcomes in patients with mCRPC. In addition, BRCA mutations predict good response to poly-ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitors, such as olaparib, rucaparib, and niraparib. However, concerns still remain on the role of extensive mutational testing in prostate cancer patients, given the implications for patients and for their progeny. The present comprehensive review attempts to provide an overview of BRCA mutations in prostate cancer, focusing on their prognostic and predictive roles

Tricuspid regurgitant velocity elevation in a three-year old child with sickle cell anemia and recurrent acute chest syndromes reversed not by hydroxyurea but by bone marrow transplantation

Elevated Tricuspid Regurgitant Velocity (TRV) has been related to higher mortality in adults and to hemolysis, lower oxygen saturation during 6-minute walk test and acute chest syndrome (ACS) in children with sickle cell disease (SCD). Hydroxyurea (HU) has reduced TRV value in children and adults. We describe a three year old HbSS child with recurrent ACS, hypoperfusion of the left lung, mild hemolysis and persistent TRV elevation. TRV did not normalize after HU, despite improvement in clinical conditions and in baseline laboratory parameters related to hemolysis and blood viscosity, but normalized after bone marrow transplantation (BMT). Our experience suggests that in young patients, TRV reduction can be a positive concomitant effect of BMT