Soft Regulating Intangibles Reporting: Rationales, Processes, and Consequences

The thesis aims to explore the economic, political and social premises according to which some governmental agencies have decided to promote Intellectual Capital (or Intangibles) Reporting in their countries. Firstly, it will examine the contextual premises and conditions that have encouraged (or inhibited) Intangibles reporting. Secondly, it will investigate the way these premises and conditions interact in different ways, through the actors involved, both within and outside countries, thus establishing (loosely) coupled relationships nationally and internationally. The relationship between IC recommendation for corporate reporting, governmental and contextual linkages will be analysed from different perspectives, namely political economy, legitimacy and institutional theory (Chapter 2) and in dis(similar) countries, namely Japan (Chapter 3) and Germany (Chapter 4). The investigation has been mainly centred on the examination of documents published by governmental agencies, and a number of interviews with high-level individuals, many of whom were directly involved in the development of the reporting practices in question. In light of the relationship that the thesis will establish between different regulatory theories and ways of conduct in (dis-)similar nations (Chapter 5), IC will be understood not as a merely corporate neutral technique but as an economic and socially constructed phenomenon aimed at re-launching the growth of a country. This way, it will be explored from both within – in terms of methods and their usefulness for its “supporters” – and also externally – in relation to how it is perceived and in turn communicated by politicians who are “delegates of different cognitive and social institutions” (Manninen, 1996). In other words, its potential to serve public interest will be here advocated

UN FRAMMENTO CON RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI FELIDE DA CHALARA (FESTÒS)?

This paper focuses on a MM IIIA ceramic fragment (F 7586) found in the southern sector of the Chalara quarter (located on the eastern slopes of the Phaistos palace hill). The vessel, of which only two joining sherds from a medium-large closed shape survive, comes from a rich homogenous fill created in an operation to fill MM III structures and construct a LM I house on top of them

A WALL-BRACKET FROM PHAISTOS

The article discusses the wall bracket found at Phaistos by Luigi Pernier. The object was dated to historical time and published by the excavator without proper description together with other prehistoric vessels. Wall brackets are extremely rare in Greece; however, the increasing number of wall brackets in the Aegean and Greek mainland (especially at Tiryns) allows speculating on the chronology and the function of this isolated item. It is argued that the Phaistian wall bracket arrived in Crete between the end of Late Minoan IIIB and the beginning of IIIC, when wall brackets spread in the Mycenaean world. Finally, the paper discusses the hypotheses that the object reached southern Crete directly via Cyprus or through a Greek mainland intermediate

UN PITHARAKI MM III DAL NUOVO «SETTORE NORD-EST» DI HAGHIA TRIADA

During the excavations in the NE sector of Haghia Triada in 1993, a MM III pitharaki (HTR 2475) was found in the northern part of the «Complesso della mazza di breccia». The vase comes from a MM III ceramic dump (Trench M/4), one of the largest in Haghia Triada, which is still in the process of being studied. Comparison with similar vases found in funeral contexts (from Apesokari and Vorou) show that the pitharaki was probably a cult vase, and this article suggests that it should connected with room z (which is situated close to the MM III ceramic dump) and for which a ceremonial function has been assumed. Furthermore, a general interpretation of the area is advanced: it is proposed that the ceramic complex of Trench M/4 is part of the largest archaeological evidence connected with ceremonies for the cult of the dead, from the prepalatial to the postpalatial period

Sustainable hydrogen production via LiH hydrolysis for unmanned air vehicle (UAV) applications

In the current study, an experimental approach for the further understanding of the LiH hydrolysis reaction for hydrogen production is considered. The experimental work has been undertaken under small scale conditions by utilising fixed bed reactors. The hydrolysis reaction has been studied at several oven temperatures (150 °C, 300 °C and 500 °C). The favourable driving potentials for the hydrolysis reactions were identified by the utilisation of the Gibbs free energy analysis. The main outcome of the study is the deceleration of the reaction pace due to the formation of the by-product layers during the reaction. At the initial stage, due to the contact of steam with the unreacted and fresh LiH surface, the reaction proceeds on a fast pace, while the formation of the layers tends to decelerate the diffusion of steam into the core of material, forcing the production step to be slower. The hydrogen yield was found to be more than 90% of the theoretical value for all the reaction temperatures. Finally, a scenario of a hybrid-electric propulsion system for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) including Li-ion battery, Proton Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) and an on-board hydrogen production system based on LiH hydrolysis is introduced and studied

Hydrogen storage properties of magnesium borohydride infiltrated in silica aerogel using solvated and pressure methods

In this work, the polymorphic α-magnesium borohydride form was infiltrated by wet impregnation using tetrahydrofuran (THF) as solvent and subcritical carbon dioxide as innovative drying process. Pressure infiltration at high temperature was also tested as another promising method for confinement. After infiltration, onset decomposition temperature was reduced from 280 °C into 220 °C using high pressure infiltration and down to 100 °C using wet impregnation followed by CO2 drying. Faster kinetics were obtained in both cases due the possible particle size reduction in the precipitation process of the complex hydride and the presence of silica, which could behave as an additive. It is the first time that this complex borohydride is 6.1 wt% H2 reversible performing the rehydrogenation at moderate conditions of 390 °C and 120 bar H2 using silica as support. Different values were obtained after infiltration method due to the different intermediates that were obtained after the first dehydrogenation

Language-enhanced RNR-Map: Querying Renderable Neural Radiance Field maps with natural language

We present Le-RNR-Map, a Language-enhanced Renderable Neural Radiance map for Visual Navigation with natural language query prompts. The recently proposed RNR-Map employs a grid structure comprising latent codes positioned at each pixel. These latent codes, which are derived from image observation, enable: i) image rendering given a camera pose, since they are converted to Neural Radiance Field; ii) image navigation and localization with astonishing accuracy. On top of this, we enhance RNR-Map with CLIP-based embedding latent codes, allowing natural language search without additional label data. We evaluate the effectiveness of this map in single and multi-object searches. We also investigate its compatibility with a Large Language Model as an "affordance query resolver". Code and videos are available at https://intelligolabs.github.io/Le-RNR-Map/Comment: Accepted at ICCVW23 VLA