Corruption: Democracy, Autocracy, and Political Stability

The recent empirical literature on corruption has identified a long list of variables that correlate significantly with corruption but only five were distinguished by Leamer’s Extreme Bounds Analysis as robust to various samples, measures of corruption, and regression specifications. Among these five factors that were found to reduce corruption are decades-long tradition of democracy and political stability. In today’s world, however, there are many countries that combine one of these two robust determinants of corruption with the opposite of the other: politically stable autocracies or newly formed and unstable democracies. The central question raised in this paper is: Is it worth, in terms of corruption, for a country to trade stability with autocratic rule for political freedoms but with transitional instability? We find that the answer to this question is in the affirmative - the level of corruption is indeed lower in unstable democracies than in stable dictatorships. Our results are robust to various measures of corruption, alternative regressor indices, and regression specifications.corruption, democracy, autocracy, dictatorship, political stability

Big Bang vs. Gradualism – A Productivity Analysis

In the beginning of the 1990s, the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union began reforming their economies. Yet despite two decades of research, it is still unclear which reform path – gradual or radical – is better for long-run growth. Unlike most other studies on the topic, which concentrate on the growth of output per capita, this paper compares the two alternative reform approaches based on the analysis of productivity. We estimate a Malmquist multifactor productivity index for 22 transition economies over 17 years to compare their relative performance depending on their speed of reform. The Malmquist index is further decomposed into efficiency and technological change, and statistical inference is obtained using a smoothed bootstrap procedure. The main results are that the radical reformers exhibit higher rates of productivity growth in the initial years of transition, while the gradual countries do better in the later years. Over the whole time period a gradual reform strategy is superior to faster reforms. These findings have important implications for reforms in the remaining non-market economies and many developing countries

Tactile Sensors Based on Conductive Polymers

This paper presents results from a selection of tactile sensors that have been designed and fabricated. These sensors are based on a common approach that consists in placing a sheet of piezoresistive material on the top of a set of electrodes. We use a thin film of conductive polymer as the piezoresistive mate¬rial. Specifically, a conductive water-based ink of this polymer is deposited by spin coating on a flexible plastic sheet, giving it a smooth, homogeneous and conducting thin film. The main interest in this procedure is that it is cheap and it allows the fabrication of flexible and low cost tactile sensors. In this work we present results from sensors made using two technologies. Firstly, we have used a flexible Printed Circuit Board (PCB) technology to fabricate the set of electrodes and addressing tracks. The result is a simple, flexible tactile sensor. In addition to these sensors on PCB, we have proposed, designed and fabricated sensors with screen printing technology. In this case, the set of electrodes and addressing tracks are made by printing an ink based on silver nanoparticles. The intense characterization provides us insights into the design of these tactile sensors.This work has been partially funded by the spanish government under contract TEC2006-12376-C02

On the temporal stability of analyte recognition with an e-nose based on a metal oxide sensor array in practical applications

The paper deals with a functional instability of electronic nose (e-nose) units which significantly limits their real-life applications. Here we demonstrate how to approach this issue with example of an e-nose based on a metal oxide sensor array developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany). We consider the instability of e-nose operation at different time scales ranging from minutes to many years. To test the e-nose we employ open-air and headspace sampling of analyte odors. The multivariate recognition algorithm to process the multisensor array signals is based on the linear discriminant analysis method. Accounting for the received results, we argue that the stability of device operation is mostly affected by accidental changes in the ambient air composition. To overcome instabilities, we introduce the add-training procedure which is found to successfully manage both the temporal changes of ambient and the drift of multisensor array properties, even long-term. The method can be easily implemented in practical applications of e-noses and improve prospects for device marketing

Big Bang vs. Gradualism – A Productivity Analysis

In the beginning of the 1990s, the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union began reforming their economies. Yet despite two decades of research, it is still unclear which reform path – gradual or radical – is better for long-run growth. Unlike most other studies on the topic, which concentrate on the growth of output per capita, this paper compares the two alternative reform approaches based on the analysis of productivity. We estimate a Malmquist multifactor productivity index for 22 transition economies over 17 years to compare their relative performance depending on their speed of reform. The Malmquist index is further decomposed into efficiency and technological change, and statistical inference is obtained using a smoothed bootstrap procedure. The main results are that the radical reformers exhibit higher rates of productivity growth in the initial years of transition, while the gradual countries do better in the later years. Over the whole time period a gradual reform strategy is superior to faster reforms. These findings have important implications for reforms in the remaining non-market economies and many developing countries.Transition economies, Malmquist, speed of reforms, bootstrap

Movement Speed Models of Natural Grasp and Release Used for an Industrial Robot Equipped with a Gripper

International audienceIn this paper, movement speed models of a robotic manipulator are presented according to the mode of operation of the human hand, when it wants to grasp and release an object. In order to develop the models, measurements on a human agent were required regarding the movement coordinates of his hand. The movement patterns have been approximated on the intervals, using first and second degree functions. The speeds were obtained by deriving these functions. The models obtained are generally presented; for their implementation in models applied for a certain robot, specific changes from case to case have to be made

Model-Free segmentation and grasp selection of unknown stacked objects

We present a novel grasping approach for unknown stacked objects using RGB-D images of highly complex real-world scenes. Specifically, we propose a novel 3D segmentation algorithm to generate an efficient representation of the scene into segmented surfaces (known as surfels) and objects. Based on this representation, we next propose a novel grasp selection algorithm which generates potential grasp hypotheses and automatically selects the most appropriate grasp without requiring any prior information of the objects or the scene. We tested our algorithms in real-world scenarios using live video streams from Kinect and publicly available RGB-D object datasets. Our experimental results show that both our proposed segmentation and grasp selection algorithms consistently perform superior compared to the state-of-the-art methods