Impacts of the Brazilian science and technology sectoral funds on the industrial firms’ R&D inputs and outputs

Os fundos setoriais foram instituídos no final da década de 1990, com o propósito de criar condições mais estáveis de financiamento público às atividades de ciência, tecnologia e inovação (CT&I) no Brasil. De maneira análoga ao que se observa com outros instrumentos de incentivo à inovação nas empresas, a expectativa é que o acesso aos fundos setoriais contribuiria para o aumento dos esforços tecnológicos e para o alcance de melhores resultados pelas empresas. O objetivo deste trabalho é, portanto, avaliar o impacto desses fundos sobre os esforços tecnológicos e sobre os resultados das empresas industriais no Brasil, no período 2001 a 2006. A base teórica para a discussão é a literatura internacional que tem, recorrentemente, analisado o efeito crowding in ou crowding out de políticas de apoio à inovação nas empresas. Esses trabalhos buscam verificar se as políticas adotadas complementam os recursos alocados nas atividades de inovação pelas empresas ou se haveria simplesmente a substituição desses últimos por recursos públicos. Neste artigo, uma técnica quasi-experimental é aplicada para comparar as empresas que acessaram os fundos setoriais com aquelas que não os acessaram, usando dados de painel que incluem informações sobre esforços tecnológicos e resultados. O grupo de controle é definido com base no algoritmo de Propensity Score Matching (PSM), visando eliminar o viés de seleção no acesso aos fundos, o que faz com que, a priori, as empresas que acessam esses recursos trilhem uma trajetória distinta daquelas que não acessam. Estimativas das diferenças percentuais das taxas de crescimento dos esforços tecnológicos indicam significativo descolamento entre os grupos de tratamento e controle e permitem que se rejeite a hipótese de crowding out. Estima-se que o diferencial na taxa de crescimento do PoTec – que corresponde à proxy para os esforços tecnológicos – seja de 6,8 p.p. no primeiro ano, 11,5 p.p. no segundo, 15,7 p.p. no terceiro e 26,7 p.p. no quarto ano após o acesso. Os fundos setoriais apresentam ainda impacto positivo e significativo no pessoal ocupado total, embora apenas um impacto marginalmente significante nas exportações de alto conteúdo tecnológico tenha sido observado após quatro anos nas empresas que compõem o grupo de tratamento. Adicionalmente, uma análise preliminar dos impactos dos diferentes instrumentos que compõem os fundos setoriais permite associar a maior parte dos impactos dos recursos à concessão de crédito em condições mais favoráveis. _________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACTThe Brazilian science and technology sectoral funds were established at the end of the 1990s, aiming at providing more stable financial resources to science, technology, and innovation (ST&I) activities in the country. Similarly to other instruments used to foster innovation at the firm level, the sectoral funds are expected to increase firms’ technological efforts as well as their result indicators. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impacts of these funds on the industrial firms’ R&D inputs and outputs in Brazil during the period between 2001 and 2006. Several papers have discussed the additionality or crowding out effects of innovation policies that involve grants and fiscal incentives, for example. In this paper, the firms which accessed the sectoral funds are compared with the ones which did not, based upon the path followed by their indicators of technological efforts (R&D inputs) and results (R&D outputs). The control group was defined using a Propensity Score Matching (PSM) procedure aiming at reducing the selection bias that makes firms which accessed the funds follow a different path when compared to the ones that did not. Percentage differencein- differences indicate a significant detachment between the technological efforts of the treatment and control groups and permit the hypothesis of crowding out to be rejected. The growth differential on the PoTec variable – the proxy for technological efforts – is estimated in 6.8 p.p. in the first year, 11.5 in the second, 15.7 p.p. in the third and 26.7 p.p. in the fourth year after the access to the funds. The sectoral funds also presented a significant and positive impact on the number of employees, although only a marginally significant impact on high-tech exports was observed four years after the treatment. Additionally, a preliminary analysis of the impacts of the different instruments that form the sectoral funds suggests that most impacts observed in the technological efforts can be associated to the credit at favorable conditions

The Multilingual TEDx Corpus for Speech Recognition and Translation

We present the Multilingual TEDx corpus, built to support speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST) research across many non-English source languages. The corpus is a collection of audio recordings from TEDx talks in 8 source languages. We segment transcripts into sentences and align them to the source-language audio and target-language translations. The corpus is released along with open-sourced code enabling extension to new talks and languages as they become available. Our corpus creation methodology can be applied to more languages than previous work, and creates multi-way parallel evaluation sets. We provide baselines in multiple ASR and ST settings, including multilingual models to improve translation performance for low-resource language pairs

Occupy: in theory and practice

This paper situates the discourse of the Occupy movement within the context of radical political philosophy. Our analysis takes place on two levels. First, we conduct an empirical analysis of the ‘official’ publications of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Occupy London (OL). Operationalising core concepts from the framing perspective within social movement theory, we provide a descriptive-comparative analysis of the ‘collective action frames’ of OWS and OL. Second, we consider the extent to which radical political philosophy speaks to the discourse of Occupy. Our empirical analysis reveals that both movements share diagnostic frames, but there were notable differences in terms of prognostic framing. The philosophical discussion suggests that there are alignments between anarchist, post-anarchist and post-Marxist ideologies at the level of both identity and strategy. Indeed, the absence of totalising anti-capitalist or anti-statist positions in Occupy suggests that – particularly with Occupy London – alignments are perhaps not so distant from typically social democratic demands

Responding to Negative Electronic Word of Mouth to Improve Purchase Intention

Retailers have little control over what their customers say about their products and services online. Review platforms (e.g., Yelp and Travelocity) are rife with negativity, from both real customers with bad experiences and from fake reviews created by competitors. These negative reviews have been shown to influence the purchasing behavior of future consumers. Many platforms do afford companies some control by including them in the online conversation about their products or services. Crafting a response to a poor review which appeals to future consumers may mitigate some of the negative outcomes associated with that review. This study advances our knowledge of responding to negative reviews by adding to the growing body of research, using a simulation-based experiment to test the influence of three elements of a review response on purchase intention (i.e., an apology, an explanation and a pledge to correct the problem identified in the review). In doing so, the data show that purchase intention increases only when a response contains all three elements. Implications for e-commerce researchers and review platform developers are discussed

The Profanation of Revelation: On Language and Immanence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben

This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agamben’s work holds for theology. It aims therefore to examine his (re)conceptualizations of language, in light of particular historical glosses on the ‘name of God’ and the nature of the ‘mystical’, as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanity’s ‘religious’ quest to find its Voice. As such, we see how he challenges those standard (ontotheological) notions of transcendence which have been consistently aligned with various historical forms of sovereignty. In addition, I intend to present his redefinition of revelation as solely the unveiling of the ‘name of God’ as the fact of our linguistic being, a movement from the transcendent divine realm to the merely human world before us. By proceeding in this manner, this essay tries to close in on one of the largest theological implications contained within Agamben’s work: the establishment of an ontology that could only be described as a form of ‘absolute’ immanence, an espousal of some form of pantheism (or perhaps panentheism) yet to be more fully pronounced within his writings

Globally invariant metabolism but density-diversity mismatch in springtails.

Soil life supports the functioning and biodiversity of terrestrial ecosystems. Springtails (Collembola) are among the most abundant soil arthropods regulating soil fertility and flow of energy through above- and belowground food webs. However, the global distribution of springtail diversity and density, and how these relate to energy fluxes remains unknown. Here, using a global dataset representing 2470 sites, we estimate the total soil springtail biomass at 27.5 megatons carbon, which is threefold higher than wild terrestrial vertebrates, and record peak densities up to 2 million individuals per square meter in the tundra. Despite a 20-fold biomass difference between the tundra and the tropics, springtail energy use (community metabolism) remains similar across the latitudinal gradient, owing to the changes in temperature with latitude. Neither springtail density nor community metabolism is predicted by local species richness, which is high in the tropics, but comparably high in some temperate forests and even tundra. Changes in springtail activity may emerge from latitudinal gradients in temperature, predation and resource limitation in soil communities. Contrasting relationships of biomass, diversity and activity of springtail communities with temperature suggest that climate warming will alter fundamental soil biodiversity metrics in different directions, potentially restructuring terrestrial food webs and affecting soil functioning

Global fine-resolution data on springtail abundance and community structure

Springtails (Collembola) inhabit soils from the Arctic to the Antarctic and comprise an estimated ~32% of all terrestrial arthropods on Earth. Here, we present a global, spatially-explicit database on springtail communities that includes 249,912 occurrences from 44,999 samples and 2,990 sites. These data are mainly raw sample-level records at the species level collected predominantly from private archives of the authors that were quality-controlled and taxonomically-standardised. Despite covering all continents, most of the sample-level data come from the European continent (82.5% of all samples) and represent four habitats: woodlands (57.4%), grasslands (14.0%), agrosystems (13.7%) and scrublands (9.0%). We included sampling by soil layers, and across seasons and years, representing temporal and spatial within-site variation in springtail communities. We also provided data use and sharing guidelines and R code to facilitate the use of the database by other researchers. This data paper describes a static version of the database at the publication date, but the database will be further expanded to include underrepresented regions and linked with trait data.</p

Energy Resolution Performance of the CMS Electromagnetic Calorimeter

The energy resolution performance of the CMS lead tungstate crystal electromagnetic calorimeter is presented. Measurements were made with an electron beam using a fully equipped supermodule of the calorimeter barrel. Results are given both for electrons incident on the centre of crystals and for electrons distributed uniformly over the calorimeter surface. The electron energy is reconstructed in matrices of 3 times 3 or 5 times 5 crystals centred on the crystal containing the maximum energy. Corrections for variations in the shower containment are applied in the case of uniform incidence. The resolution measured is consistent with the design goals