Facing the challenge of globalization: the role of confidence in institutions.

An extensive debate on the determinants of people's support for globalization concluded that it is necessary to leverage on welfare schemes to compensate those who lose from globalization. Yet, this solution is not universally accepted and it may not be viable in times of budget constraints. We test the hypothesis that confidence in institutions improves people's acceptance of globalization. We use micro data from the Eurobarometer, the European Social Survey and the European Quality of Life Survey to study the case of Luxembourg, a small and open economy, highly integrated in international markets and in which immigrants are more than half of the total residents. Figures indicate that confidence in institutions, and in particular in international ones, increases people's acceptance of globalization. However, when globalization is considered as free movement of people across borders, confidence in international institutions plays a major role. These results are robust to reverse causality

Motivations for Corporate Social Responsibility: all talk and no walk?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can be defined as voluntarily going beyond what the law requires to achieve social and environmental objectives. Present work provides the profile of the firms adopting CSR strategies in Luxembourg focusing on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for CSR. The analysis is performed using ICT 2011 data representative of the whole economy, including large, medium and small enterprises of the manufacturing and service sectors. Contingency analysis contrasted the adoption of CSR with a set of firms’ features (size, group, exports, sector of economic activity and perceived competition). The econometric analysis explores the link between firm’s features and CSR disclose. The typical firm that adopts CSR practices is a large market leader, part of an international group, with a strong international reputation and operating in the utilities sector. Looking at the reasons behind the CSR, both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are strongly correlated with CSR. Firms choose CSR both as a tool to promote their image and as part of their corporate culture. Some policy implications conclude the research

Motivations for Corporate Social Responsibility: all talk and no walk?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can be defined as voluntarily going beyond what the law requires to achieve social and environmental objectives. Present work provides the profile of the firms adopting CSR strategies in Luxembourg focusing on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for CSR. The analysis is performed using ICT 2011 data representative of the whole economy, including large, medium and small enterprises of the manufacturing and service sectors. Contingency analysis contrasted the adoption of CSR with a set of firms’ features (size, group, exports, sector of economic activity and perceived competition). The econometric analysis explores the link between firm’s features and CSR disclose. The typical firm that adopts CSR practices is a large market leader, part of an international group, with a strong international reputation and operating in the utilities sector. Looking at the reasons behind the CSR, both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are strongly correlated with CSR. Firms choose CSR both as a tool to promote their image and as part of their corporate culture. Some policy implications conclude the research

Sensory-Glove-Based Open Surgery Skill Evaluation

Manual dexterity is one of the most important surgical skills, and yet there are limited instruments to evaluate this ability objectively. In this paper, we propose a system designed to track surgeons’ hand movements during simulated open surgery tasks and to evaluate their manual expertise. Eighteen participants, grouped according to their surgical experience, performed repetitions of two basic surgical tasks, namely single interrupted suture and simple running suture. Subjects’ hand movements were measured with a sensory glove equipped with flex and inertial sensors, tracking flexion/extension of hand joints, and wrist movement. The participants’ level of experience was evaluated discriminating manual performances using linear discriminant analysis, support vector machines, and artificial neural network classifiers. Artificial neural networks showed the best performance, with a median error rate of 0.61% on the classification of single interrupted sutures and of 0.57% on simple running sutures. Strategies to reduce sensory glove complexity and increase its comfort did not affect system performances substantially

Novel devices and strategies to investigate and counteract pain: an engineer’s point of view on pain and how to fight against it

Pain is a gift; it is a fundamental adaptive mechanism to protect ourselves from injuries and illnesses [1]. While usually pain is perceived as debilitating and intolerable and researchers are focusing on how to suppress it, its presence has a great survival value, which becomes evident in its absence. Contrary to the common belief, insensitivity to pain is a curse, which sometimes is an ill-fated consequence of some conditions, such as alcoholism, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and leprosy [2]. Pain warns us of dangers, impeding us to continue adding insult to an injury causing more serious issues; it forces us to rest and protect the affected body part until the latter has recovered completely. As such, pain represents an "unpleasant sensory and emotional experience" but "associated with actual or potential tissue damage" [3], thus necessary to avoid further repercussions. When a high-intensity stimulus that can damage tissues is applied onto the human skin, it activates pain receptors [4], called nociceptors; information reaches the brain through myelinated A and un-myelinated C nerve fibers and the pain is experienced. If pain is certainly a gift, complications arise when its natural mechanisms do not perform correctly and the unpleasant painful sensations become incessant, interfering drastically with the person’s quality of life. This is not a rare event: as an example, more than 100 million adults in the United States only are affected by chronic pain. In such cases, pain loses its role as a warning against more critical injuries and simply becomes a medical problem, requiring medical treatment. Costs of these treatments are not negligible: they range from $560 to$635 billion of US dollars per year, combining the health care cost and the productivity estimates [5]. Therefore pain has to be investigated, to be better understood and counteracted, if necessary. Easy? Not at all: pain is difficult to ascertain, is primarily assessed by means of self-report [6] and experiments on pain suffer from a lack of reproducibility and accuracy. The result is that many relevant neuro-physiological aspects on pain still remain unclear. Here is where the engineer work becomes essential: medicine needs engineering to design, develop and implement reliable and precise devices whose features help pain research. Furthermore, when possible, the engineer should propose solutions that are inexpensive, portable, easy-to-assemble and customizable to suit diverse experimental requirements, ready to be employed into different researches. A complex challenge, without a doubt, but fundamental: the reader will find throughout this thesis, final report of my PhD in Electronic Engineering, a dissertation on the development of brand new devices and strategies to study and counteract the feeling of pain. Particularly, this thesis is made of two distinct engineering projects, devoted to these two aspects respectively. i ii Part I - Pain Counteraction: PROVIRT PLP project has the aim to improve the rehabilitation of upper limb amputees who suffer from Phantom Limb Pain syndrome, a chronic pain condition, with a technology based on pattern recognition and virtual reality. A promising discover made by Ramachandran [3] showed how restoring the visual feedback of the amputated limb may have a primary importance in the pain counteraction, thus I implemented a device to maximise such illusion. PROVIRT PLP is able to read surface electromyographic signals from the amputee’s stump and coherently convert them into the movement of an avatar in a virtual reality environment. This part describes the project requisites, the design and implementation of the electronics, the observation regarding the classifiers and the pattern recognition stage and the software application that commands the virtual reality module. The system is then further improved by the means of three experimental in-vivo tests, namely Test A - Optimization of EMG-based hand gesture recognition: Supervised vs. unsupervised data preprocessing on healthy subjects and transradial amputees (published as [7]), Test B - Evaluating the influence of subject-related variables on EMG-based hand gesture classification (published as [8]) and Test C - Tuning parameters and performance evaluation. The project has been funded by INAIL (Italian government agency for the insurance against work-related injuries) and can be considered a successful compromise between gesture/intention of movement classification accuracy and ease of use for both health professionals and amputees. To date, Test D - Therapy effectiveness that will eventually shed some light on PROVIRT PLP suitability for PLP counteraction is ongoing, with promising partial results. Part II - Pain Investigation: PUSH project has the aim to define objective measures of pain, by means of robust and consistent patterns of noxious stimuli and innocuous touch. The project wants to develop a device, able to allow for reliable non-invasive investigation of the peripheral and central mechanisms related to the sense of pain, towards the definition of biomarkers for its quantitative assessment. Since fMRI is the standard tool in advanced brain research, PUSH is developed to be completely MR-compatible. This part describes the idea of a pneumatic-driven system to elicit pain, the design and implementation of the electronics, the characterization of the system and a fMRI in-vivo experiment on an adult volunteer to validate it. The project can be considered as a brand new interesting prototype for any kind of fMRI- and EEG-based work on painful mechanical stimulation, and a technical paper that describes its details is published as [9]. This work has been funded by the Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London, UK, the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, University College London, London, UK and the Centre for the Developing Brain, Kings College London, St Thomas’ Hospital, London, UK. Support for this research is by the EU-FP7 grants CONTEST (ITN-317488), BALANCE (ICT-601003), Symbitron (ICT-661626) and EU-H2020 grant CogIMon (ICT-23-2014). Summarizing, this research work is a step forward towards a strict cooperation between engineers and medical doctors, in the perspective of further advances in the understanding and the counteracting of the feeling of pain in humans. Two engineering devices, PROVIRT PLP and PUSH, have been developed to address and solve medical challenges, hoping they will be even a small puzzle piece in helping people achieve a better quality of life

Facing the challenge of globalization: the role of confidence in institutions.

An extensive debate on the determinants of people's support for globalization concluded that it is necessary to leverage on welfare schemes to compensate those who lose from globalization. Yet, this solution is not universally accepted and it may not be viable in times of budget constraints. We test the hypothesis that confidence in institutions improves people's acceptance of globalization. We use micro data from the Eurobarometer, the European Social Survey and the European Quality of Life Survey to study the case of Luxembourg, a small and open economy, highly integrated in international markets and in which immigrants are more than half of the total residents. Figures indicate that confidence in institutions, and in particular in international ones, increases people's acceptance of globalization. However, when globalization is considered as free movement of people across borders, confidence in international institutions plays a major role. These results are robust to reverse causality

Comparability of web and telephone survey modes for the measurement of subjective well-being

We compare subjective well-being measures collected with a web and telephone surveys to test whether survey mode affects people's evaluations of their well-being. We use unique, nationally representative data from Luxembourg which contains five measures of subjective well-being collected through web and telephone surveys. Oaxaca decomposition and multinomial logit with Coarsened Exact Matching indicate that the survey mode affects peoples' well-being scores. Web respondents are more likely to report low well-being and less likely to report the neutral category. However, the consequences for statistical inference are negligible. Our results support the view that web and telephone surveys are comparable tools for collecting subjective data, such as people's well-being

Evaluating the influence of subject-related variables on EMG-based hand gesture classification

In this study we evaluated the effect of subjectrelated variables, i.e. hand dominance, gender and experience in using, on the performances of an EMG-based system for virtual upper limb and prosthesis control. The proposed system consists in a low density EMG sensors arrangement, a purpose-built signal-conditioning electronic circuitry and a software able to classify the gestures and to replicate them via avatars. The classification algorithm was optimized in terms of feature extraction and dimensionality reduction. In its optimal configuration, the system allows to accurately discriminate five different hand gestures (accuracy = 88.85 ± 7.19%). Statistical analysis demonstrated no significant difference in classification accuracy related to hand-dominance (handedness) and to gender. In addition, maximum accuracy in dominant hand is achieved since first use of the system, whilst accuracy in classifying gestures of the non-dominant hand significantly increases with experience. These results indicate that this system can be potentially used by every trans-radial upper-limb amputee for virtual/real limb control

Therapeutic afucosylated monoclonal antibody and bispecific T-cell engagers for T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Background T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is an aggressive disease with a poor cure rate for relapsed/resistant patients. Due to the lack of T-cell restricted targetable antigens, effective immune-therapeutics are not presently available and the treatment of chemo-refractory T-ALL is still an unmet clinical need. To develop novel immune-therapy for T-ALL, we generated an afucosylated monoclonal antibody (mAb) (ahuUMG1) and two different bispecific T-cell engagers (BTCEs) against UMG1, a unique CD43-epitope highly and selectively expressed by T-ALL cells from pediatric and adult patients. Methods UMG1 expression was assessed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) on a wide panel of normal tissue microarrays (TMAs), and by flow cytometry on healthy peripheral blood/bone marrow-derived cells, on 10 different T-ALL cell lines, and on 110 T-ALL primary patient-derived cells. CD43-UMG1 binding site was defined through a peptide microarray scanning. ahuUMG1 was generated by Genetic Glyco-Engineering technology from a novel humanized mAb directed against UMG1 (huUMG1). BTCEs were generated as IgG1-(scFv)(2) constructs with bivalent (2+2) or monovalent (2+1) CD3 epsilon arms. Antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC), antibody dependent cellular phagocytosis (ADCP) and redirected T-cell cytotoxicity assays were analysed by flow cytometry. In vivo antitumor activity of ahUMG1 and UMG1-BTCEs was investigated in NSG mice against subcutaneous and orthotopic xenografts of human T-ALL. Results Among 110 T-ALL patient-derived samples, 53 (48.1%) stained positive (24% of TI/TII, 82% of TIII and 42.8% of TIV). Importantly, no expression of UMG1-epitope was found in normal tissues/cells, excluding cortical thymocytes and a minority (<5%) of peripheral blood T lymphocytes. ahUMG1 induced strong ADCC and ADCP on T-ALL cells in vitro, which translated in antitumor activity in vivo and significantly extended survival of treated mice. Both UMG1-BTCEs demonstrated highly effective killing activity against T-ALL cells in vitro. We demonstrated that this effect was specifically exerted by engaged activated T cells. Moreover, UMG1-BTCEs effectively antagonized tumor growth at concentrations >2 log lower as compared with ahuUMG1, with significant mice survival advantage in different T-ALL models in vivo. Conclusion Altogether our findings, including the safe UMG1-epitope expression profile, provide a framework for the clinical development of these innovative immune-therapeutics for this still orphan disease