Putting on the Debate: Behind the Scenes of a Live Broadcast and Real-Time Political Analysis

When the first gubernatorial debate in Rhode Island came to the Roger Williams University campus Thursday evening, RWU turned it into a real-world learning opportunity for our students about civic engagement and what goes on behind the scenes of putting on a live debate

COOPERATIVE GROWTH Mapping scaling strategies for new parameters of wealth

Eight minutes to eleven o’clock. I stand in front of a crossroad, where I can still see the striped tents of the large marketplace behind Oerlikon Railway Station as well as the bright orange logo of COOP Group right on Schwamendingerstr. The weekly market has a long tradition in Zurich due to the top-quality goods on sale directly from the producers, mostly organic from regional farmers, featuring a crowd of health-minded consumers. Right next to it, over 150 years of Swiss cooperative enterprise is illustrated by one of the 2,000 retail outlets of the COOP Group, which began as a small consumer cooperative and became an international retail and wholesale cooperative. Unique structures built on a common core. Both markets share the same economic environment identifying and evaluating potential alternatives to assess the social, technical, and environmental challenges of modern society. Both sum up - in a small local initiative and in an international enterprise - the perspective of different models of entrepreneurship oriented by the urge of a sustainable and democratic- centered economy. They translate the rise of new perspectives on how to do business. The scene I captured in Zurich is a small but significant sample of a bulkier movement that has been quietly growing around the world over centuries. Cooperative endeavors have a blueprint throughout human history. Nevertheless, the modern cooperative can trace its roots to Europe in the late 1700s as a response to changes brought by the Industrial Revolution. Closer to a new technological Industrial Revolution, cooperatives gain novel features and navigate through market pains and opportunities to remain competitive while growing in size and scope. Despite the long history of cooperative enterprises, its significant economic impact, and the substantial data available about these institutions, their vast potential has not been fully explored. They represent a significant portion of the agriculture and food industries, wholesale and retail sales, insurance cooperatives, banking, and financial services, health, education, and social care. Nevertheless, the choice for cooperatives is still shy in most endeavors and there is a profound lack of understanding about what this option truly represents among entrepreneurs, investors, consumers, and policymakers. A question that has always resonated in my mind since the bachelors is if Law is an emancipatory tool capable of designing in advance a better pathway for society and enticing fundamental changes or if our normative body is merely a foxtail - always behind - barely following the brisk development and kaleidoscopic nature of human experience. By the end of the doctorate and the profound dedication towards intellectual matureness, I had the fair expectation of answering this question. However, diving into the search for economic democracy did not provide me with a definitive answer. Still, the doctorate sparked hope of Law as a liberating tool and raised new questions that I am eager to respond to in future developments of my studies. Here I confess the naiveness coming to Italy years ago. My wrongful idea that a PhD would turn me into a subject expert. Little did I know back then that a doctorate serves only to remind us of how shallow our comprehension of the world is, and even individual research objects have a highly dynamic nature and hold a multiverse in itself with a myriad of reflections, beyond what I could anticipate when elaborating the research proposal. Law alone will never solve all the sores. The intricacy of the status quo calls forth a multifaceted approach guided by democratic values and respect for human and environmental wellness. Any ‘one size fits all’ resolution is doomed to failure. We obsessively search for revolutionary and unprecedented innovations when we already have the structural beams we need to support a new societal standpoint. Hence, it is a matter of hermeneutic recognition of the potential of what has already been built by generations. Cooperatives are a perfect example of an old remedy for novel pains. Many advocates in different times, cultures, and legal systems have pointed toward a more equitable life and economy, proving that it is possible to collectively create value and distribute wealth. The literature is rich and vast. So are the many cases and great stories made by people simply trying to reinvent the way of doing business and impact their community. While an undergraduate student, I joined an international conference on Human Rights and Business to discuss the harm of mining companies in Brazil and the recurrent violation of fundamental rights in the communities surrounding those operations in my home country. At the time, we analyzed the judicial attempt of a large mining company of avoiding bankruptcy. We evaluated the primary focus on financial metrics within the recovery plan, which marginalized the interests of many families directly impacted by the business activities. The financial safeguard of businesses over people has always been an unsettling idea for me. Money primacy is not quite over, but we have potent alternatives of subverting the logic behind profit at all costs. Here, I have compiled possible paths for cooperative growth and how they can meaningfully impact our prospects by nurturing new wealth parameters. I uphold that growth and business scalability have a unique denotation based on the pursuit of economic democracy beyond sheer financial metrics. We will indelibly frustrate the safeguard of our democracy if we perpetuate the great divide between the economy and our socio-political choices. Any attempt at building sustainable and perennial democracy in the economic sphere relies on a shift towards non-monetary values. A wise entrepreneur once told me that money is like the air we breathe or the food we eat, what allows the economy to be alive and fuels its operations. Nobody, however, lives to breathe or to eat. The purpose of life and our economic ventures must trespass the pursuit of money and fulfil a larger mission. Capital is a tool, not a self-centered goal

Taxation, credit constraints and the informal economy

AbstractThis paper extends Evans and Jovanovic (1989)'s entrepreneurship model to incorporate the informal sector. Specifically, entrepreneurs can operate either in the formal sector – in which they have limited access to credit markets and must pay taxes – or in the informal sector – in which they can avoid paying taxes, but have no access to credit markets. In addition, technology in the informal sector is both less productive and more labor intensive than that in the formal sector. We calibrate the model to the Brazilian economy, and evaluate the impact of credit frictions and taxation on occupational choices, aggregate output and inequality. Removing all distortions can improve aggregate efficiency considerably, largely because this induces entrepreneurs to switch to the formal sector, where the technology is superior. Most of this effect comes from removing credit market frictions, but taxes on formal businesses are also important. The elimination of distortions can also reduce income inequality substantially

Hepatitis A: How We Are after the Introduction of Vaccines

Hepatitis A is a disease known for a long time. It has a universal distribution, although it has a higher prevalence in places with poor sanitary conditions due to its main form of transmission: fecal-oral. The local health conditions also influence the age of acquisition of the disease and, therefore, its clinical presentation, because the disease in young children is usually asymptomatic. It is a viral disease whose prevention is possible through improvements in the population’s basic sanitation conditions and vaccination. Since the introduction of vaccines, it has been possible to see a reduction in its incidence, especially in places where universal vaccination of children has been instituted. In recent years immunoglobulin therapy is being replaced by vaccination in pre- and postexposure prophylaxis (PEP), except in specific situations. Its incidence, even in developing countries, has decreased after introduction of hepatitis A vaccine. The vaccine is recommended in two doses for children, starting at the age of 1. Argentina and, more recently, Brazil have adopted the universal vaccination of all children upon completion of 12 months of age in a single-dose regimen. Despite this breakthrough isolated outbreaks in homeless and drug users are still described in developed countries

L-C2ST: Local Diagnostics for Posterior Approximations in Simulation-Based Inference

Many recent works in simulation-based inference (SBI) rely on deep generative models to approximate complex, high-dimensional posterior distributions. However, evaluating whether or not these approximations can be trusted remains a challenge. Most approaches evaluate the posterior estimator only in expectation over the observation space. This limits their interpretability and is not sufficient to identify for which observations the approximation can be trusted or should be improved. Building upon the well-known classifier two-sample test (C2ST), we introduce L-C2ST, a new method that allows for a local evaluation of the posterior estimator at any given observation. It offers theoretically grounded and easy to interpret - e.g. graphical - diagnostics, and unlike C2ST, does not require access to samples from the true posterior. In the case of normalizing flow-based posterior estimators, L-C2ST can be specialized to offer better statistical power, while being computationally more efficient. On standard SBI benchmarks, L-C2ST provides comparable results to C2ST and outperforms alternative local approaches such as coverage tests based on highest predictive density (HPD). We further highlight the importance of local evaluation and the benefit of interpretability of L-C2ST on a challenging application from computational neuroscience.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 7 appendices, in proceeding

Validation Diagnostics for SBI algorithms based on Normalizing Flows

Building on the recent trend of new deep generative models known as Normalizing Flows (NF), simulation-based inference (SBI) algorithms can now efficiently accommodate arbitrary complex and high-dimensional data distributions. The development of appropriate validation methods however has fallen behind. Indeed, most of the existing metrics either require access to the true posterior distribution, or fail to provide theoretical guarantees on the consistency of the inferred approximation beyond the one-dimensional setting. This work proposes easy to interpret validation diagnostics for multi-dimensional conditional (posterior) density estimators based on NF. It also offers theoretical guarantees based on results of local consistency. The proposed workflow can be used to check, analyse and guarantee consistent behavior of the estimator. The method is illustrated with a challenging example that involves tightly coupled parameters in the context of computational neuroscience. This work should help the design of better specified models or drive the development of novel SBI-algorithms, hence allowing to build up trust on their ability to address important questions in experimental science.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 1 appendix, published at "Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences" workshop (NeurIPS 2022): https://ml4physicalsciences.github.io/2022

A palavra vermelha: diálogo entre Mariana Paiva e Hilda Hilst

Vermelho-vida, de Mariana Paiva (2018), se constrói em diálogo com a obra de Hilda Hilst. Escrito a partir da residência de Paiva na Casa do Sol ­– onde Hilst viveu e escreveu –, o livro é um misto de diário da vivência, leituras de Hilst e criação própria. Há uma interlocução particularmente estreita com Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão (1974), livro em que Hilst emula de maneira cifrada uma paixão clandestina que vivera. Uma epígrafe dessa obra é de Sylvia Plath, poeta associada à poesia confessional. Nessa leitura – baseada nos comentários de Janet Malcolm, W. D. Snodgrass e Diane Middlebrook –, o confessional se baseia menos na inclusão de dados biográficos no poema e mais num jogo que perturba limites entre público e privado. Hilst, embora se diferencie dos confessionais, adota estratégias semelhantes para codificar o biográfico. Em Vermelho-vida, por sua vez, Paiva nos apresenta seu encontro com Hilst, enquanto reflete criticamente sobre a dedução da intimidade. Assim, nossa leitura se debruça sobre esse duplo retrato, simultaneamente pessoal e político, social e íntimo: acompanhamos a jornada de Paiva e Hilst, duas mulheres escritoras, em sua reflexão crítica a respeito do vínculo entre poesia e vida nesse modo lírico moderno.Vermelho-vida, a book by Mariana Paiva (2018) is founded on a dialogue with the work of Hilda Hilst. It begins with Paiva’s experience at Casa do Sol: Paiva’s book is a mix of diary, readings of Hilst and her own poetic creations. There is a straight interlocution with Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão (1974), the work in which Hilst emulates an adulterous and forbidden passion. One of Hilst’s epigraphs is by Sylvia Plath, often associated with confessional poetry. In our reading — based on Janet Malcolm’s and Diane Middlebrook’s comments —, the confessional mode is not so much based on the exposure of biographical information as it is on the blurring of the public and private spheres. Hilst, though different from the American confessionists, adopted similar strategies to encode the biographical as she provokes common sense from a personal sphere. In Vermelho-vida, Paiva presents her contact with Hilst. She reflects upon the deduction of intimacy and introduces herself as a writer. Thus, our reading focuses on this double portrait, both personal and political, social and intimate: we follow Paiva and Hilst, two women writers, in their insights on the link between poetry and life within this modern lyrical mode

Análise dos principais meios de comunicação adotados pelas micro e pequenas empresas na cidade de Nova Veneza – SC

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso, apresentado para obtenção do grau de Bacharel no curso de Administração de Empresas da Universidade do Extremo Sul Catarinense, UNESC.As micro e pequenas empresas já são 9 milhões no Brasil, representam 27% do Produto Interno Bruto do país, sendo a participação das mesmas muitos significativa na economia brasileira. A comunicação é muito importante no âmbito empresarial, pois com consumidores e com tantos concorrentes, os meios de divulgação se tornaram mais indispensáveis. Por esta razão, as organizações buscar vários meios de divulgação, utilizando de inteligência e criatividade, para se destacar no mercado de atuação. Diante disto, este estudo tem como objetivo analisar quais os meios de comunicação adotados pelas micro e pequenas empresas, situadas na cidade de Nova Veneza, Santa Catarina. A metodologia utilizada para o início da pesquisa, foi bibliográfica, por meio de livros, teses, artigos. Quanto aos fins, é uma pesquisa exploratória-descritiva visto que o assunto em questão não possui informações sistematizadas. Foram pesquisas 111 empresas, dentre as 662 empresas que estão localizadas em Nova Veneza – SC, por meio de questionário realizados com o responsável de marketing, quando a empresa possuía ou o próprio proprietário. A análise dos dados foi qualitativas. Verificou-se que as micro e pequenas empresas entrevistadas de Nova Veneza, utilizam muito do boca-a-boca como forma de divulgação, pelo fato de ser uma cidade pequena, na qual as pessoas ainda prezam pela confiança da indicação de outra pessoa conhecida. Verificou-se também que as empresas estão começando a utilizar meios de divulgação digital, como Facebook, por acharem que desta forma conquistam mais clientes e por ser um meio de divulgação barato. Em contraponto, alguns setores não empregam deste meio, pois o seu público-alvo ainda não adota a internet como recurso para busca de informações sobre produtos e serviços. Outro aspecto percebido foi o de que ainda não há muito investimento por parte das empresas em comunicação, embora elas reconheçam a importância destas estratégias para atingir os seus consumidores