Democratic innovation: the case of Milan’s Area C

Can an innovation in public sector be also respectful of the will of the citizens? While public managers are asked by NPM-led reforms to become more entrepreneurial and risk-takers, several scholars are concerned with the discretionary power awarded to managers being detrimental to democracy.This paper investigates the case of Area C in the city of Milan, an innovation in transport policy, through both a document analysis and interviews conducted with top managers involved in the innovation design and implementation and politicians adopting the «Harvard Kennedy School’s Innovations in Government Award Programs Semi-finalists’ Questionnaire» as a frame of reference.Results show that innovation is achieving relevant results in reducing both pollution and traffic congestion while increasing the average speed of public transport. Such achievements have been reached through a long process of consensus building, started including such policies in the electoral program, and persuading citizens about the necessity and usefulness of the initiative. Difficulties regard the necessity of a continuous involvement of citizens and the oppositions of some economic associations worried that Area C could damage their own businesses

PFIs Involving Multiple Public Partners:A Case Study from the Italian Health Care Sector

The financial crisis experienced by many countries since 2008 has given new importance to private finance initiatives (PFIs) for providing public services. This paper analyses the relationships between multiple public and private sector actors participating in a PFI in the healthcare sector in order to better understand the motives and behaviour of public and private sector partners. High levels of trust and the active participation of a regulatory body were found to be significant factors in terms of creating a partnership that benefits all sides

Where is Public Sector Auditing: A Comparative Analysis

This chapter summarises the analysis of the preceding chapters. Whilst different countries use different models for their audit, some continuities do emerge. The audit explosion has led to the advance of both financial and performance audit. Inspection however remains an infrequent feature of the audit landscape. Many countries have a localised system of local audit in which the role and influence of audit is variable. Furthermore, the audit of local government lacks a clear democratic role at the moment

ON THE VALIDITY OF TEREBRATULA SINUOSA (BROCCHI)

Here we aim to fix some nomenclatural problems relating to the definition of Terebratula sinuosa. In 1616 Fabio Colonna first described two different brachiopod specimens from Italy which were later attributed to the genus Terebratula. In 1758 Linnaeus erected Anomia terebratula in reference to the drawings of Colonna. He described the heavily sulciplicate specimen figured on the upper left (specimen number 4) but addressed the specimen as if it was the number 1 in the figure (upper right). Several authors later inadvertently followed the error of Linnaeus. The neotype for T. terebratula, indicated in 1998 by Lee & Brunton, refers to the specimen number 1 in Colonna’s figure (the one to the upper right). The two specimens in Colonna were originally considered synonyms. However, the sulciplicate specimen number 4, originally figured by Colonna, refers to a distinctive Miocene Terebratula species, which has been often referred to as Terebratula sinuosa. We review evidence in favour of such a designation and provide stratigraphic and morphological evidence that T. sinuosa deserves the full rank of species. The name T. sinuosa should be maintained given the long tradition of the name in the literature, and the definition of T. terebratula should therefore be amended

One-particle density matrix and momentum distribution of the out-of-equilibrium 1D Tonks-Girardeau gas: Analytical results at large NN

In one-dimensional (1D) quantum gases, the momentum distribution (MD) of the atoms is a standard experimental observable, routinely measured in various experimental setups. The MD is sensitive to correlations, and it is notoriously hard to compute theoretically for large numbers of atoms $N$, which often prevents direct comparison with experimental data. Here we report significant progress on this problem for the 1D Tonks-Girardeau (TG) gas in the asymptotic limit of large $N$, at zero temperature and driven out of equilibrium by a quench of the confining potential. We find an exact analytical formula for the one-particle density matrix $\langle \hat{\Psi}^\dagger(x) \hat{\Psi}(x') \rangle$ of the out-of-equilibrium TG gas in the $N \rightarrow \infty$ limit, valid on distances $|x-x'|$ much larger than the interparticle distance. By comparing with time-dependent Bose-Fermi mapping numerics, we demonstrate that our analytical formula can be used to compute the out-of-equilibrium MD with great accuracy for a wide range of momenta (except in the tails of the distribution at very large momenta). For a quench from a double-well potential to a single harmonic well,which mimics a `quantum Newton cradle' setup, our method predicts the periodic formation of peculiar, multiply peaked, momentum distributions.Comment: 13pages, 6 figures. v2: minor changes; v3: fixed layout issues in appendice

Twisted and untwisted negativity spectrum of free fermions

A basic diagnostic of entanglement in mixed quantum states is known as the positive partial transpose (PT) criterion. Such criterion is based on the observation that the spectrum of the partially transposed density matrix of an entangled state contains negative eigenvalues, in turn, used to define an entanglement measure called the logarithmic negativity. Despite the great success of logarithmic negativity in characterizing bosonic many-body systems, generalizing the operation of PT to fermionic systems remained a technical challenge until recently when a more natural definition of PT for fermions that accounts for the Fermi statistics has been put forward. In this paper, we study the many-body spectrum of the reduced density matrix of two adjacent intervals for one-dimensional free fermions after applying the fermionic PT. We show that in general there is a freedom in the definition of such operation which leads to two different definitions of PT: the resulting density matrix is Hermitian in one case, while it becomes pseudo-Hermitian in the other case. Using the path-integral formalism, we analytically compute the leading order term of the moments in both cases and derive the distribution of the corresponding eigenvalues over the complex plane. We further verify our analytical findings by checking them against numerical lattice calculations

Negativity spectrum of one-dimensional conformal field theories

The partial transpose \u3c1T2A of the reduced density matrix \u3c1A is the key object to quantify the entanglement in mixed states, in particular through the presence of negative eigenvalues in its spectrum. Here we derive analytically the distribution of the eigenvalues of \u3c1T2A, that we dub negativity spectrum, in the ground sate of gapless one-dimensional systems described by a Conformal Field Theory (CFT), focusing on the case of two adjacent intervals. We show that the negativity spectrum is universal and depends only on the central charge of the CFT, similarly to the entanglement spectrum. The precise form of the negativity spectrum depends on whether the two intervals are in a pure or mixed state, and in both cases, a dependence on the sign of the eigenvalues is found. This dependence is weak for bulk eigenvalues, whereas it is strong at the spectrum edges. We also investigate the scaling of the smallest (negative) and largest (positive) eigenvalues of \u3c1T2A. We check our results against DMRG simulations for the critical Ising and Heisenberg chains, and against exact results for the harmonic chain, finding good agreement for the spectrum, but showing that the smallest eigenvalue is affected by very large scaling corrections

CSR Strategic Approach, Financial Resources and Corporate Social Performance:The Mediating Effect of Innovation

Given the current undefined relational effect between corporate financial performance (CFP) and corporate social performance (CSP) and the potentially myopic behavior of managers, this paper answers the call from some scholars to contribute towards a better understanding of the relationship between CFP and CSR. Different from other papers, it does so by analyzing the role of innovation activities as a mediator between CFP and CSR, applying a regression and mediation analysis between firms' financial resources, innovation initiatives, and social and environmental performance. The results demonstrate that innovation is a critical factor in the relationship between CFP and corporate social performance (CSP) as it enables organizations to respond to new economic, social and environmental challenges faster and better than organizations that are not able to innovate. Therefore, the investment of financial resources in innovation initiatives is one of the most important levers to pursue and to increase CSP

The role of agroforestry areas of the province of Bari in the absortion of carbon dioxide

Agroforestry areas have a significant and recognized productive, socio – economic, environmental and landscape role. An important ecological function performed by these areas is the net absorption of considerable quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The scientific knowledge of the CO2 assimilation capacity of agroforestry ecosystems in a territory, is a useful and innovative means to support territorial planning. In the interests of environmental sustainability, emissions from human activities carried out in a specific local context, must be adapted by the simultaneous capacity of CO2 sequestration. For the protection of environmental quality, the choice of land use should therefore optimize the circuit of interaction between emissions and absorption. This work takes into account the agroforestry areas of the Province of Bari to estimate the potential capacity to absorb CO2 and compare it, with the current emission levels