TOWARDS NEW PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT SERVICE? FINDING THE OPTIMAL DESIGN OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE CONTRACTING ARRANGEMENTS. EVIDENCE FROM TWO REGIONAL CASES

The latest labour market reforms in Italy have brought the issue of strengthening public employment services (PES) and active labour market policies (ALMPs). With the decree 150/2015, a new policy tool has been introduced for activation purposes: the \u201creintegration voucher\u201d (assegno di ricollocazione - AdR). It is interesting to consider the nature of this tool, as implementation of a quasi-market model in Italian PES. Labour market policies in Italy have already undergone deep reform process between the second half of the Nineties and the early Two-Thousands. During this phase, there was a combination between marketization and decentralization reforms. Italian regions received policy competence for ALMPs and the responsibility for outsourcing employment services to private providers. These started to follow different logics of contracting-out, thus creating the conditions for a high level of territorial differentiation. Contracting-out of services, however, requires governance mechanisms that can mitigate the risks of opportunistic behaviour of private operators, who can tend to place only less disadvantaged people on the labour market (creaming) or avoid higher efforts to go faster toward remuneration (parking). These effects lead to sub-optimal results in terms of the equitability of the performance. In these terms, an \u201coptimal design\u201d could be approximated as the one able to take into account both economic (efficiency and effectiveness of the performance) and social goals (equity of the performance, avoiding opportunistic behaviour of private providers involved). This analysis is realized by means of a comparison between two regions considered as the two most dissimilar cases in the context of PES Italian regional differentiation: Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. These two cases can be placed at the extremes of a hypothetical continuum defined on the basis of the degree of market exposure of PES regional models. Lombardy in particular has caught the attention showing a quasi-market model very similar to that of the AdR, giving the possibility to test the mechanisms of the new national scheme, not yet fully implemented, using a local experience already well established. In this way it will be possible to know what the consequences of a greater market exposure of Italian regional PES could be, considering both the impact in terms of effectiveness and equitability of the outcomes. The two cases are comparable not only in terms of capacity building and level of economic development, but especially regarding their political and institutional contexts, being characterized by a symmetrical and divergent trajectory of formation of their models. This has been the result of a layering process favoured in both the cases by a similar strength of different actors\u2019 coalitions. The research then will go for an in-depth analysis of market-based governance in regional contexts, relying on the methodology of policy evaluation, much used for studies in this field

Visualizing Processes on the Web

In this paper, we describe 3WPS, a framework to build distributed systems that are able to monitor and interact with a process through a 3D interface that is accessible via the World Wide Web (WWW). The 3WPS is easily configurable, easily adaptable to different processes with high reuse of ts software components and its distributed architecture leverages on off-the-shelf components of the WWW infrastructure such as Java applets and Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) browsers. We describe the characteristics of 3WPS framework by mainly focusing on the issue of programmability and by contextually providing an example tour of its usage

On the Effect of Channel Knowledge in Underwater Acoustic Communications: Estimation, Prediction and Protocol

Underwater acoustic communications are limited by the following channel impairments: time variability, narrow bandwidth, multipath, frequency selective fading and the Doppler effect. Orthogonal Frequency Division Modulation (OFDM) is recognized as an effective solution to such impairments, especially when optimally designed according to the propagation conditions. On the other hand, OFDM implementation requires accurate channel knowledge atboth transmitter and receiver sides. Long propagation delay may lead to outdated channel information. In this work, we present an adaptive OFDM scheme where channel state information is predicted through a Kalman-like filter so as to optimize communication parameters, including the cyclic prefix length. This mechanism aims to mitigate the variability of channel delay spread. This is cast in a protocol where channel estimation/prediction are jointly considered, so as to allow efficiency. The performance obtained through extensive simulations using real channels and interference show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, both in terms of rate and reliability, at the expense of an increasing complexity. However, this solution is significantly preferable to the conventional mechanism, where channel estimation is performed only at the receiver, with channel coefficients sent back to the transmit node by means of frequent overhead signaling

Personalizable edge services for Web accessibility

Web Content Accessibility guidelines by W3C (W3C Recommendation, May 1999. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/) provide several suggestions for Web designers regarding how to author Web pages in order to make them accessible to everyone. In this context, this paper proposes the use of edge services as an efficient and general solution to promote accessibility and breaking down the digital barriers that inhibit users with disabilities to actively participate to any aspect of society. The idea behind edge services mainly affect the advantages of a personalized navigation in which contents are tailored according to different issues, such as client’s devices capabilities, communication systems and network conditions and, finally, preferences and/or abilities of the growing number of users that access the Web. To meet these requirements, Web designers have to efficiently provide content adaptation and personalization functionalities mechanisms in order to guarantee universal access to the Internet content. The so far dominant paradigm of communication on theWWW, due to its simple request/responsemodel, cannot efficiently address such requirements. Therefore, it must be augmented with new components that attempt to enhance the scalability, the performances and the ubiquity of the Web. Edge servers, acting on the HTTP data flow exchanged between client and server, allow on-the-fly content adaptation as well as other complex functionalities beyond the traditional caching and content replication services. These value-added services are called edge services and include personalization and customization, aggregation from multiple sources, geographical personalization of the navigation of pages (with insertion/emphasis of content that can be related to the user’s geographical location), translation services, group navigation and awareness for social navigation, advanced services for bandwidth optimization such as adaptive compression and format transcoding, mobility, and ubiquitous access to Internet content. This paper presents Personalizable Accessible Navigation (PAN) that is a set of edge services designed to improveWeb pages accessibility, developed and deployed on top of a programmable intermediary framework. The characteristics and the location of the services, i.e., provided by intermediaries, as well as the personalization and the opportunities to select multiple profiles make PAN a platform that is especially suitable for accessing the Web seamlessly also from mobile terminals

Blind fractionally spaced channel equalization for shallow water PPM digital communications links

Underwater acoustic digital communications suffer from inter-symbol interference deriving from signal distortions caused by the channel propagation. Facing such kind of impairment becomes particularly challenging when dealing with shallow water scenarios characterized by short channel coherence time and large delay spread caused by time-varying multipath effects. Channel equalization operated on the received signal represents a crucial issue in order to mitigate the effect of inter-symbol interference and improve the link reliability. In this direction, this contribution presents a preliminary performance analysis of acoustic digital links adopting pulse position modulation in severe multipath scenarios. First, we show how the spectral redundancy offered by pulse position modulated signals can be fruitfully exploited when using fractional sampling at the receiver side, which is an interesting approach rarely addressed by the current literature. In this context, a novel blind equalization scheme is devised. Specifically, the equalizer is blindly designed according to a suitably modified Bussgang scheme in which the zero-memory nonlinearity is replaced by a M-memory nonlinearity, M being the pulse position modulation order. Numerical results not only confirm the feasibility of the technique described here, but also assess the quality of its performance. An extension to a very interesting complex case is also provided

WNT4 deficiency—a clinical phenotype distinct from the classic Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome: A Case Report

The pathways leading to female sexual determination in mammals are incompletely defined. Loss-of-function mutations in the WNT4 gene appear to cause developmental abnormalities of sexual differentiation in women and mice. We recruited six patients with different degrees of Müllerian abnormalities, with or without renal aberrations and a normal female 46,XX karyotype. A clear androgen excess was found only in one patient. This 19-year-old woman was affected by primary amenorrhoea, absence of Müllerian ducts derivatives, clinical (acne and hirsutism) and biochemical (repeatedly high levels of testosterone) signs of androgen excess. Direct sequencing of her WNT4 gene followed by functional studies in human ovarian cells (OVCAR3) was performed. This patient carried the novel R83C loss-of-function dominant negative mutation in her WNT4, confirming the role of WNT4 in the development and maintenance of the female phenotype in women. Our study can also help refine the phenotype of WNT4 deficiency in humans. In fact, it appears that at least in this limited casuistic small group of patients, the absence of a uterus (and not other Müllerian abnormalities) and the androgen excess are the pathognomonic signs of WNT4 defects, suggesting that this might be a clinical entity distinct from the classic Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrom