Making the Risk of Job Loss a Way of Life: Does it Affect Job Satisfaction?

This study investigates the relationship between job satisfaction and job security in European countries. In doing so, it attempts to take into account the endogenous nature of the job security – job satisfaction relationship after controlling for the various economic and personal characteristics. The results show that, workers in jobs with low likelihood of job termination derive higher utility from work compared to the workers in insecure jobs. This holds even after controlling for endogeneity by using both a conventional IV approach and a selection model. This appears to be the case for both men and women.European Commissio

Jobs as Lancaster Goods: Facets of Job Satisfaction and Overall Job Satisfaction

Overall job satisfaction is likely to reflect the combination of partial satisfactions related to various features of one’s job, such as pay, security, the work itself, working conditions, working hours, and the like. The level of overall job satisfaction emerges as the weighted outcome of the individual’s job satisfaction with each of these facets. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent and importance of partial satisfactions in affecting and explaining overall job satisfaction. Using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) a two layer model is estimated which proposes that job satisfaction with different facets of jobs are interrelated and the individual’s reported overall job satisfaction depends on the weight that the individual allocates to each of these facets. For each of the ten countries examined, satisfaction with the intrinsic aspects of the job is the main criterion which workers use to evaluate their job and this is true for both the short and the long term.European Commissio

Delivering elder-care environments utilizing TV-channel based mechanisms

In this paper, we present a smart environment for elderly. What makes the development of such system challenging is that the concept of smartness for elderly brings to the extreme the idea of invisibility of the technology. In our experience, elders are well-disposed to new technologies, provided that those will not require significant changes - namely, they are invisible - to their habits. Starting from this consideration, 200 caregivers responses were collected by questionnaire, so as to better understand elders' needs and habits. A system was subsequently developed allowing elders to access a number of "modern web services" as standard TV channels: at channel 43 there is the health status, at channel 45 the photos of the family, at 46 the agenda of the week, just to mention few of the available services. The content of such services is automatically generated by the smart devices in the environment and is managed by the caregivers (e.g., family members) by simple web apps. Fourteen families were asked to install the system in their house. The results of these experiments confirm that the proposed system is considered effective and user-friendly by elders

Climate finance for agricultural adaptation

Climate finance has largely focused on non-agricultural sectors, while finance for adaptation remains to be largely unexplored. This paper takes stock of existing funds for agricultural adaptation and compares different elements across these

Agriculture's prominence in the INDCs

Analysis of agriculture in countries’ climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies finds: Most Parties to the UNFCCC include agriculture in their mitigation targets (80%) and adaptation strategies (64%); Non-annex 1 Parties note the need for international financial support to implement their INDCs and raise the ambition of their contributions; For countries to meet their targets, climate finance will need to address agriculture

How countries plan to address agricultural adaptation and mitigation

Agriculture is well represented in Parties’ adaptation and mitigation strategies as communicated in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). There is much attention to conventional agricultural practices that can be climate-smart (e.g. livestock and crop management), but less to the enabling services that can facilitate uptake (e.g. climate information services, insurance, and credit). Considerable finance is needed for agricultural adaptation and mitigation by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) – in the order of USD 3 billion annually for adaptation and 2 billion annually for mitigation. Parties need better information in order to refine their finance needs. Non-Annex 1 Parties raise issues of climate justice, social inequality and food security in their INDCs

Towards Semantic Detection of Smells in Cloud Infrastructure Code

Automated deployment and management of Cloud applications relies on descriptions of their deployment topologies, often referred to as Infrastructure Code. As the complexity of applications and their deployment models increases, developers inadvertently introduce software smells to such code specifications, for instance, violations of good coding practices, modular structure, and more. This paper presents a knowledge-driven approach enabling developers to identify the aforementioned smells in deployment descriptions. We detect smells with SPARQL-based rules over pattern-based OWL 2 knowledge graphs capturing deployment models. We show the feasibility of our approach with a prototype and three case studies.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures. The 10 th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS 2020

GeoTriples: Transforming geospatial data into RDF graphs using R2RML and RML mappings

A lot of geospatial data has become available at no charge in many countries recently. Geospatial data that is currently made available by government agencies usually do not follow the linked data paradigm. In the few cases where government agencies do follow the linked data paradigm (e.g., Ordnance Survey in the United Kingdom), specialized scripts have been used for transforming geospatial data into RDF. In this paper we present the open source tool GeoTriples which generates and processes extended R2RML and RML mappings that transform geospatial data from many input formats into RDF. GeoTriples allows the transformation of geospatial data stored in raw files (shapefiles, CSV, KML, XML, GML and GeoJSON) and spatially-enabled RDBMS (PostGIS and MonetDB) into RDF graphs using well-known vocabularies like GeoSPARQL and stSPARQL, but without being tightly coupled to a specific vocabulary. GeoTriples has been developed in European projects LEO and Melodies and has been used to transform many geospatial data sources into linked data. We study the performance of GeoTriples experimentally using large publicly available geospatial datasets, and show that GeoTriples is very efficient and scalable especially when its mapping processor is implemented using Apache Hadoop

Transformation in governance towards resilient food systems

The dynamics of systemic societal transformations are not well understood, and the extent to which such transformations can be governed is contested. This research paper is the result of a joint effort among a small group of researchers to identify pathways for transformation towards sustainable food systems, which are resilient towards shocks and towards climate change in particular. Using empirical studies, both transformations in governance systems and governance of transformations were investigated. These cases served as a preliminary analysis to identify some of the trends and patterns that warrant further investigation. Not surprisingly, transformational change in food systems is often triggered by a shock to the system, or by increasing pressure to that system. But that alone is not enough to bring about a transformation. A number of preconditions and conditions need to be present including sufficient ‘wealth’ or economic and social capital in the system with resources that can be mobilized, and sufficient flexibility in the institutional context to allow innovation to emerge and gain strength. A particular area of interest that appears to stimulate transformations is collective action, which often involves collaboration across geographical scales and interest groups. The outcomes of transformations are complex and typically multifaceted, and can take years to emerge. However, broadly speaking, the cases explored demonstrate that governance is central to food system transformation both in terms of pre-conditions and provoking processes as well as in the outcomes of the transformation itself. Food system transformations in general appear to entail fundamental shifts in social relations and institutions – in other words, the governance of the food system

HGCA2.0: An RNA-Seq Based Webtool for Gene Coexpression Analysis in Homo sapiens

Genes with similar expression patterns in a set of diverse samples may be considered coexpressed. Human Gene Coexpression Analysis 2.0 (HGCA2.0) is a webtool which studies the global coexpression landscape of human genes. The website is based on the hierarchical clustering of 55,431 Homo sapiens genes based on a large-scale coexpression analysis of 3500 GTEx bulk RNA-Seq samples of healthy individuals, which were selected as the best representative samples of each tissue type. HGCA2.0 presents subclades of coexpressed genes to a gene of interest, and performs various built-in gene term enrichment analyses on the coexpressed genes, including gene ontologies, biological pathways, protein families, and diseases, while also being unique in revealing enriched transcription factors driving coexpression. HGCA2.0 has been successful in identifying not only genes with ubiquitous expression patterns, but also tissue-specific genes. Benchmarking showed that HGCA2.0 belongs to the top performing coexpression webtools, as shown by STRING analysis. HGCA2.0 creates working hypotheses for the discovery of gene partners or common biological processes that can be experimentally validated. It offers a simple and intuitive website design and user interface, as well as an API endpoint