Parties between thresholds: state subsidies and party behaviour in post-communist democracies

Much has been written about what makes political parties form, persist, change and die. One factor often brought into this discussion is the availability of resources in general and of state financing of political parties in particular. However, an empirical link at the aggregate level is difficult to establish because of various issues of conceptualization, operationalization and measurement. Working at the party level and taking into consideration that state funding provides important resources that make running in elections and achieving a party’s electoral target more likely; this article provides empirical support to the claim that parties who (anticipate to be or) are being funded by the state have a higher chance of forming and surviving in an independent format in the party system. Based on a comparison of 14 post-communist party systems, the main conclusion of the article is that the survival rate for such parties exceeds the survival rate for the non-publicly funded ones in almost all cases. A second, novel and more particular, finding is that parties who find themselves outside parliament, but above the payout threshold, display higher survival rates than parties who are below it

Political party finance regulation in 13 African countries

This report reviews and analyses party financing regulation in 13 African countries, drawing on an in depth scrutiny of party legislation and personal interviews1 with representatives of nine different political parties2 in more than half of those countries (i.e. Angola, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda). It examines the complex dynamics between money and party politics, looking in particular at (1) how public funds are allocated, (2) how campaigns are financed, (3) the different options (and obstacles) parties face when trying to finance their ordinary activities, (4) the type and scope of financial disclosure and oversight, and (5) the extent to which financial violations are sanctioned. Overall, and despite variation in national contexts and national regulations, we find that (1) in most countries party financing regulations are shine by their absence, and (2) party competition is largely unequal. In this context, it is possible to conclude that while incumbents not only receive often the lion’s share of public and private funding, but also have unsupervised access to state resources; opposition parties face the highest hurdles to be able to perform key functions such as mobilization of voter support and electoral campaigning.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Inteligencia artificial en juegos : desarrollando un game partner utilizando generación de lenguaje natural

Tesis (Lic. en Cs. de la Computación)--Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física, 2013.Actualmente la mayoría de los tutoriales en los videojuegos están hechos para que el jugador siga un script fijo. Por lo tanto, que un tutorial sea bueno o malo es todavía un arte que depende de cuán bueno sea el script para hacernos creer que como jugadores tenemos libertad (por ejemplo, prediciendo posibles reacciones del jugador) con el fin de hacer el juego más entretenido. Para la industria de videojuegos, los tutoriales son caros de desarrollar porque los programadores deben predecir todas las posibles reacciones del jugador. La generación de lenguaje natural puede proveer a los game designers de técnicas que, en el futuro, podrían transformar el arte del diseño de tutoriales en una ciencia que ofrezca diferentes puntos de vista y algoritmos eficientes para el cálculo del conocimiento del jugador y así poder lidiar con sus reacciones de forma dinámica.Currently, in most video games tutorials, the player follows a fixed script. Thus, to decide if a tutorial is good or not is an art that depends on the script quality to make believe the player that he has freedom (for example, predicting possible player's reactions) with the goal to make the game more entertaining. For the video games industry, the tutorials are expensive to implement because the developer must predict all the possible player's reactions. The natural language generation can provide the game designers with techniques that, in the future, can transform the art of tutorial design in a science that offers a different point of view and efficient algorithms to get the player's knowledge and to be able to deal with his reactions in a dynamic way.publishedVersionFil: Bertoa, Nicolás. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina

Impact of ethanol containing gasoline blends on emissions from a flex-fuel vehicle tested over the Worldwide Harmonized Light duty Test Cycle (WLTC)

AbstractRegulated and unregulated emissions from a Euro 5a flex-fuel vehicle tested with nine different hydrous and anhydrous ethanol containing fuel blends at 23 and −7°C over the World harmonized Light-duty vehicle Test Cycle and the New European Driving Cycle, were investigated at the Vehicle Emission Laboratory at the European Commission Joint Research Centre Ispra, Italy. The experimental results showed no differences on the regulated and unregulated emissions when hydrous ethanol blends were used instead of anhydrous ethanol blends. The use of E85 and E75 blends (gasoline containing 85% and 75% of ethanol, respectively) resulted in a reduction of NOx emissions (30–55%) but increased the emissions of carbon monoxide, methane, carbonyls and ethanol compared to E5, E10 and E15 blends (gasoline containing 5%, 10% and 15% of ethanol, respectively). The increase of the acetaldehyde and ethanol emissions (up to 120% and 350% at 23°C and up to 400% and 390% at −7°C, for acetaldehyde and ethanol, respectively) caused a severe increment of the ozone formation potential. Most of the studied pollutants presented similar emission factors during the tests performed with E10 and E15 blends. The emission factors of most unregulated compounds were lower over the NEDC (with ammonia as an exception) than over the WLTC. However, when taking into consideration only the cold start emissions, emission factors over the WLTC were observed to be higher, or similar, to those obtained over the NEDC. Low ambient temperature caused an increase of the emissions of all studied compounds with all tested blends

Incorporating Measurement Uncertainty into OCL/UML Primitive Datatypes

Preprint publicado en la revista Software & System Modeling :Bertoa, M.F., Burgueño, L., Moreno, N., Vallecillo, A. "Incorporating measurement uncertainty into OCL/UML primitive datatypes." Softw Syst Model (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-019-00741-0)The correct representation of the relevant properties of a system is an essential requirement for the effective use and wide adoption of model-based practices in industry. Uncertainty is one of the inherent properties of any measurement or estimation that is obtained in any physical setting; as such, it must be considered when modeling software systems that deal with real data. Although a few modeling languages enable the representation of measurement uncertainty, these aspects are not normally incorporated into their type systems. Therefore, operating with uncertain values and propagating their uncertainty become cumbersome processes, which hinder their realization in real environments. This paper proposes an extension of OCL/UML primitive datatypes that enables the representation of the uncertainty that comes from physical measurements or user estimates into the models, together with an algebra of operations that are defined for the values of these types.TIN2014-52034-R, TIN2016-75944-R and PGC2018-094905-B-I

Uncertainty representation in software models: a survey

This paper provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of research work on how uncertainty is currently represented in software models. The survey presents the definitions and current research status of different proposals for addressing uncertainty modeling and introduces a classification framework that allows to compare and classify existing proposals, analyze their current status and identify new trends. In addition, we discuss possible future research directions, opportunities and challenges.This work is partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER) and the Spanish Government under projects APOLO (US1264651), HORATIO (RTI2018-101204-B-C21), EKIPMENT-PLUS (P18-FR-2895) and COSCA (PGC2018-094905-B-I00)

Paying for appeasement: On the moderating role of public subsidies in East Central European party politics

Focusing on the relationship between the access of political parties to direct public funding and electoral support for anti-political-establishment (e.g. populist, extremist) parties (APEp), this article tries to fill an important gap in the literature. Whereas previous contributions, mostly focused on the United States or established democracies in Western Europe, have presented contradictory findings, our study of 19 new democracies in East Central Europe clearly shows that the absence of state subsidies for political parties boosts support for those with an anti-political-establishment character. More importantly, and taking into account the minimum legal payout threshold that grants parties access to public subsidies, our results show that the more restrictive the regulations and the greater the difficulties faced by parties in obtaining state help, the higher the support for APEp. Our findings have obvious implications for the development of post-Communist party systems and the future of legislative (party funding) reform in the region

The volatility of volatility: measuring change in party vote shares

Volatility is a widely used term in political science, but even the most widely used measure of volatility, Pedersen's index, can mask as much as it reveals. His simple and elegant calculation has become part of the political science toolbox, but scholars employing this tool have tended to produce distinctly different results thanks to a series of decisions about measurement and classification. Using examples from Central Europe the critical role of decisions related to party continuity and threshold of inclusion are identified. The article not only unpacks the underlying questions addressed by different uses of Peder- sen's index, but offers standards for choosing particular methods over others and outlines steps that should be followed in creating a more accurate measure of volatility

Uncertainty explicit assessment of off-the-shelf software: A Bayesian approach

Assessment of software COTS components is an essential part of component-based software development. Poorly chosen components may lead to solutions of low quality and that are difficult to maintain. The assessment may be based on incomplete knowledge about the COTS component itself and other aspects (e.g. vendor’s credentials, etc.), which may affect the decision of selecting COTS component(s). We argue in favor of assessment methods in which uncertainty is explicitly represented (‘uncertainty explicit’ methods) using probability distributions. We provide details of a Bayesian model, which can be used to capture the uncertainties in the simultaneous assessment of two attributes, thus, also capturing the dependencies that might exist between them. We also provide empirical data from the use of this method for the assessment of off-the-shelf database servers which illustrate the advantages of ‘uncertainty explicit’ methods over conventional methods of COTS component assessment which assume that at the end of the assessment the values of the attributes become known with certainty

Podophyllotoxin and Antitumor Synthetic Aryltetralines. Toward a Biomimetic Preparation

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