Marine and Coastal Information Systems for Europe and Africa

Marine Information Systems for Europe (EMIS, http://emis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) and Africa (AMIS, http://amis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) have been recently developed at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission to provide the Users with an appropriate set of bio-physical information, of importance to conduct water quality assessment, resource monitoring and climate change studies in the coastal and marine waters. These systems are simple and easy-to-use mapping tool applications, created for the publication and dissemination of African and European marine information via the web. Both systems rely mostly on Earth Observation data from optical and thermal sensors, processed according to standard (i.e., space agency-related) and in-house peer-reviewed algorithms, as well modeled data, to generate indicators for global diagnostic of the coastal state and analyses of changes in marine ecosystems. In addition, the systems supply the users with basic navigation and interrogation tools with a range of time-series and statistical analysis generated automatically in a format ready for publication / reporting, and enabling decision makers to make full and lasting use of this information.JRC.H.5-Land Resources Managemen

Sensitivity to meaningful regularities acquired through experience

AbstractEnglish spelling provides multiple cues to word meaning, and these cues are readily exploited by skilled readers. In two crowdsourcing studies, we tested skilled readers' sensitivity to a large number of morphological as well as nonmorphological orthographic cues by asking them to classify nonwords as adjectives or nouns. We observed a substantial variability across individuals and orthographic cues. In this paper, we discuss some sources of this variation. Specifically, we found consistent correlations between readers' sensitivity to cues and their performance on language tasks (reading, spelling, and author recognition tests) suggesting that reading experience is critical for assimilating spelling-to-meaning regularity from written language. Further, we identified characteristics that may be important for the learning and exploitation of orthographic cues that are related to the nature of their function and use in context

Інституціональна структура суспільства та економічна безпека держави

У статті розглядається взаємозв’язок між інституціональною структурою суспільства та економічною безпекою держави. Виділено інститути, які мають найбільший вплив на економічну безпеку держави.The article is concerned with institutional structure and economic state security and its correlation. It focus on institutes that it have potent influence on economic state security

The Children and Young People’s Books Lexicon (CYP-LEX):A large-scale lexical database of books read by children and young people in the United Kingdom

This article introduces CYP-LEX, a large-scale lexical database derived from books popular with children and young people in the United Kingdom. CYP-LEX includes 1,200 books evenly distributed across three age bands (7–9, 10–12, 13+) and comprises over 70 million tokens and over 105,000 types. For each word in each age band, we provide its raw and Zipf-transformed frequencies, all parts-of-speech in which it occurs with raw frequency and lemma for each occurrence, and measures of count-based contextual diversity. Together and individually, the three CYP-LEX age bands contain substantially more words than any other publicly available database of books for primary and secondary school children. Most of these words are very low in frequency, and a substantial proportion of the words in each age band do not occur on British television. Although the three age bands share some very frequent words, they differ substantially regarding words that occur less frequently, and this pattern also holds at the level of individual books. Initial analyses of CYP-LEX illustrate why independent reading constitutes a challenge for children and young people, and they also underscore the importance of reading widely for the development of reading expertise. Overall, CYP-LEX provides unprecedented information into the nature of vocabulary in books that British children aged 7+ read, and is a highly valuable resource for those studying reading and language development

Le societ\ue0 a partecipazione pubblica nel contesto italiano: classificazione, evoluzione normativa, natura giuridica e disciplina applicabile

La diffusione delle societ\ue0 pubbliche in Italia deriva da un'iniziale propensione imprenditoriale degli enti pubblici, dall'avvio, negli anni novanta, alle privatizzazioni formali, dall'intento di eludere la rigidit\ue0 dell\u2019azione amministrativa e dalla necessit\ue0 di esternalizzare quote importanti del bilancio pubblico. L'impiego di tale strumento ha portato a notevoli criticit\ue0 per: - la sottrazione di interi settori del mercato ai privati; - gestioni inefficienti e sperpero di risorse pubbliche; - l\u2019elusione dei vincoli pubblicistici, quali quelli di finanza pubblica e quelli relativi all'assunzione del personale e all\u2019acquisto di beni e servizi; - il conferimento d'incarichi secondo criteri clientelari; - l\u2019utilizzo della societ\ue0 come strumento politico di tipo assistenziale. Il legislatore ha tentato di limitare le criticit\ue0, introducendo vincoli all'operativit\ue0 delle societ\ue0 pubbliche, cercando di \u201cmoralizzare\u201d il fenomeno introducendo tetti ad alcune categorie di spese a spiccata matrice politica, impedendo che la forma privatistica favorisse l\u2019elusione di disposizioni proprie dei soggetti pubblici. I risultati concreti sono stati inconcludenti, frutto di un insieme confuso di disposizioni speciali. Col \u201cTesto Unico delle societ\ue0 a partecipazione pubblica\u201d (comunque non onnicomprensivo della materia), il Governo ha inteso razionalizzare il quadro normativo attraverso disposizioni omogenee, che partono dal principio che le societ\ue0 partecipate sono soggetti privati e che le norme speciali si giustificano solo se strettamente necessarie secondo il principio di proporzionalit\ue0. Vengono previsti strumenti di monitoraggio interno, che evidenzino per tempo eventuali segnali di inefficienza o di crisi della societ\ue0, di controlli amministrativi e giurisdizionali pi\uf9 veloci ed efficaci e, infine, di sanzioni. Tra gli aspetti pi\uf9 importanti del decreto vi \ue8 la chiara individuazione delle finalit\ue0 perseguibili con lo strumento societario e il rafforzamento degli obblighi motivazionali