It's never too late: Funding dynamics and self pledges in reward-based crowdfunding

Crowdfunding recently emerged as an alternative funding channel for entrepreneurs. We use pledge-level data from Startnext, the biggest German platform, to gain insights on funding dynamics and pledgers’ motivations. We find that the majority of projects that eventually succeed are not on a successful track at 75% of their funding period. These late successes are boosted by information cascades during the final 25% of the funding duration. We conclude – in contrast with earlier literature – that project success is only partially path-dependent. While early pledges do anticipate project success, a lack of them does not necessarily mean that projects will fail. Interviews and questionnaire responses indicate that projects’ communication efforts play a role in making severely under track projects succeed eventually. Moreover, our dataset uniquely allows us to quantify the extent of self funding. Self pledges account for about 10% of all initial pledges and 9% of all pledges that secure funding. Nonetheless, the late surges at severely under track projects are mostly driven by external funders. Furthermore, we find no evidence of subsequent herding triggered by self pledges.     

The contribution of urban-scale environmental monitoring to materials diagnostics: A study on the Cathedral of Modena (Italy)

The problem of environmental monitoring aimed at identifying and evaluating the weathering mechanisms affecting historical stoneworks is here discussed and a methodology based on the use of already available, long record, urban-scale environmental data is proposed. An example of its application to the Cathedral of Modena (Italy, XII-XIV century, included in the UNESCO's World Heritage List) is then presented. In this case, the methodology allowed the identification of the main degradation causes, which found significant confirmation by material diagnostics on the available samples and finite element structural modelling. Thanks to the decay causes identification allowed by the proposed methodology, more effective restoration procedures can be outlined.     

Self-citations as strategic response to the use of metrics for career decisions

There is limited knowledge on the extent to which scientists may strategically respond to metrics by adopting questionable practices, namely practices that challenge the scientific ethos, and the individual and contextual factors that affect their likelihood. This article aims to fill these gaps by studying the opportunistic use of self-citations, i.e. citations of one’s own work to boost metric scores. Based on sociological and economic literature exploring the factors driving scientists’ behaviour, we develop hypotheses on the predictors of strategic increase in self-citations. We test the hypotheses in the Italian Higher Education system, where promotion to professorial positions is regulated by a national habilitation procedure that considers the number of publications and citations received. The sample includes 886 scientists from four of science’s main disciplinary sectors, employs different metrics approaches, and covers an observation period beginning in 2002 and ending in 2014. We find that the introduction of a regulation that links the possibility of career advancement to the number of citations received is related to a strong and significant increase in self-citations among scientists who can benefit the most from increasing citations, namely assistant professors, associate professors and relatively less cited scientists, and in particular among social scientists. Our findings suggest that while metrics are introduced to spur virtuous behaviours, when not properly designed they favour the usage of questionable practices.     

Universities’ attractiveness to students: The Darwinism effect

Due to significant government cuts to Higher Education funding in Southern European systems, their already underfunded universities were forced to increasingly compete for students as sources of additional revenue. Concurrently, families and students that continued to afford participation in Higher Education became more selective when choosing a university, realising the riskier investment that Higher Education participation had become. Through a competing destinations model and relying on all Italian private and public universities, this study finds that the competition forces characterising universities’ attractiveness over the last decade have changed since the financial crisis of 2008. In a context of lower demand for Higher Education, the competition for students grew and universities in close proximity were better prepared to face the new challenges, leading to the growth of Higher Education clusters.     

Deductive teaching from computer science foundations

Various problems concerning the teaching of informatics arise from the foundations of computer science. Difficulties in terminology, in lesson definition, in the introduction to topics are examples of substantial and they are not psychological or expressive problems. The foundations are officially acknowledged as an open problem and they give rise to incomplete and mnemomic computer science learning. They do not allow the student to be aware of informatics themes. They subsequently inhibit programming, systems design, research and many other activities. This paper discusses the results of theoretical research on the foundations carried out at IBM. This facititates deductive teaching and improves students preparation on the basic contents and on all the other themes of computer science. The early lessons of a high-school course are outlined. © 1998 IFIP, published by Chapman & Hall Ltd     

Evaluating the Efficiency of Research in Academic Departments: an Empirical Analysis in an Italian Region

This paper investigates the efficiency of university departments in science, technology and medicine in an Italian Region (Lombardy). The aim of the paper is twofold: (i) to analyse the changes in productivity in recent years (from 2004 and 2007); and (ii) to detect factors that are potentially affecting efficiency. The research benefited from a new and unique dataset (called QuESTIO) developed by the Lombardy Regional Government. Using facilities and academic staff as inputs and research grants and publications as outputs, the research activity of academic departments was modelled. The methodological approach for computing efficiency scores is (DEA) Data Envelopment Analysis; Malmquist indexes have been used to measure changes in productivity, while Kruskal‐Wallis tests were employed to study the potential determinants of efficiency. Two main results were obtained. First, the academic departments improved their efficiency but, at the same time, the efficiency frontier worsened. Second, external and measurable factors (such as scientific sector, proportion of tenured staff, location, etc.) have a limited impact in explaining efficiency differentials. The policy implications of both results are discussed.     

A Graphical Method for Assessing the Identification of Linear Structural Equation Models

A graphical method is presented for assessing the state of identifiability of the parameters in a linear structural equation model based on the associated directed graph. We do not restrict attention to recursive models. In the recent literature, methods based on graphical models have been presented as a useful tool for assessing the state of identifiability of the parameters of the model. This article proposes the graphical counterpart of the rank condition of the matrix of structural coefficients, which allows for checking of the identifiability through a simple graphical rule. This approach can be used to develop algorithms.     

Irony detection via sentiment-based transfer learning

Irony as a literary technique is widely used in online texts such as Twitter posts. Accurate irony detection is crucial for tasks such as effective sentiment analysis. A text’s ironic intent is defined by its context incongruity. For example in the phrase “I love being ignored”, the irony is defined by the incongruity between the positive word “love” and the negative context of “being ignored”. Existing studies mostly formulate irony detection as a standard supervised learning text categorization task, relying on explicit expressions for detecting context incongruity. In this paper we formulate irony detection instead as a transfer learning task where supervised learning on irony labeled text is enriched with knowledge transferred from external sentiment analysis resources. Importantly, we focus on identifying the hidden, implicit incongruity without relying on explicit incongruity expressions, as in “I like to think of myself as a broken down Justin Bieber – my philosophy professor.” We propose three transfer learning-based approaches to using sentiment knowledge to improve the attention mechanism of recurrent neural models for capturing hidden patterns for incongruity. Our main findings are: (1) Using sentiment knowledge from external resources is a very effective approach to improving irony detection; (2) For detecting implicit incongruity, transferring deep sentiment features seems to be the most effective way. Experiments show that our proposed models outperform state-of-the-art neural models for irony detection.     

Modelling the joint torques and loadings during squatting at the Smith machine

An analytical biomechanical model was developed to establish the relevant properties of the Smith squat exercise, and the main differences from the free barbell squat. The Smith squat may be largely patterned to modulate the distributions of muscle activities and joint loadings. For a given value of the included knee angle (θ(knee)), bending the trunk forward, moving the feet forward in front of the knees, and displacing the weight distribution towards the forefoot emphasizes hip and lumbosacral torques, while also reducing knee torque and compressive tibiofemoral and patellofemoral forces (and vice versa). The tibiofemoral shear force φ(t) displays more complex trends that strongly depend on θ(knee). Notably, for 180° ≥ θ(knee) ≥ 130°, φ(t) and cruciate ligament strain forces can be suppressed by selecting proper pairs of ankle and hip angles. Loading of the posterior cruciate ligament increases (decreases) in the range 180° ≥ θ(knee) ≥ 150° (θ(knee) ≤ 130°) with knee extension, bending the trunk forward, and moving the feet forward in front of the knees. In the range 150° > θ(knee) > 130°, the behaviour changes depending on the foot weight distribution. The conditions for the development of anterior cruciate ligament strain forces are explained. This work enables careful use of the Smith squat in strengthening and rehabilitation programmes.     

意大利和国际体育法及判例制裁的比例原则

研究意大利和国际体育法判例制裁的比例原则,首先需要了解意大利(以下简称国家)和国际体育规则。其次是根据意大利与国际体育法的判例如何与归责原则连接,以及解释(和执行)方式,尤其是关于足球与反兴奋剂规则。研究的主要目的是为了验证这一原则是否在规则中被编撰和认可(通过体育法庭得到解释和执行),评估这一原则是否应用于保护体育运动的完整性(确保它的正常运作),并应当平衡要遵守体育规则和保护运动员利益二者之间的关系。