Effects of the financial crisis on university choice by gender

This study analyses the university choices of male and female students in Italy over the 2003–2012 period and for two sub-periods before (2003–2008) and after (2009–2012) the 2008 financial crisis. The analysis is guided by human capital, signalling and preference theories and implemented through a competing destinations model that controls for the socio-economic features of both the region of origin and destination. The findings show that in the post-crisis period, males became more career-oriented in their university choices due to increasingly constrained and competitive labour markets. The constrained post-crisis labour markets led females to focus more on the educational experience than on future employability prospects. Our results suggest that the financial crisis maintained or even widened gendered social roles as they relate to university choices; specifically, males assumed an even greater career-centred family role, whereas females adopted more adaptive lifestyles that potentially place them at a disadvantage in the labour market and in society in years to come.     

Optimal design for manipulation of random consensus over discrete information in networked systems

In distributed and cooperative systems, the network structure is determinant to the success of the strategy adopted to solve complex tasks. Those systems are primarily governed by consensus protocols whose convergence is intrinsically dependent on the network topology. Most of the consensus algorithms deal with continuous values and perform average-based strategies to reach cohesion over the exchanged information. However, many problems demand distributed consensus over countable values, that cannot be handled by traditional protocols. In such a context, this work presents an approach based on semidefinite programming to design the optimal weights of a network adjacency matrix, in order to control the convergence of a distributed random consensus protocol for variables at the discrete-space domain, based on the voter model. As a second contribution, this work uses Markov theory and the biological inspiration of epidemics to find out a dynamical spreading model that can predict the information diffusion over this discrete consensus protocol. Also, convergence properties and equilibrium points of the proposed model are presented regarding the network topology. Finally, extensive numerical simulations evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed consensus algorithm, its spreading model, and the approach for optimal weight design.     

Entrepreneurial effectiveness of European universities: An empirical assessment of antecedents and trade-offs

The phenomenon of entrepreneurial universities has received considerable attention over the last decades. An entrepreneurial orientation by academia might put regions and nations in an advantageous position in emerging knowledge-intensive fields of economic activity. At the same time, such entrepreneurial orientation requires reconciliation with the scientific missions of academia. Large-scale empirical research on antecedents of the entrepreneurial effectiveness of universities is scarce. This contribution examines the extent to which scientific productivity affect entrepreneurial effectiveness, taking into account the size of universities and the presence of disciplines, as well as the R&D intensity of the regional business environment (BERD). In addition, we assess the occurrence of trade-offs between different transfer mechanisms (contract research, patenting and spin off activity). The data used pertain to 105 European universities. Our findings reveal that scientific productivity is positively associated with entrepreneurial effectiveness. Trade-offs between transfer mechanisms do not reveal themselves; on the contrary, contract research and spin off activities tend to facilitate each other. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.     

The impact of academic patenting on university research and its transfer

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the impact of academic patenting on publishing and knowledge transfer. Drawing upon two separate surveys of academics, and their CV information, we provide empirical evidence for UK academics in engineering and physical sciences. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, our findings show that (the intensity of) academic patenting complements publishing up to a certain level of patenting output, after which we find evidence of a substitution effect. We also find weak evidence of important differences across scientific fields with the more basic-oriented fields showing indications of a crowding-out effect. Second, our analysis of the potential impact of patenting on knowledge transfer shows a positive correlation between the stock of patents and engagement in knowledge transfer channels. However, we find that a substitution effect sets in, indicating an inverted U-shaped relationship between patenting and several knowledge transfer channels.     

The Market for Picasso Prints: A Hybrid Model Approach

Two basic approaches have been used by the literature focusing on the return to holding artistic works: the hedonic price model and the repeat-sales model. This paper provides a procedure for jointly estimating the two models in a way that take advantages of the unique information contained in each. A semiannual price index for Picasso prints is estimated by using a model derived from the basic framework of the hybrid models. The empirical results suggest that the hybrid model provides the most precisely estimated price index by reducing the level of price volatility.JEL Classification: C5, Z1p     

Teaching about violence prevention: A bridge between public health and criminal justice educators

Public health perspectives on violence-related injuries have become increasingly important over the past two decades, yet they are rarely mentioned in criminal justice educational texts or articles. Here we provide a brief overview of the public health approach to the prevention of violence and related injuries and compare it to an approach to crime prevention commonly associated with the criminal justice approach: deterrence. The prevention of sexual assault on college and university campuses is used as an illustration of the two approaches. Finally, given the similarities between the manner in which these two multi-disciplinary fields approach violence prevention, we explore how and why criminal justice educators might want to teach a bridge between public health and criminal justice.     

CFD application to optimise the ventilation strategy of Senate Room at Palazzo Madama in Turin (Italy)

Over the last years, there was an increasing interest in keeping suitable microclimatic conditions for the preservation of artefacts: the artefacts preservation requirements may diverge from those of the museums visitors, willing to enjoy the works of art in a situation of psycho-physical wellness. The HVAC designers and engineers will have then to cooperate closely with the curator, in order to define a compromise between conflicting environmental performance requirements. In particular at the stage of air-conditioning system design or retrofit, it is extremely important to carry out a series of preliminary analysis to evaluate and monitor the existing environmental conditions and to anticipatory simulate and predict the post-intervention conditions. To this aim, advanced fluid-dynamic investigation tools (Computational Fluid Dynamic [CFD] techniques) enable to deal with the specificity of such topics and provide a useful decision-making support.     

A structural property of the wavelet packet transform method to localise incoherency of a signal

This paper proves a general structural property of the wavelet tree for a given seminorm in the context of the wavelet packet transform method. This structural property can be used in denoising algorithms of different applications to guarantee the optimality of novel search strategies. The property holds for any input signals using any orthogonal analysing wavelet families. The property holds for any norms, which results to be a convex function through the wavelet tree. Using a defined norms, seminorms or pseudonorms, this property can be used to detect incoherent parts of an input signal by using the minimal depth of the tree. In this sense the proposed denoising procedure works without thresholds for the localisation of different kinds of noise, as well as for a stop criterium for an optimal representation of the incoherency. The proof of this property is performed by mathematical induction and the demonstration is based on orthonormality with the help of the multiresolution framework aspects of the wavelets packet tree. The Theorem is independent of the definition of the adopted norm and of the incoherent part of an input signal. In this sense, the discovered property is a general one, which is related to any norm and any nature of the signal incoherence. It can be used in different applications, in which a minimum of a norm is required to be calculated through the wavelet tree.