Evaluating the efficiency of public procurement contracts for cultural heritage conservation works in Italy

Almost everywhere public intervention in cultural heritage (CH) conservation is widespread. Using Italy as a case study, the paper analyses public capital expenditure for CH conservation and investigates whether the high degree of specialization of contracting authorities affects the efficiency of CH conservation works. A two-stage analysis is carried out. At a first stage, a nonparametric approach (Data Envelopment Analysis—DEA) investigates the relative efficiency scored by each single work; at a second stage, the determinant factors of the scores variability are investigated. The empirical analysis shows that, ceteris paribus, the expertise affects the efficiency of CH works.     

Analysis of named entity recognition and linking for tweets

Applying natural language processing for mining and intelligent information access to tweets (a form of microblog) is a challenging, emerging research area. Unlike carefully authored news text and other longer content, tweets pose a number of new challenges, due to their short, noisy, context-dependent, and dynamic nature. Information extraction from tweets is typically performed in a pipeline, comprising consecutive stages of language identification, tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and entity disambiguation (e.g. with respect to DBpedia). In this work, we describe a new Twitter entity disambiguation dataset, and conduct an empirical analysis of named entity recognition and disambiguation, investigating how robust a number of state-of-the-art systems are on such noisy texts, what the main sources of error are, and which problems should be further investigated to improve the state of the art.     

Assessing the pressure of tennis balls using nonlinear solitary waves: a numerical study

We present a method based on the propagation of highly nonlinear solitary waves (HNSWs) to measure the internal pressure of tennis balls. HNSWs are compact waves that can form and travel in nonlinear systems such as one-dimensional chains of spherical particles, where they are conventionally generated by the mechanical impact of a striker. The speed, amplitude, and duration of these waves can be tuned by modifying the particles’ material or size, or the velocity of the striker. In the present study we numerically investigated the coupling mechanism between the solitary waves propagating along a 1-D granular chain and a tennis ball in contact with the nonlinear medium. A discrete particle model of the beads was coupled to a linear mass–spring–damper model of the tennis ball computed using finite element analysis. Balls with different internal pressures were considered and we found that the time of flight of the HNSWs decreases monotonically with the increase of the internal pressure of the ball.     

The Role of Competitive and Cooperative Norms in the Development of Deviant Evaluations

The present study examined how peer group norms influence children's evaluations of deviant ingroup members. Following the manipulation of competitive or cooperative norms, participants (children, M_age = 8.69; adolescents, M_age = 13.81; adults, M_age = 20.89; n = 263) evaluated deviant ingroup members from their own and the group's perspective. Children rated cooperative deviancy positively and believed their group would do the same. Adolescents and adults believed that their group would negatively evaluate cooperative deviancy when their group supported a competitive allocation strategy. Reasoning varied based on norm and participants’ agreement with deviancy. Understanding an ingroup may not be favorable toward a cooperative deviant in a competitive context is a developmental challenge requiring the coordination of social and moral norms.