Search results for " programmi"
showing 10 items of 1629 documents
Impact of the process of isolating humic acids from peat on their propertiesA paper submitted to the Journal of Environmental Engineering and Science.
2009
Humic substances (HS) can be isolated in preparative quantities from low rank coal, peat, and soil. Traditionally, treatment with solutions of NaOH, KOH, or metal salts (K4P2O7) has been used for their isolation. The aim of this article is to study the effectiveness of different technologies in extracting HS from peat as well as the impact of the different extractive technologies on the properties of the isolated HS. Yields of HS depend very much on the extraction process (extractant, temperature, pretreatment procedures, solvent, mixing intensity); however, the properties of the substances obtained (molecular mass, number of functional groups, spectral characteristics) differ significantly…
Designing Guarantee Options in Defined Contribution Pension Plans
2015
The shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) is pervasive among pension funds, due to demographic changes and macroeconomic pressures. In DB all risks are borne by the provider, while in plain vanilla DC all risks are borne by the beneficiary. For DC to provide income security some kind of guarantee is required. A minimum guarantee clause can be modeled as a put option written on some underlying reference portfolio of assets and we develop a discrete model that optimally selects the reference portfolio to minimise the cost of a guarantee. While the relation DB-DC is typically viewed as a binary one, the model can be used to price a wide range of guarantees creating a con…
Assessment of University Students’ Critical Thinking: Next Generation Performance Assessment
2019
Following employers’ criticisms and recent societal developments, policymakers and educators have called for students to develop a range of generic skills such as critical thinking (“twenty-first c...
Individual Rank and Response: Survey-Based Evidence on the Effects of Rank-Based Performance Feedback
2021
On the Effects of Relative Performance Feedback in a Risk Elicitation Task: Evidence From a Lab Experiment
2018
This paper experimentally investigates the influence of different non-payoff-relevant feedback regimes on motivation, competitiveness and risk-taking behaviors in a risk elicitation task. We explore four feedback regimes: private feedback, full ranking feedback, top-5 ranking feedback, and non-ranking feedback based on the median performance of peers. We found that providing relative performance feedback increases risk-taking behavior, especially when using a top-5 ranking. Feedback regimes that provide a user with rank-based feedback have adverse effects on the users' attitudes as they increase competitiveness while failing to increase intrinsic motivation and performance motivation. In co…
Design of Implanted RFID Tags for Passive Sensing of Human Body: The STENTag
2012
Numerical processing of passive UHF-RFID tags' response may provide physical insight about the hosting object or about the nearby environment. This idea is here extended to implanted antennas with the purpose to sense the evolution of some human physiological and pathological process involving a local change of effective permittivity inside the body. The goal is to understand how master the design of this class of devices taking into account both communication and sensing capabilities. An ad hoc design methodology is here presented and discussed by means of a realistic medical case concerning the modification of an endo-vascular device to achieve a STENTag able to sense the state of the ves…
Teaching GP to program like a human software developer
2019
Program synthesis is one of the relevant applications of GP with a strong impact on new fields such as genetic improvement. In order for synthesized code to be used in real-world software, the structure of the programs created by GP must be maintainable. We can teach GP how real-world software is built by learning the relevant properties of mined human-coded software - which can be easily accessed through repository hosting services such as GitHub. So combining program synthesis and repository mining is a logical step. In this paper, we analyze if GP can write programs with properties similar to code produced by human software developers. First, we compare the structure of functions generat…
Patterns of poverty among elderly Americans: a Latent Class Markov Model
2017
ABSTRACTThis article studies poverty persistence and the role of social security programmes on poverty among elderly in the US. We use a Latent Markov model to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence. Because of its dynamic nature, unobserved heterogeneity is modelled to vary over time. This allows to capture different latent states of poverty that change over time. Result indicates the existence of three unobserved types evolving over time according to their propensity to be poor. Moreover, a strong persistence in poverty especially for women, individuals living alone and ethnic minorities is found. Finally, the estimates indicate that giving social assistance tends to re…