Search results for "technical"
showing 10 items of 955 documents
The Contribution of Technological Change on EU’s Exports Performance
2013
Technical efficiency and regional disparities in Italy
2019
This paper is a contribution to the literature on Italy's regional disparities with a focus on the nature and determinants of firms' technical efficiency. Our analysis concerns a vast number of Italian firms for the decade 2008-2017 and considers the firms that are annually obliged to deposit their balance sheet. A frontier stochastic analysis is used as a method for estimating the technical efficiency of each firm. Our results offer a detailed representation on a provincial basis of disparity gaps. Moreover econometric analysis provides convincing evidence on the importance of territorial variables in the determinants of technical efficiency.
Smart cities: a policy tool for city efficiency?
2016
The level of interest in smart cities has been growing during these last years. The academic literature (Hollands, 2008; Caragliu et al., 2009, Nijkamp et al., 2011 and Lombardi et al., 2012) has identified a number of factors that characterise a city as smart, such as economic development, business-friendly, environmental sustainability, social innovation, information and knowledge process, and human and social capital. Thus, the smartness concept is strictly linked to urban efficiency in a multifaceted way as well as to citizens’ wellbeing through the use of appropriate technologies. Instead, from a “political perspective” smartness is mainly related to the ability of using ICT as instrum…
An Integrated Assessment Model on Local Aptitudes for Green-Energy Self-sustainability
2018
The Encyclical Letter Laudato Si of the Holy Father Francis on “Care for our Common Home” holds human society responsible for the achievement of a fairer world, through research into solutions to environmental problems and a moderate and efficient use of nonrenewable resources. It recalls that energy usage is one of the major factors of environmental pressure and shares the crucial questions of current European and international energy policies. In Italy, for the electric sector, energy policy requires the increase of energy production by renewable sources and the development of a transmission grid able to support a diffused and non-programmed production of electrical energy (a smart grid),…
Accounting for operating environments in measuring water utilities’ managerial efficiency
2009
In this paper adjusted input-specific scores of technical efficiency are computed for a sample of Spanish water utilities. Performance is adjusted by netting out efficiency scores from the effect of operating environments and statistical noise. The results show that computation of adjusted efficiency scores at the input level manifestly improves the assessment of utilities’ performance in our sample of water utilities. In addition, several environmental variables capable of affecting input-specific technical management are discovered, ownership or demand seasonality among them. Finally, distributions of conventional and adjusted scores of technical performance are found to be statistically …
Urban Planning and Technological Innovation
2017
Over the years, city and territory have been transformed disproportionately and the planning appears to have lost control over the dynamics of the events that, unfortunately, have caused indelible changes on urban and environmental systems. The reworking of alphanumeric and geographic data through the territorial information system can be useful as technical support and methodological knowledge capable of intervening and redeveloping the residential centers. In fact, cities and their dynamics can be visualized with tools and machinery capable of representing them in a graphic or schematic way. This study presents some Italian experiences of urban renewal made possible by territorial informa…
¿Técnicos o profesionales? ¿Qué opinan los implicados? El caso de los agentes de empleo y desarrollo local (AEDL)
2014
Desde que aparece una actividad laboral -empleo u ocupación- hasta que llega a ser considerada una profesión, muchas son las dificultades que ésta ha de superar. En el presente texto, centramos nuestro interés en analizar las dificultades existentes en una de las actividades surgidas en las últimas décadas del siglo XX -la de generar empleo y desarrollo a nivel local o, lo que es lo mismo, la actividad de los AEDL (agentes de empleo y desarrollo local)- en su proceso de reconocimiento como profesión. En base a lo que se expondrá a lo largo de este artículo, buscaremos conocer la percepción que tiene el propio colectivo de afectados sobre la realidad de su situación profesional, así como de …
How to blend language and ICT in the didactics of scientific translation
2014
New information and communication technologies (ICT) have burst into all spheres of our lives, modifying them in ways inconceivable barely 10 years ago. Generally speaking, these modifications have enhanced interaction processes (telecommunications), work and human production (task automation). The field of professional translation has been particularly affected by this technological revolution and has led to new research, professional and didactic paradigms, known as Automatic Translation and Computer Aided Translation. This is the framework for our present work, which attempts to put together the development of communicative (linguistic) competences with procedural (instrumental) and eval…
Philosophy and Technology in the French Tradition. The Legacy of François Dagognet
2018
In opposition to philosophers focused on the intimacy of the subject, a number of French philosophers were more concerned with understanding the objective world as it is, and as we built it. In this respect, technology as an historical process, ending up in a set of objects and practices, affords a worthwhile ground for developing such world-oriented philosophical reflections. This paper provides a survey of this philosophical landscape with a special emphasis on the pro-eminent role of Francois Dagognet who pioneered a material and object philosophy in France.
Volume III. DUNE far detector technical coordination
2020
The preponderance of matter over antimatter in the early universe, the dynamics of the supernovae that produced the heavy elements necessary for life, and whether protons eventually decay-these mysteries at the forefront of particle physics and astrophysics are key to understanding the early evolution of our universe, its current state, and its eventual fate. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is an international world-class experiment dedicated to addressing these questions as it searches for leptonic charge-parity symmetry violation, stands ready to capture supernova neutrino bursts, and seeks to observe nucleon decay as a signature of a grand unified theory underlying the st…