The Top-Down/Bottom-Up Controversy from a Constructionist Approach. A Method for Measuring Top-Down Effects Applied to a Sample of Older People

Two different theories, called bottom-up and top-down, were developed to understand the determinants of an individual's satisfaction. Experimental studies didn't provide unanimous results, and confirmed, to different extents, both theories. Aside from these classic theories, a constructionist approach was developed. The purposes of this study were to examine the top-down/bottom-up controversy from a constructionist point of view and to obtain a new method for measuring the top-down effects in different satisfaction judgements. In this approach, an individual's satisfaction is viewed as constructions, evoked by the specific question in its particular context, and made by people using cognitive strategies. This view implies that the correlation between satisfaction judgements may reflect the use of the same strategies, rather than a causal effect. From this point of view, the top-down and bottom-up effects, described by the classic theories, cannot be seen as a pattern of causal links among satisfaction domains; therefore we propose a reinterpretation of these concepts in which they refer to ways used by people to construct their satisfaction judgements. On these grounds, we developed a method to extract the weight of top-down effects from correlation coefficients between satisfaction judgements. Two hypotheses concerning the different weight of top-down processes in the different satisfaction judgements were subsequently developed.These propositions were tested using the data set of 'Outdoor Mobility Survey' which was carried out in Italy on a sample of 600 people, 55--95 years of age, stratified by sex and age. We found different top-down effects in satisfaction judgements that confirm our hypothesis, even if some aspects need further investigation.     

The Photovoltaic Market Facing the Challenge of Organic Solar Cells: Economic and Technical Perspectives

Solar cells are gaining more interest in recent times as a possible technological solution to improve energy production whilst reducing its environmental impact. The majority of the market is still dominated by first generation solar cells made of single crystal or poly-crystalline silicon solar cells. Silicon technology has reached an high standard efficiency. However, silicon technology needs a very pure material that means high cost in dollar per watt. In order to improve the production of solar power, governments have started big economical interventions, like the feed-in tariff. The advancement of technology, especially the nano-technological revolution, is bringing the attention to another generation of solar cells, hybrid/organic solar cells like Dye Solar Cells, which reduce the costs and suggest the possibility of a mass production of solar modules without the need of public funds.     

Fuzzy Measures of Longitudinal Poverty in a Comparative Perspective

In this paper we present a methodology for the study of longitudinal aspects of monetary and multi-dimensional poverty, and apply this in a multi-country comparative context. The conventional poor/non-poor dichotomy is replaced by defining poverty as a matter of degree, determined by the place of the individual in the income distribution. The same methodology facilitates the inclusion of other dimensions of deprivation into the analysis: by appropriately weighting indicators of deprivation to reflect their dispersion and correlation, we can construct measures of non-monetary deprivation in its various dimensions. An important contribution of the paper is to identify rules for the intersection and union of fuzzy sets appropriate for the study of poverty and deprivation. These rules allow us to meaningfully study the persistence of poverty and deprivation over time. We establish the consistency of the approach when applied to a time sequence of any length. We can thus study longitudinally over time a whole range of indicators of poverty and deprivation, from cross-sectional monetary poverty rates to multi-dimensional indicators of deprivation: in particular, we propose the new “Fuzzy At-persistent-risk-of-poverty rate”, and compare it with the corresponding Laeken indicator adopted by Eurostat.     

Streamlining Acquisition Workflows Through Collaboration and Innovation

Abstract

As a selector, have you ever wondered if the resource you requested was ordered? As an acquisitions staff member, are you struggling with keeping track of your order requests from various channels? As a manager, are you finding it challenging to monitor staff work? CORAL, an open source electronic resource management system, proved to be one solution to these concerns for North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries. This article discusses how to manage workflows in CORAL and outlines a NCSU initiative to evolve this tool through collaboration across departments and across the CORAL community.