Beyond Gender Composite Indicators: Object-Oriented Bayesian Network Model to Strengthen Gender Equality Index Insights

Composite indicators simplify complex phenomena by combining multiple dimensions into a single score that synthesizes the overall latent status, such as gender equality or economic development. These indicators comprise various domains and subdomains, each capturing different aspects. For example, the European Gender Equality Index (GEI) combines data across six domains to provide a score that reflects gender gaps in a country. This paper introduces a multivariate statistical learning approach to measure the gender gap, complementing and enriching composite indicators. In particular, Object-Oriented Bayesian networks are employed. An Italian case-study shows that the model offers insight into territorial disparities impacting gender equality outcomes

Il ritmo del copista: regulae e strumenti

Esame degli strumenti scrittori assegnati al certosino dalle Consuetudines (28, 2) di Guigone I di Castro (terzo decennio del sec. XII) e rilettura della ricetta per la mise en page trascritta nel margine inferiore del Par. Lat. 11884, f. 2v (sec. IX).This is an examination of the writing implements that the Consuetudines of Guigone I of Castro (28, 2) assign to the Carthusian monk (third decade of the 12th cent.), and a reinterpreta- tion of the instructions for the mise en page transcribed in the lower margin of Par. Lat. 11884, f. 2v (9th cent.)

«Die Individualität der Wörter – das Fesselnde an der Kleberei». Herta Müllers Collagen-Gedichte am Beispiel der Erzählung Der Beamte sagte

La creazione di collages di parole e immagini è da anni al centro dell’opera letteraria del Premio Nobel rumeno-tedesco Herta Müller. Il suo lavoro con parole, frammenti di parole o di immagini si è modificato e raffinato nel corso degli anni arricchendosi di svariate sfumature: l’aspetto creativo, le diverse dimensioni e i diversi caratteri, nonché la varietà grafica e colorata di parole e immagini ha acquistato sempre più rilievo, insieme al gioco linguistico e alla rima, e i collages si sono trasformati nel tempo in opere d’arte vivaci e poliedriche. Rispetto alla prosa convenzionale, la tecnica del collage, spesso guidata dal caso, consente alla scrittrice un approccio più leggero, a tratti persino umoristico nei confronti del proprio passato, segnato dalle misure repressive della dittatura di Ceauşescu, con una presa di distanza da quei traumi e una sorta di opposizione e ribellione alla precedente censura. Questo contributo rivisita i diversi aspetti di tali cambiamenti, sulla base della più recente pubblicazione Der Beamte sagte (2021) di Müller, in cui per la prima volta i singoli collages sono collegati e raccontano una storia.The creation of word-image collages has been at the centre of Romanian-German Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller’s literary work for several years. Her work with cut-out words and images, or fragments of words and images, has changed and refined over the years: the creative aspect, the different sizes and fonts, as well as the graphic and colourful variety of the word and image parts, have increasingly come to the fore alongside language play and rhyme, and the collages have developed over time into vibrant and multifaceted works of art. Compared to conventional prose, the collage technique, which is often guided by chance, allows the writer a more light-footed, at times humorous, approach to her own past, which was characterised by the repressive measures under Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, and thus enables a distancing from the traumas as well as a kind of opposition and rebellion against the former censorship. This article examines all these aspects with regard to Müller’s collage narrative Der Beamte sagte (2021) in which the individual collages are linked for the first time and tell a story

Distributed state estimation for interdependent and switching multi-agent systems

This paper addresses the problem of multi-agent distributed state estimation in switching networks over directed graphs. Specifically, we consider a novel estimation setting for a linear continuous-time system that is broken down into subsystems, each of which is locally estimated by the corresponding agent. This task is undertaken despite the complexities due to interdependencies on both cyber and physical levels, and due to the fact that the system is switching, i.e., the different subsystems/agents can activate (e.g., to accomplish some specific task) or deactivate (e.g., due to a fault) during a transient that ends with a cutoff time, unknown to the agents, after which the topology becomes fixed. In particular, by exploiting the negativizability property – the pair (A,C) is negativizable if there is a feedback gain K such that A−KC is negative definite – each agent is able to locally perform the calculation of its own estimation gain matrix. The paper is complemented by the convergence analysis of the estimation error executed by leveraging on nonsmooth analysis and simulations to prove the effectiveness of the proposed results

Nonlinear perturbations of Hill's systems and the pendulum with variable length

The stability of the trivial solution to the nonlinear Hill equation has been extensively studied in the literature. In this paper, we provide an approach mainly based on the application of KAM theory to relate the stability of the nonlinear equation to the stability of the linearised equation. In addition, we extend the stability result to the case where a quasi-periodic perturbation is added to the periodic forcing of Hill's equation. We focus on the pendulum with variable length, both because of its physical interest and for the sake of concreteness, but the analysis may be extended to any nonlinear Hill system. Therefore, rather than looking for optimal estimates, which strongly depend on the considered system, we emphasise the general strategy for studying the stability of both the linearised equations and the full nonlinear equations