Ahab, Ulysses, and the white whale: Vittorio Gassman’s adaptation of Moby-Dick

Il saggio analizza alcuni aspetti e problemi sollevati dall'adattamento teatrale del capolavoro di Melville da parte di Vittorio Gassman, con particolare attenzione all'accostamento proposto tra la figura di Ulisse e quella del capitano Ahab.The essay investigates some features and issues raised by Vittorio Gassman's adaptation for the stage of Melville's masterpiece. Specific attention is paid to the conjunction of the figures of Ulysses, on the one hand, and of Captain Ahab, on the other

The Social Benefit of War

Recent findings in economic theory show that cooperation (settlement) between two identical players with conflicting interests in a valuable and contestable resource always Pareto dominates violent dispute (war), given that cooperation is presented using a symmetric bargaining norm. Necessary conditions for settlement to arise are the destructibility of war, and the costless and exogenous enforcement of any agreement made by the two players. We show that endogenous enforcement of the agreements alters the incentives of the players to bargain. This causes a shift in the Pareto frontier so that - under certain conditions - war Pareto dominates settlement.contests, property rights, endogenous enforcement, bargaining

Multinational Firms, FDI Flows and Imperfect Capital Markets

This paper examines how costly financial contracting and weak investor protection influence the cross-border operational, financing and investment decisions of firms. We develop a model in which product developers have a comparative advantage in monitoring the deployment of their technology abroad. The paper demonstrates that when firms want to exploit technologies abroad, multinational firm (MNC) activity and foreign direct investment (FDI) flows arise endogenously when monitoring is nonverifiable and financial frictions exist. The mechanism generating MNC activity is not the risk of technological expropriation by local partners but the demands of external funders who require MNC participation to ensure value maximization by local entrepreneurs. The model demonstrates that weak investor protections limit the scale of multinational firm activity, increase the reliance on FDI flows and alter the decision to deploy technology through FDI as opposed to arm's length licensing. Several distinctive predictions for the impact of weak investor protection on MNC activity and FDI flows are tested and confirmed using firm-level data.

Direction-aware Spatial Context Features for Shadow Detection

Shadow detection is a fundamental and challenging task, since it requires an understanding of global image semantics and there are various backgrounds around shadows. This paper presents a novel network for shadow detection by analyzing image context in a direction-aware manner. To achieve this, we first formulate the direction-aware attention mechanism in a spatial recurrent neural network (RNN) by introducing attention weights when aggregating spatial context features in the RNN. By learning these weights through training, we can recover direction-aware spatial context (DSC) for detecting shadows. This design is developed into the DSC module and embedded in a CNN to learn DSC features at different levels. Moreover, a weighted cross entropy loss is designed to make the training more effective. We employ two common shadow detection benchmark datasets and perform various experiments to evaluate our network. Experimental results show that our network outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves 97% accuracy and 38% reduction on balance error rate.Comment: Accepted for oral presentation in CVPR 2018. The journal version of this paper is arXiv:1805.0463

Piracy of Digital Products: A Contest Theoretical Approach

In the following, we examine a market of a digital consumption good with monopolistic supply. In this market, it is the ability of the consumer to bypass (”crack”) the copy-protection of the monopolist which induces a lower price of the digital good, compared to an uncontested monopoly (textbook case). We analyze the complex relationship between the cracking efforts of the consumer, the copy-protection efforts and the pricing decision of the monopolist, and the welfare of the economy. We find, for example, that the monopolist will deter piracy if the (exogenous) relative effectiveness of the consumer’s bypassing activity is low compared to the copy-protection technology. In this case welfare is lower than the welfare in the textbook case. On the contrary, welfare rises above the textbook case level if the relative effectiveness of cracking is sufficiently high

Shadow Optimization from Structured Deep Edge Detection

Local structures of shadow boundaries as well as complex interactions of image regions remain largely unexploited by previous shadow detection approaches. In this paper, we present a novel learning-based framework for shadow region recovery from a single image. We exploit the local structures of shadow edges by using a structured CNN learning framework. We show that using the structured label information in the classification can improve the local consistency of the results and avoid spurious labelling. We further propose and formulate a shadow/bright measure to model the complex interactions among image regions. The shadow and bright measures of each patch are computed from the shadow edges detected in the image. Using the global interaction constraints on patches, we formulate a least-square optimization problem for shadow recovery that can be solved efficiently. Our shadow recovery method achieves state-of-the-art results on the major shadow benchmark databases collected under various conditions.Comment: 8 pages. CVPR 201

VerbAtlas: a novel large-scale verbal semantic resource and its application to semantic role labeling

We present VerbAtlas, a new, hand-crafted lexical-semantic resource whose goal is to bring together all verbal synsets from WordNet into semantically-coherent frames. The frames define a common, prototypical argument structure while at the same time providing new concept-specific information. In contrast to PropBank, which defines enumerative semantic roles, VerbAtlas comes with an explicit, cross-frame set of semantic roles linked to selectional preferences expressed in terms of WordNet synsets, and is the first resource enriched with semantic information about implicit, shadow, and default arguments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VerbAtlas in the task of dependency-based Semantic Role Labeling and show how its integration into a high-performance system leads to improvements on both the in-domain and out-of-domain test sets of CoNLL-2009. VerbAtlas is available at http://verbatlas.org