June 1940: Britain’s forgotten attempt to build a EuropeanUnion

As the UK is heading for a hard Brexit, Andrea Bosco uncovers a largely forgotten attempt by Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet to build a federal union with France. The British proposal included a plan for joint organs of defence, for common foreign, financial, and economic policies, as well as for a common citizenship

Modulation Format, Core and Spectrum Assignment in a Multicore Optical Link with and without MIMO Receivers

We study the modulation format, core and spectrum assignment problem in a multi-core flexi-grid optical link, under the assumption that MIMO receivers can operate on various core subsets and considering distance-adaptive reaches for different modulation formats. We show results obtained following an optimization approach, comparing scenarios with and without the use of MIMO transmission

Multifield nested metafilters for wave propagation control

The present work proposes a novel class of multifield nested tunable metadevices that serve as high performance acoustic metafilters. The designed metafilter is characterized by a multiscale, hierarchical structure. At the mesoscale, the metamaterial consists of a sequence of two different periodically alternating layers: a polymeric homogeneous layer, which exhibits a viscoelastic constitutive response, and a microstructured one. The latter is based on the periodic repetition of a multiphase microscale cell that is composed by a stiff elastic external coating, a viscoelastic phase and an internal disk of piezoelectric material shunted by an external electrical circuit having a tunable impedance/admittance This tuning parameter affects the constitutive elastic properties of the piezoelectric phase and, in turn, the overall response of the microscale cell, thereby ultimately enabling to achieve an optimal filtering performance for the metadevice. Due to the periodicity of the multiphase cell at the microscale, a two-scale variational-asymptotic homogenization technique is exploited in the frequency domain in order to obtain the frequency-dependent overall constitutive properties of the microstructured layer. Subsequently, in-plane free wave propagation inside the periodic multilayered metamaterial at the mesoscale is investigated by means of Floquet–Bloch theory, together with the transfer matrix method. By triggering the shunting effect, a stiffening of the piezoelectric phase can be achieved, which is demonstrated to open low frequency band gaps in the metamaterial frequency spectrum. The filtering capability of the metadevice has been assessed as a function of its geometrical features and the tuning parameter, thus paving the way towards the design of sophisticated and topologically optimized acoustic filters

La simulazione nella valutazione neuropsicologica come problema diagnostico: le statistiche bayesiane

I risultati delle valutazioni neuropsicologiche possono essere intenzionalmente distorti minacciandone gli esiti. Tale eventualitàè chiamata simulazione o malingering. Lo scopo di questo studio è di mettere a confronto due approcci diagnostici che adottanoentrambi il SIMS e il ToMM e tre livelli di prevalenza del malingering mediante statistiche bayesiane e metodo MonteCarlo. L’approccio più conservativo, secondo cui i test devono essere entrambi positivi per la diagnosi di malingering, ha risultatidi accuratezza diagnostica ottimi per i livelli di prevalenza considerati e risulta eccellente nel minimizzare i falsi positivi.Lo studio si conclude con un esempio di procedura di valutazione in cui le statistiche bayesiane si applicano al processo diagnosticoe con alcune riflessioni sulle procedure per intercettare il malingering

Overview of the EVALITA 2016 Part of speech on twitter for Italian task

The increasing interest for the extraction of various forms of knowledge from micro-blogs and social media makes crucial the development of resources and tools that can be used for automatically deal with them. PoSTWITA contributes to the advancement of the state-of-the-art for Italian language by: (a) enriching the community with a previously not existing col- lection of data extracted from Twitter and annotated with grammatical categories, to be used as a benchmark for system evaluation; (b) supporting the adaptation of Part of Speech tagging systems to this particular text domain

16x125 Gb/s Quasi-Nyquist DAC-Generated PM-16QAM Transmission Over 3590 km of PSCF

We report on a transmission experiment over high-performance pure silica core fiber (PSCF) of 16 Nyquist wavelength-division-multiplexed (Nyquist-WDM) channels at a symbol rate of 15.625 GBaud, using polarization-multiplexed (PM) 16 symbols quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM), resulting in a per-channel raw bit rate of 125 Gb/s. The channel spacing is 16 GHz, corresponding to 1.024 times the symbol rate. The interchannel crosstalk penalty is drastically reduced through the confinement of the signal spectrum within a near-Nyquist bandwidth, achieved with digital filtering and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) operating at 1.5 samples/symbol. The optical line is a recirculating loop composed of two spans of high-performance PSCF with erbium-doped fiber amplifiers only. The transmission distance of 3590 km at a target line bit-error rate (BER) of 1.5 10^-2 is achieved at a raw spectral efficiency (SE) of 7.81 b/s/Hz. Assuming a commercial hard forward error correction with 20.5% redundancy, capable of handling the target BER, the net SE is 6.48 b/s/Hz, the highest so far reported for multithousand kilometer transmission of PM-16QAM at ≥ 100 Gb/s per channel. These results demonstrate the feasibility of very high SE DAC-enabled ultra-long-haul quasi-Nyquist-WDM transmission using PM-16QAM with current technologies and manageable digital signal processing complexit