Bread or Circuses? Repoliticization in the Italian Populist Government Experience

The majority view within political science is that populism is best understood as a (thin) ideology. We problematize the ideational approach by broadening the scope of analysis, linking populism to the rise of long-term generalized anti-political sentiments, against interpretations that tend to tie the populist wave to conjunctural factors related to recent crises. We argue that the essence of populism lies at the intersection of the ‘material constitution’ of advanced industrial democracies (that is, how macroeconomic governance relates to democratic decision-making) and the feelings of societal alienation that are at the heart of anti-political sentiments. We show the peculiar coexistence of economic turbulence, heralded by the crisis of the cartel party and of the neoliberal economic consensus, and an appeal to a post-democratic ‘virtual politics’ of performed but ineffectual popular sovereignty. The policies of the populist coalition governing Italy in 2018–19 provide a key case to test the relevance of our arguments

Chapter 1 THE WESTMINSTER MODEL AND THE UK POLITICAL SYSTEM BEFORE BREXIT

Westminster model; UK politics; Brexi

Chapter 2 UNDERSTANDING THE BREXIT EFFECT

Westminster model; UK politics; Brexi

Chapter 2 UNDERSTANDING THE BREXIT EFFECT

Westminster model; UK politics; Brexi

Chapter 1 THE WESTMINSTER MODEL AND THE UK POLITICAL SYSTEM BEFORE BREXIT

Westminster model; UK politics; Brexi

3D Cephalometric Normality Range: Auto Contractive Maps (ACM) Analysis in Selected Caucasian Skeletal Class I Age Groups

The objective of this paper is to define normal values of a novel 3D cephalometric analysis and to define the links through an artificial neural network (ANN)

May Measure Month 2022 in Italy: A Focus on Fixed-dose Combination, Therapeutic Adherence, and Medical Inertia in a Nationwide Survey

Introduction Hypertension is the main risk factor for cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Notably, only about half of hypertensive patients manage to achieve the recommended blood pressure (BP) control. Main reasons for the persistence of uncontrolled BP during treatment are lack of compliance on the patients' side, and therapeutic inertia on physicians' side.Methods During the global BP screening campaign "May Measure Month" (MMM) (May 1st to July 31st, 2022), a nationwide, cross-sectional, opportunistic study endorsed by the Italian Society of Hypertension was conducted on volunteer adults >= 18 years to raise awareness of the health issues surrounding high BP. A questionnaire on demographic/clinical features and questions on the use of fixed-dose single-pills for the treatment of hypertension was administered. BP was measured with standard procedures.Results A total of 1612 participants (mean age 60.0 +/- 15.41 years; 44.7% women) were enrolled. Their mean BP was 128.5 +/- 18.1/77.1 +/- 10.4 mmHg. About half of participants were sedentary, or overweight/obese, or hypertensive. 55.5% individuals with complete BP assessment had uncontrolled hypertension. Most were not on a fixed-dose combination of antihypertensive drugs and did not regularly measure BP at home. Self-reported adherence to BP medications was similar between individuals with controlled and uncontrolled BP (95% vs 95.5%).Conclusions This survey identified a remarkable degree of therapeutic inertia and poor patients' involvement in the therapeutic process and its monitoring in the examined population, underlining the importance of prevention campaigns to identify areas of unsatisfactory management of hypertension, to increase risk factors' awareness in the population with the final purpose of reducing cardiovascular risk

Physics case for an LHCb Upgrade II - Opportunities in flavour physics, and beyond, in the HL-LHC era

The LHCb Upgrade II will fully exploit the flavour-physics opportunities of the HL-LHC, and study additional physics topics that take advantage of the forward acceptance of the LHCb spectrometer. The LHCb Upgrade I will begin operation in 2020. Consolidation will occur, and modest enhancements of the Upgrade I detector will be installed, in Long Shutdown 3 of the LHC (2025) and these are discussed here. The main Upgrade II detector will be installed in long shutdown 4 of the LHC (2030) and will build on the strengths of the current LHCb experiment and the Upgrade I. It will operate at a luminosity up to 2×1034 cm−2s−1, ten times that of the Upgrade I detector. New detector components will improve the intrinsic performance of the experiment in certain key areas. An Expression Of Interest proposing Upgrade II was submitted in February 2017. The physics case for the Upgrade II is presented here in more depth. CP-violating phases will be measured with precisions unattainable at any other envisaged facility. The experiment will probe b → sl+l−and b → dl+l− transitions in both muon and electron decays in modes not accessible at Upgrade I. Minimal flavour violation will be tested with a precision measurement of the ratio of B(B0 → μ+μ−)/B(Bs → μ+μ−). Probing charm CP violation at the 10−5 level may result in its long sought discovery. Major advances in hadron spectroscopy will be possible, which will be powerful probes of low energy QCD. Upgrade II potentially will have the highest sensitivity of all the LHC experiments on the Higgs to charm-quark couplings. Generically, the new physics mass scale probed, for fixed couplings, will almost double compared with the pre-HL-LHC era; this extended reach for flavour physics is similar to that which would be achieved by the HE-LHC proposal for the energy frontier

LHCb upgrade software and computing : technical design report

This document reports the Research and Development activities that are carried out in the software and computing domains in view of the upgrade of the LHCb experiment. The implementation of a full software trigger implies major changes in the core software framework, in the event data model, and in the reconstruction algorithms. The increase of the data volumes for both real and simulated datasets requires a corresponding scaling of the distributed computing infrastructure. An implementation plan in both domains is presented, together with a risk assessment analysis