The Refugee Tales Project as Transmedia Activism and the Poetics of Listening. Towards Decolonial Citizenship

The Refugee Tales project aims to raise awareness about the experiences of asylum seekers in Britain. It pivots around a walk through the British countryside, which becomes the occasion to share tales about immigration detention, subsequently published in a series of anthologies. In this essay, I frame Refugee Tales as a series of activist citizen media practices, engaging in prefigurative politics by providing refugees with a chance to perform a critical form of citizenship. Finally, I discuss how the tales themselves juxtapose forms of sympathetic and hostile listening

Sara Florian. Caribbean Counterpoint: The Aesthetics of Salt in Lasana Sekou

Si tratta di una recensione di Sara Florian. Caribbean Counterpoint: The Aesthetics of Salt in Lasana Sekou. Il libro è una momografia dedicata allo scrittore caraibico Lasana Sekou

An Introduction to RP-Testing

This paper reviews the concept of Reproducibility Probability and makes a brief introduction to RP-testing. The RP-based version of some common parametric tests is provided. Moreover, a particular attention is devoted to the well-known nonparametric Wilcoxon Rank-Sum test. A comparison between the properties of the RP and the p-value is made in order to evaluate the practical utility of these stability indicators. It turns out that the use of the RP to perform the tests and to interpret their results, requires more technical analysis, but it provides more interpretable direct information on the stability of the test results

Riots, Crowds and the Collective in Amitav Ghosh's Political Imagination. From The Shadow Lines to Gun Island

This article, using the riots in The Shadow Lines (1988) as a point of departure, maps a more general system of representations of multitudes within Amitav Ghosh’s work. Its implications, in turn, can shed light on Ghosh’s relationship with the idea of collectivity, which is more fraught with tensions and ambivalence than it may initially appear. More precisely, I argue that Ghosh’s work is deeply concerned with the various ways in which collectivities, masses and gatherings of different kinds can affect, enhance, diminish or threaten individual existences, and tries to find a reconciliation between the collectivity and the individual. As a result of these anxieties, Ghosh tends to represent crowds and multitudes chiefly in two modes: as an anonymous, dehumanized and threatening mass; or as a community of individuals bound together by spontaneous human solidarity. In turn, this tends to exclude from his imaginative horizon certain kinds of collectivities that do not fit in either of the two modes, such as various kinds of explicitly politically engaged movements. Besides The Shadow Lines – the moment in which Ghosh lays the foundations of this system of representations –, the article considers other works of fiction and non-fiction – most notably “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” (1995), In an Antique Land (1992), The Hungry Tide (2004) and River of Smoke (2011) – in order to show how the characteristics of this system have remained consistent throughout Ghosh’s career. The point of arrival, finally, is Ghosh’s recent work on climate change and migration – The Great Derangement (2016) and Gun Island (2019) – in which the shortcomings of this system of representations, as regards Ghosh’s intervention in current public debates, come to light with particular clarity

Data security issues in cloud scenarios

The amount of data created, stored, and processed has enormously increased in the last years. Today, millions of devices are connected to the Internet and generate a huge amount of (personal) data that need to be stored and processed using scalable, efficient, and reliable computing infrastructures. Cloud computing technology can be used to respond to these needs. Although cloud computing brings many benefits to users and companies, security concerns about the cloud still represent the major impediment for its wide adoption. We briefly survey the main challenges related to the storage and processing of data in the cloud. In particular, we focus on the problem of protecting data in storage, supporting fine-grained access, selectively sharing data, protecting query privacy, and verifying the integrity of computations

Reproducibility Probability Estimation and RP-Testing for Some Nonparametric Tests

Several reproducibility probability (RP)-estimators for the binomial, sign, Wilcoxon signed rank and Kendall tests are studied. Their behavior in terms of MSE is investigated, as well as their performances for RP-testing. Two classes of estimators are considered: the semi-parametric one, where RP-estimators are derived from the expression of the exact or approximated power function, and the non-parametric one, whose RP-estimators are obtained on the basis of the nonparametric plug-in principle. In order to evaluate the precision of RP-estimators for each test, the MSE is computed, and the best overall estimator turns out to belong to the semi-parametric class. Then, in order to evaluate the RP-testing performances provided by RP estimators for each test, the disagreement between the RP-testing decision rule, i.e., "accept H0 if the RP-estimate is lower than, or equal to, 1/2, and reject H0 otherwise", and the classical one (based on the critical value or on the p-value) is obtained. It is shown that the RP-based testing decision for some semi-parametric RP estimators exactly replicates the classical one. In many situations, the RP-estimator replicating the classical decision rule also provides the best MSE