Spatial Autoregressive Models for House Price Dynamics in Italy

This paper elaborates a Spatial Autoregressive and Spatial Error Model (SAR-SE Model) to investigate the Italian house price dynamics. House prices in real terms have been modelled for the period 1995-2008 in all the 103 Italian provinces along with affordability ratio, persistency term, some social-economic variables and credit market variables. One of the key results of this paper, is the evidence on house price spatial autocorrelation, verified through the Baltagi, Song and Koh (2003) LM test. On the contrary, no evidence of housing price overvaluation has been found, in comparison with the fundamental values determined by interest rates, households income, rents, employment and construction cost.house prices, fundamentals, mean reversion, serial correlation, spatial dependence

Operators in Rigged Hilbert spaces: some spectral properties

A notion of resolvent set for an operator acting in a rigged Hilbert space \D \subset \H\subset \D^\times is proposed. This set depends on a family of intermediate locally convex spaces living between \D and \D^\times, called interspaces. Some properties of the resolvent set and of the corresponding multivalued resolvent function are derived and some examples are discussed.Comment: 29 page

Bounded elements of C*-inductive locally convex spaces

The notion of bounded element of C*-inductive locally convex spaces (or C*-inductive partial *-algebras) is introduced and discussed in two ways: the first one takes into account the inductive structure provided by certain families of C*-algebras; the second one is linked to natural order of these spaces. A particular attention is devoted to the relevant instance provided by the space of continuous linear maps acting in a rigged Hilbert space

"Der Roman beginnt zu sagen, was er ist" : zur Romanpoetik von Rolf Dieter Brinkmann

"Der Romancier hat sich abgeschieden. Die Geburtskammer des Romans ist das Individuum in seiner Einsamkeit, das sich über seine wichtigsten Anliegen nicht mehr exemplarisch auszusprechen vermag, selbst unberaten ist, und keinen Rat geben kann. Einen Roman schreiben, heisst, in der Darstellung des menschlichen Lebens das Inkommensurable auf die Spitze treiben" (Benjamin 1999,443). Was Walter Benjamin 1936 in kritischer Distanz zur Form des Romans seiner Zeit formulierte, kommt der schweren Krisis nah, in der sich Rolf Dieter Brinkmann fast vierzig Jahre später befinden wird. Enttäuscht über den zunehmenden politischen Dogmatismus der Studentenbewegung zieht er sich bekanntlich Anfang der 70er aus dem Literaturbetrieb zurück, isoliert sich auch fast völlig von Freunden und Bekannten. Und doch sollte insbesondere die Kölner Wohnung in der Engelbertstraße zur "Geburtskammer" eines Groß-Projekts werden, von dem bis zuletzt die Rede ist: einem zweiten, an Keiner weiß mehr anschließenden Roman

Text(ge)schichten : Antonio Tabucchi unterwegs zu Dino Campana, Nietzsche und Orpheus

In Vagabondaggio from the early collection Il gioco del rovescio, Tabucchi undertakes an oneiric and personal approach to the life and work of the Italian symbolist poet Dino Campana (1885–1932). The text is based on Nietzsche’s aphorism "Reisende und ihre Grade" ( Menschliches, Allzumenschliches), which establishes five categories of voyagers. Tabuchi uses these as stages in the protagonist’s quest for personal aesthetics. The aesthetics itself alludes to major motives in Campana’s masterpiece, Canti Orfici

La pensée disciplinaire à la Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio : le choix de l’exclusion

L’histoire du théâtre est une histoire d’exclusion. L’élément qui unit à jamais certains réformateurs du théâtre du XVIIIe siècle — appelés à limiter l’ingérence des désordres qui accompagnaient les séances des spectacles — et des artistes contemporains qui souhaitent s’opposer aux pratiques bourgeoises du théâtre, est ce que nous avons appelé la pensée disciplinaire. Cette figure de pensée se situe aux croisements entre les écritures de la pratique et les écritures de la théorie lors de la naissance d’une nouvelle esthétique. Or, que l’esthétique en question ait comme but la recherche d’une intégration sociale ou, au contraire, un travail de rupture avec les codes en vigueur, elle s’accompagne toujours d’un nouveau système de contraintes, d’un nouvel ordre, paradoxalement demandeur d’une nouvelle exclusion. L’aperçu historique que nous proposons autour de la notion de pensée disciplinaire touchera à des interrogations fondamentales : le vertige de l’aliénation et ses monstres, les tensions entre texte et matière, la relation entre art et culpabilité, la crainte de la punition liée à l’exposition publique qui sont autant de lieux de la pensée et de la pratique artistique qu’on retrouvera aussi bien au XVIIIe siècle que dans le travail de redéfinition de l’art théâtral de la Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, au XXe siècle.The history of theatre is one of exclusion. What we have designated here as disciplinary thought is that which unites certain theatre reformers of the 18th century called to limit the intrusion of disorders which accompanied representations and contemporary artists who wished to oppose bourgeois practices of theatre. This thought figure is found at the crossroads between practical and theoretical writings when a new aesthetic is born. That this aesthetic aims at social acceptability or on the contrary to break away from existing codes, it is always accompanied by a new system of constraints—a new order—that is paradoxically in need of new exclusions. The historical overview that we propose around the notion of disciplinary thought will concern itself with fundamental interrogations—the vertigo of alienations and its monsters, the tensions between text and matter, the relationship between art and culpability, the fear of punishment in regards to public exposure: all places of thought and artistic practices which we find during the 18th century but also, during the 20th century, in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's efforts in redefining theatre

Rafik Schami: Sophia oder Der Anfang aller Geschichten

SOPHIA oder Der Anfang aller Geschichten ist das j\ufcngste Beispiel f\ufcr das \ufcberzeugende und erfolgreiche literarische Schaffen des syrischst\ue4mmigen Schriftstellers Rafik Schami, Pseudonym f\ufcr Suheil Fad\ue9l. Das Werk, dessen Titel auf den Namen der Mutter der Hauptfigur verweist, gliedert sich in 43 nicht nummerierte Hauptkapitel von unterschiedlicher L\ue4nge. SOPHIA oder Der Anfang aller Geschichten ist der Ehefrau Root und dem Sohn Emil des Autors gewidmet, aber auch all denjenigen, die \uabeine Fata Morgana f\ufcr ihr verlorenes Paradies halten\ubb , die also mit einem tr\ufcgerischen Spiegelbild ihrer verlorenen Heimat im Kopf leben und \u2013 vergeblich \u2013 einen Weg aus der W\ufcste erhoffen. Der Roman erz\ue4hlt den Lebenslauf des exilierten Salman Baladi, der aus politischen Gr\ufcnden aus seiner Heimat Syrien flieht und in Europa zweimal ein neues Leben beginnen muss. SOPHIA macht Salmans Lebens zum Ausgangspunkt zahlreicher weiterer Erz\ue4hlungen

Book review: Cut/copy/paste: fragments from the history of bookwork by Whitney Trettien

In Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork, Whitney Trettien explores how seventeenth-century English publishers cut up and reassembled paper media into radical, bespoke publications, arguing that this ‘bookwork’ contributes to understanding digital scholarship and publishing today. Through its magnetic prose that narrates weird and joyous entanglements with the printed word, Trettien reveals that the lives of books are longer and stranger than we imagine, writes Sam di Bella. Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork. Whitney Trettien. University of Minnesota Press. 2021

Book review: Cut/copy/paste: fragments from the history of bookwork by Whitney Trettien

In Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork, Whitney Trettien explores how seventeenth-century English publishers cut up and reassembled paper media into radical, bespoke publications, arguing that this ‘bookwork’ contributes to understanding digital scholarship and publishing today. Through its magnetic prose that narrates weird and joyous entanglements with the printed word, Trettien reveals that the lives of books are longer and stranger than we imagine, writes Sam di Bella

MODELLING & SIMULATION HYBRID WARFARE Researches, Models and Tools for Hybrid Warfare and Population Simulation

The Hybrid Warfare phenomena, which is the subject of the current research, has been framed by the work of Professor Agostino Bruzzone (University of Genoa) and Professor Erdal Cayirci (University of Stavanger), that in June 2016 created in order to inquiry the subject a dedicated Exploratory Team, which was endorsed by NATO Modelling & Simulation Group (a panel of the NATO Science & Technology organization) and established with the participation as well of the author. The author brought his personal contribution within the ET43 by introducing meaningful insights coming from the lecture of \u201cFight by the minutes: Time and the Art of War (1994)\u201d, written by Lieutenant Colonel US Army (Rtd.) Robert Leonhard; in such work, Leonhard extensively developed the concept that \u201cTime\u201d, rather than geometry of the battlefield and/or firepower, is the critical factor to tackle in military operations and by extension in Hybrid Warfare. The critical reflection about the time - both in its quantitative and qualitative dimension - in a hybrid confrontation it is addressed and studied inside SIMCJOH, a software built around challenges that imposes literally to \u201cFight by the minutes\u201d, echoing the core concept expressed in the eponymous work. Hybrid Warfare \u2013 which, by definition and purpose, aims to keep the military commitment of both aggressor and defender at the lowest - can gain enormous profit by employing a wide variety of non-military tools, turning them into a weapon, as in the case of the phenomena of \u201cweaponization of mass migrations\u201d, as it is examined in the \u201cDies Irae\u201d simulation architecture. Currently, since migration it is a very sensitive and divisive issue among the public opinions of many European countries, cynically leveraging on a humanitarian emergency caused by an exogenous, inducted migration, could result in a high level of political and social destabilization, which indeed favours the concurrent actions carried on by other hybrid tools. Other kind of disruption however, are already available in the arsenal of Hybrid Warfare, such cyber threats, information campaigns lead by troll factories for the diffusion of fake/altered news, etc. From this perspective the author examines how the TREX (Threat network simulation for REactive eXperience) simulator is able to offer insights about a hybrid scenario characterized by an intense level of social disruption, brought by cyber-attacks and systemic faking of news. Furthermore, the rising discipline of \u201cStrategic Engineering\u201d, as envisaged by Professor Agostino Bruzzone, when matched with the operational requirements to fulfil in order to counter Hybrid Threats, it brings another innovative, as much as powerful tool, into the professional luggage of the military and the civilian employed in Defence and Homeland security sectors. Hybrid is not the New War. What is new is brought by globalization paired with the transition to the information age and rising geopolitical tensions, which have put new emphasis on hybrid hostilities that manifest themselves in a contemporary way. Hybrid Warfare is a deliberate choice of an aggressor. While militarily weak nations can resort to it in order to re-balance the odds, instead military strong nations appreciate its inherent effectiveness coupled with the denial of direct responsibility, thus circumventing the rules of the International Community (IC). In order to be successful, Hybrid Warfare should consist of a highly coordinated, sapient mix of diverse and dynamic combination of regular forces, irregular forces (even criminal elements), cyber disruption etc. all in order to achieve effects across the entire DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. However, the owner of the strategy, i.e. the aggressor, by keeping the threshold of impunity as high as possible and decreasing the willingness of the defender, can maintain his Hybrid Warfare at a diplomatically feasible level; so the model of the capacity, willingness and threshold, as proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone and Gunneriusson (2016), remains critical to comprehend Hybrid Warfare. Its dynamicity is able to capture the evanescent, blurring line between Hybrid Warfare and Conventional Warfare. In such contest time is the critical factor: this because it is hard to foreseen for the aggressor how long he can keep up with such strategy without risking either the retaliation from the International Community or the depletion of resources across its own DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. Similar discourse affects the defender: if he isn\u2019t able to cope with Hybrid Threats (i.e. taking no action), time works against him; if he is, he can start to develop counter narrative and address physical countermeasures. However, this can lead, in the medium long period, to an unforeseen (both for the attacker and the defender) escalation into a large, conventional, armed conflict. The performance of operations that required more than kinetic effects drove the development of DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models and in turn this drive the development of Human Social Culture Behavior Modelling (HCSB), which should stand at the core of the Hybrid Warfare modelling and simulation efforts. Multi Layers models are fundamental to evaluate Strategies and Support Decisions: currently there are favourable conditions to implement models of Hybrid Warfare, such as Dies Irae, SIMCJOH and TREX, in order to further develop tools and war-games for studying new tactics, execute collective training and to support decisions making and analysis planning. The proposed approach is based on the idea to create a mosaic made by HLA interoperable simulators able to be combined as tiles to cover an extensive part of the Hybrid Warfare, giving the users an interactive and intuitive environment based on the \u201cModelling interoperable Simulation and Serious Game\u201d (MS2G) approach. From this point of view, the impressive capabilities achieved by IA-CGF in human behavior modeling to support population simulation as well as their native HLA structure, suggests to adopt them as core engine in this application field. However, it necessary to highlight that, when modelling DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT domains, the researcher has to be aware of the bias introduced by the fact that especially Political and Social \u201cscience\u201d are accompanied and built around value judgement. From this perspective, the models proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone, Guinnarson (2016) and by Balaban & Mileniczek (2018) are indeed a courageous tentative to import, into the domain of particularly poorly understood phenomena (social, politics, and to a lesser degree economics - Hartley, 2016), the mathematical and statistical instruments and the methodologies employed by the pure, hard sciences. Nevertheless, just using the instruments and the methodology of the hard sciences it is not enough to obtain the objectivity, and is such aspect the representations of Hybrid Warfare mechanics could meet their limit: this is posed by the fact that they use, as input for the equations that represents Hybrid Warfare, not physical data observed during a scientific experiment, but rather observation of the reality that assumes implicitly and explicitly a value judgment, which could lead to a biased output. Such value judgement it is subjective, and not objective like the mathematical and physical sciences; when this is not well understood and managed by the academic and the researcher, it can introduce distortions - which are unacceptable for the purpose of the Science - which could be used as well to enforce a narrative mainstream that contains a so called \u201ctruth\u201d, which lies inside the boundary of politics rather than Science. Those observations around subjectivity of social sciences vs objectivity of pure sciences, being nothing new, suggest however the need to examine the problem under a new perspective, less philosophical and more leaned toward the practical application. The suggestion that the author want make here is that the Verification and Validation process, in particular the methodology used by Professor Bruzzone in doing V&V for SIMCJOH (2016) and the one described in the Modelling & Simulation User Risk Methodology (MURM) developed by Pandolfini, Youngblood et all (2018), could be applied to evaluate if there is a bias and the extent of the it, or at least making clear the value judgment adopted in developing the DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models. Such V&V research is however outside the scope of the present work, even though it is an offspring of it, and for such reason the author would like to make further inquiries on this particular subject in the future. Then, the theoretical discourse around Hybrid Warfare has been completed addressing the need to establish a new discipline, Strategic Engineering, very much necessary because of the current a political and economic environment which allocates diminishing resources to Defense and Homeland Security (at least in Europe). However, Strategic Engineering can successfully address its challenges when coupled with the understanding and the management of the fourth dimension of military and hybrid operations, Time. For the reasons above, and as elaborated by Leonhard and extensively discussed in the present work, addressing the concern posed by Time dimension is necessary for the success of any military or Hybrid confrontation. The SIMCJOH project, examined under the above perspective, proved that the simulator has the ability to address the fourth dimension of military and non-military confrontation. In operations, Time is the most critical factor during execution, and this was successfully transferred inside the simulator; as such, SIMCJOH can be viewed as a training tool and as well a dynamic generator of events for the MEL/MIL execution during any exercise. In conclusion, SIMCJOH Project successfully faces new challenging aspects, allowed to study and develop new simulation models in order to support decision makers, Commanders and their Staff. Finally, the question posed by Leonhard in terms of recognition of the importance of time management of military operations - nowadays Hybrid Conflict - has not been answered yet; however, the author believes that Modelling and Simulation tools and techniques can represent the safe \u201ctank\u201d where innovative and advanced scientific solutions can be tested, exploiting the advantage of doing it in a synthetic environment