517 research outputs found
Faraway, so close: a spatial account of the Conte I government formation in Italy, 2018
The formation of the âyellow-greenâ government that took office in Italy after the general election held on 4 March 2018 looked puzzling to many commentators as the two coalition partners â the Five Star Movement and the League â appeared to be quite distant on the leftâright continuum. In this article, we argue that despite being widely used in the literature, a unidimensional representation of parties' policy positions on the encompassing leftâright scale is inadequate to explain the process of coalition governments' formation. We focus first on coalition outcomes in Italy in the period 2001â18. Our statistical analysis including, among other variables, parties' policy distance on the leftâright dimension performs rather well until 2013 but fails to predict the coalition outcome in 2018. To solve the puzzle, we propose a two-dimensional spatial account of the Conte I government formation in which the first dimension coincides with the economic leftâright and the second one is related to immigration, the European Union issues and social conservatism. We show that the coalition outcome ceases to be poorly understandable once parties' policy positions are measured along these two dimensions, rather than on the general leftâright continuum
The Making of Uniform Costing in a War Economy: the case of the 'Uniconti' Commission in Fascist Italy
The paper analyses the experience carried out by the Uniconti Commission in setting rules of uniform costing in Italy during the World War II (WWII). This initiative was promoted by the Italian Fascist government and the Confederazione dellâIndustria (Industry Confederation) in 1941. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the process of setting the uniform costing rules and âwhyâ and âhowâ they were designed, according to a Foucauldian perspective that allows the problematization of accounting as a complex phenomenon, whose emergence and functioning is linked to the context and dependent on the interplay of different influences.
Starting from the aims inspired to the totalitarian ideology of the government that promoted the Commission, the analysis is grounded on archival primary sources and provides the perspective of the making of new accounting rules by the interplay among the participants acting in the process. This allows focusing the interaction between the domains of interests and of expectations - political-ideological, technical and economic - that the process of setting the uniform costing system in that context implied. The outcome of the Commission represented a compromise between the stances of the accounting academy, the interests of business representatives, the dominant ideology and the political targets.
Thus, the paper provides insightful evidence of the complex interplay between knowledge, techniques, institutions and ideology in setting accounting rules in a totalitarian context, marked by a prevailing role of ideology and state in the regulation of econom
Thermal boundary resistance from transient nanocalorimetry: a multiscale modeling approach
The Thermal Boundary Resistance at the interface between a nanosized Al film
and an Al_{2}O_{3} substrate is investigated at an atomistic level. A room
temperature value of 1.4 m^{2}K/GW is found. The thermal dynamics occurring in
time-resolved thermo-reflectance experiments is then modelled via macro-physics
equations upon insertion of the materials parameters obtained from atomistic
simulations. Electrons and phonons non-equilibrium and spatio-temporal
temperatures inhomo- geneities are found to persist up to the nanosecond time
scale. These results question the validity of the commonly adopted lumped
thermal capacitance model in interpreting transient nanocalorimetry
experiments. The strategy adopted in the literature to extract the Thermal
Boundary Resistance from transient reflectivity traces is revised at the light
of the present findings. The results are of relevance beyond the specific
system, the physical picture being general and readily extendable to other
heterojunctions.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure
Fast deuterium fractionation in magnetized and turbulent filaments
Deuterium fractionation is considered as an important process to infer the
chemical ages of prestellar cores in filaments. We present here the first
magneto-hydrodynamical simulations including a chemical network to study
deuterium fractionation in magnetized and turbulent filaments and their
substructures. The filaments typically show widespread deuterium fractionation
with average values . For individual cores of similar age, we
observe the deuteration fraction to increase with time, but also to be
independent of their average properties such as density, virial or
mass-to-magnetic flux ratio. We further find a correlation of the deuteration
fraction with core mass, average H density and virial parameter only at
late evolutionary stages of the filament and attribute this to the lifetime of
the individual cores. Specifically, chemically old cores reveal higher
deuteration fractions. Within the radial profiles of selected cores, we notice
differences in the structure of the deuteration fraction or surface density,
which we can attribute to their different turbulent properties. High
deuteration fractions of the order may be reached within
approximately ~kyrs, corresponding to two free-fall times, as defined for
cylindrical systems, of the filamentsComment: submitted to MNRAS. Comments welcom
The evolution of massive clumps in star forming regions
In this thesis two related arguments are investigated:
- The first stages of the process of massive star formation, investigating the physical conditions and -properties of massive clumps in different evolutionary stages, and their CO depletion;
- The influence that high-mass stars have on the nearby material and on the activity of star formation.
I characterise the gas and dust temperature, mass and density of a sample of massive clumps, and analyse the variation of these properties from quiescent clumps, without any sign of active star formation, to clumps likely hosting a zero-age main sequence star. I briefly discuss CO depletion and recent observations of several molecular species, tracers of Hot Cores and/or shocked gas, of a subsample of these clumps.
The issue of CO depletion is addressed in more detail in a larger sample consisting of the brightest sources in the ATLASGAL survey: using a radiative tranfer code I investigate how the depletion changes from dark clouds to more evolved objects, and compare its evolution to what happens in the low-mass regime.
Finally, I derive the physical properties of the molecular gas in the photon-dominated region adjacent to the HII region G353.2+0.9 in the vicinity of Pismis 24, a young, massive cluster, containing some of the most massive and hottest stars known in our Galaxy. I derive the IMF of the cluster and study the star formation activity in its surroundings.
Much of the data analysis is done with a Bayesian approach. Therefore, a separate chapter is dedicated to the concepts of Bayesian statistics
Heat and mass transfer coefficients of falling-film absorption on a partially wetted horizontal tube
Tracking local magnetic dynamics via high-energy charge excitations in a relativistic Mott insulator
We use time- and energy-resolved optical spectroscopy to investigate the
coupling of electron-hole excitations to the magnetic environment in the
relativistic Mott insulator NaIrO. We show that, on the picosecond
timescale, the photoinjected electron-hole pairs delocalize on the hexagons of
the Ir lattice via the formation of quasi-molecular orbital (QMO) excitations
and the exchange of energy with the short-range-ordered zig-zag magnetic
background. The possibility of mapping the magnetic dynamics, which is
characterized by typical frequencies in the THz range, onto high-energy (1-2
eV) charge excitations provides a new platform to investigate, and possibly
control, the dynamics of magnetic interactions in correlated materials with
strong spin-orbit coupling, even in the presence of complex magnetic phases.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, supplementary informatio
Strong enhancement of d-wave superconducting state in the three-band Hubbard model coupled to an apical oxygen phonon
We study the hole binding energy and pairing correlations in the three-band
Hubbard model coupled to an apical oxygen phonon, by exact diagonalization and
constrained-path Monte Carlo simulations. In the physically relevant
charge-transfer regime, we find that the hole binding energy is strongly
enhanced by the electron-phonon interaction, which is due to a novel
potential-energy-driven pairing mechanism involving reduction of both
electronic potential energy and phonon related energy. The enhancement of hole
binding energy, in combination with a phonon-induced increase of quasiparticle
weight, leads to a dramatic enhancement of the long-range part of d-wave
pairing correlations. Our results indicate that the apical oxygen phonon plays
a significant role in the superconductivity of high- cuprates.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
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