Social policies in Italian Fascism. Authoritarian strategies and social integration

The essay will retrace some of the fundamental steps concerning the development of the Italian welfare state during the years of Fascism, framing them within the most recent historiographical debate as well as in the context of some national and international issues. In particular, the national insurance and welfare policies under Fascism will be examined both in the more general context of the growth of social policies seen in the 1930s, and in reference to the main Italian institution responsible for the management of social security (the INFPS, the Fascist National Institute of Social Welfare)

Semistability of certain bundles on a quintic Calabi-Yau threefold

In the paper ``Chirality change in string theory'', by Douglas and Zhou, the authors give a list of bundles on a quintic Calabi-Yau threefold. Here we prove the semistability of most of these bundles. This provides examples of string theory compactifications which have a different number of generations and can be connected

Simplicity of generic Steiner bundles

We prove that a generic Steiner bundle E is simple if and only if the Euler characteristic of the endomorphism bundle of E is less or equal to 1. In particular we show that either E is exceptional or it satisfies the following inequality t\leq(\frac{n+1+\sqrt((n+1)^2-4)}{2})s.Comment: 11 page

Parallel Tempering for the planted clique problem

The theoretical information threshold for the planted clique problem is $2\log_2(N)$, however no polynomial algorithm is known to recover a planted clique of size $O(N^{1/2-\epsilon})$, $\epsilon>0$. In this paper we will apply a standard method for the analysis of disordered models, the Parallel-Tempering (PT) algorithm, to the clique problem, showing numerically that its time-scaling in the hard region is indeed polynomial for the analyzed sizes. We also apply PT to a different but connected model, the Sparse Planted Independent Set problem. In this situation thresholds should be sharper and finite size corrections should be less important. Also in this case PT shows a polynomial scaling in the hard region for the recovery.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Rifugiati o libertà? Le responsabilità dell’Europa nella crisi dei rifugiati siriani in Turchia.

Le responsabilità dell'Europa nella crisi dei rifugiati siriani in Turchi

Cokernel bundles and Fibonacci bundles

We are interested in those bundles $C$ on $\mathbb{P}^N$ which admit a resolution of the form $$0 \to \mathbb{C}^s \otimes E \xrightarrow{\mu} \mathbb{C}^t \otimes F \to C \to 0.$$ In this paper we prove that, under suitable conditions on $(E,F)$, a generic bundle with this form is either simple or canonically decomposable. As applications we provide an easy criterion for the stability of such bundles on $\mathbb{P}^2$ and we prove the stability when $E = \mathcal{O}$, $F = \mathcal{O}(1)$ and $C$ is an exceptional bundle on $\mathbb{P}^N$ for $N \geq 2$.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, revised version, to appear in Mathematische Nachrichte

Back to the future: authors, publishers and ideas in a copy-friendly environment

How could scholars survive in a copy-friendly environment jeopardizing the established system of scholarly publishing in which scientific publishers seemed to be authors' best friends? A backward itinerary across three German Enlightenment thinkers who took part to the debate on (unauthorized) reprinting shows us ways – usual and unusual - in which culture can flourish in a copy-friendly environment. While Fichte endorsed an intellectual property theory, took the function of publishers for granted and neglected the interests of the public, Kant saw authors as speakers and justified publishers' rights only as long as they work as spokespersons helping writers to reach the public. Eventually Lessing's project was designed to foster authors' autonomy by means of a subscription system that could have worked only on the basis of a free information flow and of direct relationships with and within the public itself. Such a condition can be compared with the situation of ancient auctores, with one difference: while the ancient communities of knowledge were educated minorities, because of the limitations of orality and manuscript media system, we have now the opportunity to take Enlightenment seriously

The pirate from Koenigsberg: why closed source software is not worth of copyright protection

According to Kant, property applies only to touchable things, among which he includes the works of art. For the very principle of private property, a legitimate purchaser has the right to replicate and to share them without restrictions. Kant recognizes copyright only on written texts, by conceiving them as speeches that exclusively authorized spokespersons - the publishers - may convey to the public in the name of their authors. The rights of the authorized publishers, however, are justified only if they help the public to get the texts. In a Kantian environment, open source software would be worth of copyright protection, because it can be conceived as a speech meant to human beings. On the contrary, Kant would treat closed source programs as works of art, without according them copyright protection, because, as none is allowed to read and to understand them, they cannot be conceived as a speeches meant to the public. Closed source programs are like sealed books that no one is allowed to read: why do we keep on taking for granted that they are worth of copyright protection?Kant copyright software

Real Space Renormalization Group Theory of Disordered Models of Glasses

We develop a real space renormalisation group analysis of disordered models of glasses, in particular of the spin models at the origin of the Random First Order Transition theory. We find three fixed points respectively associated to the liquid state, to the critical behavior and to the glass state. The latter two are zero-temperature ones; this provides a natural explanation of the growth of effective activation energy scale and the concomitant huge increase of relaxation time approaching the glass transition. The lower critical dimension depends on the nature of the interacting degrees of freedom and is higher than three for all models. This does not prevent three dimensional systems from being glassy. Indeed, we find that their renormalisation group flow is affected by the fixed points existing in higher dimension and in consequence is non-trivial. Within our theoretical framework the glass transition results to be an avoided phase transition.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure