International Environmental Agreement: a Dynamic Model of Emissions Reduction

We model an International Environmental Agreement as a two stages game: during the first stage each country decides whether or not to join the agreement while, in the second stage, the quantity of emissions reduction is choosen. Players determine their abatement levels in a dynamic setting, given the dynamics of pollution stock and the strategies of other countries. Players may act cooperatively, building coalitions and acting according to the interest of the coalition, or they make their choices taking care of their individual interest only. Countries can behave myopically or in a farsighted way. As a consequence, the size of stable coalition can completely change. A continuous time framework is choosen in the present paper and consequently the problem is studied by a differential game.IEA, Differential games, Coalition stability.

Cooperazione e competizione nello sfruttamento di una risorsa rinnovabile

In this paper we propose a static model describing the commercial exploitation of a common property renewable resource by a population of agents. Players can cooperate or compete; cooperators maximize the utility of their group while defectors maximize their own profit. Agents aren't assumed to be divided into the two groups from the beginning; by solving the static game we obtained the best response function of i-th player without making other agents positions. Then, the Nash equilibria we calculated point out how different strategies - all the players cooperate, all the players compete or players can be divided into cooperators and defectors - can coexist.Resource Exploitation, Game theory

The Sea Urchin Embryo: A Model for Studying Molecular Mechanisms Involved in Human Diseases and for Testing Bioactive Compounds

Most of the current knowledge concerning fundamental genetic mechanisms, evolutionary processes and development, cellular physiology, and pathogenesis comes from studies of different animal model systems. Whereas mice, rats, and other small mammals are generally thought of as the typical model systems used by researchers in biomedical studies, aquatic models including both freshwater and marine organisms have long proved to be essential for the study of basic biological processes. For over a century, biologists have used the sea urchin embryo as a prototype for the investigation of developmental mechanisms that contribute to building the embryo body plan. Here we highlight the contribution of the sea urchin embryo as a simple model for studying aging and age-associated neurodegenerative diseases, as well as the pathways and mechanisms involved in cell survival and death. Moreover, we point out the role of this embryonic system as a potent and affordable tool for learning about developmental effects and toxicity responses to environmental contaminants and chemical compounds

Salivary Biomarkers for Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Diagnosis and Follow-Up: Current Status and Perspectives

Oral cancer is the sixth most common cancer type in the world, and 90% of it is represented by oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Despite progress in preventive and therapeutic strategies, delay in OSCC diagnosis remains one of the major causes of high morbidity and mortality; indeed the majority of OSCC has been lately identified in the advanced clinical stage (i.e., III or IV). Moreover, after primary treatment, recurrences and/or metastases are found in more than half of the patients (80% of cases within the first 2 years) and the 5-year survival rate is still lower than 50%, resulting in a serious issue for public health. Currently, histological investigation represents the “gold standard” of OSCC diagnosis; however, recent studies have evaluated the potential use of non-invasive methods, such as “liquid biopsy,” for the detection of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in body fluids of oral cancer patients. Saliva is a biofluid containing factors such as cytokines, DNA and RNA molecules, circulating and tissue- derived cells, and extracellular vesicles (EVs) that may be used as biomarkers; their analysis may give us useful information to do early diagnosis of OSCC and improve the prognosis. Therefore, the aim of this review is reporting the most recent data on saliva biomarker detection in saliva liquid biopsy from oral cancer patients, with particular attention to circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), EVs, and microRNAs (miRNAs). Our results highlight that saliva liquid biopsy has several promising clinical uses in OSCC management; it is painless, accessible, and low cost and represents a very helpful source of diagnostic and prognostic biomarker detection. Even if standardized protocols for isolation, characterization, and evaluation are needed, recent data suggest that saliva may be successfully included in future clinical diagnostic processes, with a considerable impact on early treatment strategies and a favorable outcome

National Security Strategies: The Italian Case

Italy does not have a National Security Strategy (NSS) in the strict sense of the word, ie, a single governmental document for the medium-to-long term identifying the main security threats and response guidelines at a strategic level. Instead, it has several documents on the institutional responsibilities for the external (military) and internal (civil) dimensions of security

Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveal life styles in urban populations

Zipf-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics, biology, economics and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf-laws describe for example the frequency of words appearance in a text or the purchases types in shopping patterns. In the latter, the uneven distribution of transaction types is bound with the temporal sequences of purchases of individual choices. In this work, we define a framework using a text compression technique on the sequences of credit card purchases to detect ubiquitous patterns of collective behavior. Clustering the consumers by their similarity in purchases sequences, we detect five consumer groups. Remarkably, post checking, individuals in each group are also similar in their age, total expenditure, gender, and the diversity of their social and mobility networks extracted by their mobile phone records. By properly deconstructing transaction data with Zipf-like distributions, this method uncovers sets of significant sequences that reveal insights on collective human behavior.Comment: 30 pages, 26 figure

CoClust: An R Package for Copula-Based Cluster Analysis

The aim of this chapter is to present and describe the R package CoClust, which enables implementing a clustering algorithm based on the copula function. The copula-based clustering algorithm, called CoClust, was introduced by Di Lascio and Giannerini in 2012 (Journal of Classification, 29(1):50–75), improved in 2016 (Statistical Papers, p.1–17, DOI 10.1007/s00362-016-0822-3), and is able to find clusters according to the complex multivariate dependence structure of the data-generating process. Hence, among other advantages, the CoClust overcomes the limitations of classic approaches that only deal with linear bivariate relationships. The first part of the chapter briefly describes the clustering algorithm. The second part illustrates the clustering procedure through the R package CoClust and presents numerical examples showing how the main R commands can be used to perform a fully developed clustering of multivariate dependent data

Understanding Musical Consonance and Dissonance: Epistemological Considerations from a Systemic Perspective

Different accounts have been given in order to face the problem of the emergence of musical consonance and dissonance. Getting a more adequate comprehension of such phenomenology may require a systemic view to integrate such multidimensionality into a unitary picture in which every partial solution enlightens a particular aspect of the very same problem. Such a systemic viewpoint shifts the focus from different explanations to analytic dimensions that seem to be embedded in music perception. Taking into consideration these dimensions means understanding consonance and dissonance in an embodied context, in which arithmetic, physics, psychology and physiology are part of a complex and dynamic process of understanding, which is not reducible to any privileged explanatory level