Government Equity Participation Under the EEC Rules on State Aids: Recent Developments

This Article examines the main legal questions raised by the particulat form of State aid known as equity participation. While the focus is on the internal, or EEC, aspect of such aids, the Article also suggests a comparison to some of the most relevant external, or GATT, aspects of these questions

Activated γδ T cells inhibit osteoclast differentiation and resorptive activity in vitro

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

An agent-driven semantical identifier using radial basis neural networks and reinforcement learning

Due to the huge availability of documents in digital form, and the deception possibility raise bound to the essence of digital documents and the way they are spread, the authorship attribution problem has constantly increased its relevance. Nowadays, authorship attribution,for both information retrieval and analysis, has gained great importance in the context of security, trust and copyright preservation. This work proposes an innovative multi-agent driven machine learning technique that has been developed for authorship attribution. By means of a preprocessing for word-grouping and time-period related analysis of the common lexicon, we determine a bias reference level for the recurrence frequency of the words within analysed texts, and then train a Radial Basis Neural Networks (RBPNN)-based classifier to identify the correct author. The main advantage of the proposed approach lies in the generality of the semantic analysis, which can be applied to different contexts and lexical domains, without requiring any modification. Moreover, the proposed system is able to incorporate an external input, meant to tune the classifier, and then self-adjust by means of continuous learning reinforcement.Comment: Published on: Proceedings of the XV Workshop "Dagli Oggetti agli Agenti" (WOA 2014), Catania, Italy, Sepember. 25-26, 201

Long run and short run dynamics in italian manufacturing labour productivity

This paper examines structural changes in the Italian manufacturing sector, focusing on labour productivity in recent decades. To this end it distinguishes between trend and cyclical movements in the data using a multivariate unobserved components model. Changes in the relative importance of cyclical and trend components in labour productivity allow discrimination among the impacts of the factors affecting the performance of the Italian manufacturing sector during the 1980s, 1990s and in the more recent period.unobserved component models

Preliminary Results of a Survey of Farm Animal Biodiversity Conservation Actions in Europe Under the Framework of Agenda 2000

In this paper we report on preliminary results of a research aimed to examine the content of farm animal biodiversity conservation actions currently under implementation in the European Union in the framework of EU Agenda 2000. In particular, we surveyed sixty-three Rural Development Plans (RDPs) set up in twelve countries in application of EEC regulations 1257/99 and 1750/99. Our analysis focused on endangered breeds of six major livestock species included in the RDPs. This analysis, which is based on the comparison with the indicator's status of the DAD-IS FAO database, allowed to identify priorities in conservation efforts in each country, and estimate the level of expected public expenditure needed to ensure the moving of breeds from at-risk (of extinction) status to not-at-risk status over the period 2000-2006.farm animal biodiversity, Agenda 2000, Rural Development Plans., Livestock Production/Industries, Q18, Q20,

Tectonic deformation on icy satellites: A model of compensating horsts

Voyager images demonstrate that the icy satellites have been shaped by a variety of magmatic and tectonic processes, of which ridge and trough terrain is a manifestation. This terrain is observed on Ganymede, Enceladus, Miranda, and Ariel, and many models have been proposed to explain its origin. A likely model is horst and graben style normal faulting, in which horizontal extension results in a series of downdropped grabens and relatively uplifted horsts. The apparent negative elevation of ridges and troughs relative to surrounding terrain has been used to argue such an extensional-tectonic origin for ridge and trough terrain on Ganymede and Enceladus. A ridge or ridge set which stands above a presumed original base level, thus, might be suspect of having a magmatic or compressional origin. It has been shown that rotation of domino-style normal faulting, which involves rotation of fault blocks about a fulcrum, can allow ridges to stand slightly above the original base level, and this relative uplift may be amplified by isostatic uplift. Compensation might also be accomplished through uplift of adjacent horsts. These theories are defended with dynamical equations