Landscape as mediator, landscape as commons: an introduction

Il contributo propone una trattazione dei due temi chiavi che si intersecano nel volume, andando a costituire non solo una introduzione ai saggi ivi contenuti, ma una pi\uf9 ampia trattazione delle questioni attorno a cui questi si muovono: le potenzialit\ue0 del concetto di paesaggio considerato come intermediario/mediatore e come bene comune/commons. Il volume raccoglie i migliori contributi internazionali presentati nelle sessioni sul paesaggio del congresso Eugeo 2013 (Roma) coordinate dai curatori dell'opera, e si conclude con una approfondita postfazione redatta da Kenneth R. Olwig, che ha partecipato come discussant ai lavori congressuali

Overhauling corporate taxation in the digital economy. CEPS Policy Insights No 2019-15/October 2019

Is the corporate income tax (CIT) still an efficient system for taxing companies today? The CIT was introduced when economies were characterised primarily by tangible assets and goods and by limited international trade. Globalisation, digitalisation and the increasing weight of immaterial goods in company transactions and balance sheets have rendered that system outdated. These radical changes call for equally radical reflections on how to reform the CIT, bearing in mind the need for a corporate tax system that is fit for both the digital and the traditional economy, in developing and developed countries alike. Rather than offering a complete solution, this paper discusses various approaches that could contribute to a solution. First, we suggest that the CIT base should always be strictly aligned with the accounting profit and loss account, eschewing special adjustments for tax purposes. Second, a more radical possibility would be to abandon altogether the reference to corporate income and tax companies instead on cash flow, based on destination. And, third, the possibility could also be explored to tax companies with reference to ‘presumptive’ indicators of activity, rather than on the basis of public accounts. Presumptive indicators are already used in federal systems to allocate corporate income among decentralised jurisdictions. These propositions would not be viable without international agreement, at least at the level of the European Union. Such an agreement may prove difficult given the conflicts of interest between EU member states and between them and the United State

Ultralong-range radiative excitation transfer between quantum dots in a planar microcavity

We study the system of two quantum dots lying on the central plane of a planar semiconductor microcavity. By solving the full Maxwell problem, we demonstrate that the rate of resonant excitation transfer between the two dots decays as $d^{-1/2}$ as a function of the distance $d$ at long distance. This very long-range mechanism is due to the leaky and guided modes of the microcavity, which act as effective radiative transfer channels. At short distance, the $d^{-3}$ dependence of the F\"orster mechanism, induced by the electrostatic dipole-dipole interaction, is recovered

L'Enciclopedia Multimediale delle Scienze Filosofiche

La presentazione affronta il tema della comunicazione multimediale attraverso linguaggi e format di eccellenza.2008-04-17Sardegna Ricerche, Edificio 2, Località Piscinamanna 09010 Pula (CA) - ItaliaPAAL 2008 - Pubblica Amministrazione Aperta e Libera: dalle tecnologie aperte alla libera circolazione dei contenuti digital

Crisis of landscapes, landscapes of the crisis: notes for a socio-ecological approach

The paper focuses on the relationships between landscape and the multi-faceted crisis of our times. We live in a time of crises for Western citizens (cultural, ecological, political, institutional and social crises). The landscape crisis is actually entangled in a bundle of planetary crises, and this paper represents an attempt to outline a relational and genetic approach to this subject. Landscape crisis is rooted in an underlying territorial crisis, and the case of the crumbling of the Italian code of space is taken as an example. The premodern Italian landscape has been dismantled by the irruption of a growth-first paradigm and a commodification of the social system. In a globalising process, surrounding territories have lost importance for localised communities. Contextually, mechanized monocultures and industrialized metropolitan areas have reshaped the geographical features of territories, in Italy and on the world scale. The landscape issue cannot therefore be detached from an overall process of change from traditional to modern territorialities. This approach to landscapes and landscaping aims to provide some basic tools to deconstruct the reasons for the present crisis from their foundations, in the conviction that the landscape cannot be “saved” alone. In fact, it is not possible to attain liveable landscapes without preserving at the same time our territories, our living planet and the natural commons essential to life

Two load sharing plates fixation in mandibular condylar fractures: Biomechanical basis

Mandibular condylar fractures have a high incidence but there is no consensus regarding the best choice of osteosynthesis. From a review of the literature, it is evident that the technique used most frequently for fixation is the positioning of a single plate despite complications concerning plate fracture or screw loosening have been reported by various authors. Different studies have highlighted that the stability of osteosynthesis is correlated with the mechanical strains occurring in the condylar region, generated by the muscles of mastication. The aim of our study was, through a mandibular finite element model (FEM), to confirm this correlation and to analyse the behaviour of single and double elements of union in the fixation of mandibular subcondylar fractures. We concluded that the use of two plates provides greater stability compared with the single plate, reducing the possibility of displacement of the condylar fragment. Therefore we recommend that this technique should be adopted whenever possible

Learning Independent Causal Mechanisms

Statistical learning relies upon data sampled from a distribution, and we usually do not care what actually generated it in the first place. From the point of view of causal modeling, the structure of each distribution is induced by physical mechanisms that give rise to dependences between observables. Mechanisms, however, can be meaningful autonomous modules of generative models that make sense beyond a particular entailed data distribution, lending themselves to transfer between problems. We develop an algorithm to recover a set of independent (inverse) mechanisms from a set of transformed data points. The approach is unsupervised and based on a set of experts that compete for data generated by the mechanisms, driving specialization. We analyze the proposed method in a series of experiments on image data. Each expert learns to map a subset of the transformed data back to a reference distribution. The learned mechanisms generalize to novel domains. We discuss implications for transfer learning and links to recent trends in generative modeling.Comment: ICML 201

Tempered Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been shown to produce realistic samples from high-dimensional distributions, but training them is considered hard. A possible explanation for training instabilities is the inherent imbalance between the networks: While the discriminator is trained directly on both real and fake samples, the generator only has control over the fake samples it produces since the real data distribution is fixed by the choice of a given dataset. We propose a simple modification that gives the generator control over the real samples which leads to a tempered learning process for both generator and discriminator. The real data distribution passes through a lens before being revealed to the discriminator, balancing the generator and discriminator by gradually revealing more detailed features necessary to produce high-quality results. The proposed module automatically adjusts the learning process to the current strength of the networks, yet is generic and easy to add to any GAN variant. In a number of experiments, we show that this can improve quality, stability and/or convergence speed across a range of different GAN architectures (DCGAN, LSGAN, WGAN-GP).Comment: accepted to ICML 201