Vulnerable and voiceless on the move. Unaccompanied child migrants in the EU

A significant part of child migration is “often invisible in data and policy”, but available data shows that at least 5.3% of the over one million migrants who have lodged first time asylum application in the EU in 2016 were unaccompanied children in need of international protection and that the numbers are constantly rising. In spite of this alarming trend, unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC) still suffer in Europe particularly in Greece and Italy seriously inadequate protection, inappropriate services to meet their needs and interests, as well as slow and poor procedures to process their files and ensure them asylum status, family reunification, or relocation, according to their needs. Such dysfunctionalities often encourage young migrants to escape the system and continue their journey relying on smugglers, with the additional risk of becoming victims of abuse and exploitation. The European Union should overcome the Member States’ increasing lack of solidarity and expand the EU regular migration package, starting from the family reunification procedures

Environmental Migrations from Conflict-Affected Countries: Focus on EU Policy Response

Given the strong evidence that most environmental migration is likely to occur within the Global South, the analysis of this paper and many of its recommendations focus on EU external and humanitarian policies in the field of environmental migration, as well as foreign policy and humanitarian aid and development-cooperation programs implemented in conflict-affected countries. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the environmental migration debate with a multifaceted perspective that takes into account the relationship between climate change, migration and conflict. In doing so, it aims to highlight areas of particular political and geopolitical interest where further EU legal, policy, and humanitarian action is needed. On the basis of the analyzed legal, political, and institutional frameworks and the critical issues raised from the rograms implemented in the field, I will indicate areas of political and geopolitical interest for EU external action and humanitarian aid strategy and where further EU policy action is needed

Multigranular scale speech recognition: tehnological and cognitive view

We propose a Multigranular Automatic Speech Recognizer. The hypothesis is that speech signal contains information distributed on more different time scales. Many works from various scientific fields ranging from neurobiology to speech technologies, seem to concord on this assumption. In a broad sense, it seems that speech recognition in human is optimal because of a partial parallelization process according to which the left-to-right stream of speech is captured in a multilevel grid in which several linguistic analyses take place contemporarily. Our investigation aims, in this view, to apply these new ideas to the project of more robust and efficient recognizers

Pompeii & Herculaneum archaeological sites: conservation and management

This first part of the paper begins with an historical overview of the development of Pompeii and Herculaneum as an archaeological site and heritage attraction, providing an insight concerning the culture and nature of these ancient citiesduring theRoman period. A focus will be given on the context of these rediscoveries, and their impact within Italy and around the world and most importantly who owned, managed, and/or visited the sites throughout their history.The paper also looks at how the ideas about thefame of Pompeii affects tourism, management, and the creation of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The conclusion compares the potential of the recent public/private partnership initiative at Herculaneum ‘The Herculaneum Conservation Project’and the latest fully public funded project at Pompeii ‘The Great Project Pompeii’

Temperature dependence of the surface plasmon resonance in small electron gas fragments, self consistent field approximation

The temperature dependence of the surface plasmon resonance in small metal spheres is calculated using an electron gas model within the Random Phase Approximation. The calculation is mainly devoted to the study of spheres with diameters up to at least 10 nm, where quantum effects can still be relevant and simple plasmon pole approximation for the dielectric function is no more appropriate. We find a possible blue shift of the plasmon resonance position when the temperature is increased while keeping the size of the sphere fixed. The blue shift is appreciable only when the temperature is a large fraction of the Fermi energy. These results provide a guide for pump and probe experiments with a high time resolution, and tailored to study the excited electron system before thermalisation with the lattice takes place.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Alignment-free Genomic Analysis via a Big Data Spark Platform

Motivation: Alignment-free distance and similarity functions (AF functions, for short) are a well established alternative to two and multiple sequence alignments for many genomic, metagenomic and epigenomic tasks. Due to data-intensive applications, the computation of AF functions is a Big Data problem, with the recent Literature indicating that the development of fast and scalable algorithms computing AF functions is a high-priority task. Somewhat surprisingly, despite the increasing popularity of Big Data technologies in Computational Biology, the development of a Big Data platform for those tasks has not been pursued, possibly due to its complexity. Results: We fill this important gap by introducing FADE, the first extensible, efficient and scalable Spark platform for Alignment-free genomic analysis. It supports natively eighteen of the best performing AF functions coming out of a recent hallmark benchmarking study. FADE development and potential impact comprises novel aspects of interest. Namely, (a) a considerable effort of distributed algorithms, the most tangible result being a much faster execution time of reference methods like MASH and FSWM; (b) a software design that makes FADE user-friendly and easily extendable by Spark non-specialists; (c) its ability to support data- and compute-intensive tasks. About this, we provide a novel and much needed analysis of how informative and robust AF functions are, in terms of the statistical significance of their output. Our findings naturally extend the ones of the highly regarded benchmarking study, since the functions that can really be used are reduced to a handful of the eighteen included in FADE