Testing Linear Inequalities of Subgraph Statistics

Property testers are fast randomized algorithms whose task is to distinguish between inputs satisfying some predetermined property ? and those that are far from satisfying it. Since these algorithms operate by inspecting a small randomly selected portion of the input, the most natural property one would like to be able to test is whether the input does not contain certain forbidden small substructures. In the setting of graphs, such a result was obtained by Alon et al., who proved that for any finite family of graphs ?, the property of being induced ?-free (i.e. not containing an induced copy of any F ? ?) is testable. It is natural to ask if one can go one step further and prove that more elaborate properties involving induced subgraphs are also testable. One such generalization of the result of Alon et al. was formulated by Goldreich and Shinkar who conjectured that for any finite family of graphs ?, and any linear inequality involving the densities of the graphs F ? ? in the input graph, the property of satisfying this inequality can be tested in a certain restricted model of graph property testing. Our main result in this paper disproves this conjecture in the following strong form: some properties of this type are not testable even in the classical (i.e. unrestricted) model of graph property testing. The proof deviates significantly from prior non-testability results in this area. The main idea is to use a linear inequality relating induced subgraph densities in order to encode the property of being a pseudo-random graph

Making Coalition Under Occupation Coalition Building and Solidarity across Divides in Social Movements Campaigns in Israel and Palestine

Sotto il controllo israeliano, la regione storicamente nota come Palestina ha sperimentato una persistente frammentazione e la disconnessione delle sue terre. Tuttavia, questa frammentazione si estende oltre il dominio geografico per includere la divisione delle comunità che la popolano. Queste divisioni e separazioni non sono solo il risultato di un conflitto in corso tra due gruppi etnonazionali, ma piuttosto il risultato dell'inesorabile colonizzazione perseguita dal movimento sionista. Questa tesi mira a collegare le intuizioni sia della letteratura del colonialismo d'insediamento che degli studi sui movimenti sociali, uno sforzo unico che non è stato intrapreso in precedenza e ha il potenziale per favorire lo scambio e l'apprendimento interdisciplinare. Nonostante le oppressive divisioni imposte, ci sono casi in cui si possono osservare alleanze e cooperazione tra ebrei israeliani e palestinesi. Questa tesi esaminerà le circostanze e le condizioni relazionali che rendono possibili tali coalizioni.Nel corso dei decenni, la Palestina storica è stata teatro di massicce mobilitazioni, mostrando la capacità del movimento palestinese di innovare e riformulare costantemente le sue strategie, tecniche di protesta e rivendicazioni. Del resto, nel corso degli anni, la repressione israeliana non è mai cessata anzi, si è evoluta, trovando sempre nuove strategie e nuove tecnologie per reprimere il dissenso. In un contesto sociale così rarefatto, come è possibile sostenere la creazione di coalizioni tra palestinesi e israeliani mentre tutto sembra spingere nella direzione del confronto e del conflitto? E quando questa cooperazione è stabilita, in che modo gli attori dei movimenti sociali sono in grado di affrontare l'asimmetria di potere che deriva dall'essere gli "occupanti" e gli "occupati"? Mantenere coalizioni, solidarietà e cooperazione al di là delle differenze (di razza, genere, etnia e religione) non è mai stato così urgente. Questa tesi cerca di colmare questa lacuna nella letteratura proponendo un quadro teorico originale per analizzare tre campagne di movimenti sociali che hanno visto la cooperazione di diversi gruppi etnonazionali. Le tre campagne si sono articolate in tre diversi contesti territoriali mostrando l'importanza del contesto e delle opportunità politiche e legali.La prima campagna esaminata si è svolta nei territori palestinesi con l'obiettivo di proteggere un villaggio che rischiava la demolizione nelle colline a sud di Hebron, in particolare nell'area C della Cisgiordania. Il secondo caso, invece, si è svolto nel cuore di Gerusalemme, una città divisa, e si è concentrato su un quartiere prevalentemente palestinese che spesso ha subito sgomberi da parte delle istituzioni israeliane. Sebbene questi due casi siano considerati esempi positivi, è importante riconoscere e affrontare le differenze che esistevano al loro interno.Infine, il terzo caso esplora una coalizione formata all'interno del movimento delle donne israeliane che ha cercato di coinvolgere gruppi di donne palestinesi sia dentro i confini di Israele che nei Territori palestinesi occupati. Questo tentativo si è rivelato impegnativo e alla fine infruttuoso, portando a considerarlo come un caso negativo in cui è stata tentata un'alleanza ma alla fine è fallita. Questi tre casi mostrano come attivisti appartenenti a diversi gruppi etnonazionali abbiano saputo o meno affrontare l'asimmetria di potere che caratterizza la divisione coloniale. Oltre alle strategie specifiche, questa tesi considera anche come il tipo di regime politico e il contesto locale influenzino questo tipo di alleanza. Infine, sviluppa un modello concettuale che ridefinisce come mantenere coalizioni attraverso la regola delle tre T: Time, Trust and Ties.Per quanto riguarda i metodi utilizzati in questa tesi, la ricerca si è svolta in due periodi di lavoro sul campo. Sono state condotte un totale di 71 interviste (faccia a faccia e online) insieme a diverse osservazioni partecipanti che hanno portato alla stesura di quasi un centinaio di pagine di note di campo. Oltre alle interviste e all'osservazione partecipanti, è stata effettuata un'analisi degli eventi di protesta, per ricostruire il ciclo della protesta nel tempo. Ciò ha consentito la possibilità di svolgere uno studio longitudinale della composizione di questi movimenti. Per il caso negativo, insieme alle interviste, ho creato un questionario presentato online per ricostruire la rete delle organizzazioni femminili attive in questa campagna. L'analisi dei dati è avvenuta con il programma MaxQDA e attraverso una Social Network Analysis qualitativa con UCINET che permette di comprendere descrittivamente la composizione e le caratteristiche dei gruppi che hanno partecipato alle campagne e come sono cambiati nel tempo. Molto lavoro è stato dedicato anche alla restituzione con le comunità e gli attivisti coinvolti e alla diffusione all'interno della società civile italianaUnder Israeli control, the region historically known as Palestine has experienced persistent fragmentation and the disconnection of its lands. However, this fragmentation extends beyond the geographic domain to include the division of communities. I argue that these divisions and separations are not solely the outcome of an ongoing conflict between two ethnonational groups but rather the result of the relentless colonization pursued by the Zionist movement. This thesis aims to bridge insights from both settler-colonial literature and Social Movements Studies, a unique endeavour that has not been undertaken previously and has the potential to foster interdisciplinary exchange and learning. Despite the oppressive divisions imposed, there are instances where alliances and cooperation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians can be observed. This dissertation will examine the circumstances and relational conditions that make such coalitions possible.Throughout the decades, Historical Palestine has been the stage of massive mobilizations and social engagements, showing the ability of the Palestinian movement to constantly innovate and re-frame its strategies, techniques of protests, and claims. Besides, all over the years, Israeli repression has never ceased rather, it evolved, finding always new strategies and new technologies to repress dissent, from all sides. In such a rarefied social context, how is it possible to support the creation of coalitions between Palestinians and Israelis while everything seems to push in the direction of confrontation and conflict? And when this cooperation is established, how are social movements’ actors able to address the power asymmetry that derives from being the “occupiers” and the “occupied”? Maintaining coalitions, solidarity, and cooperation across differences (such as race, gender, ethnicity, and religion) has never been so urgent. This thesis tries to fill this gap in the literature by proposing an original theoretical framework to analyse three social movement campaigns that witnessed the cooperation of ethnonational diverse groups. The three campaigns articulated into three different territorial settings in order to show the importance of context and political and legal opportunities.The initial campaign examined occurred in the Palestinian territories and aimed to protect a village facing demolition in the South Hebron Hills, specifically in area C of the West Bank. The second case, on the other hand, took place in the heart of Jerusalem, a divided city, and focused on a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood that frequently faced evictions by Israeli institutions. Although these two cases are regarded as positive examples, it is important to acknowledge and address the internal differences that existed within them.Lastly, the third case explores a coalition formed within the Israeli women's movement that sought to engage Palestinian women's groups both within the borders of Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This endeavour proved to be challenging and ultimately unsuccessful, leading to consider it as a negative case in which an alliance was attempted but ultimately failed. These three cases show how activists belonging to different ethnonational groups have been able or not to address the asymmetry of power that characterizes the colonial division. In addition to the specific strategies, this thesis also considers how the type of political regime, and the legislative setting influences this type of alliance. Finally, it develops a conceptual model that redefines how to maintain long-lasting coalitions through the rule of the three Ts: Time, Ties, and Trust.As regards the methods used in this thesis, the research took place in two periods of fieldwork. A total of 71 interviews were conducted (face-to-face and online) together with several participant observations which led to the drafting of almost a hundred pages of field notes. In addition to interviews and participant observation, a Protest Event Analysis was carried out, to reconstruct the protest cycle through time. This allows for the inclusion of a longitudinal study of these movements' composition. For the negative case, together with the interviews, I created a questionnaire to reconstruct the network of women's organizations active in this campaign submitted online. The data analysis took place with the MaxQDA program and through a qualitative Social Network Analysis with UCINET which allows understanding descriptively the composition and characteristics of the groups that participated in the campaigns and how they changed over time. Much work has been also devoted to restitution with the communities and activists involved and dissemination within the Italian civil society secto

A Case Study of Faculty Experiences in a College Union

College Unions remain an important presence on many campuses, and often have long legacies of service to students and the campus. Faculty members have largely been left out of the college union literature, despite their tenure on campuses. This study examined the experiences of faculty members with the college union at a case study institution. Interviews with faculty produced themes of participant’s connection to the union, faculty convenience, and student purpose. Many faculty participants shared common traits that may have influenced their involvement in, and experiences with, the union, such as an undergraduate degree from the same institution and their proximity to the facility on campus. The findings suggest that college unions can do more to incorporate faculty into their overall programs

Normal and Pathological Breakdown in Arabic.

The grammatical structure of Arabic allows for significant cross-linguistic comparisons in the study of Slips-of-the-tongue as well as aphasia. The dissertation presents a case study of the aphasic deficit in the speech of a speaker of Arabic, in particular, the Hijazi dialect spoken in the Western Province of Saudi Arabia, with a subsequent comparison with regular slips-of-the-tongue in the same dialect collected and analyzed by the same author. Both the slips-of-the-tongue data and the aphasia data have been collected in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, by the present investigator. It was observed that in such a highly inflected language, grammatical morphemes carry a heavier functional load than in analytical languages. Thus, those elements that do not carry a high informational load are deleted, whereas those that do are retained. Clitic pronouns are robust and resist errors in both the slips-of-the-tongue and aphasic errors. During processing, the third person singular masculine form becomes a default form for T.A. and accounts for the unidirectionality of his substitutions. The brain damage syndrome discussed here results in impairment that affects grammatical morpheme selection as well as lexical processing mechanisms. The locus of the functional damage is identified with the computations that specify the Positional Level of Garrett\u27s (1984, 1988) model. Both slip and aphasic data argue for Kiparsky\u27s (1982) two level morphology, where Level I is responsible for irregular morphological forms, while Level II morphology computes regular morphological forms. The segmental errors analyzed in this study violate the syllabic position constraints proposed for Western languages such as English. These constraints appear to be language dependent rather than language universal. The dissociation of consonantal roots and vocalic patterns observed in the data (which has not been observed or documented before), demand a closer investigation and refinement of the long accepted syllable position constraint. This reported dissociation provides evidence for McCarthy\u27s proposed two tier autosegmental representation for Semitic languages, where one tier contains the consonantal roots while the other contains the vocalic patterns

The Challenging Pathway of Treatment for Neurogenesis Impairment in Down Syndrome: Achievements and Perspectives

Down syndrome (DS), also known as trisomy 21, is a genetic disorder caused by triplication of Chromosome 21. Gene triplication may compromise different body functions but invariably impairs intellectual abilities starting from infancy. Moreover, after the fourth decade of life people with DS are likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. Neurogenesis impairment during fetal life stages and dendritic pathology emerging in early infancy are thought to be key determinants of alterations in brain functioning in DS. Although the progressive improvement in medical care has led to a notable increase in life expectancy for people with DS, there are currently no treatments for intellectual disability. Increasing evidence in mouse models of DS reveals that pharmacological interventions in the embryonic and neonatal periods may greatly benefit brain development and cognitive performance. The most striking results have been obtained with pharmacotherapies during embryonic life stages, indicating that it is possible to pharmacologically rescue the severe neurodevelopmental defects linked to the trisomic condition. These findings provide hope that similar benefits may be possible for people with DS. This review summarizes current knowledge regarding (i) the scope and timeline of neurogenesis (and dendritic) alterations in DS, in order to delineate suitable windows for treatment; (ii) the role of triplicated genes that are most likely to be the key determinants of these alterations, in order to highlight possible therapeutic targets; and (iii) prenatal and neonatal treatments that have proved to be effective in mouse models, in order to rationalize the choice of treatment for human application. Based on this body of evidence we will discuss prospects and challenges for fetal therapy in individuals with DS as a potential means of drastically counteracting the deleterious effects of gene triplication

The role of chemistry in the oscillating combustion of hydrocarbons : an experimental and theoretical study

The stable operation of low-temperature combustion processes is an open challenge, due to the presence of undesired deviations from steady-state conditions: among them, oscillatory behaviors have been raising significant interest. In this work, the establishment of limit cycles during the combustion of hydrocarbons in a wellstirred reactor was analyzed to investigate the role of chemistry in such phenomena. An experimental investigation of methane oxidation in dilute conditions was carried out, thus creating quasi-isothermal conditions and decoupling kinetic effects from thermal ones. The transient evolution of the mole fractions of the major species was obtained for different dilution levels (0.0025 <= X-CH4 <= 0.025), inlet temperatures (1080K <= T <= 1190K) and equivalence ratios (0.75 <= Phi <= 1). Rate of production analysis and sensitivity analysis on a fundamental kinetic model allowed to identify the role of the dominating recombination reactions, first driving ignition, then causing extinction. A bifurcation analysis provided further insight in the major role of these reactions for the reactor stability. One-parameter continuation allowed to identify a temperature range where a single, unstable solution exists, and where oscillations were actually observed. Multiple unstable states were identified below the upper branch, where the stable (cold) solution is preferred. The role of recombination reactions in determining the width of the unstable region could be captured, and bifurcation analysis showed that, by decreasing their strength, the unstable range was progressively reduced, up to the full disappearance of oscillations. This affected also the oxidation of heavier hydrocarbons, like ethylene. Finally, less dilute conditions were analyzed using propane as fuel: the coupling with heat exchange resulted in multiple Hopf Bifurcations, with the consequent formation of intermediate, stable regions within the instability range in agreement with the experimental observations

A new player in the development of TRAIL based therapies for hepatocarcinoma treatment: ATM kinase

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide. HCCs are genetically and phenotypically heterogeneous tumors characterized by very poor prognosis, mainly due to the lack, at present, of effective therapeutic options, as these tumors are rarely suitable for radiotherapy and often resistant to chemotherapy protocols. In the last years, agonists targeting the Tumor Necrosis Factor Related Apoptosis Inducing Ligand (TRAIL) death receptor, has been investigated as a valuable promise for cancer therapy, based on their selectivity for malignant cells and low toxicity for healthy cells. However, many cancer models display resistance to death receptor induced apoptosis, pointing to the requirement for the development of combined therapeutic approaches aimed to selectively sensitize cancer cells to TRAIL. Recently, we identified ATM kinase as a novel modulator of the ability of chemotherapeutic agents to enhance TRAIL sensitivity. Here, we review the biological determinants of HCC responsiveness to TRAIL and provide an exhaustive and updated analysis of the molecular mechanisms exploited for combined therapy in this context. The role of ATM kinase as potential novel predictive biomarker for combined therapeutic approaches based on TRAIL and chemotherapeutic drugs will be closely discussed

Integrating LHCb workflows on HPC resources: status and strategies

High Performance Computing (HPC) supercomputers are expected to play an increasingly important role in HEP computing in the coming years. While HPC resources are not necessarily the optimal fit for HEP workflows, computing time at HPC centers on an opportunistic basis has already been available to the LHC experiments for some time, and it is also possible that part of the pledged computing resources will be offered as CPU time allocations at HPC centers in the future. The integration of the experiment workflows to make the most efficient use of HPC resources is therefore essential. This paper describes the work that has been necessary to integrate LHCb workflows at a specific HPC site, the Marconi-A2 system at CINECA in Italy, where LHCb benefited from a joint PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) allocation with the other Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. This has required addressing two types of challenges: on the software application workloads, for optimising their performance on a many-core hardware architecture that differs significantly from those traditionally used in WLCG (Worldwide LHC Computing Grid), by reducing memory footprint using a multi-process approach; and in the distributed computing area, for submitting these workloads using more than one logical processor per job, which had never been done yet in LHCb.Comment: 9 pages, submitted to CHEP2019 proceedings in EPJ Web of Conference

MISTRAL: An Information System for Local Public Transport Services in Lombardy

The local public transport system in the Lombardy Region is to be restructured in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of public transportation. In line with EU and national legislation, public authorities are to be directly responsible for the planning and financial support of public transport, stipulating contracts with train and bus companies setting out specific requirements on both sides for the supply of transportation services (regional authorities for rail transport and local authorities for bus transport). Monitoring of the transport system is therefore a key activity for the Region in planning local railway services and promoting – in agreement with Provinces – a regional, trans-modal transport network which makes better use of transport facilities. MISTRAL is a project which aims to define an information system to support regional and local authority planning of transport activities by: · monitoring the contracts for transportation services that public authorities are to stipulate with train and bus companies; · evaluating the transport system through indicators related to mobility and transport demand, bus and train supply (involving both transportation and economic aspects) and all issues affecting public transport (e.g.: distribution of public facilities such as schools, possibility of park-and-ride etc.); · providing support to decision and negotiation processes with methodologies based on multicriteria analysis, sensitivity analysis and analytical techniques for solving conflict; · providing standard information and procedures regarding the regional transport system to public authorities, transport companies and users.Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies. Faculty of Economics and Business. The University of Sydne

Targeting the DNA damage response to overcome cancer drug resistance in glioblastoma

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is one of the most recalcitrant brain tumors characterized by a tumor microenvironment (TME) that strongly supports GBM growth, aggressiveness, invasiveness, and resistance to therapy. Importantly, a common feature of GBM is the aberrant activation of receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) and of their downstream signaling cascade, including the non-receptor tyrosine kinase SRC. SRC is a central downstream intermediate of many RTKs, which triggers the phosphorylation of many substrates, therefore, promoting the regulation of a wide range of different pathways involved in cell survival, adhesion, proliferation, motility, and angiogenesis. In addition to the aforementioned pathways, SRC constitutive activity promotes and sustains inflammation and metabolic reprogramming concurring with TME development, therefore, actively sustaining tumor growth. Here, we aim to provide an updated picture of the molecular pathways that link SRC to these events in GBM. In addition, SRC targeting strategies are discussed in order to highlight strengths and weaknesses of SRC inhibitors in GBM management, focusing our attention on their potentialities in combination with conventional therapeutic approaches (i.e., temozolomide) to ameliorate therapy effectiveness