Contractual Community in the Self-Organising City. Freedom, Creativity, Subsidiarity

In our cities, both "land-use regulation" and "territorial collective services" have traditionally been guaranteed through the efforts of public administrations. In more recent times, greater space has been taken by different forms of private land-use regulation and collective service provision, that is, by "contractual communities". These contractual communities are territory-based organisational forms (prevalently - but not only - residential ones) by which members join on the basis of a contract unanimously accepted, and in light of the benefits it will guarantee them. The contract establishes a set of commitments (e.g., rules of cohabitation) and rights (e.g., the availability of a package of services) for the members. The literature on contractual communities (particularly on that specific form of contractual community that is represented by homeowners associations) so far consists largely of profoundly critical writings that raise numerous concerns about the phenomenon. Some other writers, on the contrary, have taken a wholly positive, acritical approach toward contractual communities. In this book a middle path is explored, one that aims to take a serious look at the phenomenon of contractual communities, and avoids taking an overly alarmist view while steering clear of equally unwarranted apologies. In the case of contractual communities there are both problems and opportunities. There is a genuine need for honest questioning and realistic responses. In this perspective the book propose a revised idea of the state role (and of the law role) that permits ample leeway for all possible forms of contractual community. The idea is that cases in which coercive action by a public agency was deemed indispensable have been unjustly overstated; whereas the potential of voluntary self-organising processes has been seriously understate

Cryptographic Tools for Privacy Preservation

Data permeates every aspect of our daily life and it is the backbone of our digitalized society. Smartphones, smartwatches and many more smart devices measure, collect, modify and share data in what is known as the Internet of Things.Often, these devices don’t have enough computation power/storage space thus out-sourcing some aspects of the data management to the Cloud. Outsourcing computation/storage to a third party poses natural questions regarding the security and privacy of the shared sensitive data.Intuitively, Cryptography is a toolset of primitives/protocols of which security prop- erties are formally proven while Privacy typically captures additional social/legislative requirements that relate more to the concept of “trust” between people, “how” data is used and/or “who” has access to data. This thesis separates the concepts by introducing an abstract model that classifies data leaks into different types of breaches. Each class represents a specific requirement/goal related to cryptography, e.g. confidentiality or integrity, or related to privacy, e.g. liability, sensitive data management and more.The thesis contains cryptographic tools designed to provide privacy guarantees for different application scenarios. In more details, the thesis:(a) defines new encryption schemes that provide formal privacy guarantees such as theoretical privacy definitions like Differential Privacy (DP), or concrete privacy-oriented applications covered by existing regulations such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR);(b) proposes new tools and procedures for providing verifiable computation’s guarantees in concrete scenarios for post-quantum cryptography or generalisation of signature schemes;(c) proposes a methodology for utilising Machine Learning (ML) for analysing the effective security and privacy of a crypto-tool and, dually, proposes a secure primitive that allows computing specific ML algorithm in a privacy-preserving way;(d) provides an alternative protocol for secure communication between two parties, based on the idea of communicating in a periodically timed fashion

Social Dominance Orientation and Emotion Regulation: A Parallel Multiple Mediator Model of Instigated Incivility Moderated By Workgroup Civility Climate

While most of the existing research on the topic of workplace incivility has focused upon its consequences on employee and organizational well-being, researchers are recognizing the need for research on predictors, mediators, and moderators of uncivil workplace behavior. The current study contributes to this new wave of workplace incivility research by emphasizing the links among variables not previously explored in incivility research. This nonexperimental correlational study (N = 1027) developed and tested a parallel multiple mediator model of instigated incivility. The model examined the mediation of the emotion regulation strategies – cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression – on the relation of two types of social dominance orientation – intergroup dominance (SDO-D) and intergroup antiegalitarianism (SDO-E) – on the outcome of instigated incivility, and tested the moderating effects of workgroup civility climate on the paths of the proposed model. An Internet-based self-report survey battery was administered to a sample drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk worker population. Hypotheses were tested though structural equation modeling analytic procedures. Findings suggest that intergroup dominance (SDO-D) increases instigated incivility and the relationship is not moderated by workgroup civility climate norms. In contrast, intergroup antiegalitarianism (SDO-E) decreases instigated incivility. Further, this study found that SDO-D had an indirect effect on instigated incivility through the emotion regulation strategy of expressive suppression. Additional findings suggest that the emotion regulation strategy of cognitive reappraisal has the potential to reduce uncivil workplace behavior. Future research was proposed to test the model examined in this study in different cultural settings, with additional mediators and moderators, and longitudinally. The practical findings suggest that HRD practitioners may find emotion regulation and civility trainings useful to reduce the likelihood of uncivil workplace behavior

Wrongful life and wrongful birth cases: a comparative approach

Parents may undergo tests in order to ascertain, before birth, whether their child will be born with defects or hereditary diseases: however, doctors may fail to perform them or misdiagnose their outcome. The consequence is often the birth of an impaired child, which automatically becomes the object of two different kinds of lawsuits. One is the wrongful birth lawsuit: the parents sue the physician for negligence; the other is the wrongful life lawsuit, which is brought by, or on behalf of, the disabled child himself, sometimes even against his own parents, for being obliged to live a life "he would have preferred not to live". In the first case, the liability of the physician or of the laboratories and the consequent acknowledgment of the right to compensation for damages is recognised both in common and in civil law. The right of the child to sue for prenatal torts and to recover damages for being born impaired is on the contrary much more troublesome: until recently only few American States had recognised wrongful life cases, as did the French Cour de Cassation last year, thus demonstrating a radical change in trend. Legal solutions are often contradictory: the contributions made by the different disciplines within the framework of such a delicate and complex issue must be carefully examined

Structure Determination by X-Ray Diffraction Methods and Physicochemical Characterization of Quaternary Diamond-Like Semiconductors

Diamond-like semiconductors (DLSs) are a class of semiconductor materials having structures similar to that of either cubic or hexagonal diamond. These normal valence compounds are of interest for their wide variety of technologically useful properties that can be tuned for specific applications. Until recently, DLS research has been focused on binary and ternary compositions due to their relative ease of synthesis. However, quaternary DLSs have gained considerable popularity due to their increased compositional flexibility and their potential as multifunctional materials. Despite their growing reputation, the vast number of possible combinations and conceivable solid solutions, DLSs remain fairly unexplored. This work focuses on quaternary DLSs of the formula Ag2-II-IV-S4 in order to advance the knowledge of structure-property relationships for this entire class of materials. Toward this goal, a more complete understanding of the crystal structures of these materials is necessary. This task is often problematic due to the presence of isoelectronic, or nearly isoelectonic elements, that can complicate X-ray structure refinements. In this work, Ag2CdGeS4 is used as a case study to demonstrate that this problem can be resolved with careful consideration of bonding environments as well as the use of high-resolution X-ray sources. For the novel DLS Ag2ZnSiS4, the relationship between the structure and optical properties is probed with the combination of single crystal X-ray diffraction, optical diffuse reflectance spectroscopy and electronic structure calculations using the software package Wien2k. Finally, the current set of predictive tools employed to forcast diamond-like structures are reviewed, including the adherence of these guidelines to the novel compound Ag2FeSiS4 as well all over 60 ternary and quaternary diamond-like materials currently reported in the literature. Furthermore, the most common radii sets used for the prediction of bond distance and cell parameters in these materials are compared to the observed bond distances in quaternary diamond-like nonoxide materials

Moving in the Economic Mainstream

The requirements for economic mobility in a postindustrial society present many barriers for low-income women. Social policy and program goals for improving their opportunities should focus on educational, training, and entrepreneurial activities using individualized assessment, counseling, and academic and occupational advisers. Social consensus needs to be achieved in order to establish viable programs that address women\u27s total needs rather than approaching the problem with fragmented, uncoordinated solutions

The federal government and public morals

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Kansas, History, 1930

L'outsourcing nella sanit\ue0

Il ricorso all’esternalizzazione si inquadra tradizionalmente in politiche di conte- nimento di costi e ricerca dell’efficienza da parte delle imprese, configurandolo come una pratica aziendale virtuosa, attraverso la quale si attua la gestione strate- gica dei processi aziendali. Di converso, nei settori di pubblica utilità, l’impiego di politiche di esternalizzazione ha dato luogo a dibattiti controversi. In particolare, per quanto riguarda la sanità pubblica, le scelte di esternalizzazione sono coerenti con una più generale trasformazione verso la managerializzazione delle aziende ospedaliere, non sempre e non da tutti giudicata positivamente