Vulnerable Capacity. Notes on a Quiet Legal Revolution

The vulnerability turn has contributed to the concept of vulnerability becoming an established part of the legal lexicon. By adopting a legal-philosophical perspective, this paper will explore what might be considered the most interesting theoretical outcome of the vulnerability paradigm: the concept of universal legal capacity, enshrined in Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The reasoning will focus on two main areas. First, the theoretical background of this reflection will be clarified, by investigating the main arguments of the current debate on vulnerability. Such a reflection will provide the necessary background to explore the relationship between autonomy and vulnerability. The second part of this paper specifically aims to analyse the content and legal implications of Article 12 CRPD. The exegesis of Article 12 will attempt to show that said Article is theoretically founded on the paradigm of vulnerability. Following that, a ‘reality test’ will give the opportunity to discuss some of the main positions that are present in the existing literature on the topic, with particular attention to the relationship between support and substitution. The expression vulnerable capacity has been used in order to emphasise the complex analysis required to adequately address the issue of capacity from a theoretical perspective. It will be argued that legal capacity can be considered vulnerable because it characterises a (universally) vulnerable subject

Reverse-Safe Data Structures for Text Indexing

We introduce the notion of reverse-safe data structures. These are data structures that prevent the reconstruction of the data they encode (i.e., they cannot be easily reversed). A data structure D is called z-reverse-safe when there exist at least z datasets with the same set of answers as the ones stored by D. The main challenge is to ensure that D stores as many answers to useful queries as possible, is constructed efficiently, and has size close to the size of the original dataset it encodes. Given a text of length n and an integer z, we propose an algorithm which constructs a z-reverse-safe data structure that has size O(n) and answers pattern matching queries of length at most d optimally, where d is maximal for any such z-reverse-safe data structure. The construction algorithm takes O(n ω log d) time, where ω is the matrix multiplication exponent. We show that, despite the n ω factor, our engineered implementation takes only a few minutes to finish for million-letter texts. We further show that plugging our method in data analysis applications gives insignificant or no data utility loss. Finally, we show how our technique can be extended to support applications under a realistic adversary model

Vibration damping performances of buildings with moving façades under harmonic excitation

Façade technologies are in continuous evolution and the idea to realize buildings equipped with cladding systems capable to undergo significant displacements relatively to the main structure has been considered by many authors as an opportunity to improve their vibration performances. From a structural dynamics viewpoint, a building with a monolithic Moving Façade is essentially the same thing as a building with a Tuned Mass Damper. However, in the presence of excitations directly acting on the external surface of the building, there may be significant diferences of behavior. In this work, a first step towards a systematic comparison between the performances of buildings with Moving Façades and Tuned Mass Dampers is carried out in the simplest setting of 2 degrees of freedom modeling and harmonic excitation. Results Despite the deceptive simplicity of the setting, some of the aspects related to the potential applicability of moving façades to vibration damping and the correlated limitations are discussed and critically analyzed. The analyses show that, depending on the tuning of the system, monolithic Moving Façades could effectively act as vibration absorbers with a potentially high efficiency. However, it turns out that good performances could be realized at the price of extremely large displacements of the façade. The possibility to pursue potential applications of this type of systems seems therefore to be subordinated to the search of solutions to limit such displacements within functionally acceptable ranges

Fixed Points and Attractors of Reactantless and Inhibitorless Reaction Systems

Reaction systems are discrete dynamical systems that model biochemical processes in living cells using finite sets of reactants, inhibitors, and products. We investigate the computational complexity of a comprehensive set of problems related to the existence of fixed points and attractors in two constrained classes of reaction systems, in which either reactants or inhibitors are disallowed. These problems have biological relevance and have been extensively studied in the unconstrained case; however, they remain unexplored in the context of reactantless or inhibitorless systems. Interestingly, we demonstrate that although the absence of reactants or inhibitors simplifies the system's dynamics, it does not always lead to a reduction in the complexity of the considered problems.Comment: 29 page

Post-Genomics and Skin Inflammation

Atopic dermatitis and psoriasis are two chronic skin inflammatory diseases that have so far received a greater attention within the scientific community through different post-genomic approaches; on the contrary, acne, which is undoubtedly one of the most common skin disorders involving inflammatory processes, seems to be still quite neglected under the post-genomic point of view. In this paper, we will review how post-genomic technologies have provided new fundamental tools for the analysis of these three conditions and we will cast light on their potential in addressing future research challenges

On Two Measures of Distance Between Fully-Labelled Trees

The last decade brought a significant increase in the amount of data and a variety of new inference methods for reconstructing the detailed evolutionary history of various cancers. This brings the need of designing efficient procedures for comparing rooted trees representing the evolution of mutations in tumor phylogenies. Bernardini et al. [CPM 2019] recently introduced a notion of the rearrangement distance for fully-labelled trees motivated by this necessity. This notion originates from two operations: one that permutes the labels of the nodes, the other that affects the topology of the tree. Each operation alone defines a distance that can be computed in polynomial time, while the actual rearrangement distance, that combines the two, was proven to be NP-hard. We answer two open question left unanswered by the previous work. First, what is the complexity of computing the permutation distance? Second, is there a constant-factor approximation algorithm for estimating the rearrangement distance between two arbitrary trees? We answer the first one by showing, via a two-way reduction, that calculating the permutation distance between two trees on n nodes is equivalent, up to polylogarithmic factors, to finding the largest cardinality matching in a sparse bipartite graph. In particular, by plugging in the algorithm of Liu and Sidford [ArXiv 2020], we obtain an ??(n^{4/3+o(1}) time algorithm for computing the permutation distance between two trees on n nodes. Then we answer the second question positively, and design a linear-time constant-factor approximation algorithm that does not need any assumption on the trees

Disuguaglianze intersezionali di genere e pandemia: il caso delle donne con disabilità

Oltre a generare nuove diseguaglianze, la pandemia si è rivelata anche un potente amplificatore di altre, che erano già presenti nel tessuto sociale. Tra queste, figura la peculiare situazione delle donne e ragazze con disabilità, che si sono trovate in una condizione di estrema vulnerabilità, in quanto sono esposte a forme di discriminazione di tipo intersezionale. Tale forma acuta di discriminazione, che nel caso di specie è data dall’interazione tra il sessismo e l’abilismo, durante la pandemia è stata esacerbata su più fronti, a conferma del suo carattere “strutturale”. Il contributo si concentra su alcuni dei principali effetti prodotti dalla pandemia in ordine alla tutela dei diritti fondamentali e umani di tali donne, all’interno di una riflessione diretta a fare emergere la loro condizione di strutturale discriminazione, alimentata dalla presenza di radicati stereotipi relativi alla loro soggettività.The pandemic generated new inequalities but has also proved to be a powerful amplifier of others. These include the peculiar situation of women and girls with disabilities, who have found themselves in a condition of extreme vulnerability, as they are exposed to intersectional forms of discrimination. This acute form of discrimination, given by the interaction between sexism and ableism and “structural” in its nature, was exacerbated on several fronts during the pandemic. The contribution focuses on some of the main effects produced by the pandemic with regard to the protection of the fundamental and human rights of these women, within a reflection aimed at highlighting their condition of structural discrimination, fuelled by the presence of deep-rooted stereotypes concerning their subjectivity

Las clínicas jurídicas y la identidad del jurista : reflexiones filosófico-jurídicas a partir del debate italiano | Legal Clinics And The Identity Of The Jurist: A Legal-Philosophical Perspective From The Italian Landscape

Although the Italian debate concerning legal clinics is at the beginning, a growing number of Law Schools is starting to explore this approach to legal education. As a consequence, new topics specifically concerning legal clinics arise, while others ? more ?traditional? for legal-philosophical experts ? need to be reconfigured and re-articulated. This essay aims at addressing some of the latter aspects: once the terms of the debate have been reconstructed, I will consider two of the main topics of the clinical experience, namely the jurist?s formation and the tension towards social justice outcomes