Balanced Presentation a Dishonest Exercise in Presidential Race

I have been teaching courses in American government for more than 25 years. I enjoy getting students interested in and excited about politics. I especially love engaging with them during a presidential election. Their interest is at a high point - most of them voting for the first time. My goal is to pull them into the process and get them hooked on real politics, making them eager to study political science. [excerpt

Women\u27s Leadership and Third-Wave Feminism

Leadership is a term that women strive to claim as their own. Whether in the halls of Congress, the corporate boardroom, or the privacy of the home, women’s leadership challenges traditional notions of the concept. Throughout the ages images of leadership feature men in uniform and men in positions of power, whether it be military, government, or market. The traditional view of leaders is imbued with male images of “heroes,” who issue orders, lead the troops—save the day. But leadership has another face. It is the face of Abigail Adams admonishing her husband to “Remember the Ladies” in the formation of this new American nation (McGlen, O’Connor, van Assendelft, & Gunther-Canada, 2002, p. 1). It is the face of Susan B. Anthony in 1872 standing trial for illegally voting. It is the face of scores of women in today’s world who have shattered glass ceilings in corporate America and hold important legislative and administrative posts in state and federal government. Yet there is more to the concept of “women’s leadership” than substituting one face for another. [excerpt

Il libertarianism: saggio bibliografico

The essay is an overview of libertarian literature. It begins dealing with lexical issues concerning the meaning of liberalism, classical liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism. There are two meanings of libertarianism: a large one, as a free market oriented liberalism, and a strict one, as an extreme classical liberalism which calls in question the State as the main enemy of liberty. Novelist Ayn Rand is one of the main sources for contemporary libertarian theory, although she never called herself libertarian. Murray N. Rothbard is the most important libertarian thinker; he was an “austrian” economist and a natural law theorist who considered free market as the social institution capable to satisfy every human need, security and justice included. In response to rothbardian society without a State, Robert Nozick exposed a minarchist position, in favour of a minimal State limited to the function of protecting individual rights. This distinction between anarchism and minarchism is a crucial one for libertarian theory. The most interesting current literature is that in rothbardian, natural law and natural rights style. There is also an italian libertarian literature, including works of political theory, philosophy of law, environmentalism and history

A new procedure to analyze RNA non-branching structures

RNA structure prediction and structural motifs analysis are challenging tasks in the investigation of RNA function. We propose a novel procedure to detect structural motifs shared between two RNAs (a reference and a target). In particular, we developed two core modules: (i) nbRSSP_extractor, to assign a unique structure to the reference RNA encoded by a set of non-branching structures; (ii) SSD_finder, to detect structural motifs that the target RNA shares with the reference, by means of a new score function that rewards the relative distance of the target non-branching structures compared to the reference ones. We integrated these algorithms with already existing software to reach a coherent pipeline able to perform the following two main tasks: prediction of RNA structures (integration of RNALfold and nbRSSP_extractor) and search for chains of matches (integration of Structator and SSD_finder)

Note e riflessioni sul valore dell'Epistola ad Milites Corotici di San Patrizio quale fonte delle origini del cristianesimo celtico e della Britannia post-Romana

Lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di dimostrare il valore unico ed eccezionale dell’Epistola ad milites Corotici quale fonte diretta per la ricostruzione storica delle origini della Chiesa Celtica insulare negli anni della cosiddetta Sub-Roman Britain. Lo scritto di Patrizio, come infatti cercherò di sostenere, contiene informazioni altrimenti non reperibili intorno a quegli anni cruciali. Inoltre, il valore dell’ Epistola in merito a questi eventi è accresciuto dal confronto con la Confessio. I temi e i protagonisti discussi nell’Epistola risultano fondamentali per comprendere le relazioni storiche, sociali, religiose e fenomenologiche tra i motivi che portarono alla fine del dominio romano nelle Isole Britanniche e il sorgere repentino delle missioni apostoliche e delle istituzioni ecclesiastiche soprattutto in Irlanda e nella Britannia post-romana, nonché, di seguito, nelle regioni settentrionali meno romanizzate attraverso la predicazione di Nynias e di Columba e dalla definitiva azione della Chiesa di Roma con l’invio di Agostino di Canterbury in Britannia

Parental Monitoring and Youth's Binge Behaviors: The Role of Sensation Seeking and Life Satisfaction

Framed within an ecological perspective of the onset of adolescent problem behaviors, the current study explored the joint role of parent-adolescents’ relationships and youth's individual factors in binge eating and drinking. Firstly, in line with pieces of research highlighting the beneficial impact of effective parenting on youth development, the present paper sought to enhance the knowledge about the positive influence of parental monitoring on youth's binge drinking and eating. Moreover, since literature evidenced that the explanatory mechanisms of the association between parental monitoring and binge behaviors are not fully explored, the study focused on the potential intervening role of sensation seeking and life satisfaction as mediators. The study design was cross-sectional and self-report questionnaires were administered among a population of 944 high school students (M = 16.35, SD = 1.31) living in Palermo (Italy). Path analysis showed that parental monitoring was directly and negatively related to both binge eating and binge drinking. Moreover, sensation seeking negatively mediated the relationships between parental monitoring and both binge behaviors, whereas life satisfaction only mediated between parental monitoring and binge eating. The current study provided data useful to understand the complex interrelations between intrapersonal (life satisfaction and personality trait, i.e. sensation seeking) and contextual factors (parent–child relationships) that may discourage or cause eating and alcohol use disorders among youth. Finally, implications for parents and practitioners working with youngsters were discussed

Notes and Considerations on the Importance of St. Patrick's Epistola Ad Milites Corotici as a Source on the Origins of Celtic Christinanity and Sub-Roman Britain

The purpose of this tripartite paper is to demonstrate the unique and exceptional value of the Epistola ad milites Corotici as a direct source for the historical reconstruction of the origins of the Celtic insular Church in the early years of so-called Sub-Roman Britain. Patrick’s letter, as I will try to show, contains information which is not otherwise available on these crucial years. Moreover —and on occasions in comparison with the Confessio—the value of the Epistola in relation to these events has increased. The themes and historical figures discussed in the Epistola have proved to be fundamental to an understanding of the historical, social and religious causes both of the end of Roman power in Britain and the sudden rise of the apostolic missions especially in Ireland and in the rest of the Post-Roman Britain, as well as in less Romanised areas as a result of Nynias’s and Columba’s preaching and by means of the definitive action of the Roman Church in sending Augustine of Canterbury to Britain

Energy harvesting-aware design of wireless networks

Recent advances in low-power electronics and energy-harvesting (EH) technologies enable the design of self-sustained devices that collect part, or all, of the needed energy from the environment. Several systems can take advantage of EH, ranging from portable devices to wireless sensor networks (WSNs). While conventional design for battery-powered systems is mainly concerned with the battery lifetime, a key advantage of EH is that it enables potential perpetual operation of the devices, without requiring maintenance for battery substitutions. However, the inherent unpredictability regarding the amount of energy that can be collected from the environment might cause temporary energy shortages, which might prevent the devices to operate regularly. This uncertainty calls for the development of energy management techniques that are tailored to the EH dynamics. While most previous work on EH-capable systems has focused on energy management for single devices, the main contributions of this dissertation is the analysis and design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for WSNs operated by EH-capable devices. In particular, the dissertation first considers random access MAC protocols for single-hop EH networks, in which a fusion center collects data from a set of nodes distributed in its surrounding. MAC protocols commonly used in WSNs, such as time division multiple access (TDMA), framed-ALOHA (FA) and dynamic-FA (DFA) are investigated in the presence of EH-capable devices. A new ALOHA-based MAC protocol tailored to EH-networks, referred to as energy group-DFA (EG-DFA), is then proposed. In EG-DFA nodes with similar energy availability are grouped together and access the channel independently from other groups. It is shown that EG-DFA significantly outperforms the DFA protocol. Centralized scheduling-based MAC protocols for single-hop EH-networks with communication resource constraints are considered next. Two main scenarios are addressed, namely: i) nodes exclusively powered via EH; ii) nodes powered by a hybrid energy storage system, which is composed by a non-rechargeable battery and a capacitor charged via EH. For the former case the goal is the maximization of the network throughput, while in the latter the aim is maximizing the lifetime of the non-rechargeable batteries. For both scenarios optimal scheduling policies are derived by assuming different levels of information available at the fusion center about the energy availability at the nodes. When optimal policies are not derived explicitly, suboptimal policies are proposed and compared with performance upper bounds. Energy management policies for single devices have been investigated as well by focusing on radio frequency identification (RFID) systems, when the latter are operated by enhanced RFID tags with energy harvesting capabilities

Study of the dependency of CMS drift tubes efficiency on the atmospheric pressure

L'efficienza dei Drift Tubes di CMS è costantemente monitorata per verificare l'eventuale presenza di segnali di invecchiamento delle camere. Durante il 2017 e il 2018 non sono stati evidenziati chiari segnali di invecchiamento, ma si sono osservate variazioni inattese. In questa tesi è stata cercata una eventuale dipendenza dell'efficienza di singolo hit dalla pressione atmosferica, ritenuta possibile nel rivelatore a gas. Dai dati analizzati non è emersa una relazione chiara, indicando che le cause delle variazioni debbano essere ricercate altrove

An Analysis and Validation of an Online Photographic Identity Exposure Evaluation System

The rapid growth in volume over the last decade of personal photos placed online due to the advent of social media has made users highly susceptible to malicious forms of attack. A system was proposed and constructed using Open Source technologies capable of acquiring the necessary data to conduct a measurement of online photographic exposure to aid in assessing a user\u27s digital privacy. The system\u27s effectiveness at providing feedback on the level of exposure was tested by using a controlled set of three subjects. Each subject provided three training photos each that simulated what would be easily ascertainable from social media profiles, online professional portfolios, or public photography. The system was able to successfully biometrically identify 23 images out of ~14,000 that related to one of the respective candidates. This validates the system as an automated threat and vetting tool for online photographic privacy. VeriLook 5.4 one-to-many matching grossly underperformed on the images gathered with a mere 21% at best true acceptance rate. The scoring algorithm used herein to evaluate each candidate\u27s online photographic exposure was proven to be effective. The system developed was able to show that a candidate\u27s assumption of their digital footprint size is not always correct. Additional testing of the scoring algorithm is recommended before a conclusion can be made with about its universal accuracy