Gradus dignitatis (Cic. rep. I 27, 43). Merito e metro di valutazione dell’optimus status civitatis

Starting from the review of the expression gradus dignitatis, used by Cicero in rep. I 27, 43, by means of a specific semantic-etymological investigation of the lemma dignitas and by comparing the different translations of this couple of words in the main modern languages, the paper attempts to reconstruct the position held by Cicero about the choice of magistratures within the optimus status civitatis. A position of highly meritocratic mark and in open polemic against the principle, promoted by the supporters of democratic regimes, of aequitas / aequabilitas in covering official positions, in a dialectical relationship with Plato and Aristotle. In the background of the specific debate opened by Cicero we also glimpse a thin network of references to the analysis of the constitutions and public offices among Sparta, Carthage and Rome led by Polybius in the sixth book of his Historiae

Compressing dictionaries of strings

The aim of this work is to develop a data structure capable of storing a set of strings in a compressed way providing the facility to access and search by prefix any string in the set. The notion of string will be formally exposed in this work, but it is enough to think a string as a stream of characters or a variable length dat}. We will prove that the data structure devised in our work will be able to search prefixes of the stored strings in a very efficient way, hence giving a performant solution to one of the most discussed problem of our age. In the discussion of our data structure, particular emphasis will be given to both space and time efficiency and a tradeoff between these two will be constantly searched. To understand how much string based data structures are important, think about modern search engines and social networks; they must store and process continuously immense streams of data which are mainly strings, while the output of such processed data must be available in few milliseconds not to try the patience of the user. Space efficiency is one of the main concern in this kind of problem. In order to satisfy real-time latency bounds, the largest possible amount of data must be stored in the highest levels of the memory hierarchy. Moreover, data compression allows to save money because it reduces the amount of physical memory needed to store abstract data and this particularly important since storage is the main source of expenditure in modern systems

Suggestioni lucanee, riflessioni lucanee

Riflessioni dossografico-critiche sul volume curato da C. Tesoriero, Lucain, (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies), Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press 2010, pp. viii, 53