Semi-Parametric Empirical Best Prediction for small area estimation of unemployment indicators

The Italian National Institute for Statistics regularly provides estimates of unemployment indicators using data from the Labor Force Survey. However, direct estimates of unemployment incidence cannot be released for Local Labor Market Areas. These are unplanned domains defined as clusters of municipalities; many are out-of-sample areas and the majority is characterized by a small sample size, which render direct estimates inadequate. The Empirical Best Predictor represents an appropriate, model-based, alternative. However, for non-Gaussian responses, its computation and the computation of the analytic approximation to its Mean Squared Error require the solution of (possibly) multiple integrals that, generally, have not a closed form. To solve the issue, Monte Carlo methods and parametric bootstrap are common choices, even though the computational burden is a non trivial task. In this paper, we propose a Semi-Parametric Empirical Best Predictor for a (possibly) non-linear mixed effect model by leaving the distribution of the area-specific random effects unspecified and estimating it from the observed data. This approach is known to lead to a discrete mixing distribution which helps avoid unverifiable parametric assumptions and heavy integral approximations. We also derive a second-order, bias-corrected, analytic approximation to the corresponding Mean Squared Error. Finite sample properties of the proposed approach are tested via a large scale simulation study. Furthermore, the proposal is applied to unit-level data from the 2012 Italian Labor Force Survey to estimate unemployment incidence for 611 Local Labor Market Areas using auxiliary information from administrative registers and the 2011 Census

The great excuse: how Renzi could exploit the UK’s EU deal

The conclusion of the UK’s renegotiation has obvious implications for British party politics, but what impact has the deal had on domestic politics in other EU countries? Bruno Marino and Nicola Martocchia Diodati write on reactions to the deal in Italy. They state that while the response has been mixed among Italian parties, Matteo Renzi is likely to view the deal as an opportunity to push for European concessions over the ongoing migration crisis

Canonical construction of polytope Barabanov norms and antinorms for sets of matrices

Barabanov norms have been introduced in Barabanov (Autom. Remote Control, 49 (1988), pp. 152\u2013157) and constitute an important instrument in analyzing the joint spectral radius of a family of matrices and related issues. However, although they have been studied extensively, even in very simple cases it is very difficult to construct them explicitly (see, e.g., Kozyakin (Discrete Contin. Dyn. Syst. Ser. B, 14 (2010), pp. 143\u2013158)). In this paper we give a canonical procedure to construct them exactly, which associates a polytope extremal norm\u2014constructed by using the methodologies described in Guglielmi, Wirth, and Zennaro (SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 27 (2005), pp. 721\u2013743) and Guglielmi and Protasov (Found. Comput. Math., 13 (2013), pp. 37\u201397)\u2014to a polytope Barabanov norm. Hence, the existence of a polytope Barabanov norm has the same genericity of an extremal polytope norm. Moreover, we extend the result to polytope antinorms, which have been recently introduced to compute the lower spectral radius of a finite family of matrices having an invariant cone

Automated Symbolic Verification of Telegram's MTProto 2.0

MTProto 2.0 is a suite of cryptographic protocols for instant messaging at the core of the popular Telegram messenger application. In this paper we analyse MTProto 2.0 using the symbolic verifier ProVerif. We provide fully automated proofs of the soundness of MTProto 2.0's authentication, normal chat, end-to-end encrypted chat, and rekeying mechanisms with respect to several security properties, including authentication, integrity, secrecy and perfect forward secrecy; at the same time, we discover that the rekeying protocol is vulnerable to an unknown key-share (UKS) attack. We proceed in an incremental way: each protocol is examined in isolation, relying only on the guarantees provided by the previous ones and the robustness of the basic cryptographic primitives. Our research proves the formal correctness of MTProto 2.0 w.r.t. most relevant security properties, and it can serve as a reference for implementation and analysis of clients and servers.Comment: 19 page

Whatever its outcome, the Brexit referendum is likely to strengthen anti-EU rhetoric in Italy

What impact is the UK’s EU referendum likely to have on Italian politics? Bruno Marino and Nicola Martocchia Diodati see few chances for the referendum to reinforce the position of pro-EU parties in Italy, irrespective of its outcome. With Euroscepticism on the rise in Italy, even a win for the Remain campaign could bolster stances critical of further European integration. They argue that the only possible outcome that could benefit the pro-EU camp is one through which the values of unity and solidarity are highlighted

Global Lipschitz extension preserving local constants

The intent of this short note is to extend real valued Lipschitz functions on metric spaces, while locally preserving the asymptotic Lipschitz constant. We then apply this results to give a simple and direct proof of the fact that Sobolev spaces on metric measure spaces defined with a relaxation approach à la Cheeger are invariant under isomorphism class of mm-structures

Multi-Party Media Partisanship Attention Score. Estimating Partisan Attention of News Media Sources Using Twitter Data in the Lead-up to 2018 Italian Election

The ongoing radical transformations in communication ecosystems have brought up concerns about the risks of partisan selective exposure and ideological polarization. Tra- ditionally, partisan selective exposure is measured by cross-tabulating survey responses to questions on vote intentions and media consumption. This process is expensive, limits the number of news outlets taken into account and is prone to the typical biases of self-reported data. Building upon previous works and with a specific focus on the online media environment, we introduce a new method to measure partisan media attention in a multi-party political system using Twitter data from 2018 Italian general election. Our first research question addresses the effectiveness of this method by measuring the extent to which our estimates correlate with partisan newspaper consumption measured by the latest Italian National Election Studies (ITANES) survey. Once established the reliability of our method, we employ these scores and measures to analyze the Italian digital media ecosystem in the lead-up to March 2018 election. The traditionally high level of political parallelism that characterizes both the Italian press and TV sectors is only partially reflected in a digital media ecosystem where partisan news sources seem to coexist with cross-partisan outlets. Results also point out that certain online partisan communities tend to rely more on exclusive news media sources

Rehabilitation and seismic upgrading of the masonry arch bridge over the Magra river in Villafranca

The paper deals with the rehabilitation of an historical masonry bridge crossing the Magra river and connecting the small towns of Mulazzo and Villafranca in the northern part of Tuscany (I).The masonry arch bridge, characterized by eight arches spanning 19 m around each and by around 12 m height intermediate masonry piers on shallow foundations, was built in 1874. Since the original carriageway width was not sufficient to allow two lanes, in 1961 it was widened by means of two lateral prestressed concrete beams, supported by the piers, so hiding the arches and modifying severely the original aspect of the bridge itself. In 2011, during the Magra flooding, two arches on the Mulazzo side collapsed due to scour of the extreme pier. The reconstruction the collapsed arches and rehabilitation and the strengthening of the bridge, which has been completed last year, is discussed and the execution of the interventions, which has performed without erection of temporary support in the riverbed, is also illustrated. Particular attention is devoted to the original solutions which have been adopted for the full seismic upgrading of the bridge according to the Italian Building Code currently in force, recovering the original architectural aspect of the bridge and widening the carriageway as well

It takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 Italian elections.

Over the last few years, a proliferation of attempts to define, understand and fight the spread of problematic information in contemporary media ecosystems emerged. Most of these attempts focus on false content and/or bad actors detection. In this paper, we argue for a wider ecological focus. Using the frame of media manipulation and a revised version of the ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ original definition, the paper presents a study based on an unprecedented combination of Facebook data, accessed through the CrowdTangle API, and two datasets of Italian political news stories published in the run-up to the 2018 Italian general election and 2019 European election. By focusing on actors’ collective behavior, we identified several networks of pages, groups, and verified public profiles (‘entities’), that shared the same political news articles on Facebook within a very short period of time. Some entities in our networks were openly political, while others, despite sharing political content too, deceptively presented themselves as entertainment venues. The proportion of inauthentic entities in a network affects the wideness of the range of news media sources they shared, thus pointing to different strategies and possible motivations. The paper has both theoretical and empirical implications: it frames the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ in existing literature, introduces a method to detect coordinated link sharing behavior and points out different strategies and methods employed by networks of actors willing to manipulate the media and public opinion