Mercantilism and Class Struggle: Italy in the International Economy, 1960-1990

The outbreak of the world-wide economic crisis in 2008 and its later worsening brought the topic of Italy’s ‘economic decline’ to the forefront of public debate The most common explanations of this decline revolve round the inability of Italian society to adapt to the new conditions caused by the advent of the ‘second wave of globalisation’ after the 1970s. Emphasis falls on the burden of public debt, the inadequacy of the reforms of Italy’s economic and social institutions (privatisation, flexibility in the labour market, market liberalisation and deregulation) and on the need for investment in education. Here, we adopt a different outlook, one which hinges on class interests and the conflict between them. The chapter covers the development of the Italian economy from 1945 to the 1990s, focusing in particular on the period starting with the crisis which put an end to the ‘economic miracle’ in 1963 and ends in 1992, when the lira left the European Monetary System. This was a period of sustained, and unprecedented, growth for the Italian economy, during which Italy caught up with other advanced industrial economies. At the same time, those were the years in which we can find the roots of the problems which have afflicted the Italian economy in the last two decades

The Holographic RG flow to conformal and non-conformal theory

We review some aspects of the AdS supergravity description of RG flows. The case of a flow to an IR CFT can be rigorously studied within the framework of supergravity. Here we discuss various central charges of the conformal theory (included the usually neglected ones) and we compare them with QFT expectations. The case of flows to non-conformal theories is more problematic in that one usually encounters a naked singularity. We mainly focus on the flow to an IR N=1 super Yang-Mills theory. We discuss the properties of the solution and we briefly comment on the fate of the singularity. We also compare the supergravity results with the expectations of an N=1 SYM at strong coupling.Comment: LaTex,13 pages, 3 embedded eps figures, minor changes.Contribution to the proceedings of the TMR Conference on Quantum Aspects of Gauge Theories, Supersymmetry and Unification, Paris, 1-7 September 199

The exceptional generalised geometry of supersymmetric AdS flux backgrounds

We analyse generic AdS flux backgrounds preserving eight supercharges in $D=4$ and $D=5$ dimensions using exceptional generalised geometry. We show that they are described by a pair of globally defined, generalised structures, identical to those that appear for flat flux backgrounds but with different integrability conditions. We give a number of explicit examples of such "exceptional Sasaki-Einstein" backgrounds in type IIB supergravity and M-theory. In particular, we give the complete analysis of the generic AdS$_5$ M-theory backgrounds. We also briefly discuss the structure of the moduli space of solutions. In all cases, one structure defines a "generalised Reeb vector" that generates a Killing symmetry of the background corresponding to the R-symmetry of the dual field theory, and in addition encodes the generic contact structures that appear in the $D=4$ M-theory and $D=5$ type IIB cases. Finally, we investigate the relation between generalised structures and quantities in the dual field theory, showing that the central charge and R-charge of BPS wrapped-brane states are both encoded by the generalised Reeb vector, as well as discussing how volume minimisation (the dual of $a$- and $\mathcal{F}$-maximisation) is encoded.Comment: 40 page

Audiovisual integration of emotional signals from others' social interactions

Audiovisual perception of emotions has been typically examined using displays of a solitary character (e.g., the face-voice and/or body-sound of one actor). However, in real life humans often face more complex multisensory social situations, involving more than one person. Here we ask if the audiovisual facilitation in emotion recognition previously found in simpler social situations extends to more complex and ecological situations. Stimuli consisting of the biological motion and voice of two interacting agents were used in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with visual, auditory, auditory filtered/noisy, and audiovisual congruent and incongruent clips. We asked participants to judge whether the two agents were interacting happily or angrily. In Experiment 2, another group of participants repeated the same task, as in Experiment 1, while trying to ignore either the visual or the auditory information. The findings from both experiments indicate that when the reliability of the auditory cue was decreased participants weighted more the visual cue in their emotional judgments. This in turn translated in increased emotion recognition accuracy for the multisensory condition. Our findings thus point to a common mechanism of multisensory integration of emotional signals irrespective of social stimulus complexity

Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting from airflow in HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems

This study focuses on the design and wind tunnel testing of a high efficiency Energy Harvesting device, based on piezoelectric materials, with possible applications for the sustainability of smart buildings, structures and infrastructures. The development of the device was supported by ESA (the European Space Agency) under a program for the space technology transfer in the period 2014-2016. The EH device harvests the airflow inside Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, using a piezoelectric component and an appropriate customizable aerodynamic appendix or fin that takes advantage of specific airflow phenomena (vortex shedding and galloping), and can be implemented for optimizing the energy consumption inside buildings. Focus is given on several relevant aspects of wind tunnel testing: different configurations for the piezoelectric bender (rectangular, cylindrical and T-shaped) are tested and compared, and the effective energy harvesting potential of a working prototype device is assessed

On the Evaluation of Compton Scattering Amplitudes in String Theory

We consider the Compton amplitude for the scattering of a photon and a (massless) ``electron/positron'' at one loop (i.e. genus one) in a four-dimensional fermionic heterotic string model. Starting from the bosonization of the world-sheet fermions needed to explicitly construct the spin-fields representing the space-time fermions, we present all the steps of the computation which leads to the explicit form of the amplitude as an integral of modular forms over the moduli space.Comment: 41 pages, Late

Non-Relativistic Solutions of N=2 Gauged Supergravity

We find infinite families of supersymmetric solutions of four dimensional, N=2 gauged supergravity with Lifshitz, Schrodinger and also AdS symmetries. We focus on the canonical example of a single hypermultiplet and a single vector multiplet and find that the spectrum of solutions depends crucially on whether the gaugings are electric or magnetic but to a far milder extent on the strength of the gaugings. For purely electric or purely magnetic gaugings we generically find Lifshitz solutions, while for a mixed gauging we find Schrodinger and AdS solutions. For some of the gaugings the theory has a known lift to string/M-theory thus giving a higher dimensional embedding of our solutions.Comment: 27 pages, v2 refs added, comments regarding string embeddings altered, cleaner discussion of the scaling parameter for Schrodinger solutions; v3 published version, refs adde

BPS Black Holes in AdS4 from M-theory

We study supersymmetric black holes in $AdS_4$ in the framework of four dimensional gauged $\N=2$ supergravity coupled to hypermultiplets. We derive the flow equations for a general electrically gauged theory where the gauge group is Abelian and, restricting them to the fixed points, we derive the gauged supergravity analogue of the attractor equations for theories coupled to hypermultiplets. The particular models we analyze are consistent truncations of M-theory on certain Sasaki-Einstein seven-manifolds. We study the space of horizon solutions of the form $AdS_2\times \Sigma_g$ with both electric and magnetic charges and find a four-dimensional solution space when the theory arises from a reduction on $Q^{111}$. For other $SE_7$ reductions, the solutions space is a subspace of this. We construct explicit examples of spherically symmetric black holes numerically.Comment: 38 page, 4 figures; typos correcte