Modernity and Sustainability

Since always sociology disclaimed about the role of science and technique. First, it used to analyse the firms, making some critics, during their period of the highest expansion and industrialisation, and later focussing on their unpredictability and uncontrollability. Science and technique follow the fate of modernity. The human activities through science and technique modify the society and, as it’s happening any time more, they create risks even more uncontrollable. From the risk hypothesis we pass into the threat until arriving to a real crisis. From the different crisis of the post-modernity era, the most severe seems to be the environmental one. This work analysis how, through the risks linked to the unpredictability of human actions we arrive to the modernity and post-modernity crisis. Attention is put on the consequences of this crisis, driving men to solve the existing problems, creating from the beginning the base principles of the society itself, in a sustainable path

The Effect of Chronic Stress on Generalization of Conditioned Fear

Prior lifetime experience of stress is a significant risk factor for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other anxiety disorders. The mechanisms by which stress conveys these effects are unknown and likely involve complicated neurobiological alterations. In order to begin to characterize this relationship, we examined the effect of two weeks of chronic stress on fear learning and discrimination. Contrary to our hypothesis, we failed to observe exaggerated fear or poor discrimination in stressed mice. Although the lack of difference in fear learning between stressed and control mice may be attributed to complications in experimental design, these results suggest that the relationship between prior stress and vulnerability to PTSD is more complex than originally conceived

Institutions and Development Processes: the Role of Strategic Complementarities. A Review of main Literature

This survey is an overview on the literature that investigates the relationship between the institutions and development processes. The attention it has been focus, in sequence, on the ways in which it has been performed the empirical and the theoretical analysis of the relationship between the economic development and the role of institutions. As it is clear the first difficulty is the definition of what an institution is, so the survey gives dig relevance to the different manners to conceptualize the notion of institution. Another difficulty arises from the perplexity about how the efficiency of the institutions can be evaluated. This problem is related to the necessity to close off in the right way the weight and the influence of the institutions respect to the other variables on the economic development. The analysis of the complementarities involved in the development processes, can be a useful way to explain some kinds of relationship between institutions and development processes especially in the short run. The use of more elaborated indices to measure the in�uence of institutions in the economic system and of the coentegration models can improve the reliability of the empirical analysis. In the same manner the supermodularity and the supermodular games can efficiently explain the mechanism of the strategic complementarity between di¤erent kinds of institution generating virtuous development processes from a theoretical point of view. Necessarily, in the future, both the analysis must be integrated but, for the time being, the state of art in the two approaches represent a very good starting point for new outcomes related to the investigation on these type of kind of economic phenomena.Institutions, Complementarities, Development Process

Public Good Provision with Convex Costs

This paper considers a model of voluntary public good provision with two players and convex costs. I demonstrate that the provision of public good is higher in the sequential framework under fairly general conditions. This outcome shows that introducing convex costs may reverse under some condition the results of Varian ( 1994).Public Goods, Contribution Games, Private Provision of Public Goods

The constancy of \zeta in single-clock Inflation at all loops

Studying loop corrections to inflationary perturbations, with particular emphasis on infrared factors, is important to understand the consistency of the inflationary theory, its predictivity and to establish the existence of the slow-roll eternal inflation phenomena and its recently found volume bound. In this paper we show that \zeta-correlators are time-independent at large distances at all-loop level in single clock inflation. We write the n-th order correlators of \dot\zeta\ as the time-integral of Green's functions times the correlators of local sources that are function of the lower order fluctuations. The Green's functions are such that only non-vanishing correlators of the sources at late times can lead to non-vanishing correlators for \dot\zeta\ at long distances. When the sources are connected by high wavenumber modes, the correlator is peaked at short distances, and these diagrams cannot lead to a time-dependence by simple diff. invariance arguments. When the sources are connected by long wavenumber modes one can use similar arguments once the constancy of \zeta\ at lower orders was established. Therefore the conservation of \zeta\ at a given order follows from the conservation of \zeta\ at the lower orders. Since at tree-level \zeta\ is constant, this implies constancy at all-loops by induction.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure