June 1940: Britain’s forgotten attempt to build a EuropeanUnion

As the UK is heading for a hard Brexit, Andrea Bosco uncovers a largely forgotten attempt by Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet to build a federal union with France. The British proposal included a plan for joint organs of defence, for common foreign, financial, and economic policies, as well as for a common citizenship

Markov chain models for inspecting response dynamics in psychological testing

The importance of considering contextual probabilities in shaping response patterns within psychological testing is underscored, despite the ubiquitous nature of order effects discussed extensively in methodological literature. Drawing from concepts such as path-dependency, first-order autocorrelation, state-dependency, and hysteresis, the present study is an attempt to address how earlier responses serve as an anchor for subsequent answers in tests, surveys, and questionnaires. Introducing the notion of non-commuting observables derived from quantum physics, I highlight their role in characterizing psychological processes and the impact of measurement instruments on participants' responses. We advocate for the utilization of first-order Markov chain modeling to capture and forecast sequential dependencies in survey and test responses. The employment of the first-order Markov chain model lies in individuals' propensity to exhibit partial focus to preceding responses, with recent items most likely exerting a substantial influence on subsequent response selection. This study contributes to advancing our understanding of the dynamics inherent in sequential data within psychological research and provides a methodological framework for conducting longitudinal analyses of response patterns of test and questionnaire.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables, 25 equations/matrices. Part of this paper was presented to the XXIX AIP Congress, Experimental Psychology Section. September 18th-20th 2023, Lucca, Italy. Title of the talk: "Differentiating students with signs of ADHD or OCD based on hysteresis in responses to a mind-wandering test. A Study of Markov Chain Test Response Sequences

Modulation Format, Core and Spectrum Assignment in a Multicore Optical Link with and without MIMO Receivers

We study the modulation format, core and spectrum assignment problem in a multi-core flexi-grid optical link, under the assumption that MIMO receivers can operate on various core subsets and considering distance-adaptive reaches for different modulation formats. We show results obtained following an optimization approach, comparing scenarios with and without the use of MIMO transmission

Multifield nested metafilters for wave propagation control

The present work proposes a novel class of multifield nested tunable metadevices that serve as high performance acoustic metafilters. The designed metafilter is characterized by a multiscale, hierarchical structure. At the mesoscale, the metamaterial consists of a sequence of two different periodically alternating layers: a polymeric homogeneous layer, which exhibits a viscoelastic constitutive response, and a microstructured one. The latter is based on the periodic repetition of a multiphase microscale cell that is composed by a stiff elastic external coating, a viscoelastic phase and an internal disk of piezoelectric material shunted by an external electrical circuit having a tunable impedance/admittance This tuning parameter affects the constitutive elastic properties of the piezoelectric phase and, in turn, the overall response of the microscale cell, thereby ultimately enabling to achieve an optimal filtering performance for the metadevice. Due to the periodicity of the multiphase cell at the microscale, a two-scale variational-asymptotic homogenization technique is exploited in the frequency domain in order to obtain the frequency-dependent overall constitutive properties of the microstructured layer. Subsequently, in-plane free wave propagation inside the periodic multilayered metamaterial at the mesoscale is investigated by means of Floquet–Bloch theory, together with the transfer matrix method. By triggering the shunting effect, a stiffening of the piezoelectric phase can be achieved, which is demonstrated to open low frequency band gaps in the metamaterial frequency spectrum. The filtering capability of the metadevice has been assessed as a function of its geometrical features and the tuning parameter, thus paving the way towards the design of sophisticated and topologically optimized acoustic filters

La simulazione nella valutazione neuropsicologica come problema diagnostico: le statistiche bayesiane

I risultati delle valutazioni neuropsicologiche possono essere intenzionalmente distorti minacciandone gli esiti. Tale eventualitàè chiamata simulazione o malingering. Lo scopo di questo studio è di mettere a confronto due approcci diagnostici che adottanoentrambi il SIMS e il ToMM e tre livelli di prevalenza del malingering mediante statistiche bayesiane e metodo MonteCarlo. L’approccio più conservativo, secondo cui i test devono essere entrambi positivi per la diagnosi di malingering, ha risultatidi accuratezza diagnostica ottimi per i livelli di prevalenza considerati e risulta eccellente nel minimizzare i falsi positivi.Lo studio si conclude con un esempio di procedura di valutazione in cui le statistiche bayesiane si applicano al processo diagnosticoe con alcune riflessioni sulle procedure per intercettare il malingering

Overview of the EVALITA 2016 Part of speech on twitter for Italian task

The increasing interest for the extraction of various forms of knowledge from micro-blogs and social media makes crucial the development of resources and tools that can be used for automatically deal with them. PoSTWITA contributes to the advancement of the state-of-the-art for Italian language by: (a) enriching the community with a previously not existing col- lection of data extracted from Twitter and annotated with grammatical categories, to be used as a benchmark for system evaluation; (b) supporting the adaptation of Part of Speech tagging systems to this particular text domain