Amor proprio. Attualità politica di una passione moderna

This article is devoted to the analysis of the passion of self-love. The first part aims to retrace some of the main landmark cases within the history of modern philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes and the Jansenists), highlighting how the distinction between self-preservation and pride becomes the main explanatory model of human agency. We find a meaningful case of such an anthropology in Mandeville’s categories of self-love and self-liking. We consider the theory of self-liking the attempt to establish a fully-fledged ‘philosophy of vainness’. The second part deals with the contemporary use of self-love. We stress how it can be considered not only as the proper theoretical background for the current debate on recognition. It is also an anti-dualistic analytic tool which contests any Manichean understanding of power. We conclude with an interpretation of Primo Levi’s testimony which ideally stands for an extreme confirmation of modern theories on self-love

Efficient asymmetric inclusion of regular expressions with interleaving and counting for XML type-checking

The inclusion of Regular Expressions (REs) is the kernel of any type-checking algorithm for XML manipulation languages. XML applications would benefit from the extension of REs with interleaving and counting, but this is not feasible in general, since inclusion is EXPSPACE-complete for such extended REs. In Colazzo et al. (2009) [1] we introduced a notion of ?conflict-free REs?, which are extended REs with excellent complexity behaviour, including a polynomial inclusion algorithm [1] and linear membership (Ghelli et al., 2008 [2]). Conflict-free REs have interleaving and counting, but the complexity is tamed by the ?conflict-free? limitations, which have been found to be satisfied by the vast majority of the content models published on the Web.However, a type-checking algorithm needs to compare machine-generated subtypes against human-defined supertypes. The conflict-free restriction, while quite harmless for the human-defined supertype, is far too restrictive for the subtype. We show here that the PTIME inclusion algorithm can be actually extended to deal with totally unrestricted REs with counting and interleaving in the subtype position, provided that the supertype is conflict-free.This is exactly the expressive power that we need in order to use subtyping inside type-checking algorithms, and the cost of this generalized algorithm is only quadratic, which is as good as the best algorithm we have for the symmetric case (see [1]). The result is extremely surprising, since we had previously found that symmetric inclusion becomes NP-hard as soon as the candidate subtype is enriched with binary intersection, a generalization that looked much more innocent than what we achieve here

Manipulation of Mitochondria Dynamics Reveals Separate Roles for Form and Function in Mitochondria Distribution

Mitochondria shape is controlled by membrane fusion and fission mediated by mitofusins, Opa1, and Drp1, whereas mitochondrial motility relies on microtubule motors. These processes govern mitochondria subcellular distribution, whose defects are emphasized in neurons because of their polarized structure. We have studied how perturbation of the fusion/fission balance affects mitochondria distribution in Drosophila axons. Knockdown of Marf or Opa1 resulted in progressive loss of distal mitochondria and in a distinct oxidative phosphorylation and membrane potential deficit. Downregulation of Drp1 rescued the lethality and bioenergetic defect caused by neuronal Marf RNAi, but induced only a modest restoration of axonal mitochondria distribution. Surprisingly, Drp1 knockdown rescued fragmentation and fully restored aberrant distribution of axonal mitochondria produced by Opa1 RNAi; however, Drp1 knockdown did not improve viability or mitochondria function. Our data show that proper morphology is critical for proper axonal mitochondria distribution independent of bioenergetic efficiency. The health of neurons largely depends on mitochondria function, but does not depend on shape or distribution. Trevisan et al. separate the independent contribution of form and function in determining the distribution of mitochondria in axons. They show that morphology is crucial for proper axonal mitochondria distribution, independent of their bioenergetic efficiency. However, the health of neurons depends on mitochondria function, but does not depend on shape or distributio

Melanopsin-expressing retinal ganglion cells are resistant to cell injury, but not always

Melanopsin retinal ganglion cells (mRGCs) are intrinsically photosensitive RGCs deputed to non-image forming functions of the eye such as synchronization of circadian rhythms to light-dark cycle. These cells are characterized by unique electrophysiological, anatomical and biochemical properties and are usually more resistant than conventional RGCs to different insults, such as axotomy and different paradigms of stress. We also demonstrated that these cells are relatively spared compared to conventional RGCs in mitochondrial optic neuropathies (Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy and Dominant Optic Atrophy). However, these cells are affected in other neurodegenerative conditions, such as glaucoma and Alzheimer's disease. We here review the current evidences that may underlie this dichotomy. We also present our unpublished data on cell experiments demonstrating that melanopsin itself does not explain the robustness of these cells and some preliminary data on immunohistochemical assessment of mitochondria in mRGCs

XQuery!: An XML Query Language with Side Effects

Abstract. As XML applications become more complex, there is a growing interest in extending XQuery with side-effect operations, notably XML updates. However, the presence of side-effects is at odds with XQuery’s declarative semantics which leaves evaluation order unspecified. In this paper, we define “XQuery!”, an extension of XQuery 1.0 that supports first-class XML updates and user-level control over update application, preserving the benefits of XQuery’s declarative semantics when possible. Our extensions can be easily implemented within an existing XQuery processor and we show how to recover basic database optimizations for such a language.

Typing Copyless Message Passing

We present a calculus that models a form of process interaction based on copyless message passing, in the style of Singularity OS. The calculus is equipped with a type system ensuring that well-typed processes are free from memory faults, memory leaks, and communication errors. The type system is essentially linear, but we show that linearity alone is inadequate, because it leaves room for scenarios where well-typed processes leak significant amounts of memory. We address these problems basing the type system upon an original variant of session types.Comment: 50 page

Topological phases in spin ladders

Questa tesi si occupa di approfondire lo studio di possibili fasi topologiche in un sistema costituito da due catene di spin caratterizzate entrambe da un'interazione alternata forte e debole. Infatti è interessante capire se questo tipo di interazione può portare a termini topologici non nulli nella funzione di partizione, termini che invece sono assenti per due catene accoppiate quando l'interazione tra spin vicini è sempre la stessa. Quello che si scopre dal punto di vista analitico è che, quando l'interazione su una catena è traslata di un sito rispetto a quella sull'altra catena, il nostro modello, nel limite del continuo, si può mappare nel modello sigma non lineare più un termine topologico diverso da zero. In corrispondenza di un certo valore critico del termine topologico si ha una transizione di fase tra due fasi isolanti differenti. Tale valore critico corrisponde a un certo valore critico del parametro che caratterizza l'interazione alternata sulle catene. L'analisi numerica, basata sul metodo DMRG, conferma questa previsione teorica. Inoltre, dal confronto tra i risultati numerici per i livelli energetici ottenuti con condizioni al contorno aperte e chiuse, si può già notare che una delle due fasi sembra avere proprietà topologiche non triviali. E' dunque molto interessante chiedersi se queste fasi siano caratterizzate da un qualche tipo di ordine topologico, rilevabile attraverso parametri d'ordine non locali. Le simulazioni numeriche confermano questa ipotesi: il parametro d'ordine non locale di stringa è non nullo nella fase caratterizzata da proprietà topologiche non triviali, che è dunque identificata come un isolante di Haldane, e il parametro d'ordine non locale di parità è non nullo nella fase topologicamente triviale, che è dunque identificata come un isolante di Mott. Si ha dunque una transizione di fase tra l'isolante di Mott e l'isolante di Haldane

Extremal Dependence Indices: improved verification measures for deterministic forecasts of rare binary events

Copyright © 2011 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or [email protected] forecasts of rare events is challenging, in part because traditional performance measures degenerate to trivial values as events become rarer. The extreme dependency score was proposed recently as a nondegenerating measure for the quality of deterministic forecasts of rare binary events. This measure has some undesirable properties, including being both easy to hedge and dependent on the base rate. A symmetric extreme dependency score was also proposed recently, but this too is dependent on the base rate. These two scores and their properties are reviewed and the meanings of several properties, such as base-rate dependence and complement symmetry that have caused confusion are clarified. Two modified versions of the extreme dependency score, the extremal dependence index, and the symmetric extremal dependence index, are then proposed and are shown to overcome all of its shortcomings. The new measures are nondegenerating, base-rate independent, asymptotically equitable, harder to hedge, and have regular isopleths that correspond to symmetric and asymmetric relative operating characteristic curves