Istituzioni ecclesiastiche e potere regio nel mediterraneo medievale. Scritti per Salvatore Fodale

Il volume è un omaggio degli allievi al professore Salvatore Fodale. Il filo conduttore sono le Istituzioni ecclesiastiche e il potere regio tra l’età normanna e la fine del Medioevo. Uno spazio particolare è dedicato alla città di Messina, al centro dei saggi sulla religiosità tra Oriente e Occidente e su Raimondo Puyolis, arcivescovo catalano nel Trecento. Il rapporto tra Istituzioni ecclesiastiche e potere regio emerge negli articoli su Papato e propaganda di crociata nel Duecento e sul monastero di Santa Maria del Bosco di Calatamauro. Viene, inoltre, esaminata la complessa relazione tra Martino il Giovane e la comunità ebraica siciliana. Il regno di Alfonso il Magnanimo fa da sfondo ai saggi sul memoriale della Camera reginale, al tempo della moglie Maria di Castiglia, e sulla Descendencia dominorum Regni Sicilie di Pau Rossell, codice commissionato a Valencia tra il 1437 e il 1438. In un mondo a parte sembrano vivere i La Grua, baroni di Carini, non inseriti nel sistema di potere della monarchia

Multi-agent Confidential Abductive Reasoning

In the context of multi-agent hypothetical reasoning, agents typically have partial knowledge about their environments, and the union of such knowledge is still incomplete to represent the whole world. Thus, given a global query they collaborate with each other to make correct inferences and hypothesis, whilst maintaining global constraints. Most collaborative reasoning systems operate on the assumption that agents can share or communicate any information they have. However, in application domains like multi-agent systems for healthcare or distributed software agents for security policies in coalition networks, confidentiality of knowledge is an additional primary concern. These agents are required to collaborately compute consistent answers for a query whilst preserving their own private information. This paper addresses this issue showing how this dichotomy between "open communication" in collaborative reasoning and protection of confidentiality can be accommodated. We present a general-purpose distributed abductive logic programming system for multi-agent hypothetical reasoning with confidentiality. Specifically, the system computes consistent conditional answers for a query over a set of distributed normal logic programs with possibly unbound domains and arithmetic constraints, preserving the private information within the logic programs. A case study on security policy analysis in distributed coalition networks is described, as an example of many applications of this system

EFFECTS OF NDL-PCB ON PORCINE MACROPHAGES: PRELIMINARY RESULTS

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are persistent organic pollutants (POPs) causing adverse effects on both humans and animals. Immune system is an important target organ for many environmental contaminants. Macrophages constitute an important component of the immune system of humans and animals, in fact, they are responsible for triggering innate immune responses and host defense. The aim of the current study was to assess the immunomodulatory effects of certain non dioxin like PCBs (PCB 138; PCB 153 and PCB 180) using porcine macrophage 3D4/31 cell line. We evaluated not only the effects induced by the individual congeners but also those deriving from mixtures of more contaminants, in consideration of the fact that co-contamination of the same substrate is common in natural conditions and the effects of simultaneous exposure to multiple contaminants are still little investigated. The results of the current study showed that ndl-PCBs reduced significantly cell viability only at the highest concentration (50 µM); such effect was not linked to apoptosis induction or cell cycle arrest. The contemporary presence of more than one contaminant (differently combined) did not induce any enhancement of effects on 3D4/31 cell line

The modulation of sirtuins and apoptotic proteins in rats after exhaustive exercise

A large body of evidence shows that a single bout of strenuous exercise induces oxidative stress in circu- lating human lymphocytes leading to lipid peroxide- tion, DNA damage, mitochondrial perturbations, and protein oxidation. In a training experiment, Wistar rats were divided into control group (CG) and exer- cise group (EG). After a running level exercise until exhaustion, we observed an increase in the mRNA content and protein expression of SIRT1 and SIRT7 in the EG compared to the CG. Moreover, such train- ing exercise did not change mRNA transcripts and protein expression of FOXO3A and GADD45. We also observed an increase of pro-apoptotic protein bax and a decrease of the anti-apoptotic protein bcl-2 in the EG. Accordingly, we observed a caspase-3 activation and poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) cleavage only in EG rats. Statistical analysis of the data showed a significant correlation between SIRT1 and SIRT7 expression and apoptotic proteins such as bax, bcl-2 in both tissues. We conclude that, in both muscle, such exercise activates both a damaging apoptotic mecha- nism with bax increase and bcl-2 decrease and a counterbalancing protective mechanism with SIRT1 and SIRT7 increase

Fast Label Extraction in the CDAWG

The compact directed acyclic word graph (CDAWG) of a string $T$ of length $n$ takes space proportional just to the number $e$ of right extensions of the maximal repeats of $T$, and it is thus an appealing index for highly repetitive datasets, like collections of genomes from similar species, in which $e$ grows significantly more slowly than $n$. We reduce from $O(m\log{\log{n}})$ to $O(m)$ the time needed to count the number of occurrences of a pattern of length $m$, using an existing data structure that takes an amount of space proportional to the size of the CDAWG. This implies a reduction from $O(m\log{\log{n}}+\mathtt{occ})$ to $O(m+\mathtt{occ})$ in the time needed to locate all the $\mathtt{occ}$ occurrences of the pattern. We also reduce from $O(k\log{\log{n}})$ to $O(k)$ the time needed to read the $k$ characters of the label of an edge of the suffix tree of $T$, and we reduce from $O(m\log{\log{n}})$ to $O(m)$ the time needed to compute the matching statistics between a query of length $m$ and $T$, using an existing representation of the suffix tree based on the CDAWG. All such improvements derive from extracting the label of a vertex or of an arc of the CDAWG using a straight-line program induced by the reversed CDAWG.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure. In proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE 2017). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1705.0864

Homogeneous Open Quantum Random Walks on a lattice

We study Open Quantum Random Walks for which the underlying graph is a lattice, and the generators of the walk are translation-invariant. We consider the quantum trajectory associated with the OQRW, which is described by a position process and a state process. We obtain a central limit theorem and a large deviation principle for the position process, and an ergodic result for the state process. We study in detail the case of homogeneous OQRWs on a lattice, with internal space $h={\mathbb C}^2$

Learning Rules from User Behaviour

Accepted versio

Quantum to Classical Transition in a Single-Ion Laser

Stimulated emission of photons from a large number of atoms into the mode of a strong light field is the principle mechanism for lasing in "classical" lasers. The onset of lasing is marked by a threshold which can be characterised by a sharp increase in photon flux as a function of external pumping strength. The same is not necessarily true for the fundamental building block of a laser: a single trapped atom interacting with a single optical radiation mode. It has been shown that such a "quantum" laser can exhibit thresholdless lasing in the regime of strong coupling between atom and radiation field. However, although theoretically predicted, a threshold at the single-atom level could not be experimentally observed so far. Here, we demonstrate and characterise a single-atom laser with and without threshold behaviour by changing the strength of atom-light field coupling. We observe the establishment of a laser threshold through the accumulation of photons in the optical mode even for a mean photon number substantially lower than for the classical case. Furthermore, self-quenching occurs for very strong external pumping and constitutes an intrinsic limitation of single-atom lasers. Moreover, we find that the statistical properties of the emitted light can be adjusted for weak external pumping, from the quantum to the classical domain. Our observations mark an important step towards fundamental understanding of laser operation in the few-atom limit including systems based on semiconductor quantum dots or molecules.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, 10 pages supplement, accepted by Nature Physic