276 research outputs found
La tutela degli interessi collettivi nel diritto dell'Unione europea
No full textAs a result of some scandals (such as that of Dieselgate), collective actions have recently returned to the fore. While these mechanisms are particularly common in the United States, the European Union has always been quite dubious about the adoption of a comprehensive regulation on the matter. In recent times, however, as a result of the Commission's initiative, they have come back into vogue. In particular, the Commission presented a proposal of a directive on the protection of collective consumer interests in April 2018. The legislative procedure has gone ahead and it is now nearing its conclusion. In this context it is appropriate to evaluate, both the legitimacy of the action of the European political institutions, with regard to the division of competences in procedural matters, and the need for the same, in the light of certain provisions of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In particular, according to the author, an action by European institutions is necessary with reference to articles 37 and 38 of the Charter, concerning, respectively, the protection of the environment and consumers. In fact, in the absence of specific instruments for the protection of collective interests, the rights of these two categories would remain devoid of effective judicial protection, in sharp contrast with Section 47 of the same regulatory instrument. In this context, the author examines the current state of European legislation with reference to access to justice in environmental issues and the judicial protection of consumer rights
Il Recovery Fund
No full textThe Next Generation EU (also called Recovery Fund for its function of restructuring the economy of the member States, after the COVID-19 pandemic) is a plan with which the European Union aims to raise funds on the market through the issue of bonds and, subsequently, to disburse sums of money, including non-repayable funds, for the realization of projects of common European interest. With this plan, the EU intends to finance the so-called green transition, bridge the digital divide and, in addition, support the structural reforms necessary for each member State. The program is very ambitious and marks a turning point in the European Union’s approach to managing economic crises, in the sense that, instead of the so-called ‘austerity’, the supranational legislator prefers to finance investments capable of supporting growth and industrial reconversion. The paper analyzes the conclusions of the extraordinary meeting of the European Council in July and the main draft acts published by the European Commission. The author notes that the program presents certain provisions which, at first glance, may appear incompatible with the Treaty, such as the power of the Commission to issue bonds and the incidence of the no bail-out clause on the legitimacy of non-repayable aids. However, these doubts can be resolved in the light of the correct reading of the provisions of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The problem is that the Next Generation EU plan ends up restricting the already limited room for maneuver of national parliaments in defining economic policies, so it does not seem really lawful in the light of the democratic principle enshrined in Article 10 TEU
Intelligenza artificiale e dati personali
No full textThe European Commission, on April 21, 2021, adopted a legislative proposal of a regulation on artificial intelligence.
This proposal was formulated after a long preparatory work, in which all the political institutions of the EU have been involved.
The proposal does not intend to interfere with the regulatory framework for the protection of personal data (regulation 2016/679).
However, there appears to be some overlap between the two sources of EU law. These overlaps concern the principle of consent, the so called minimization, the pseudoanonymization, the improper use of involuntary discriminatory biases and the right to the explanation of the outcome of a specific system of artificial intelligence.
The author tries to overcome the overlaps and the disharmonies due to the cumulative application of the two sources of EU law (reg. 2016/679 and the future regulation on AI), but it would be better for the European legislator to clarify how to solve the difficulties discending from the application of the GDPR to artificial intelligence systems
La proposta della Commissione europea di adozione del “Digital Markets Act”
No full textI mercati digitali presentano caratteristiche molto peculiari, che ne hanno determinato una struttura fortemente oligopolistica. Questo assetto ha, fino a questo momento, prodotto diverse conseguenze dannose, sia sul funzionamento del mercato che sullo sviluppo di nuove imprese e nuovi prodotti. In questo contesto, diversi Stati hanno cercato di contrastare il fenomeno attraverso l’intervento delle autorità antitrust. Tuttavia, al momento, i tentativi sembrano non aver prodotto gli effetti sperati. L’approccio ora tentato dalla Commissione europea, che sta cercando di introdurre una specifica regolamentazione ex ante delle piattaforme online, fa sperare in una parziale soluzione del problema. La proposta non appare, tuttavia, molto chiara su una questione cruciale, che è il rapporto della stessa con la normativa antitrust. A parere dell’Autore, il Digital Markets Act deve essere considerato come una fonte di diritto complementare, il che significa che gli obblighi previsti al suo interno devono sommarsi agli obblighi previsti dagli artt. 101 e 102 TFUE.Digital markets present very peculiar characteristics, which have determined a strongly oligopolistic structure of the market. This structure has produced several harmful consequences, both on the functioning of the market and on the development of new businesses and new products. In this context, several States have tried to tackle the phenomenon through the intervention of the antitrust authorities. However, at the moment, the attempts do not seem to have produced the desired effects. In this context, the approach now attempted by the European Commission, which is trying to introduce specific ex ante regulation of online platforms, gives hope for a partial solution to the problem. The proposal is not very clear on a crucial matter, which is the relationship between the proposal itself and the antitrust rules. According to the opinion of the Author, the Digital Markets Act must be regarded as a complementary source of law, which means that the obligations provided within should add up to the obligations provided for by Articles 101 and 102 TFEU
Probing the galactic and extragalactic gravitational wave backgrounds with space-based interferometers
No full textWe employ the formalism developed in [1] and [2] to study the prospect of detecting an anisotropic Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background (SGWB) with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) alone, and combined with the proposed space-based interferometer Taiji. Previous analyses have been performed in the frequency domain only. Here, we study the detectability of the individual coefficients of the expansion of the SGWB in spherical harmonics, by taking into account the specific motion of the satellites. This requires the use of time-dependent response functions, which we include in our analysis to obtain an optimal estimate of the anisotropic signal. We focus on two applications. Firstly, the reconstruction of the anisotropic galactic signal without assuming any prior knowledge of its spatial distribution. We find that both LISA and LISA with Taiji cannot put tight constraints on the harmonic coefficients for realistic models of the galactic SGWB. We then focus on the discrimination between a galactic signal of known morphology but unknown overall amplitude and an isotropic extragalactic SGWB component of astrophysical origin. In this case, we find that the two surveys can confirm, at a confidence level ≳ 3σ, the existence of both the galactic and extragalactic background if both have amplitudes as predicted in standard models. We also find that, in the LISA-only case, the analysis in the frequency domain (under the assumption of a time average of data taken homogeneously across the year) provides a nearly identical determination of the two amplitudes as compared to the optimal analysis
Ghost instabilities of cosmological models with vector fields nonminimally coupled to the curvature
No full textWe prove that many cosmological models characterized by vectors nonminimally coupled to the curvature (such as the Turner-Widrow mechanism for the production of magnetic fields during inflation, and models of vector inflation or vector curvaton) contain ghosts. The ghosts are associated with the longitudinal vector polarization present in these models and are found from studying the sign of the eigenvalues of the kinetic matrix for the physical perturbations. Ghosts introduce two main problems: (1) they make the theories ill defined at the quantum level in the high energy/subhorizon regime (and create serious problems for finding a well-behaved UV completion), and (2) they create an instability already at the linearized level. This happens because the eigenvalue corresponding to the ghost crosses zero during the cosmological evolution. At this point the linearized equations for the perturbations become singular (we show that this happens for all the models mentioned above). We explicitly solve the equations in the simplest cases of a vector without a vacuum expectation value in a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker geometry, and of a vector with a vacuum expectation value plus a cosmological constant, and we show that indeed the solutions of the linearized equations diverge when these equations become singular
Instability of anisotropic cosmological solutions supported by vector fields
No full textModels with vector fields acquiring a nonvanishing vacuum expectation value along one spatial direction have been proposed to sustain a prolonged stage of anisotropic accelerated expansion. Such models have been used for realizations of early time inflation, with a possible relation to the large scale cosmic microwave background anomalies, or of the late time dark energy. We show that, quite generally, the concrete realizations proposed so far are plagued by instabilities (either ghosts or unstable growth of the linearized perturbations) which can be ultimately related to the longitudinal vector polarization present in them. Phenomenological results based on these models are therefore unreliable
The impact of SNCA variations and its product alpha-synuclein on non-motor features of parkinson’s disease
No full textParkinson’s disease (PD) is a common and progressive neurodegenerative disease, caused by the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta in the midbrain, which is clinically characterized by a constellation of motor and non-motor manifestations. The latter include hyposmia, constipation, depression, pain and, in later stages, cognitive decline and dysautonomia. The main pathological features of PD are neuronal loss and consequent accumulation of Lewy bodies (LB) in the surviving neurons. Alpha-synuclein (α-syn) is the main component of LB, and α-syn aggregation and accumulation perpetuate neuronal degeneration. Mutations in the α-syn gene (SNCA) were the first genetic cause of PD to be identified. Generally, patients carrying SNCA mutations present early-onset parkinsonism with severe and early non-motor symptoms, including cognitive decline. Several SNCA polymorphisms were also identified, and some of them showed association with non-motor manifestations. The functional role of these polymorphisms is only partially understood. In this review we explore the contribution of SNCA and its product, α-syn, in predisposing to the non-motor manifestations of PD
Gravitational instability of de Sitter compactifications
No full textWe consider warped compactifications in ( 4 + d)-dimensional theories, with four-dimensional (4d) de Sitter dS(4) vacua ( with Hubble parameter H) and with a compact internal space. After introducing a gauge-invariant formalism for the generic metric perturbations of these backgrounds, we focus on modes which are scalar with respect to dS(4). The physical eigenmasses of these modes acquire a large universal tachyonic contribution - 12d/(d + 2) H^2, independently of the stabilization mechanism for the compact space, in addition to the usual KK masses, which instead encode the effects of the stabilization. General arguments, as well as specific examples, lead us to conjecture that, for sufficiently large dS curvature, the compactified geometry becomes gravitationally unstable due to the tachyonic growth of the scalar perturbations. This means that for any stabilization mechanism the curvature of the dS geometry cannot exceed some critical value. We relate this effect to the anisotropy of the bulk geometry and suggest the end points of the instability. Of relevance for inflationary cosmology, the perturbations of the bulk metric inevitably induce a new modulus field, which describes the conformal fluctuations of the 4d metric. If this mode is light during inflation, the induced conformal fluctuations will be amplified with a scale free spectrum and with an amplitude which is disentangled from the standard result of slow-roll inflation. The conformal 4d metric fluctuations give rise to a very generic realization of the mechanism of modulated cosmological fluctuations, related to spatial variation of couplings during ( p) reheating after inflation
Instability of the Ackerman-Carroll-Wise model, and problems with massive vectors during inflation
No full textWe prove that the anisotropic inflationary background of the Ackerman-Carroll-Wise model, characterized by a fixed-norm vector field, is unstable. We found the instability by explicitly solving the linearized equations for the most general set of perturbations around this background, and by noticing that the solutions diverge close to horizon crossing. This happens because one perturbation becomes a ghost at that moment. A simplified computation, with only the perturbations of the vector field included, shows the same instability, clarifying the origin of the problem. We then discuss several other models, with a particular emphasis on the case of a nonminimal coupling to the curvature, in which vector fields are used either to support an anisotropic expansion, or to generate cosmological perturbations on an isotropic background. In many cases, the mass squared of the vector needs to be negative; we show that, as a consequence, the longitudinal vector mode is a ghost (a field with negative kinetic term, and negative energy, and not simply a tachyon). We comment on problems that arise at the quantum level. In particular, the presence of a ghost can be a serious difficulty for the UV completion that such models require in the subhorizon regime
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