196,680 research outputs found
EU Studies in Political Science. Rival Interpretations and the Art of Trespassing Borders
No full textEU Studies in Political Science.
Rival Interpretations and the Art of Trespassing Borders
Andrea Mignone (University of Genoa)
The studies of European Union have coincided with an intensification of particular approaches to making sense of the EU political institutions. EU studies are largely based on political science methods and approaches and it has been affected by the tendency within political science to be defined by particular “disciplinary” approaches (notably rational choice). Indeed, the development of EU studies could be seen as focusing on the EU as a “system”, and there has been a proliferation of approaches which seek to make a sense of European integration. While this remains only one part of the picture of EU studies, its growing significance must not be leading to a marginalisation of the inter-disciplinarity or multi-disciplinarity.
Studying the European Union political system, asks us to think anew about political science as a discipline and how its sub-fields are separated or fit together. Theories on international relations have long benefited from the dynamic of European integration. The effort to theorize about the process of European integration began within the political science sub-field of international relations, and the field of integration theory in particular. During the first few decades of the integration process, the literature was essentially divided between (neo)-functionalists (political integration as a spillover effect of economic integration) and intergovernmentalists (national governments as gatekeepers). In recent years, however, there are other approaches to study the European Union, in particular in the fields of international relations (realists, rational choice and historical institutionalists, reflectivists or constructivists) and comparative politics (pluralism, neo-corporatism, transnationalism, multilevel governance studies, Lipset-Rokkan model). In no other substantive area is the relation between comparative politics and international relations so close and their existence as two independent sub-fields so problematic. But they have not distinct conceptual bases or theoretical contributions, so we can hope on the possibility to overcome the divide. The boundaries among the sub-fields of political science are not written in stone. European integration, alongside a variety of global economic and social pressures, has blurred the distinction between domestic and international politics. Among these recent studies, a more specific and original movement has developed around what we will refer as the political sociology of the EU.
Currently, students of EU politics and policy-making are taking up insights from the new institutionalism in political science, sociology, economics. They debate over the relative applicability of International Relations and Comparative Politics for understanding the EU.
The evolution of the studies on EU politics is a far from banal exercise. There are clearly many conceptions of what constitutes “scientific progress” in EU studies. In this essay we do not dispute that approaches from Comparative Politics (CP) can bring added value to the study of the EU. Nor is its intention to suggest that comparisons between the EU and nation states perform no useful function – quite the contrary. The EU contains elements that are irreducibly international, which makes the character of interactions within it fundamentally different from those within national political systems, even federal ones. Largely, though not exclusively, because of the unique nature of states as political actors, politics between them differs in numerous fundamental ways from the politics found within them. Comparative Politics approaches are often based on insights about the nature of politics that are not easily transposable from the domestic to the international realm.
In: Morini M. (ed.), EU-Russia, Genova, Eidon Edizioni, 2010, pp. 49-83
(ISBN 978-88-95677-30-9
Big Data analytics for knowledge transfer among organisms while reconstructing Gene Regulatory Networks
No full textThe reconstruction of gene regulatory networks (GRNs)
from gene expression data is pivotal for understanding
gene regulatory mechanisms and processes. In this
context, machine learning and big data analytics tools
can be considered fundamental. However, most existing
methods (i) produce poor results when the amount of
labelled examples is limited or when no negative example
is available and (ii) they are not able to exploit information
extracted from GRNs of other (better studied) related
organisms.
We overcome these limitations by proposing
an innovative transfer learning method, called
BioSfer (Mignone et al., 2020), which can exploit the
knowledge about the GRN of a source organism for the
reconstruction of the GRN of the target organism. In the
first stages, we identify two predictive models to discover
unknown links for both the considered GRNs. In the final
stage, we build a new geometrically-combined model,
which can identify unknown links better. Moreover, the
proposed method is natively able to work in the positiveunlabeled setting, where no negative example is available,
by fruitfully exploiting a set of unlabeled examples. In
our experiments, we reconstructed the human GRN by
exploiting the knowledge of the GRN of M. musculus. The
qualitative analysis showed that the proposed method is
able to identify biologically plausible gene regulations
that are not identified by other tools. Results showed
that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art
approaches (Zhang et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017; Long
et al., 2014; Huynh-Thu et al., 2010; Aibar et al., 2017;
Mignone et al., 2018) and identifies previously unknown
functional relationships among the analysed genes
Translating Sardinia into Chinese: How Indirect Translation Affected the Reception of Geographic and Culture-bounds Words in Deledda’s Short Fiction
No full textAs in the case of many literary traditions originating from minor countries, in Late Imperial and Early Republican China several Italian literary works reached the Chinese readership through the mediation of foreign translations, mostly composed in English and French, as well as Japanese. Such languages, which Chinese literati and intellectuals had started to master, served as a catalyst and contributed to the diffusion of promising works which were starting to approach the international literary landscape, but were hardly able to reach China in their original form.
In this context, also Grazia Deledda’s literary production has been introduced by the early 20th century Chinese translators through indirect translations. Despite being a stimulus to broaden the Chinese literary landscape, such process often compromised the integrity of the original linguistic choices: omissions, domestication and a frequent use of transliterations of realia strongly characterize Deledda’s translations, leading their readers through a winding path which could have compromised the reception of Deledda’s symbolic representation of the universal human psychology.
From this perspective, this paper will introduce the first translations of Deledda’s production to show how the Chinese translators’ choices, and their inevitable tie with the medium language, affected a genuine understanding of the rural Sardinian world and its traditional moral values
An Investigation of the Hydrodynamics of Hypersonic Jets in Astrophysical Conditions
No full textHypersonic, collimated jets are being lately intensively studied in Earth laboratories, trying to reproduce some of the physical properties of a subclass of astrophysical jets that are the Herbig-Haro (HH) jets. These jets are produced in the regions around Young Stellar Objects (YSOs), that are proto-stars located inside galactic Giant Molecular Clouds. In addition to the novel experimental approach, HH or YSO jets have been object of interest by the astrophysical community since a few decades and studied by means of observations at different wavelengths and analytical and numerical modeling. We present laboratory experiments and 2D numerical simulations of hypersonic jets, comparing the results of experiments and simulations that reproduce the evolution of the above mentioned jets. The experimental flows match two main scaling parameter requirements for proto-stellar jets, i.e. the ejection Mach number M and the jet/ambient density ratio. In particular, eta goes from slightly underdense to overdense values. Furthermore, as a development of previous works, we consider here the dependence of the jet structure and morphology on the Mach number, in the range 10 to 1
Hydrodynamics of Hypersonic Jets: Experiments and Numerical Simulations
No full texthypersonic jet, long-term evolution, astrophysical jets, density measure by fluorescent emissio
In praise of raw data
No full textIn this project, Dr Melanie King and Dr Claudia Mignone (INAF - Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Rome) looked at the construction of astronomical images, considering artefacts that are removed from astronomical images. Astronomical images are highly mediated, for example - colours are added to represent chemicals present in a galaxy or nebula. In this project King, and Mignone viewed raw data images from the James Webb Telescope, and have been in discussion with Alyssa Pagan and Joseph Depasquale at NASA to learn more about their image editing processes. Mignone and King also met with Mark McCaughrean (Former Senior Advisor for Science & Exploration at the European Space Agency) about his work with astronomical imaging.
This project comprises several colour printing processes and sustainable printing techniques, which mimic the digital imaging processing techniques. It draws attention to the artefacts resulting from astronomical telescopes and from the printing processes themselves.
The Shaw-IAU workshops focus on astronomy education for primary and secondary school students and teacher training both in universities and in service. This year's workshop will feature two special topics: an exploration of the first two years of the James Webb Space Telescope for the scientific topic, and the crucial aspect of evaluation in educational contexts as the non-scientific topic.
The complete list of sessions is listed below:
Science topic –James Webb Space Telescope, the first two years
Special topic – evaluation
Astronomy education research
Teaching methods and tools
Astronomy education in schools in practice (primary and secondary schools
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