3,350 research outputs found
Math everywhere: deterministic and stochastic modelling in biomedicine, economics and industry dedicated to the 60th birthday of Vincenzo Capasso
No full textThese proceedings are reporting on the conference ''Math Everywhere", a successful event celebrating a leading scientist, promoting ideas he pursued and sharing the open atmosphere he is known for. The broad spectrum of contributions to this volume illustrates that its title is correct. The areas of the contributions are the following: Deterministic and Stochastic Systems. Mathematical Problems in Biology, Medicine and Ecology. Mathematical Problems in Industry and Economics.
Disciplinarity is basic for interdisciplinarity. This statement seems to be trivial, however, everyone, not influenced by fashionable trends and buzzwords entering more and more also science, will find out that it is nontrivial at all in practice. Competence in mathematics and the field of application are both needed. The relevance of mathematical theory is getting more obvious the more one faces the challenges of real life applications. It is a well-known fact that mathematical modelling of real problems very often leads to frontiers of mathematical theory and requires new mathematical methods. This conference combined competence in mathematical theory and methods with competence in the fields of applications
Variations on the Author
No full text“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
La relazione tra disimpegno morale e comportamenti trasgressivi in adolescenza: il ruolo moderatore dell'alessitimia
No full textIl disimpegno morale costituisce un significativo fattore di rischio individuale per lo sviluppo e l'adattamento in adolescenza, come ampiamente dimostrato in letteratura. Questo lavoro si focalizza sulla relazione tra disimpegno morale e comportamenti trasgressivi in un gruppo di 308 adolescenti italiani, di età compresa tra i 14 e i 19 anni, con lo scopo di verificare se talerelazione sia moderata dall'alessitimia. I risultati hanno evidenziato significative differenze di genere e di età sia rispetto al disimpegno morale che all'alessitimia. Essi hanno inoltre mostrato una relazione tra disimpegno morale e trasgressione, moderata dalla difficoltà a identificare le emozioni
Kant, l'assassino alla porta e il giudizio morale comune
No full textNel 1797, Kant sottoscrisse, rivendicandola, una tesi che Benjamin Constant aveva at-
tribuito, con intento polemico, a “un filosofo tedesco”: neppure a un assassino che ci
chieda se un nostro amico, da lui inseguito, si sia rifugiato in casa nostra, è lecito mentire.
La risposta kantiana al dilemma dell’assassino alla porta e l’affermazione di un dovere
incondizionato di veridicità sembrano, in virtù del loro carattere controintuitivo, mal
conciliabili con la tesi kantiana che il giudizio morale comune sia affidabile, che il com-
pito del filosofo morale sia un’analisi concettuale della morale esistente e che, quanto
all’etica normativa, la filosofia non abbia nulla da dire, di diverso o di ulteriore rispetto
a quanto l’uomo comune già non sappia da solo, né un diverso principio, tramite il
quale giungervi.
L’articolo ricostruisce il vero oggetto della discussione tra Kant e Constant e presenta la
concezione che induce Kant a respingere come non realistico il dilemma dell’assassino
alla porta. La dottrina morale di Kant si fonda sulla concezione, largamente condivisa
tra i suoi contemporanei, che esclude che il corso del mondo e le decisioni dei soggetti
morali possano essere oggetto di calcolo, previsione e controllo, e che vede perciò, come
costitutive della vita morale, due dimensioni, di cui quella prioritaria impone divieti il
cui rispetto è sempre in potere di ognuno.In 1797, Kant asserted a thesis that Benjamin Constant had polemically attributed to a German philosopher: we are not allowed to lie, not even to a murderer who asks us whether a friend of ours who is being pursued by him has taken refuge in our house.
Kant's answer to the dilemma of the murderer at the door, which rules out the possibility of any exceptions to the duty of truthfulness, seems counterintuitive and difficult to reconcile with Kant's thesis that common moral judgement is reliable. For Kant, the task of the moral philosopher is a conceptual analysis of existing morality, and philosophy has nothing to say about normative ethics other than, or in addition to, what the common man already knows.
The paper traces the real subject of the discussion between Kant and Constant and presents the conception that leads Kant to reject the dilemma of the murderer at the door as unrealistic. Kant believes that the course of the world and the choices of moral subjects cannot be objects of calculation, prediction and control and therefore, like his contemporaries, assumes two dimensions, as constitutive of moral life, of which the overriding one imposes prohibitions whose observance is always in the power of everyone
Scienza, filosofia e politica. Kant e le neuroscienze del giudizio morale
No full textL’articolo discute la contrapposizione delle neuroscienze del giudizio morale alla filosofia morale, mettendo in luce il significato politico della tesi che sia possibile, o già reale, una scienza della moralità, e che questa dimostri che il riconoscimento dei diritti equivale a un errore cognitivo. L’articolo presenta inoltre alcuni dei contributi teorici che la dottrina morale di Kant può fornire – purché si eviti di fornirne un resoconto infondato e caricaturale, per farne il paradigma della filosofia dalla poltrona – quanto al ruolo dell’intuizione e del ragionamento nella formulazione dei giudizi morali e quanto alla funzione da attribuire agli esperimenti mentali relativi ai dilemmi morali.This article discusses the opposition of neurosciences of moral judgement to moral philosophy, shedding light on the political meaning of the thesis according to which a science of morality is possible, or already real, and would demonstrate that rights’ recognition equates to a cognitive error. It furthermore presents some theoretical contribu-tions offered by Kant’s moral doctrine – on condition that one avoids providing an unfounded and caricatural ac-count in order to make it the paradigm of armchair philosophy – about the role of intuition and reasoning in formulating moral judgements and of mental experiments on moral dilemmas
Ant colonies: a nature inspired paradigm for the mathematical modelling of self-organizing systems
No full textImparare le lingue per abbracciare il mondo
No full textL’autrice che si colloca, come Daniela Zorzi, tra i fautori di una linguistica “impegnata”, propone in ricordo della studiosa amica, una riflessione sul ruolo cruciale del multilinguismo e delle lingue- culture, per il successo professionale e il benessere sociale, nella società contemporanea. Il multilinguismo appare come un’urgenza educativa che interpella studiosi e formatori a tutti i livelli al fine di promuovere nei giovani un apprendimento consapevole efficace ed autonomo.Multilingualism constitutes an urgent objective for education, which needs to involve teachers and researchers at all levels if we are to promote effective and autonomous learning in the young. Like Daniela Zorzi, the author considers herself a socially engaged linguist, and in memory of her friend’s work, offers a reflection on the key roles of languages and cultures and of multilingualism for professional success and social welfare today
Rescaling Stochastic Processes : Asymptotics
No full textIn this chapter the authors investigate the links among different scales, from a probabilistic point of view. Particular attention is being paid to the mathematical modelling of the social behavior of interacting individuals in a biological population, on one hand because there is an intrinsic interest in dynamics of population
herding, on the other hand since agent based models are being used in complex optimization problems. Among other interesting features, these systems lead to phenomena of self-organization, which exhibit interesting spatial patterns. Here we show how properties on the macroscopic level depend on interactions at the microscopic level; in particular suitable laws of large numbers are shown to imply convergence of the evolution equations for empirical spatial distributions of interacting individuals to nonlinear reaction–diffusion equations for a so called mean field, as the total number of individuals becomes sufficiently large. As a working example, an interacting particle system modelling social behavior has been proposed, based on a system
of stochastic differential equations, driven by both aggregating/repelling and external “forces”. In order to support a rigorous derivation of the asymptotic nonlinear integro-differential equation, compactness criteria for convergence in metric spaces of measures, and problems of existence of a weak/entropic solution have been analyzed.
Further the temporal asymptotic behavior of the stochastic system of a fixed number of interacting particles has been discussed. This leads to the problem of the existence of nontrivial invariant probability measure
Stochastic Modeling and Simulation of Ion Transport through Channels
No full textIon channels are of major interest, and form an area of intensive research in the fields of biophysics and medicine since they control many vital physiological functions. The aim of this work is on the one hand to propose a fully stochastic and discrete model describing the main characteristics of a multiple channel system. The movement of the ions is coupled, as usual, with a Poisson equation for the electrical field; we have considered, in addition, the influence of exclusion forces. On the other hand, we have discussed the nondimensionalization of the stochastic system by using real physical parameters, all supported by numerical simulations. The specific features of both cases of micro- and nanochannels have been taken into consideration with particular attention to the latter case in order to show that it is necessary to consider a discrete and stochastic model for ions movement inside the channels
A probabilistic interpretation of a non-conservative and path-dependent nonlinear reaction-diffusion system for the marble sulphation in Cultural Heritage
No full textGiven a reaction-diffusion system modelling the sulphation phenomenon, we derive a single regularised non-conservative and path-dependent nonlinear partial differential equation and propose a probabilistic interpretation using a non-Markovian McKean-type stochastic differential equation. We discuss the
well-posedness of such a stochastic model, and we establish the propagation of chaos property for the related interacting particle system
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