1,546 research outputs found
Pietro Verri’s Contribution to the Economic Theory of the 18th Century: Commercial Society, Civil Society and Governance of the Economy
No full text'Count Pietro Verri (1728-97) - Schumpeter writes (History, p. 178) - - would have to be included in any list of the greatest economists'. Within the Milanese school, he certainly stands out, alongside with Cesare Beccaria, during one of the most interesting periods from a history of analysis point of view. Luigi Cossa's famous introduction to the study of political economy rates Pietro Verri to be inferior to Beccaria in ingenuity and scientific cultivation, but greatly to be ahead of him as an economist.1 This judgement by Cossa, in particular, seems to echo the relative position of the two men in the history of ideas, particularly after Beccaria's rise to fame with a book - On crimes and punishments - which had in fact been largely inspired by Verri himself and defended by him.2 It is proposed in the present paper to revisit some of the basic tenets of Pietro Verri's political economy, with more in view than dwell on specific intuitions and theorems: namely relate those to Verri's own - quite original - conception of the economy. The scholarly work of Pietro Verri - with a special reference to his Meditazioni sulla economia politica of 1771 - provides the first systematic contribution stemming from the quarters of Lombard enlightenment in the field of political economy, especially so if one considers that Cesare Beccaria's parallel work - namely his Elementi di economia pubblica, conceived and drafted at the same time as Verri's Meditazioni - would only be published posthumously several years later. From the vantage point afforded by Verri's political economy, we gain a considerably attractive view of the most significant elements and characteristic concepts of Lombard enlightenment during the latter half of the 18th century; Verri, moreover, as we shall see, builds on a number of them in a new and original way. This paper is aimed at discussing Verri's political economy mainly along two distinct, but related, lines. In the first place the conception of commercial society is considered such as it is treated by the author particularly in his Meditazioni. In this perspective the analysis of such issues as competition and the market or money and taxation occupy a central place. Secondly it will be necessary to emphasise that Verri's approach has little to do either with forms of pure economics on one side - largely yet to be born throughout the 18th century - or, on the other side, with such conceptions of the polis - contrariwise well alive among his own contemporaries - as are founded on a sovereign authority conceived to be situated above the law. What Verri's political economy ultimately amounts to is an economic conception of civil society. The latter has natural strong connections with his own fact-mindedness - emphasised by Schumpeter - as well as with his deep practical involvement in administrative affairs and in the reforming process taking place during the latter half of the 18th century in Milan. In our view, a thorough investigation along the mentioned lines is the precondition for an understanding of the intellectual stature and of the scholarly contribution of Pietro Verri. His main ground is distinctly analytical and only by appreciating his analysis is it possible to shed light on the meaning and intellectual significance also of his practical contributions. Moreover Verri's pronouncements on the criticism of despotic government, the relevance of intermediate powers or bodies and on multiple levels of governance will be examined in a new and original light, showing how close they are to the gist of his analysis.
Detection of the Convex Hull of a Scattering System Embedded in a Heterogeneous Background
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Fast CPU/GPU pattern evaluation of irregular arrays
No full textAn approach for the fast analysis of "irregular", i.e., of conformal, periodic or aperiodic, 2D arrays, based on the use of the p-series approach and Non-Uniform FFT (NUFFT) routines is proposed. The approach allows for modulating the computational burden depending on the array curvature and, thanks to the use of the NUFFT, the asymptotic growth of the computing time reduces to that of a few, standard FFTs. A sub-array partition strategy is also sketched and shown to further unburden the procedure and control the accuracy. The approach has been implemented in both sequential and parallel codes enabling its execution on CPUs and on cost-effective, massively parallel computing platforms like Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). Its performance in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy has been assessed by an extensive numerical analysis and also against benchmarks provided by algorithms based on fast Matrix-Vector Multiplication routines
An approach for restoring the coherence between the scanning surfaces in phaseless near-field antenna characterization
No full textWe propose an approach for restoring the coherence between the scanningsurfaces in phaselessnear-fieldantennacharacterization. The approach consists of accounting for the misalignments of the second scanningsurface with respect to the first one directly within the radiation operator, restoring the coherence within the phaselesscharacterization algorithm. The restore of the coherence is demanded to a global optimization stage, performed by an efficient and effective Multilevel, Single-Linkage (MLSL) routine. The proposed method does not require any human intervention, nor it does need any additional hardware instrumentation. Numerical and experimental results show the potentialities of the technique
Field sampling and field reconstruction: a new perspective
No full textWe address the problem of extracting the maximum amount of information on an electromagnetic field over a domain D-O from field sample measurements on a domain D-I, with a priori information on the source (or scatterer). The problem is faced in two steps. In the first one, the source reconstruction is dealt with by taking into account the available a priori information and the optimal probe positioning is determined as that optimizing the singular value dynamics of the involved linear radiation operator. The second step consists of reconstructing the field on D-O as that radiated by the retrieved source. An extensive numerical analysis highlights the performance of the approach
Fast interpolation accelerated on GPU for SAR backprojection
No full textWe report on the development of a SAR backprojection algorithm using a Non-Uniform FFT (NUFFT) routine implemented on a GPU by the Accelereyes LibJacket programming platform. The performance of the approach is analyzed in terms of accuracy and computational speed by comparisons to Matlab and CUDA versions of the same routine and to a frequently used alternative technique based on the joined adoption of the FFT and a sinc interpolation routine coded in LibJacket as well as in Matlab. Experimental results against the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) airborne data delivered under the “challenge problem for SAR-based Ground Moving Target Identification (GMTI) in urban environments” and collected under circular flight paths are also shown
A new technique for finding the convex hull of a scattering system: performance analysis and application to inhomogeneous backgrounds
No full textSensitivity to positioning errors in aperiodic arrays
No full textA novel approach to the synthesis of linear aperiodic arrays has been recently
introduced. The approach exploits fast algorithms (NUFFT) for the evaluation of the
aperiodic array factor that restore the computation burden of the standard periodic
case. In addition, a proper representation of the design parameters, allowing the
enforcement of tight constraints on the minimum and maximum inter-element spacings
enable an effective control of mutual coupling effects, overall array dimensions and
sensitivity of the synthesized pattern against realization errors on the element
positioning.
This paper points out the computational efficiency of the approach and the role of the
constraints on the sensitivity of the solution
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