Security branding and digital narrations. Security issues representation on Twitter

In the contemporary multicentric world, sovereign states have to manage carefully the construction of their image, defining their role and aspirations. With the re-definition of the state centric politics, stories become relevant: communication is a form of power, and networked forms of communication are becoming progressively a way to conquer the transnational public spheres. Through strategic narratives of foreign politics, states try to set up the ‘tales’ of international affairs and foreign strategies, to suggest a world vision, a causal interpretation, determining frames that affect transnational actors’ position in the international environment. Sovereign states develop these kind of frame using tools and theories referred to the commercial branding tradition to promote and support their own policies and identity. We decided to investigate how that process is made through information diffusion on digital platforms.

In this work, it has been analyzed the content presented through Twitter posts by the Foreign Ministries accounts of four different States dissimilar for geopolitical positioning and security concerns (USA; Israel; France; Sweden), for a period of three months (9/1/2015-11/30/2015); leading to the identification of different models and characteristic patterns of self-representation.

The thematic content analysis, based on the identification of macrocategories and micro-issues, has led to the identification of different models and characteristic patterns of self-representation, determined by domestic vicissitudes, and has shown some regularities, caused by the branding vocation of autobiographical online contents.     

On the Use of Shadow Prices for Sustainable Well-Being Measurement

Social Indicators Research - This paper tries to answer the following research question: can multidimensional concepts like well-being or sustainability be measured by using a single metric such as...     

Are there electoral cycles of emigration? An empirical investigation based on European data

Economic literature suggests that economic factors and the availability of amenities act as determinants of migration choices together with socio‐demographic factors. Migration has also been found to be the consequence of political instability. This article argues that specific political events, i.e., democratic elections, may be linked to migration flows. By using European data over the 1999‐2012 time period, our system GMM estimations reveal that there is an emigration political cycle across European democracies and across the young democracies of Central and Eastern European countries. We observe that regular elections tend to diminish emigration ratios, whereas endogenous elections have the opposite effect. These results suggest special challenges for governments and oppositions, which are also discussed.     

Bayesian adaptive dose‐escalation designs for simultaneously estimating the optimal and maximum safe dose based on safety and efficacy

The main purpose of dose‐escalation trials is to identify the dose(s) that is/are safe and efficacious for further investigations in later studies. In this paper, we introduce dose‐escalation designs that incorporate both the dose‐limiting events and dose‐limiting toxicities (DLTs) and indicative responses of efficacy into the procedure. A flexible nonparametric model is used for modelling the continuous efficacy responses while a logistic model is used for the binary DLTs. Escalation decisions are based on the combination of the probabilities of DLTs and expected efficacy through a gain function. On the basis of this setup, we then introduce 2 types of Bayesian adaptive dose‐escalation strategies. The first type of procedures, called “single objective,” aims to identify and recommend a single dose, either the maximum tolerated dose, the highest dose that is considered as safe, or the optimal dose, a safe dose that gives optimum benefit risk. The second type, called “dual objective,” aims to jointly estimate both the maximum tolerated dose and the optimal dose accurately. The recommended doses obtained under these dose‐escalation procedures provide information about the safety and efficacy profile of the novel drug to facilitate later studies. We evaluate different strategies via simulations based on an example constructed from a real trial on patients with type 2 diabetes, and the use of stopping rules is assessed. We find that the nonparametric model estimates the efficacy responses well for different underlying true shapes. The dual‐objective designs give better results in terms of identifying the 2 real target doses compared to the single‐objective designs.     

略论中国古典戏曲中的咒语现象

在中国古典戏曲描写中,"咒语"常出现在唱词和科白里。就形态上看,可分为自咒与他咒两种类型;就内涵上看则涉及爱情生活、巫术攻侵、战事、佛道文化等等方面。对这些咒语事象作民俗文化学角度的考察,探究它们的形式、内涵、源流、变化及其在其它文体文献中的反映,可以见出文学母题学的传承性意义,以及戏曲作品"叙事单元"模态化的规律。     

Choosing Aggregation Rules for Composite Indicators

From a formal point of view, a composite indicator is an aggregate of all dimensions, objectives, individual indicators and variables used for its construction. This implies that what defines a composite indicator is the set of properties underlying its mathematical aggregation convention. In this article, I try to revise the theoretical debate on aggregation rules by looking at contributions from both voting theory and multi-criteria decision analysis. This cross-fertilization helps in clarifying many ambiguous issues still present in the literature and allows discussing the key assumptions that may change the evaluation of an aggregation rule easily, when a composite indicator has to be constructed.     

Bootstrap Testing of Hypotheses on Co‐Integration Relations in Vector Autoregressive Models

It is well known that the finite‐sample properties of tests of hypotheses on the co‐integrating vectors in vector autoregressive models can be quite poor, and that current solutions based on Bartlett‐type corrections or bootstrap based on unrestricted parameter estimators are unsatisfactory, in particular in those cases where also asymptotic χ² tests fail most severely. In this paper, we solve this inference problem by showing the novel result that a bootstrap test where the null hypothesis is imposed on the bootstrap sample is asymptotically valid. That is, not only does it have asymptotically correct size, but, in contrast to what is claimed in existing literature, it is consistent under the alternative. Compared to the theory for bootstrap tests on the co‐integration rank (Cavaliere, Rahbek, and Taylor, 2012), establishing the validity of the bootstrap in the framework of hypotheses on the co‐integrating vectors requires new theoretical developments, including the introduction of multivariate Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes with random (reduced rank) drift parameters. Finally, as documented by Monte Carlo simulations, the bootstrap test outperforms existing methods.     

职业学院和师范学院大学生自我意识发展的比较研究

为了深入了解职业院校和师范院校大学生自我意识的发展特点,本研究运用《自我意识量表》对两类两所学校664名大学生进行调查。结果发现：（1）两种院校大学生的自我意识水平总体上都处于中等,但两个维度之间发展不平衡,公众自我维度的得分显著高于内在自我维度;（2）女生在公众自我维度上显著高于男生,年龄为18岁及以下的学生在自我意识总分上显著低于其他年龄的学生;（3）师范院校大学生在公众自我维度上的得分显著高于职业院校大学生。     

行政补偿立法思考

行政赔偿在行政领域起到了重要作用,目前获得行政赔偿的必要条件之一是行政主体违法行使职权,从行政相对人的角度考虑,在是否违法问题上大费周章没有必要,进一步从行政赔偿法是救济法的本质出发,优先考虑行政相对人的权益,将有关行政补偿内容纳入行政赔偿法律体系框架之中。