‘Capturing Anarchists Across Borders’: The Transnational Dimensions of Italian Antimilitarist Campaigns, 1911–14

Abstract

This article engages with questions of the integration of different scales of analysis in the study of labour and radical movements: ‘transnational’, ‘national’ and ‘local’ or ‘trans-local’. The article places the study of transnational anarchism in a ‘national’ and ‘trans-local’ perspective. The analysis of the intersection between the networks of those who migrated from Italy and those who remained provides a fruitful means to uncover dynamics within the transnational anarchist movement and the interplay, in both directions, between home country, exile communities and host countries. The article focuses on the crucial, but still unexplored, contributions of communities of Italian anarchists abroad (in, among other places, London, Paris, Berne, Marseille, Barre and Buenos Aires) to the anti-militarist campaigns against the Italian colonial enterprise in Libya from 1911 to 1914, in terms of propaganda, theoretical debate, financing and countercultural production. The investigation of the initiatives of anarchist exiles and how they coordinated with their comrades in Italy provides a significant case study, not only to understand network-based transnational anarchism but also to reflect on mechanisms of political migration and their influence on the development of social conflicts.     

Child Sexual Behaviors in School Context: Age and Gender Differences

ABSTRACT

The main purpose of the study was to explore the child sexual behaviors that Italian teachers have observed in the school context. A representative sample of 227 children, from 5 to 10 years old, was rated by their teachers through the Child Sexual Behavior Inventory. Frequencies of sexual behaviors among children aged 5 to 6, 7 to 8, and 9 to 10 are presented. Younger children showed a broader range of sexual behaviors that decrease with the growing age, such as males in comparison to females. Moreover, findings showed that child sexual behavior is not only related to age and gender but also to family characteristics. These results suggested that child sexual behaviors reported by teachers through the Child Sexual Behavior Inventory may provide useful information about the development of children’s sexuality. The knowledge of age appropriate sexual behaviors can help teachers discern normal sexual behaviors from problematic sexual behaviors.     

Associations among trauma,depression, and alcohol use profiles and treatment motivation and engagement in college students

ABSTRACT

Objective: This study examined how profiles of alcohol use and symptoms of common mental health disorders (depression and posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) influenced the perceived need for and actual seeking of different types of treatment (for alcohol versus psychological distress) in college student drinkers. Participants: Undergraduate students (n = 164) were assessed between September 2009 and August 2015. Methods: We classified students into different symptom profiles using model-based clustering and compared these profiles on a variety of variables. Results: The cluster model yielded three profiles: Low Risk (n = 66), Concomitant (n = 35), and Heavy Drinking (n = 63). Students in these profiles significantly differed in alcohol consumption, alcohol-related cognitions and problems, and perceptions of need and prior engagement in treatment. Conclusion: A variety of strategies can be used to engage students experiencing heavy drinking and/or mental health problems into treatment on campus.     

The Unbalance Penalisation Method for Metrics of Social Progress

This study contributes to the debate on the development of aggregate metrics of societal progress. Summarising societal progress into a single number poses various methodological challenges, including the choice of indicators, normalisation, weighting and aggregation. This paper addresses the issue of aggregation in the case of metrics of well-being and uses as a case study the European Union regional Social Progress Index—EU-SPI—published by the European Commission. The index is an aggregate measure of 55 social and environmental indicators observed for all the European regions grouped into 12 components. In metrics of this type, while complete substitutability among components is rarely acceptable, controlling their level of substitutability is highly desirable. To this aim, we adopt a modified version of the unbalance penalisation approach originally proposed by Casadio Tarabusi and Guarini (Soc Indic Res 112:9–45, 2013). A penalisation is applied to the regions whose performance across the index components is unbalanced, that is when they perform well on some components but worse on others. The penalisation applied by this approach depends on two parameters that, in its original formulation, are generally arbitrarily chosen. We design a data-driven approach allowing for an informed choice of the penalisation parameters. The comparison between the EU-SPI original and penalised scores shows that the penalisation effect is particularly evident for regions with a strongly unbalanced profile across the components. The proposed method allows for adjusting the level of substitutability between components when constructing an aggregate metric, an important functionality especially when measuring societal progress for policy-making.

     

DEMOCRATIC PEACE AND ELECTORAL ACCOUNTABILITY

Democracies rarely engage in conflicts with one another, though they are not averse to fighting autocracies. We exploit the existence in many countries of executive term limits to show that electoral accountability is the key reason behind this “democratic peace” phenomenon. We construct a new dataset of term limits for a sample of 177 countries over the 1816–2001 period, and combine this information with a large dataset of interstate conflicts. Our empirical analysis shows that, although democracies are significantly less likely to fight each other, democracies with leaders who face binding term limits are as conflict prone as autocracies. The study of electoral calendars confirms the importance of re‐election incentives: in democracies with two‐term limits, conflicts are less likely to occur during the executive's first mandate than in the last one. Our findings support the Kantian idea that elections act as a discipline device, deterring leaders from engaging in costly conflicts.     

Anonymizing binary and small tables is hard to approximate

The problem of publishing personal data without giving up privacy is becoming increasingly important. An interesting formalization recently proposed is the k-anonymity. This approach requires that the rows in a table are clustered in sets of size at least k and that all the rows in a cluster become the same tuple, after the suppression of some records. The natural optimization problem, where the goal is to minimize the number of suppressed entries, is known to be NP-hard when the values are over a ternary alphabet, k=3 and the rows length is unbounded. In this paper we give a lower bound on the approximation factor that any polynomial-time algorithm can achieve on two restrictions of the problem, namely (i) when the records values are over a binary alphabet and k=3, and (ii) when the records have length at most 8 and k=4, showing that these restrictions of the problem are APX-hard.     

Use of quantitative ultrasound as bone mineral density evaluation in an Italian female population living with HIV: A real-life experience

This is a multicenter cross-sectional study where we aimed to detect the rate of osteopenia/osteoporosis in an HIV female population (WLWHIV) by means of “heel quantitative ultrasound” (QUS) measurement. We enrolled 273 patients, mean age 48.1 years, 36% menopausal, 96% on combination antiretroviral therapy (cART). Calcaneal measure of bone mass index by QUS revealed osteopenia and osteoporosis in 76 (27.8%) and 16 (5.9%) WLWHIV. Our data underline the correlation between low QUS parameters and traditional risk factors for osteoporosis rather than with cART exposure, thus suggesting the crucial importance of detection and correction of traditional risk factors for osteoporosis in WLWHIV.