Il conflitto tra ragione e passioni nel pensiero morale, economico e politico di Bernard Mandeville

Effects of the conflict between reason and passion in Bernard Mandeville’s moral, economic and political thought My PhD dissertation focuses on Bernard Mandeville (1670-1732), a Dutch philosopher who moved to London in his late twenties. The aspect of Mandeville’s thought I take into account in my research is the conflicting relation between reason and passions, and the consequences that Mandeville’s view of this conflict has in the development of his theory of human nature which, I argue, is what grounds his moral, economic and, above all, political theory. According to Mandeville, reason is fundamentally weak. Passions influence with more strength human actions, and, eventually, are the ones which motivate them. The role of reason is merely instrumental, restricted to finding appropriate means in order to reach the desired ends, which are capricious and inconstant, since they all come from unstable passions. Reason cannot take decisions meant to act in the long term, pursuing an object which has not a selfish and temporary nature. There is no possibility, thus, that men’s actions aim just to achieve a good and just society, without their interests being directly involved. The basically selfish root of every desire leads Mandeville to claim that there is neither benevolence nor altruism which guides human behaviour. Hence he expresses a judgement on the moral character of human beings, always busy with their self-satisfaction, and hardly ever considering what would be good on a wider perspective, including other people’s sake. The anthropological features ascribed to men by Mandeville, are those which lead him to prefer a political system where governors are not supposed to have particular abilities, either from an intellectual or from a moral point of view, and peace and order are preserved by the bureaucratic machine, which is meant to work with the least effort on the part of the politicians, and no big harm can be done even by corrupted or wicked governors. This system is adopted with an eye at remedying human deficiencies: Mandeville takes into primary account, when he thinks of how to build a peaceful and functioning society, that everyone is concerned with his selfish interest, and that the rationality of a single politician, or of a group of them belonging to a same generation, cannot find a good “solution” to govern men able to last over the long period, and to work in different ages. This implies a refusal of the Hobbesian theory of the pactum subjectionis, which has the character of a rational and definitive choice, and leads Mandeville to consider the order which arises spontaneously, without any plan or rational intervention.

An equilibrium approach to modelling social interaction

The aim of this work is to put forward a statistical mechanics theory of social interaction, generalizing econometric discrete choice models. After showing the formal equivalence linking econometric multinomial logit models to equilibrium statical mechanics, a multi- population generalization of the Curie-Weiss model for ferromagnets is considered as a starting point in developing a model capable of describing sudden shifts in aggregate human behaviour. Existence of the thermodynamic limit for the model is shown by an asymptotic sub-additivity method and factorization of correlation functions is proved almost everywhere. The exact solution for the model is provided in the thermodynamical limit by nding converging upper and lower bounds for the system's pressure, and the solution is used to prove an analytic result regarding the number of possible equilibrium states of a two-population system. The work stresses the importance of linking regimes predicted by the model to real phenomena, and to this end it proposes two possible procedures to estimate the model's parameters starting from micro-level data. These are applied to three case studies based on census type data: though these studies are found to be ultimately inconclusive on an empirical level, considerations are drawn that encourage further refinements of the chosen modelling approach, to be considered in future work.

From Radio Channel Modeling to a System Level Perspective in Body-Centric Communications

Body-centric communications are emerging as a new paradigm in the panorama of personal communications. Being concerned with human behaviour, they are suitable for a wide variety of applications. The advances in the miniaturization of portable devices to be placed on or around the body, foster the diffusion of these systems, where the human body is the key element defining communication characteristics. This thesis investigates the human impact on body-centric communications under its distinctive aspects. First of all, the unique propagation environment defined by the body is described through a scenario-based channel modeling approach, according to the communication scenario considered, i.e., on- or on- to off-body. The novelty introduced pertains to the description of radio channel features accounting for multiple sources of variability at the same time. Secondly, the importance of a proper channel characterisation is shown integrating the on-body channel model in a system level simulator, allowing a more realistic comparison of different Physical and Medium Access Control layer solutions. Finally, the structure of a comprehensive simulation framework for system performance evaluation is proposed. It aims at merging in one tool, mobility and social features typical of the human being, together with the propagation aspects, in a scenario where multiple users interact sharing space and resources.

Human bone: the tissue characteristics determining its mechanical behaviour

The present thesis illustrates the research carried out during the PhD studies in Bioengineering. The research was aimed to characterise the human bone tissue, with particular regard to the differences between cortical and trabecular bone. The bone tissue characteristics that affect its mechanical properties were verified or identified, using an experimental approach, to corroborate or refute hypotheses based on the state of the art in bone tissue biomechanics. The studies presented in the present PhD thesis were designed to investigate aspects of bone tissue biomechanics, which were in need of a more in-depth examination since the data found in the literature was contradictory or scarce. In particular, the work was focalised on the characterisation of the basic structure of the bone tissue (groups of lamellae), its composition, its spatial organisation (trabecular bone microarchitecture) and their influence on the mechanical properties. In conclusion, the present thesis integrates eight different studies on the characterisation of bone tissue. A more in-depth examination of some of the aspects of bone tissue biomechanics where the data found in the literature was contradictory or scarce was performed. Bone tissue was investigated at several scales, from its composition up to its spatial organization, to determine which parameters influence the mechanical behaviour of the tissue. It was found that although the composition and real density of bone tissue are similar, the differences in structure at different levels cause differences between the two types of bone tissue (cortical and trabecular) in mechanical properties. However, the apparent density can still be considered a good predictor of the mechanical properties of both cortical and trabecular bone. Finally, it was found that the bone tissue characteristics might change when a pathology is present, as demonstrated for OA.

Molecular characterization of the human gut microbiota: the effect of aging

Age-related physiological changes in the gastrointestinal tract, as well as modification in lifestyle, nutritional behaviour, and functionality of the host immune system, inevitably affect the gut microbiota. The study presented here is focused on the application and comparison of two different microarray approaches for the characterization of the human gut microbiota, the HITChip and the HTF-Microb.Array, with particular attention to the effects of the aging process on the composition of this ecosystem. By using the Human Intestinal Tract Chip (HITChip), recently developed at the Wageningen University, The Netherland, we explored the age-related changes of gut microbiota during the whole adult lifespan, from young adults, through elderly to centenarians. We observed that the microbial composition and diversity of the gut ecosystem of young adults and seventy-years old people is highly similar but differs significantly from that of the centenarians. After 100 years of symbiotic association with the human host, the microbiota is characterized by a rearrangement in the Firmicutes population and an enrichment of facultative anaerobes. The presence of such a compromised microbiota in the centenarians is associated with an increased inflammation status, also known as inflamm-aging, as determined by a range of peripheral blood inflammatory markers. In parallel, we overtook the development of our own phylogenetic microarray with a lower number of targets, aiming the description of the human gut microbiota structure at high taxonomic level. The resulting chip was called High Taxonomic level Fingerprinting Microbiota Array (HTF-Microb.Array), and was based on the Ligase Detection Reaction (LDR) technology, which allowed us to develop a fast and sensitive tool for the fingerprint of the human gut microbiota in terms of presence/absence of the principal groups. The validation on artificial DNA mixes, as well as the pilot study involving eight healthy young adults, demonstrated that the HTF-Microb.Array can be used to successfully characterize the human gut microbiota, allowing us to obtain results which are in approximate accordance with the most recent characterizations. Conversely, the evaluation of the relative abundance of the target groups on the bases of the relative fluorescence intensity probes response still has some hindrances, as demonstrated by comparing the HTF.Microb.Array and HITChip high taxonomic level fingerprints of the same centenarians.

Operating System Contribution to Composable Timing Behaviour in High-Integrity Real-Time Systems

The development of High-Integrity Real-Time Systems has a high footprint in terms of human, material and schedule costs. Factoring functional, reusable logic in the application favors incremental development and contains costs. Yet, achieving incrementality in the timing behavior is a much harder problem. Complex features at all levels of the execution stack, aimed to boost average-case performance, exhibit timing behavior highly dependent on execution history, which wrecks time composability and incrementaility with it. Our goal here is to restitute time composability to the execution stack, working bottom up across it. We first characterize time composability without making assumptions on the system architecture or the software deployment to it. Later, we focus on the role played by the real-time operating system in our pursuit. Initially we consider single-core processors and, becoming less permissive on the admissible hardware features, we devise solutions that restore a convincing degree of time composability. To show what can be done for real, we developed TiCOS, an ARINC-compliant kernel, and re-designed ORK+, a kernel for Ada Ravenscar runtimes. In that work, we added support for limited-preemption to ORK+, an absolute premiere in the landscape of real-word kernels. Our implementation allows resource sharing to co-exist with limited-preemptive scheduling, which extends state of the art. We then turn our attention to multicore architectures, first considering partitioned systems, for which we achieve results close to those obtained for single-core processors. Subsequently, we shy away from the over-provision of those systems and consider less restrictive uses of homogeneous multiprocessors, where the scheduling algorithm is key to high schedulable utilization. To that end we single out RUN, a promising baseline, and extend it to SPRINT, which supports sporadic task sets, hence matches real-world industrial needs better. To corroborate our results we present findings from real-world case studies from avionic industry.