Italy, although it considers itself to be a middle-sized power on par with France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, has been incapable of playing an international role comparable to theirs, instead keeping a low-profile foreign policy. This has not been due to any material constraints—Italy’s profile has remained consistently low, through economic times both good and bad—but rather to the country’s strategic culture, a mixture of realpolitik and pacifist tendencies. This book sets out to analyze the influence of Italy’s strategic culture on its foreign policy. It conducts an exploratory case-study to show if hypotheses generated by the strategic culture approach can shed some light on the puzzling Italian behavior in the international arena (puzzling because Italy shows a less assertive foreign policy vis-à-vis other middle powers in the same rank). The first chapter considers the main interpretations of Italian foreign policy and their limitations. The second and third chapters review the literature on strategic culture, stressing its utility for the Italian case. The fourth chapter describes the country’s strategic culture through the Liberal, Fascist, and Republican periods, and the fifth chapter analyzes the influence of ideational factors on Italy’s behavior abroad. Conclusions sum up the various emerging evidences. Scholars of political science, international relations, strategic studies, and comparative politics will find this work to be of interest.
This book deals with problems related to the evaluation of customer satisfaction in very different contexts and ways. Often satisfaction about a product or service is investigated through suitable surveys which try to capture the satisfaction about several partial aspects which characterize the perceived quality of that product or service. This book presents a series of statistical techniques adopted to analyze data from real situations where customer satisfaction surveys were performed. The aim is to give a simple guide of the variety of analysis that can be performed when analyzing data from sample surveys: starting from latent variable models to heterogeneity in satisfaction and also introducing some testing methods for comparing different customers. The book also discusses the construction of composite indicators including different benchmarks of satisfaction. Finally, some rank-based procedures for analyzing survey data are also shown.
Una banda di rapinatori, in giro per l’Europa, assalta le gioiellerie più prestigiose assicurandosi bottini milionari. Da Pamplona a Parigi, da Biarritz a Ginevra, in breve tempo, grazie alle loro operazioni spregiudicate, diventano la bestia nera delle polizie europee; la stampa li elogia e li rende degli autentici eroi ribattezzandoli Pink Panthers, le “pantere rosa”, dopo che ad Amsterdam viene ritrovato un diamante blu dentro un tubetto di crema come nel famoso film interpretato da Peter Sellers. Di innocuo, però, questi scaltri criminali non hanno nulla: sono astuti e molto bene organizzati. Colpiscono per poi svanire nel nulla. Ad affrontarli sarà la profiler Gaia Virgili che, insieme alla sua squadra dell’Europol, si troverà anche invischiata in una delicata indagine riguardante un traffico internazionale di anfetamine. Come se non bastasse, il suo compito verrà reso ancora più difficile dall’ombra del sospetto che, all’interno della squadra, qualcuno faccia il doppio gioco. Un thriller mozzafiato, ispirato a una storia vera, fra rapine, omicidi, espedienti geniali, fughe rocambolesche e una pioggia di diamanti.
This book provides insights into a wide range of topics related to milk protein. The chapters of this book will be of significant value to those interested in dairy foods, milk chemistry, cheese production, human health, neonatal development, lactation and mammary gland biology, and milk protein production. These chapters explore a range of topics related to milk protein, including: bioactivities of milk proteins and the peptides generated from those proteins; novel functions ascribed for some milk proteins; how processing of milk can impact milk proteins; allergies associated with consumption of milk; genetic variation of milk proteins; application of genomic technologies to explore expression of proteins during milk synthesis; and production of milk and milk protein as affected by environmental factors.
The purpose of this book is to thoroughly prepare the reader for applied research in clustering. Cluster analysis comprises a class of statistical techniques for classifying multivariate data into groups or clusters based on their similar features. Clustering is nowadays widely used in several domains of research, such as social sciences, psychology, and marketing, highlighting its multidisciplinary nature. This book provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to clustering and offers practical guidelines for applying clustering tools by carefully chosen real-life datasets and extensive data analyses. The procedures addressed in this book include traditional hard clustering methods and up-to-date developments in soft clustering. Attention is paid to practical examples and applications through the open source statistical software R. Commented R code and output for conducting, step by step, complete cluster analyses are available. The book is intended for researchers interested in applying clustering methods. Basic notions on theoretical issues and on R are provided so that professionals as well as novices with little or no background in the subject will benefit from the book.
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