In foro solitudo: Roman Elections and the Time of Cinna

<p>The aim of this thesis is to provide a constitutional history of the mysterious years in the 80s B.C. when L. Cornelius Cinna was re-elected to the consulship on four consecutive occasions. Further irregularities abounded in this period, raising the question of how Rome’s annual elections were conducted in this period. A large amount of the surviving literature is either biased or uninformed on such matters. As a direct result, few have attempted to interpret the role of Rome’s comitia, its voting assemblies, in this period in any sufficient detail. This survey aims to fill this lacuna. From close inspection of the scattered evidence, it may be argued that Rome’s comitia did indeed play a role in the so-called Cinnae dominatio, despite the hoarding of high magistracy by just a handful of individuals. There were laws designed to prevent this domination: men were theoretically allowed to hold the consulship once (at least within a ten-year period); continuatio was forbidden. This study sets out to investigate how Cinna’s continuatio came to be tolerated. Some scholars have attempted to explain away this irregularity as a simple product of the turbulent times. After all, electoral irregularities did indeed increase in frequency during times of existential crisis. But Cinna’s elections do not adequately harmonize with any precedent in Rome’s history. This study begins with a survey of the Roman constitution in the years leading up to the Cinnae dominatio. The years 91 to 87 were marred by almost continuous warfare in Italy and abroad. However, despite attempts at attaining the consulship by a couple of theoretically ineligible candidates, Rome’s electoral restrictions remained robustly in place. All of this changed in late 87 when Cinna marched on Rome with a large army: many political opponents were murdered or exiled; Cinna assumed the consulship soon after. The process by which he became consul has been the subject of great controversy. Although it would seem that comitia were called, the process was irregular. These irregularities would continue even after Cinna died in 84, coming to an end in the years following Sulla’s restoration of the traditional republic after 81.</p>

In foro solitudo: Roman Elections and the Time of Cinna

<p>The aim of this thesis is to provide a constitutional history of the mysterious years in the 80s B.C. when L. Cornelius Cinna was re-elected to the consulship on four consecutive occasions. Further irregularities abounded in this period, raising the question of how Rome’s annual elections were conducted in this period. A large amount of the surviving literature is either biased or uninformed on such matters. As a direct result, few have attempted to interpret the role of Rome’s comitia, its voting assemblies, in this period in any sufficient detail. This survey aims to fill this lacuna. From close inspection of the scattered evidence, it may be argued that Rome’s comitia did indeed play a role in the so-called Cinnae dominatio, despite the hoarding of high magistracy by just a handful of individuals. There were laws designed to prevent this domination: men were theoretically allowed to hold the consulship once (at least within a ten-year period); continuatio was forbidden. This study sets out to investigate how Cinna’s continuatio came to be tolerated. Some scholars have attempted to explain away this irregularity as a simple product of the turbulent times. After all, electoral irregularities did indeed increase in frequency during times of existential crisis. But Cinna’s elections do not adequately harmonize with any precedent in Rome’s history. This study begins with a survey of the Roman constitution in the years leading up to the Cinnae dominatio. The years 91 to 87 were marred by almost continuous warfare in Italy and abroad. However, despite attempts at attaining the consulship by a couple of theoretically ineligible candidates, Rome’s electoral restrictions remained robustly in place. All of this changed in late 87 when Cinna marched on Rome with a large army: many political opponents were murdered or exiled; Cinna assumed the consulship soon after. The process by which he became consul has been the subject of great controversy. Although it would seem that comitia were called, the process was irregular. These irregularities would continue even after Cinna died in 84, coming to an end in the years following Sulla’s restoration of the traditional republic after 81.</p>

Smart Policies for Multisource Inventory Systems and General Tandem Queues with Order Tracking and Expediting

We study an inventory system with multiple supply sources and expediting options. The replenishment lead times from each supply source are stochastic, representing congestion and disruption. We construct a family of smart ordering and expediting policies that utilize real-time supply information. Such dynamic policies are generally difficult to evaluate, because the corresponding supply system is a tandem queue with state-dependent arrivals and routing, whose queue-length steady-state distribution is usually not in product form. Our main result is to identify two appealing special cases of the general policy, Policy-M and Policy-E, which possess simple product-form solutions and lead to closed-form performance measures. Policy-M retains full sourcing flexibility, but ignores upstream congestion in making expediting decisions. Policy-E only orders from the normal, farthest source, but makes expediting decisions based on both upstream and downstream information. A numerical study shows that the best Policy-M leads to a lower average cost than the best Policy-E in almost all cases. Also, implementing the best Policy-M parameters, the general policy only performs slightly better than Policy-M. These observations reveal the value of combining sourcing flexibility with some, but limited, dynamic expediting. Our findings are equally applicable to the equivalent tandem queue. They thus may aid dynamic routing and expediting decisions for online retailers and logistics providers, among others.

Super Bacteria: A New Hope of Manufacturing Spider Silk in an Efficient Way

The important properties of spider dragline silk and other protein polymers will find many applications. We have demonstrated the production of spider silk, which has many important properties, are produced from the bacteria including Escherichia coli. The productions of high molecular weight spider drag line encoded by synthetic genes. Silk protein can be efficiently produced by the microbial system has become an advantageous method like quick secretion and simple product recovery has become an efficient method .From the observation of various experiments done by several scientists has shown silk made in laboratory. The study of RIKEN centre for sustainable resource science has shown that spider silk can be produce huge amount. Observation shown that joining of the fragments by split intein sequence which then cut itself to yield full name protein .Spun into fibers make the microbial spider silk tough , stretchable and stronger. Better modification of bioengineering can increase the amount of production.

On two product form modifications for finite overflow systems

Overflow mechanisms can be found in a variety of queueing models. This paper studies a simple and generic overflow system that allows the service times to be both job type and station dependent. This system does not exhibit a product form. To justify simple product form computations, two product form modifications are given, as by a so-called call packing principle and by a stop protocol. The provided proofs are self-contained and straightforward for the exponential case and of merit by itself. Next, it is numerically studied whether and when, or under which conditions, the modifications lead to a reasonable approximation of the blocking probability, if not an ordering. The numerical results indicate that call packing provides a rather accurate approximation when the overflow station is not heavily utilized. Moreover, when overflowed jobs have an equal or faster service rate, the approximation is consistently found to be pessimistic, which can be useful for practical purposes. The stop protocol, in contrast, appears to be less accurate for most natural situations. Nevertheless, for an extreme situation the order might change. In addition, for the stop protocol the product form is proven to be insensitive (i.e. to also apply for arbitrary non-exponential service times). For call packing, this numerically appears not to be the case, as of interest by itself. However, from a practical viewpoint the sensitivity seems light. The results are intriguing for both theoretical and practical further research.

The Number of Optimal Matchings for Euclidean Assignment on the Line

We consider the Random Euclidean Assignment Problem in dimension $$d=1$$ d = 1 , with linear cost function. In this version of the problem, in general, there is a large degeneracy of the ground state, i.e. there are many different optimal matchings (say, $$\sim \exp (S_N)$$ ∼ exp ( S N ) at size N). We characterize all possible optimal matchings of a given instance of the problem, and we give a simple product formula for their number. Then, we study the probability distribution of $$S_N$$ S N (the zero-temperature entropy of the model), in the uniform random ensemble. We find that, for large N, $$S_N \sim \frac{1}{2} N \log N + N s + {\mathcal {O}}\left( \log N \right) $$ S N ∼ 1 2 N log N + N s + O log N , where s is a random variable whose distribution p(s) does not depend on N. We give expressions for the moments of p(s), both from a formulation as a Brownian process, and via singularity analysis of the generating functions associated to $$S_N$$ S N . The latter approach provides a combinatorial framework that allows to compute an asymptotic expansion to arbitrary order in 1/N for the mean and the variance of $$S_N$$ S N .

A New Class of Q-Ary Codes for the McEliece Cryptosystem

The McEliece cryptosystem is a promising candidate for post-quantum public-key encryption. In this work, we propose q-ary codes over Gaussian integers for the McEliece system and a new channel model. With this one Mannheim error channel, errors are limited to weight one. We investigate the channel capacity of this channel and discuss its relation to the McEliece system. The proposed codes are based on a simple product code construction and have a low complexity decoding algorithm. For the one Mannheim error channel, these codes achieve a higher error correction capability than maximum distance separable codes with bounded minimum distance decoding. This improves the work factor regarding decoding attacks based on information-set decoding.

Assessment of individual risk of food interactions while taking warfarin

Aim. To develop a questionnaire to assess the individual risk of food interactions in a patient taking warfarin. Materials and methods. Based on the review of 159 literature sources, a test version of the questionnaire was formed. 196 respondents took part in the pilot part of the study to assess the multiplicity and volume of food consumption. For the initial assessment of the risk limit of the diet, complications of warfarin therapy were registered no earlier than 24 weeks later. Results. The final version of the questionnaire included 25 products that are most frequently consumed and significant in relation to the risk of alimentary interactions. The questionnaire contains 2 groups of products: increasing and decreasing the activity of warfarin. The volume and frequency of use of each product is evaluated in points that are calculated as the simple product of weights of frequency and volume, with a minimum value of 0 and maximum of 12. The number of points for each product is calculated separately. The points obtained are summed for a group of products that increase the activity of warfarin, and for a group of products that reduce it, and the overall risk score is calculated. The average number of points for the use of products that affect the activity of warfarin in patients with AF with complications of therapy was 75.7831.97 b. The calculation of the design validity of the questionnaire (Cronbachs a=0.864) showed a good level for confirmation purposes. Conclusion. A specialized questionnaire was developed, implemented as a computer program, to assess the significance of food preferences in ensuring the safety and effectiveness of warfarin therapy. Further research is required to determine the risk limit of alimentary interactions of warfarin, but now this questionnaire can be used to monitor the uniformity of consumption of products that affect its activity. The authors suggested using a questionnaire for assessing the risk of food interactions as one of the factors influencing the decision to prescribe warfarin to patients with insufficient adherence to lifestyle modification.

Fully recyclable Brønsted acid catalyst systems

Polyisobutylene-bound sulfonic acid are effective homogeneous Brønsted acid catalysts and they and a poly(alpha-olefin) (PAO) solvent are readily recyclable with simple product removal by extraction or distillation.

Activation of hydrogen peroxide by the nitrate anion in micellar media

Surface-active imidazolium nitrates activate hydrogen peroxide, which enables the epoxidation of olefins. The micelles solubilise the substrate in the aqueous oxidant phase and allow for simple product separation and catalyst recycling.