Trees have played countless roles in human history - by turns hopeful symbols of freedom, pioneering space travellers, keepers of ancient history and accessories to murder. From art to politics, science to crime, these are the stories of the trees that have shaped life on Earth. Neurobiologist and philosopher Stefano Mancuso brings his signature charm and eye for unforgettable detail to tell eight stories of trees that have rooted themselves in human history - from the red spruces that were made into Stradivarius' violins to the wooden ladder that solved 'The Crime of the Century'. Combining scientific vigour with his inimitable voice, Mancuso reveals the amazing ways that the world's green-print has shaped the course of our lives, issuing a passionate rallying cry for greater care and attention towards the plants that have helped us survive and thrive.

It was the middle of the nineteenth century when Lafanu Brown audaciously decided to become an artist. In the wake of the American Civil War, life was especially tough for Black women, but she didn't let that stop her. The daughter of a Native American woman and an African-Haitian man, Lafanu had the rare opportunity to study, travel, and follow her dreams, thanks to her indomitable spirit, but not without facing intolerance and violence. Now, in 1887, living in Rome as one of the city's most established painters, she is ready to tell her fiance about her difficult life, which began in a poor family forty years earlier. In 2019, an Italian art curator of Somali origin is desperately trying to bring to Europe her younger cousin, who is only sixteen and has already tried to reach Italy on a long, treacherous journey. While organizing an art exhibition that will combine the paintings of Lafanu Brown with the artworks of young migrants, the curator becomes more and more obsessed with the life and secrets of the nineteenth-century painter.Weaving together these two vibrant voices, Igiaba Scego has crafted a powerful exploration of what it means to be "other," to be a woman, and particularly a Black woman, in a foreign country, yesterday and today.

What are the limits to parliamentary sovereignty? When should the people be able to vote directly on issues? The constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey (1835-1922) was a cogent advocate of the referendum. While his enthusiasm for the institution was widely acknowledged in his own day, thereafter this dimension of his career has been largely neglected. This fall into obscurity is partly explained by the fact that Dicey never collected his writings on referendums into a single volume. Consequently, when the prolonged constitutional crisis over Brexit brought references to Dicey beyond the province of academic law and into public debate, the invocation of his legacy was less than satisfactory. This timely modern edition brings together Dicey's sophisticated and intricate writings on the referendum, and it covers his attempts to construct a credible theory of democracy on a new intellectual and institutional basis. An original scholarly introduction analyzes Dicey's thought in light of its contemporary context.

As plants see it, humans are not the masters of the Earth but only one of its most unpleasant and irksome residents. They have been on the planet for only about 300,000 years ago (nothing compared to the three billon years of plant evolution), yet have changed the conditions of the planet so drastically as to make it a dangerous place for their own survival. It's time for the plants to offer advice. In this playful, philosophical manifesto, Stefano Mancuso, expert on plant intelligence, presents a new constitution on which to build our future as beings respectful of the Earth and its inhabitants. These eight articles - the fundamental pillars on which plant life is based - must henceforth regulate all living beings.

Networked computers are ubiquitous, and are subject to attack, misuse, and abuse. One method to counteracting this cyber threat is to provide security analysts with better tools to discover patterns, detect anomalies, identify correlations, and communicate their findings. Visualization for computer security (VizSec) researchers and developers are doing just that. VizSec is about putting robust information visualization tools into the hands of human analysts to take advantage of the power of the human perceptual and cognitive processes in solving computer security problems. This volume collects the papers presented at the 4th International Workshop on Computer Security - VizSec 2007.

What are the limits to parliamentary sovereignty? When should the people be able to vote directly on issues? The constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey (1835-1922) was a cogent advocate of the referendum. While his enthusiasm for the institution was widely acknowledged in his own day, thereafter this dimension of his career has been largely neglected. This fall into obscurity is partly explained by the fact that Dicey never collected his writings on referendums into a single volume. Consequently, when the prolonged constitutional crisis over Brexit brought references to Dicey beyond the province of academic law and into public debate, the invocation of his legacy was less than satisfactory. This timely modern edition brings together Dicey's sophisticated and intricate writings on the referendum, and it covers his attempts to construct a credible theory of democracy on a new intellectual and institutional basis. An original scholarly introduction analyzes Dicey's thought in light of its contemporary context.

The notion of 'representative democracy' seems unquestionably familiar today, but how did the Victorian era - the epoch when the modern democratic state was made - understand democracy, parliamentary representation, and diversity? In the famous nineteenth-century debates about representation and parliamentary reform, two interlocked ideals were of the greatest importance: descriptive representation, that the House of Commons 'mirror' the diversity that marked society, and deliberation within the legislative assembly. These ideals presented a major obstacle to the acceptance of a democratic suffrage, which it was widely feared would produce an unrepresentative and un-deliberative House of Commons. Here, Gregory Conti examines how the Victorians conceived the representative and deliberative functions of the House of Commons and what it meant for parliament to be the 'mirror of the nation'. Combining historical analysis and political theory, he analyses the fascinating nineteenth-century debates among contending schools of thought over the norms and institutions of deliberative representative government, and explores the consequences of recovering this debate.

THE MYTHS SURROUNDING THE WORLD'S FAVOURITE DISH, DEBUNKED Did Marco Polo bring pasta back from China, or is that a myth? How did the Neapolitan "macharoni" turn into the ubiquitous spaghetti? Is it even an Italian dish? Hundreds of shapes and thousands of recipes give expression to the culture and products of the country's regions. But spaghetti with tomato sauce remains Italy's identity dish par excellence. Massimo Montanari goes in search of the dish's true origins, tracing its history along the multiple, intricate routes taken by its raw ingredients to merge and become a distinctive element of culinary tradition. It took almost two thousand years and input from the Far East, the Arabic world, and the Americas, for the dish to take centre stage. Its development is the result of chance encounters, unplanned exchanges, and unpredictable intersections. As we dig in search of spaghetti's origins, we find its strands wrap right around the world. "Learned and entertaining."-Il Giornale

The notion of 'representative democracy' seems unquestionably familiar today, but how did the Victorian era - the epoch when the modern democratic state was made - understand democracy, parliamentary representation, and diversity? In the famous nineteenth-century debates about representation and parliamentary reform, two interlocked ideals were of the greatest importance: descriptive representation, that the House of Commons 'mirror' the diversity that marked society, and deliberation within the legislative assembly. These ideals presented a major obstacle to the acceptance of a democratic suffrage, which it was widely feared would produce an unrepresentative and un-deliberative House of Commons. Here, Gregory Conti examines how the Victorians conceived the representative and deliberative functions of the House of Commons and what it meant for parliament to be the 'mirror of the nation'. Combining historical analysis and political theory, he analyses the fascinating nineteenth-century debates among contending schools of thought over the norms and institutions of deliberative representative government, and explores the consequences of recovering this debate.

Networked computers are ubiquitous, and are subject to attack, misuse, and abuse. One method to counteracting this cyber threat is to provide security analysts with better tools to discover patterns, detect anomalies, identify correlations, and communicate their findings. Visualization for computer security (VizSec) researchers and developers are doing just that. VizSec is about putting robust information visualization tools into the hands of human analysts to take advantage of the power of the human perceptual and cognitive processes in solving computer security problems. This volume collects the papers presented at the 4th International Workshop on Computer Security - VizSec 2007.

This volumecontains the paperspresented at VizSec 2008, the 5th International Workshop on Visualization for Cyber Security, held on September 15, 2008 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. VizSec 2008 was held in conjunction with the 11thInternationalSymposiumonRecentAdvancesinIntrusionDetection(RAID). There were 27 submissions to the long and short paper categories. Each submission was reviewed by at least 2 reviewers and, on average, 2.9 program committee members. The program committee decided to accept 18 papers. The program also included an invited talk and a panel. The keynote address was given by Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland at College Park, on the topic InformationForensics: HarnessingVisualizationto SupportDiscovery.The panel, on the topic The Need for Applied Visualization in Information Security Today, wasorganizedandmoderatedbyTobyKohlenbergfromIntelCorporation. July 2008 John R. Goodall Conference Organization Program Chairs John R. Goodall Secure Decisions division of Applied Visions Gregory Conti United States Military Academy Kwan-Liu Ma University of California at Davis Program Committee Stefan Axelsson Blekinge Institute of Technology Richard Bejtlich General Electric Kris Cook Paci?c Northwest National Laboratory David Ebert Purdue University Robert Erbacher Utah State University Deborah Frincke Paci?c Northwest National Laboratory Carrie Gates CA Labs John Gerth Stanford University Barry Irwin Rhodes University Daniel Keim University of Konstanz Toby Kohlenberg Intel Corporation Stuart Kurkowski Air Force Institute of Technology Kiran Lakkaraju University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ra?ael Marty Splunk Douglas Maughan Department of Homeland Security John McHugh Dalhousie University Penny Rheingans UMBC Lawrence Rosenblum National Science Foundation George Tadda Air Force Research Lab Daniel Tesone Applied Visions Alfonso Valdes SRI Internatio

In this unconventional and accessible history, Italian best-seller Alberto Angela literally follows the money to map the reach and power of the Roman Empire. To see a map of the Roman Empire at the height of its territorial expansion is to be struck by its size, stretching from Scotland to Kuwait, from the Sahara to the North Sea. What was life like in the Empire, and how were such diverse peoples and places united under one rule? The Reach of Rome explores these questions through an ingenious lens: the path of a single coin as it changes hands and traverses the vast realms of the empire in the year 115. Admired in his native Italy for his ability to bring history to life through narrative, Alberto Angela opens up the ancient world to readers who have felt intimidated by the category or put off by dry historical tomes. By focusing on aspects of daily life so often overlooked in more academic treatments, The Reach of Rome travels back in time and shows us a world that was perhaps not very different from our own. And by following the path of a coin through the streams of commerce, we can touch every corner of that world and its people, from legionnaires and senators to prostitutes and slaves. Through lively and detailed vignettes all based on archeological and historical evidence, Angela reveals the vast Roman world and its remarkable modernity, and in so doing he reinforces the relevance of the ancient world for a new generation of readers.

A major theorist in the Italian postfordist movement offers a radical new understanding of the current international economic situation. The Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi is one of the core theorists of the Italian postfordist movement, along with Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Bifo (Franco Berardi). But although his work is often cited by scholars (particularly by those in the field of "Cognitive Capitalism"), his writing has never appeared in English. This translation of his most recent work, Capital and Language (published in Italian in 2002), finally makes Marazzi's work available to an English-speaking audience. Capital and Language takes as its starting point the fact that the extreme volatility of financial markets is generally attributed to the discrepancy between the "real economy" (that of material goods produced and sold) and the more speculative monetary-financial economy. But this distinction has long ceased to apply in the postfordist New Economy, in which both spheres are structurally affected by language and communication. In Capital and Language Marazzi argues that the changes in financial markets and the transformation of labor into immaterial labor (that is, its reliance on abstract knowledge, general intellect, and social cooperation) are just two sides of the same coin. Capital and Language focuses on the causes behind the international economic and financial depression of 2001, and on the primary instrument that the U.S. government has since been using to face them: war. Marazzi points to capitalism's fourth stage (after mercantilism, industrialism, and the postfordist culmination of the New Economy): the "War Economy" that is already upon us. Marazzi offers a radical new understanding of the current international economic stage and crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form. Capital and Language also provides a warning call to a Left still nostalgic for a Fordist construct-a time before factory turned into office (and office into home), and before labor became linguistic.

A work of understated elegance and cumulative power, this novel eases readers into a drama unfolding within a Catholic family in Italy on the eve of World War II. As scenes only dimly understood by the child Lorenza are revisited by the woman she becomes, what seemed a family affair--a romance involving Lorenza's mother, her father's Jewish friend Arturo, and her aunt Margot in Switzerland--begins to reveal the broader outlines of the drama of history, in particular the tragedy of Italy's Jews during the Holocaust. Limning the interplay of past and present, of memory and presence, this haunting work by one of Italy's foremost writers brings to life the subtleties and complexities of history as it is experienced, interpreted, and relived within the most intimate of realms.