Abstract. The topic of interest rate restrictions and their legal implications represents a delicate subject about which a recent inventory of EU authorities was developed. This is aimed to inspection of the so called principle of "good morals" against usury for the Member States. The most recent Italian law regulating legal rates of interest applied in loans, sets a threshold under which loan interest rates have to remain for being nonusurious, in the sense that if the loan rate lies outside the threshold, it becomes a usury rate and has to be prosecuted.

We analyze a peer-assisted Video-on-Demand (VoD) system in which users contribute their upload bandwidth to the redistribution of a video that they are downloading or that they have cached locally. Our target is to characterize the additional bandwidth that servers must supply to immediately satisfy all requests to watch a given video. We develop an approximate fluid model to compute the required server bandwidth in the sequential delivery case, as well as in controlled nonsequential swarms.

We present and compare the performances of two many-core architectures: the Nvidia Kepler and the Intel MIC both in a single system and in cluster configuration for the simulation of spin systems. As a benchmark we consider the time required to update a single spin of the 3D Heisenberg spin glass model by using the Over-relaxation algorithm. We present data also for a traditional high-end multi-core architecture: the Intel Sandy Bridge.

This paper investigates the problem of quantifying longevity risk in a quantile perspective. In this field, the idea of deepening the expected changes of future mortality rates over a single year is gaining. In the following the authors propose an approach which combines a stochastic model for the evolution of mortality rates and a quantile analysis of the mortality distribution in order to capture the trend component of longevity. An ex post analysis is proposed, relying on the past mortality experience of the Italian male population measured in the period of 1954-2008.

Motivation: The human immune system evolved a multi-layered control mechanism to eliminate self-reactive cells. Of these so-called tolerance induction mechanisms, lymphocytes T education in the thymus gland represents the very first one. This complicated process is not fully understood and quantitative models able to help in this endeavor are lacking.

The conceptualization of immunological self is amongst the most important theories of modern biology, representing a sort of theoretical guideline for experimental immunologists, in order to understand how host constituents are ignored by the immune system (IS). A consistent advancement in this field has been represented by the danger/damage theory and its subsequent refinements, which at present represents the most comprehensive conceptualization of immunological self. Here, we present the new hypothesis of "liquid self," which integrates and extends the danger/damage theory.