Progetti per la città compatta. Il caso di San Salvario a Torino

La presente ricerca nasce da una duplice esigenza. La prima, che esprime una necessità contingente, è quella legata ad un caso studio specifico, la riqualificazione e trasformazione del quartiere San Salvario a Torino. Un settore di ampliamento urbano costituito da una maglia ortogonale di isolati edificati tra la fine dell'Ottocento e la prima metà del Novecento, che presentano una struttura a tratti discontinua a causa di parcelle mai edificate o distrutte durante la seconda guerra mondiale e che per incuria o indecisioni urbanistiche sono rimaste irrisolte. La seconda, che esprime un'idea permanente, è il concetto di continuità della città della storia e costituisce occasione per una riflessione sul tema del quartiere e dell'isolato urbano attraverso il progetto contemporaneo. La ricerca ha come obiettivo generale quello di confermare il ruolo della città compatta come principio insediativo di grande valore culturale e sociale e di dimostrarne la validità anche in termini di sostenibilità ambientale attraverso progetti che si inseriscono nel tessuto costruito a completamento e trasformazione della struttura esistent

Measurement Procedures for the Electrical Characterization of Oxide Thin Films

This paper describes a measurement system for the electrical characterization of oxide thin films. Such films can be produced using plasma-sputtering processes and permit the realization of a large set of high-performance components, such as capacitors, active devices, sensors, and protective coatings. The electrical properties of the oxide films, which have a thickness of less than 1 μm, are difficult to measure since very high resistances (on the order of gigaohms) and small capacitances (on the order of picofarads) are expected for contact areas smaller than 1 mm2. The measurement system and the procedures described in this paper represent an alternative solution to the commercial devices, which usually employ a mercury probe for performing the contact with the specimen under characterization. Furthermore, the proposed system can be used not only to estimate the electrical properties of a single point but to evaluate the uniformity of oxide films on large specimens as well. The experimental results reported refer to valve-metal-based oxide films deposited in a lab-scale capacitively coupled parallel-plate reactor and show the effectiveness of the proposed procedure

Effect of curing conditions and harvesting stage of maturity on Ethiopian onion bulb drying properties

The study was conducted to investigate the impact of curing conditions and harvesting stageson the drying quality of onion bulbs. The onion bulbs (Bombay Red cultivar) were harvested at three harvesting stages (early, optimum, and late maturity) and cured at three different temperatures (30, 40 and 50 oC) and relative humidity (30, 50 and 70%). The results revealed that curing temperature, RH, and maturity stage had significant effects on all measuredattributesexcept total soluble solids

RISK ASSESSMENT OF MALICIOUS ATTACKS AGAINST POWER SYSTEMS

The new scenarios of malicious attack prompt for their deeper consideration and mainly when critical systems are at stake. In this framework, infrastructural systems, including power systems, represent a possible target due to the huge impact they can have on society. Malicious attacks are different in their nature from other more traditional cause of threats to power system, since they embed a strategic interaction between the attacker and the defender (characteristics that cannot be found in natural events or systemic failures). This difference has not been systematically analyzed by the existent literature. In this respect, new approaches and tools are needed. This paper presents a mixed-strategy game-theory model able to capture the strategic interactions between malicious agents that may be willing to attack power systems and the system operators, with its related bodies, that are in charge of defending them. At the game equilibrium, the different strategies of the two players, in terms of attacking/protecting the critical elements of the systems, can be obtained. The information about the attack probability to various elements can be used to assess the risk associated with each of them, and the efficiency of defense resource allocation is evidenced in terms of the corresponding risk. Reference defense plans related to the online defense action and the defense action with a time delay can be obtained according to their respective various time constraints. Moreover, risk sensitivity to the defense/attack-resource variation is also analyzed. The model is applied to a standard IEEE RTS-96 test system for illustrative purpose and, on the basis of that system, some peculiar aspects of the malicious attacks are pointed ou

A Wireless Sensor Network for Cold-Chain Monitoring

This paper deals with a wireless sensor network that was specifically designed to monitor temperature-sensitive products during their distribution with the aim of conforming to the cold-chain assurance requirements. The measurement problems and the constraints that have been encountered in this application are initially highlighted, and then, an architecture that takes such problems into account is proposed. The proposed architecture is based on specifically designed measuring nodes that are inserted into the products to identify their behavior under real operating conditions, e.g., during a typical distribution. Such product nodes communicate through a wireless channel with a base station, which collects and processes the data sent by all the nodes. A peculiarity of the product nodes is the low cost, which allows the information on the cold-chain integrity to be provided to the final customer. The results that refer to the functional tests of the proposed system and to the experimental tests performed on a refrigerated vehicle during a distribution are reporte

The effectiveness of the international strategy in the analysis of the political language: Berlusconi´s speech at the chamber of deputies on the 13TH May 2008

In this context we will oversee to understand if and in which measure, the intentional attitude delineated today by the school of Anglo-Saxon thought and, in particular, by Dennett’s philosophy, can constitute an opportune and effective instrument for the analysis of the public language. With the expression “intentional system” we refer to the addressee of the communicative enterprise: a collectivity of people joined by the sharing a physical space and a temporal time; such a system can be explained, rationalized and, possibly, anticipated (as for its actions and to its behaviors) through the attribution to it of shared convictions and desires, which constitute the common sense of that organism. The so delineated philosophy of intentionality becomes, in this within, hermeneutics of the speech held by the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to the Chamber of Deputies on May, 13 2008, that is in occasion of the beginning of its IV legislature. The exposure of the former prime Minister insisted, in order to guarantee to his own government the necessary consent, on the baggage of convictions and desires shared by the Italians, in an historical moment of confusion and political-institutional instability. That speech evidenced proper values of the cultural and ideological matrix of Italy: the house, the family, the entrepreneurial increase of North, the elimination of the organized crime in the South, the tax reduction on the job of the entrepreneurs, individual safety, the removal of the material causes of the abortion. Such concepts were introduced in order to attract the interest of a conservative public opinion and to diverge the attention from the substance of that government’s action, that realized itself in a plan of drastic reduction of the job in Public Administration and of increase of the tax charge, in the picture of a progressive and general economic recess

Assessment of a Dual-Wavelength Compensation Technique for Displacement Sensors Using Plastic Optical Fibers

The paper analyzes the performance of a dual-wavelength technique devised to compensate power fluctuations in intensity-modulated plastic optical fiber sensors, which were specifically conceived for the measurement of displacements in industrial and civil applications. These sensors retrieve the displacement from the variation of the attenuation along the light path and use two signals at different wavelengths to compensate for the effects of parasitic quantities, such as temperature and strains along the fiber. The theoretical behavior of the compensation technique is presented, and the results of experiments carried out with different combinations of signal wavelengths and plastic fibers are reported. The experimental setup has proved that, by proper choice of the compensation signal wavelength, it is possible to monitor displacements in the range (0 to 10) mm, even for low received power and under severe perturbation conditions, thus significantly improving the long-term stability of the sensor

Modified POF Sensor for Gaseous Hydrogen Fluoride Monitoring in the Presence of Ionizing Radiations

This paper describes the development of a sensor designed to detect low concentrations of hydrogen fluoride (HF) in gas mixtures. The sensor employs a plastic optical fiber (POF) covered with a thin layer of glass- like material. HF attacks the glass and alters the fiber transmission capability so that the detection simply requires a LED and a photodiode. The coated POF is obtained by means of low-pressure plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition that allows the glass-like film to be deposited at low temperature without damaging the fiber core. The developed sensor will be installed in the recirculation gas system of the resistive plate chamber muon detector of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider accelerator of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN