Our Mediterranean Africa

La Goulette is one of the 19 zones of Grand Tunis, the most densely populated metropolis of Tunisia with almost two and a half million of citizens. La Goulette, built up around the canal that connects the lagoon to the sea, has hosted the most prominent Italian community that settled in Tunis. In 1893, the construction of the port of Tunis attracted in La Goulette numerous traders: dockworkers and small merchants settled here, in particular mechanics and auto parts dealers, of Sardinian and Sicilian origin. To the precariousness of houses also corresponded a disordered urban design. The landscape that thus originated was extraordinarily similar to landscapes that can be found in the Sicilian coasts, in proximity of ports, of small towns and fisherman’s villages. The neighborhood was symbolically named Petite Sicile, as Sicily mirrored herself in these spontaneous forms of architecture, in the thick intertwining of houses and social relationships, in the way of living “in the streets” of children and, of course, in the food

Pique-niquer in Paris

Una antica tradizione rinnova il rapporto tra Parigi e i suoi abitanti: l’uso sociale e pubblico di prati, giardini, scalinate, sponde dei canali e lungofiume per consumare, con estrema nonchalance, il rito del picnic. Pique-niquer è un verbo francese che abbina piquer (prendere, rubacchiare, spilluzzicare) con nique (piccola cosa di poco valore). La città gli tributa generosamente i suoi spazi pubblici dove si riversano coppie, gruppi, famiglie, attrezzati di tutto punto per godere di un pranzo o soltanto di uno spuntino all’aperto, immersi tra i panorami urbani più suggestivi.An old tradition renews the relationship existing between Paris and her inhabitants: the social and public use of lawns, gardens, stairways and riverfronts to hold, with extreme nonchalance, the ceremony of picnicking. Pique-niquer (to picnic), is a French verb made up of two words: piquer (to pick, to nick, to nibble) and nique (small little thing seemingly of no value). The City has generously dedicated many public areas to picnicking

Dotazioni culturali d’eccellenza

Le città medie della regione PACA (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur), nel confrontarsi con la forte attrattività turistica della Costa Azzurra e del Principato di Monaco e con la presenza della città di rango metropolitano di Marsiglia, hanno investito sin dal secondo dopoguerra in una direzione alternativa di sviluppo puntando su dotazioni culturali d’eccellenza, facendo sistema tra loro (centri urbani relativamente vicini con distanze medie di circa 100 km) e configurando un “distretto culturale” che, superando la dimensione locale e regionale, riesce a competere ad un livello internazionale. Accanto alla valorizzazione della propria identità, del patrimonio culturale e delle peculiarità del paesaggio provenzale, le azioni sono state dirette verso la promozione di attività culturali legate in particolare allo spettacolo ed alla creatività artistica, gestite secondo un principio di offerta diversificata: la presenza di tali eventi culturali, tra cui diversi Festival, richiede strutture in grado di soddisfare una richiesta di livello internazionale che, dedicate alle manifestazioni per un breve periodo, rimangono comunque patrimonio di rango elevato delle città medie per il resto dell’anno, contribuendo ad innalzare la qualità dell’offerta in termini di dotazioni e servizi ad elevate prestazioni e capacità. Nell’evento la città media si trasforma in città capitale, accoglie attrezzature e funzioni di rango corrispondente, e l’offerta differenziata potenzia la competitività di sistema delle città. Un modello di sviluppo che utilizza anche la produzione di attività culturali offre opportunità di riequilibrio di territori che sono o rischiano di venire emarginati dalle principali direttrici di sviluppo economico, o che soccombono nella concorrenza con altre realtà più attrattive sul capitalismo industriale o finanziario

An allergy and Novelists of the past, historians of the present

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.This thesis is comprised of a creative extract: Local History and Case Histories and an exegesis: Novelists of the Past, Historians of the Present. The creative extract is part of a much longer project, called an allergy, a multi-generic self-reflexive historiographical metafictional novel which explores ideas of history and fiction, memory and imagination, truth and identity across a number of genres, narratives, periods and voices. That history and fiction share many similarities is an idea well-established by both historians, critics and novelists, from Lionel Gossman and Hayden White to Richard Jenkins and E. L. Doctorow. The fiction–history debate has also stood at the heart of Australian literary history and Australian history itself, coming to a head during the ‘history’– and ‘culture wars’ declared by then-Prime Minister John Howard shortly after his election in 1996. These wars coincided with the so-called ‘memoir boom’ in which personal autobiographical narratives and first-person, present-tense fiction rose in popularity among a reading public hungry for ‘authentic’ stories, often by once-marginalised voices. Yet despite historian Mark McKenna calling for a dialogue between historians and novelists, the discussion seemed as vehement and vituperative as those surrounding the history– and culture wars. The creative extract offers my own parody of the memoir popular during the 1990s, and explores issues of race, authenticity, history, truth and identity, issues that were raised in cases like the controversy over Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, reaching back to the Koolmatrie and Demidenko affairs. I use these controversies as a springboard to examine in the exegesis that follows questions regarding issues fiction and fictional truth, imaginative empathy and creative freedom, appropriation and attribution, national and individual identity, especially in the context of Australia’s long and ignoble history of literary hoaxing. The exegesis examines the textual defences and broader contextual and moral criticisms in both controversies, analysing the rhetorical devices and narrative conventions common to fiction and history; it relates these problems and possibilities for negotiating them creatively and ethically to an allergy. The conceptual rationale for this thesis is embedded in the work in every possible way. My overall argument is not so much that history and fiction, truth and reality, memory and unreliability are now blurred — for this is an argument that has been made numerous times before — but that the act of retrieving truth, identity, authenticity or memory constitutes a re-imagining of the very elements it seeks to interrogate creatively and critically. The reader is ultimately positioned as an active creator of the text. The exegesis is followed by a short Appendix which contains a sample of a different section of an allergy by way of demonstrating this; while this section it is not offered for examination it showcases my deliberate merging of the boundaries of the scholarly and the creative

La rigenerazione del porto e del centro storico di Trapani: l’impatto sulla città e il territorio

Trapani ha avviato un processo di profondo rinnovamento che in un breve arco di tempo ha visto la riqualificazione del porto, del centro storico e della città, riverberandosi anche sul suo territorio. Il processo ha preso avvio in occasione dello svolgimento nel porto di Trapani delle regate dell’America’s Cup nel 2005/06, per proseguire e radicarsi nel territorio grazie ad una programmazione integrata tra più soggetti della pubblica amministrazione, alla capacità di attrarre investimenti esogeni e al coinvolgimento dei privati e della popolazione locale. Trama portante delle politiche messe in atto è stata l’identità di Trapani come città portuale: gli interventi di trasformazione ne hanno valorizzato il patrimonio, rigenerato i caratteri e potenziato l’attrattività.At the beginning of the twenty-first century Trapani has started a process of radical renewal of the port, the old town and the city, which was also transferred in its territory. The process began with the opportunity of the America's Cup in 2005/06 in the port of Trapani; this renewal process has continued in the territory thanks integrated planning, the synergy between more public actors, the ability to attract investment and the involvement of private and local residents. The identity of Trapani as a port-city has characterized all operations: the interventions of transformation have enhanced the heritage, rebuilt the characters and improved attractiveness

Managing the Historical Agricultural Landscape in the Sicilian Anthropocene Context. The Landscape of the Valley of the Temples as a Time Capsule

The debate over whether we are entering the Anthropocene Epoch focuses on the unequal consumption of the Earth system’s resources at the expense of nature’s regenerative abilities. To find a new point of balance with nature, it is useful to look back in time to understand how the so-called “Great Acceleration”—the surge in the consumption of the planet’s resources—hastened the arrival of the Anthropocene. Some particular places—for various reasons—survived the Great Acceleration and, as time capsules, have preserved more or less intact some landscape features that have disappeared elsewhere. How can we enhance these living archives that have come down to us? Through the analysis of the case study of the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento (Sicily, Italy), the article presents several initiatives that have tried to answer this question. For example, the pre-Anthropocene landscape of the Valley of the Temples has preserved rare specimens of some plant species from which living gene banks have been built for the propagation of species, such as the Living Museum of the Almond Tree. In addition, the Kolymbethra, an ancient example of a Mediterranean garden, has been brought back to life revealing finds related to Greek and Arab cultivation and irrigation systems. The research perspectives opened by the “disappeared landscapes” show that the knowledge of the historical landscape, in particular the mechanisms behind its resilience, is indispensable for countering the unsustainable voracity of the Anthropocene and rediscover a renewed synergy between humankind and nature

Peeking into the other half of the glass : handling polarization in recommender systems.

This dissertation is about filtering and discovering information online while using recommender systems. In the first part of our research, we study the phenomenon of polarization and its impact on filtering and discovering information. Polarization is a social phenomenon, with serious consequences, in real-life, particularly on social media. Thus it is important to understand how machine learning algorithms, especially recommender systems, behave in polarized environments. We study polarization within the context of the users\u27 interactions with a space of items and how this affects recommender systems. We first formalize the concept of polarization based on item ratings and then relate it to the item reviews, when available. We then propose a domain independent data science pipeline to automatically detect polarization using the ratings rather than the properties, typically used to detect polarization, such as item\u27s content or social network topology. We perform an extensive comparison of polarization measures on several benchmark data sets and show that our polarization detection framework can detect different degrees of polarization and outperforms existing measures in capturing an intuitive notion of polarization. We also investigate and uncover certain peculiar patterns that are characteristic of environments where polarization emerges: A machine learning algorithm finds it easier to learn discriminating models in polarized environments: The models will quickly learn to keep each user in the safety of their preferred viewpoint, essentially, giving rise to filter bubbles and making them easier to learn. After quantifying the extent of polarization in current recommender system benchmark data, we propose new counter-polarization approaches for existing collaborative filtering recommender systems, focusing particularly on the state of the art models based on Matrix Factorization. Our work represents an essential step toward the new research area concerned with quantifying, detecting and counteracting polarization in human-generated data and machine learning algorithms.We also make a theoretical analysis of how polarization affects learning latent factor models, and how counter-polarization affects these models. In the second part of our dissertation, we investigate the problem of discovering related information by recommendation of tags on social media micro-blogging platforms. Real-time micro-blogging services such as Twitter have recently witnessed exponential growth, with millions of active web users who generate billions of micro-posts to share information, opinions and personal viewpoints, daily. However, these posts are inherently noisy and unstructured because they could be in any format, hence making them difficult to organize for the purpose of retrieval of relevant information. One way to solve this problem is using hashtags, which are quickly becoming the standard approach for annotation of various information on social media, such that varied posts about the same or related topic are annotated with the same hashtag. However hashtags are not used in a consistent manner and most importantly, are completely optional to use. This makes them unreliable as the sole mechanism for searching for relevant information. We investigate mechanisms for consolidating the hashtag space using recommender systems. Our methods are general enough that they can be used for hashtag annotation in various social media services such as twitter, as well as for general item recommendations on systems that rely on implicit user interest data such as e-learning and news sites, or explicit user ratings, such as e-commerce and online entertainment sites. To conclude, we propose a methodology to extract stories based on two types of hashtag co-occurrence graphs. Our research in hashtag recommendation was able to exploit the textual content that is available as part of user messages or posts, and thus resulted in hybrid recommendation strategies. Using content within this context can bridge polarization boundaries. However, when content is not available, is missing, or is unreliable, as in the case of platforms that are rich in multimedia and multilingual posts, the content option becomes less powerful and pure collaborative filtering regains its important role, along with the challenges of polarization

Rewilding Urban Space. The Regeneration of Budolfi Plads (Aalborg, DK)

Tackling environmental degradation and halting the growing loss of biodiversity are among the most urgent imperatives at the turn of the third millennium. In response to the global environmental crisis, different approaches to nature conservation, biodiversity protection and ecosystem restoration are emerging

The remote and exclusive taste of border port cities

Pochissime città portuali hanno un legame così esclusivo, intenso e simbiotico con il proprio porto come Hirtshals. La giovanissima città – data di nascita 1919 – è stata fondata in occasione dell’apertura di un nuovo porto artificiale sull’estremità settentrionale della Danimarca, baricentro strategico dei commerci marittimi tra i paesi scandinavi. A riflettere sulla forma e il destino del nuovo insediamento urbano si impegnarono lungamente gli architetti danesi Steen Eiler Rasmussen e Knud Christiansen, vincitori del concorso per la progettazione di Hirtshals. Eccitati dalle recenti avanguardistiche teorie della Garden City ed esaltati dall’idea di fondare una città ex-novo, il loro disegno di città “ideale” si basò sull’innesto delle tre infrastrutture di collegamento: la ferrovia, l’autostrada e il porto.Port cities with exclusive, symbiotic and intense karmic bond with its own harbour can be counted on the fingers one hand and Hirtshals is one of these. The brand-new city – born in 1919 – was founded on the occasion of the launch of a new artificial harbor located in the extreme north of Denmark, strategic centre of gravity of maritime trades between Scandinavian countries. Danish architects Steen Eiler Rasmussen and Knud Christiansen, winners of the competition for the design of Hirtshals, worked hard to reflect on the shape and fate of the new urban settlement. Excited by the recent avantgarde theories of the “Garden City” and exalted by the idea of founding a city from scratch, their image of the “ideal” city was based on grafting three transit infrastructures: railway, motorway and harbour

JRevealPEG: A Semi-Blind JPEG Steganalysis Tool Targeting Current Open-Source Embedding Programs

Steganography in computer science refers to the hiding of messages or data within other messages or data; the detection of these hidden messages is called steganalysis. Digital steganography can be used to hide any type of file or data, including text, images, audio, and video inside other text, image, audio, or video data. While steganography can be used to legitimately hide data for non-malicious purposes, it is also frequently used in a malicious manner. This paper proposes JRevealPEG, a software tool written in Python that will aid in the detection of steganography in JPEG images with respect to identifying a targeted set of open-source embedding tools. It is hoped that JRevealPEG will assist in furthering the research into effective steganalysis techniques, to ultimately help identify the source of hidden and possibly sensitive or malicious messages, as well as contribute to efforts at thwarting the activities of bad actors