BIOMASS PRODUCTION AS AN ENERGY SOURCE IN COPPICES OF THE PROVINCE OF FLORENCE, ITALY: CONSIDERING THE ECONOMIC AND EMPLOYMENT ASPECTS

Coppice management of forests in Tuscany, and particularly in the province of Florence, has had a chequered history, which has set the stage for the present problems of forestry policy. In Italy, the period between 1955 and 1975 saw a marked reduction in use of firewood in the home and its virtual elimination from the industrial context, leading to progressive abandonment of coppice management. Since 1975, wood-cutting has once again become an increasingly frequent practice, mainly in beech and deciduous oak forests, to the point that this phenomenon has been defined as a veritable revival of coppice management. This change is due partly to a rise in firewood prices but also to the greater yield obtainable from processing activities, although the observed increase is to be attributed not so much to technological progress (only a few enterprises have adequate equipment), as to the mass accumulated during the period of non-harvesting. Basing our opinion on these considerations we realized a project for assessing the "actual" economic, occupational and environmental potential of coppice management in the province of Florence for biomass production as an energy source. To this end, our work has tried to identify the new potential market area, the enterprises typology, and analyse the social and environmental impact. Moreover, we have evaluated economic efficiency and have taken into consideration the public intervention needed to develop new markets. We have seen that at the moment the possible market areas are tied not only to the traditional markets for house heating by traditional stove with low performance, but also to a new market tied to the most recent developments in heating technologies for dwelling places and small environments, that have allowed considerable technological improvement in heating systems using wood biomasses, which are now more economical and easier to use, have lower gas emission levels and offer greater safety. Another potential market is tied to the electric power production, through the transformation from energy produced by combustion of wood biomass into electric power energy, that we can use in times of peak power consumption in the area studied. The results of this study shows that use of wood biomasses in the energy sector is competitive with oil and gas fired systems, and that biomass production as an energy source is not only environmentally sustainable but also economically feasible and capable of creating job opportunities. Moreover, the possibility for development of two new market areas exists: the first is tied to production of heating energy with new technology plants that use a wood biomass, and result in a high performance; the second is the possibility to develop the electric energy market with the use of gasification or cogeneration plants. In both cases it is possible to create new activities for installation, maintenance and fueling of heating plants, for maintenance and fueling electric generator plants, which will be complementary to harvesting activityResource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Dysbiosis in the Pathogenesis of Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Diseases

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) are chronic inflammatory conditions of the gastrointestinal tract that occur in genetically susceptible individuals. Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are two major types of IBD. In about 20–25% of patients, disease onset is during childhood and pediatric IBD can be considered the best model for studying immunopathogentic mechanisms. The fundamentals of IBD pathogenesis are considered a defective innate immunity and bacterial killing with overaggressive adaptive immune response. A condition of “dysbiosis”, with alterations of the gut microbial composition, is regarded as the basis of IBD pathogenesis. The human gastrointestinal (GI) microbial population is a complex, dynamic ecosystem and consists of up to one thousand different bacterial species. In healthy individuals, intestinal microbiota have a symbiotic relationship with the host organism and carry out important metabolic, “barrier,” and immune functions. Microbial dysbiosis in IBD with lack of beneficial bacteria, together with genetic predisposition, is the most relevant conditions in the pathogenesis of the pediatric IBD

VGI AND WEB 2.0: POLITICS IN THE TIME OF TWITTER

Il presente contributo si articola in due parti che mirano a esplorare la rappresentazione del luogo attraverso informazioni georeferenziate generate dagli utenti. La prima parte, a carattere teorico e metodologico, analizza il contesto dell’informazione geografica e le recenti innovazioni della cartografia online, con particolare attenzione alla Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). La seconda parte dello studio verte sul caso di studio: verrà infatti mostrato come le informazioni generate dall’utente possano essere utilizzate per analisi di carattere sociopolitico e come possano essere create mappe tematiche con strumenti di mappatura differenti. L’analisi prende in considerazione i tweet con geocode presenti su Twitter relativi ad alcune delle principali personalità politiche italiane al fine di mostrare una valutazione della popolarità e della percezione degli italiani nei confronti di alcune delle principali personalità politiche italiane attuali. L’articolo si conclude con una riflessione sulle potenzialità e i limiti, le opportunità e le difficoltà, delle nuove applicazioni Web 2.0 con l’intento di mostrare che il dato e l’informazione generati dall’utente possono svolgere un ruolo importante nella ricerca geografica e nella cartografia, per aiutare a comprendere meglio fenomeni, nel nostro caso politici, ma anche sociali ed economici.In this paper there are two main parts, which aim at exploring the representation of place through georeferenced user-generated information. The first part focuses on the main features of volunteered geographic information (VGI) and open source mapping tools. The second part of the paper develops a case study. It will be shown how user-generated information might be used for investigating a social and political topic and how thematic maps representing the analysis may be obtained with different mapping tools. That analysis has been developed using geocoded tweets from Twitter, concerning some of the most important Italian politicians. The paper closes with some remarks on the potentialities and the limits, the opportunities and the difficulties of the emerging Web 2.0 applications and it aims at showing that user-generated data and information can play an important role in geographical research and in mapping activities, to help to better understand political as well as social and economical phenomenon

Chapter Decomposing tourists’ sentiment from raw NL text to assess customer satisfaction

The importance of the Word of Mouth is growing day by day in many topics. This phenomenon is evident in everyday life, e.g., the rise of influencers and social media managers. If more people positively debate specific products, then even more people are encouraged to buy them and vice versa. This effect is directly affected by the relationship between the potential customer and the reviewer. Moreover, considering the negative reporting bias is evident in how the Word of Mouth analysis is of absolute interest in many fields. We propose an algorithm to extract the sentiment from a natural language text corpus. The combined approach of Neural Networks, with high predictive power but more challenging interpretation, with more simple but informative models, allows us to quantify a sentiment with a numeric value and to predict if a sentence has a positive (negative) sentiment. The assessment of an objective quantity improves the interpretation of the results in many fields. For example, it is possible to identify crucial specific sectors that require intervention, improving the company's services whilst finding the strengths of the company himself (useful for advertising campaigns). Moreover, considering that the time information is usually available in textual data with a web origin, to analyze trends on macro/micro topics. After showing how to properly reduce the dimensionality of the textual data with a data-cleaning phase, we show how to combine: WordEmbedding, K-Means clustering, SentiWordNet, and the Threshold-based Naïve Bayes classifier. We apply this method to Booking.com and TripAdvisor.com data, analyzing the sentiment of people who discuss a particular issue, providing an example of customer satisfaction

Evolution of Media Coverage on Climate Change and Environmental Awareness: An Analysis of Tweets from UK and US Newspapers

Climate change represents one of the biggest challenges of our time. Newspapers might play an important role in raising awareness on this problem and its consequences. We collected all tweets posted by six UK and US newspapers in the last decade to assess whether 1) the space given to this topic has grown, 2) any breakpoint can be identified in the time series of tweets on climate change, and 3) any main topic can be identified in these tweets. Overall, the number of tweets posted on climate change increased for all newspapers during the last decade. Although a sharp decrease in 2020 was observed due to the pandemic, for most newspapers climate change coverage started to rise again in 2021. While different breakpoints were observed, for most newspapers 2019 was identified as a key year, which is plausible based on the coverage received by activities organized by the Fridays for Future movement. Finally, using different topic modeling approaches, we observed that, while unsupervised models partly capture relevant topics for climate change, such as the ones related to politics, consequences for health or pollution, semi-supervised models might be of help to reach higher informativeness of words assigned to the topics

Citizens and institutions as information prosumers. The case study of italian municipalities on Twitter

The paper develops an analysis of the distribution, diffusion and performance of the official profiles on Twitter adopted by the Italian municipalities (comuni) up to November 2013. It aims to identify the patterns of spatial distribution and the drivers of the diffusion of Twitter profiles; the performance of the profiles through an aggregated index, called the Twitter performance index (Twiperindex), which evaluates the profiles’ activity with reference to the gravitational areas of the municipalities in order to enable comparisons of the activity of municipalities with different demographic sizes and functional roles