‘Procedes Huc’: Voltaire, Newton, and Locke in Lettres Philosophiques

In Lettres philosophiques, Letter XIII is devoted to Locke, as are Letters XIV–XVII to Newton. The ordering of these letters is not adequately explained by comparing the dates of birth or death of the two thinkers. For the Letter on Locke not only precedes but also ‘frames’ those on Newton, in the sense that it provides the reader with a guide through the philosophical intricacies of Letters XIV–XVII. This works in two ways. On the one hand, in order to defend Newton against his detractors Voltaire broadly adopts Locke’s perspective on the relation among words, ideas and things. On the other hand, he subtly and misleadingly grafts Locke’s epistemology onto the Principia, though it differs from Newton’s epistemology in significant respects. For Locke, unlike Newton, holds that we can identify fixed, permanent limits concerning what kind of thing humanity can know of matter and the universe. Voltaire presents Newton’s ideas as though they respected Locke’s limits. However, we can glimpse Voltaire’s own attitude in the final words of Letter XV: ‘Procedes huc, et non ibis amplius’: Voltaire agrees more closely with Locke than Newton concerning the limits of epistemology

Boosting energy efficiency through Smart Grids

This report discusses the role of ICT in the smart grid with a view of energy efficiency, with the ultimate goal of hindering climate changes. This is done by starting from the consideration that ICT equipment consumes energy too, and this extra energy consumption could be quite significant. This leads to the conclusion that any ICT architectural choice and any implementation should focus first on its own efficiency. From the energy efficiency perspective, the deployment of additional communication infrastructures for smart grids should carefully consider the trade-off between the gain in terms of energy saving and the cost of the operating devices. It should also avoid the risk to pose an unnecessary energy burden to end-customers, as they are expected to be bearing most of it. This report also underlines that the risk of having an ICT infrastructure with a negative energy efficiency balance often comes from the \u201cscale\u201d factor: this means small and low-power devices (a few watts) may have a huge energy footprint when they are massively deployed (electrical grids have billions of customers). This report also gives a brief understanding about the possible path toward a \u201cgreen\u201d ICT, which is the implementation of power-aware and conscious devices for communication and information management. Indeed, any roadmap toward the deployment of ICT devices and networks in support of the smart grid should take into account (and leverage on) the existence of different networking solutions from the telecommunication perspective, each with different characteristics in terms of their own capabilities, coverage extension, numerousness, services\u2019 suitability, and energy footprint. There is clearly no single communication platform that could efficiently fit all the different constraints and implementations of Smart Grids (SGs). The broad choice among the technologies and networks available will enable the most efficient, early, and economically viable implementation of SGs

Thermodynamic properties of the nacl-kriptofix[222]-water system

Catani

Towards Graph Machine Learning for Smart Grid Knowledge Graphs in Industrial Scenarios

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) demonstrated promising application perspective in different scenarios, especially when combined with Graph Machine Learning (GML) techniques able to interpret and infer over facts. Given the natural network structures of Smart Grid equipment and the exponential growth of electric power data, Smart Grid Knowledge Graphs (SGKGs) provides unprecedented opportunities to manage massive power resources and provide intelligent applications. However, a single representation of the SGKGs is never sufficient to properly exploit GML techniques that leverage different aspects of the KG for various objectives. In this work, we provide a methodology to extract various significant views of the SGKG by iteratively applying a series of transformation to the description of the power network in the IEC CIM standard. Our implementation is based on a declarative approach to guarantee easier portability, and we deploy the transformations as a stateless microservice, facilitating modular integration with the rest of the Smart Grid Semantic Platform. Experimental evaluation on two real power distribution networks demonstrates the efficacy of our approach in highlighting important topological information, without discarding precious additional knowledge present in the SGKG

Calorimetric analysis of three hydroxyacids as markers for quality and safety in food

A new analytical methodology to quantify three hydroxy acids (orotic, ascorbic, L-malic acids), by isothermal solution microcalorimetry, was outlined and applied to different foods. Three specific enzymatic reactions were used to ensure the correctness of the results. The considered acids can be considered as markers in food quality for their biochemical peculiarities. The enzymatic microcalorimetric method is very reliable and linearity is satisfied in the concentration ranges useful for food analyses. The analytical results of the underlined method are very accurate, precise, sensitive and in good agreement with the values obtained with other common methods