Vampires in the village Žrnovo on the island of Korčula: following an archival document from the 18th century

Središnja tema rada usmjerena je na raščlambu spisa pohranjenog u Državnom arhivu u Mlecima (fond: Capi del Consiglio de’ Dieci: Lettere di Rettori e di altre cariche) koji se odnosi na događaj iz 1748. godine u korčulanskom selu Žrnovo, kada su mještani – vjerujući da su se pojavili vampiri – oskvrnuli nekoliko mjesnih grobova. U radu se podrobno iznose osnovni podaci iz spisa te rečeni događaj analizira u širem društvenom kontekstu i prate se lokalna vjerovanja.The main interest of this essay is the analysis of the document from the State Archive in Venice (file: Capi del Consiglio de’ Dieci: Lettere di Rettori e di altre cariche) which is connected with the episode from 1748 when the inhabitants of the village Žrnove on the island of Korčula in Croatia opened tombs on the local cemetery in the fear of the vampires treating. This essay try to show some social circumstances connected with this event as well as a local vernacular tradition concerning superstitions

A class of estimators for quantitative sensitive data

Auxiliary variable, Privacy protection measures, Regression-type estimator, Scrambled responses, Simulation,

Optimization Problems Under Uncertainty in Smart Cities

Combinatorial optimization has proven to be a valuable tool in several real case applications. With the advent of smart cities, it has naturally been leveraged by both researchers and industries to deal with problems such as optimal allocation of urban services, effective management of scarce resources, planning of logistic operations over congested networks, and pollution reduction. In practice, these problems are turned into optimization models, and their solution reveals the best tactical or operational policy able to maximize a particular utility or minimize a particular cost. Typically, several parameters involved in these models (e.g., people’s behavior and market fluctuations) are influenced by many uncertain variables that are only partially or not known by the decision-maker. This lack of knowledge can be dealt with by using specific optimization paradigms such as the Robust Optimization or the Stochastic Programming. Nevertheless, the complexity of these models precludes, in most cases, to find an optimal solution. Thus, approximation methods have to be considered. This chapter presents several applications leveraging optimization models and algorithms for effective management of urban areas and their operations and a novel and efficient Extreme Values Theory-based deterministic approximation framework to cope with uncertainty in smart cities’ optimization and planning