2,548 research outputs found
Urban commoning in a civic social network: the case study of FirstLife
The integration of ICTs in the urban management is increasing at all levels of public administrations in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness of public services, but their role is still instrumental rather than drive a change toward a more collaborative local governance. On the other hand, there is a raising expectation of the civil society to participate in decision making processes and contribute in defining local policies about sensitive topics. These purposes are often addressed by using or creating community digital tools designed for a specific contextual scope, resulting in a deep fragmentation of information about civic initiatives and social innovation projects and a lack of continuous communication among urban stakeholders even working in the same area. The challenge is to design an ICT solution to refactor the current practices of cooperation between private and public sector and support a real change in the city management processes from the local to the territorial level. In this contribution, we present the development of FirstLife, a map-based civic social network, designed to represent the complex environment of the city through geo-referenced time framed crowdsourced data about urban entities as events, places, groups, initiatives, projects, stories, news, etc. The main goals of the platform are to support the action of multiple stakeholders in alternative processes of co-management of common or shared resources, as for instance public spaces, green areas and buildings hosting collective institutions, to enable the co-production of services based on a reform of local administrative protocols toward the We-government model, and to empower mixed local networks. The development of FirstLife followed a participatory action design research methodology involving several stakeholders among associations, local authorities and institutions, businesses and the University in the city of Turin in the last two years. The participatory process started from the requirement elicitation, and continued with the collection of applicative scenarios based on the context analysis of internal/external relations of groups of stakeholders and the balancing of their goals in a common platform. Then, the co-design of features has been undertaken in the stakeholders’ working environments to model the platform functionalities on the real processes and practices defining social acceptable technological solutions, ready to be adopted by institutional and civic organizations. The platform has been tested-in-use in multiple living labs and pilot projects, experimenting a number of use patterns representing the common actions in the city carried out by public or private actors. These activities have been integrated in an iterative development cycle that brought so far at four progressively improved versions of FirstLife, from a map-based tool to share georeferenced information to a common workbench for multiple stakeholders acting in the same area (from the neighbourhood to the city level) where open groups can self-organize initiatives and cooperate with others. The result of this process is a digital space for urban commoning practices,reflecting the organization of society in individuals and structured public and private entities, the spatial framework of their actions and the temporal development of city transformations and initiatives
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Large Polarization and Susceptibilities in Artificial Morphotropic Phase Boundary PbZr1−xTixO3 Superlattices
The ability to produce atomically precise, artificial oxide heterostructures allows for the possibility of producing exotic phases and enhanced susceptibilities not found in parent materials. Typical ferroelectric materials either exhibit large saturation polarization away from a phase boundary or large dielectric susceptibility near a phase boundary. Both large ferroelectric polarization and dielectric permittivity are attained wherein fully epitaxial (PbZr0.8Ti0.2O3)n/(PbZr0.4Ti0.6O3)2n (n = 2, 4, 6, 8, 16 unit cells) superlattices are produced such that the overall film chemistry is at the morphotropic phase boundary, but constitutive layers are not. Long- (n ≥ 6) and short-period (n = 2) superlattices reveal large ferroelectric saturation polarization (Ps = 64 µC cm−2) and small dielectric permittivity (εr ≈ 400 at 10 kHz). Intermediate-period (n = 4) superlattices, however, exhibit both large ferroelectric saturation polarization (Ps = 64 µC cm−2) and dielectric permittivity (εr = 776 at 10 kHz). First-order reversal curve analysis reveals the presence of switching distributions for each parent layer and a third, interfacial layer wherein superlattice periodicity modulates the volume fraction of each switching distribution and thus the overall material response. This reveals that deterministic creation of artificial superlattices is an effective pathway for designing materials with enhanced responses to applied bias
Optical Properties of (SrMnO3)n/(LaMnO3)2n superlattices: an insulator-to-metal transition observed in the absence of disorder
We measure the optical conductivity of (SrMnO3)n/(LaMnO3)2n superlattices
(SL) for n=1,3,5, and 8 and 10 < T < 400 K. Data show a T-dependent insulator
to metal transition (IMT) for n \leq 3, driven by the softening of a polaronic
mid-infrared band. At n = 5 that softening is incomplete, while at the
largest-period n=8 compound the MIR band is independent of T and the SL remains
insulating. One can thus first observe the IMT in a manganite system in the
absence of the disorder due to chemical doping. Unsuccessful reconstruction of
the SL optical properties from those of the original bulk materials suggests
that (SrMnO3)n/(LaMnO3)2n heterostructures give rise to a novel electronic
state.Comment: Published Online in Nano Letters, November 8, 2010;
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl1022628; 5 pages, 3 figure
Far infrared properties of the rare-earth scandate DyScO3
We present reflectance measurements in the infrared region on a single
crystal the rare earth scandate DyScO3. Measurements performed between room
temperature and 10 K allow to determine the frequency of the infrared-active
phonons, never investigated experimentally, and to get information on their
temperature dependence. A comparison with the phonon peak frequency resulting
from ab-initio computations is also provided. We finally report detailed data
on the frequency dependence of the complex refractive index of DyScO3 in the
terahertz region, which is important in the analysis of terahertz measurements
on thin films deposited on DyScO3
High-temperature optical spectral weight and Fermi liquid renormalization in Bi-based cuprates
The optical conductivity and the spectral weight W(T) of two superconducting
cuprates at optimum doping, Bi2Sr2-xLaxCuO6 and Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8, have been first
measured up to 500 K. Above 300 K, W(T) deviates from the usual T2 behavior in
both compounds, even though the zero-frequency extrapolation of the optical
conductivity remains larger than the Ioffe-Regel limit. The deviation is
surprisingly well described by the T4 term of the Sommerfeld expansion, but its
coefficients are enhanced by strong correlation. This renormalization is due to
strong correlation, as shown by the good agreement with dynamical mean field
calculations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Physical Review Letters in pres
Topology-aware indexing system for Urban Knowledge
Maps are being widely used as tools for presenting or retrieving information with spatial attributes. Existing map-based applications do not use the full potential of digital maps and geographical data: social media are disconnected from the underlying geographical entities; maps as visualization tools do not use the urban topology to cluster point of interest; maps as input systems are intrinsically ambiguous. This work presents a topology-aware indexing system supporting a new metaphor for a real integration between social media and digital maps. The methodology and technical solutions required to build and populate the indexing table starting from OpenStreetMap spatial primitives are introduced
No equity, no triple aim: strategic proposals to advance health equity in a volatile policy environment
Health professionals, including social workers, community health workers, public health workers, and licensed health care providers, share common interests and responsibilities in promoting health equity and improving social determinants of health—the conditions in which we live, work, play, and learn. This article summarizes underlying causes of health inequity and comparatively poor health outcomes in the U.S. It describes barriers to realizing the hope embedded in the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that moving away from fee-for-service payments will naturally drive care upstream as providers respond to greater financial risk for the health of their patients by undertaking greater prevention efforts. The article asserts that health equity should serve as the guiding framework for achieving the Triple Aim of health care reform. It outlines practical opportunities for improving care and for promoting stronger efforts to address social determinants of health. These proposals include developing a dashboard of measures to assist providers committed to health equity and community-based prevention and to promote institutional accountability for addressing socio-economic factors that influence health
Collaborative Multi-Perspective Urban Knowledge and Civic Media: A Never-Ending Design Challenge
Developing a civic social network requires to consider
users meeting in real life, collaborating on digital entries related
to real urban entities. This makes necessary to think about
collaboration tools in a new perspective: ensuring the
participation of users with different levels and forms of
legitimacy to represent complex relations among entities, and
ensuring the accountability of each contributor. We present a
set of technical solutions allowing the collaboration on complex
entities, keeping interactions simple, and representing multiple
perspectives about shared entities
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