Analysis of an interdisciplinary approach for teaching artificial intelligence in secondary schools through co-planning and co-teaching methodologies: a proposal for the open schooling model of the FEDORA project

This thesis is part of the FEDORA project (Future-oriented Science EDucation to enhance Responsibility and engagement in the society of Acceleration and uncertainty), a three-year project funded by the EU that started in September 2020. The project involves 6 partner institutions from five European countries coordinated by the University of Bologna. The main objective of FEDORA is to develop a “model for science education for the society of acceleration and uncertainty” (https://www.fedora-project.eu/). To achieve this, the project partners established networks of schools at the European level, called "open schooling networks", to implement interdisciplinary STEM learning-teaching modules on emerging themes such as artificial intelligence, climate change, and quantum computers, and study the implementation of teaching practices. The actions and results of the project provide recommendations for anticipatory policies to promote visionary attitudes towards open schooling and guiding concrete institutional transformations1. The work of this thesis focused on following the implementation of the FEDORA module on artificial intelligence at the “Liceo Einstein” in Rimini and the subsequent laboratory between art, creativity, and artificial intelligence (AI Atelier), conceived by the school’s teachers themselves. The research work consists of the investigation of co-planning and co-teaching methodologies implemented in the two projects. This is accomplished by directly observing the courses and later interviewing the teachers, with the goal of highlighting the benefits of this type of teaching as well as the difficulties faced in implementing it within a real school context. The overarching objective is to suggest potential solutions for improving future courses and potentially raising awareness among policymakers about the necessary reforms to align education with the demands of a society characterized by acceleration

Effects of the representation of the crustal structure on seismic wave propagation modeling on the continental scal

The representation of crustal structure in 3D numerical models often poses particular problems that are difficult to overcome. Practical implementations of an improved crustal model into efficient tools for seismic wave propagation modeling often fail to honor the strongly varying depth of the Moho discontinuity. The widely used Spectral Element Method (SEM) using hexahedral elements follows the compromise to approximate this undulating discontinuity with polynomials inside the elements. This solution is satisfactory when modeling seismic wave propagation on the global scale and limitedly to rather low frequencies, but may induce inaccuracies or artifacts when working at the continental scale, where propagation distances are in the order of a few hundred or thousand kilometers and frequencies of interest are up to 0.1 Hz. An alternative modeling tool for seismic wave propagation simulations is the Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method (ADER-DG) that achieves high-order accuracy in space and time using fully unstructured tetrahedral meshes. With this approach strong and undulating discontinuities can be considered more easily by the mesh and modifications of the geometrical properties can be carried out rapidly due to an external mesh generation process. Therefore, we implement more realistic models for the European crust -- based on a new, comprehensive compilation of currently available information from diverse sources, ranging from seismic prospection to receiver functions studies -- in both, the SEM and ADER-DG codes, to study the effects of the numerical representation of crustal structures on seismic wave propagation modeling. We compare the results of the different methods and implementation strategies with respect to accuracy and performance. Clearly, an improved knowledge and detailed representation of the structure of the Earth's crust is a key requisite for better imaging of the mantle structure

Female workers, female operatives and female employees. The women's work in Mar del Plata, between 1940 and 1960

El articulo consiste en reconstruir entre las décadas del cuarenta y sesenta, en un período de expansión económica y comercial para la ciudad de Mar del Plata, la inserción de las mujeres y sus comportamientos en actividades que requirieron mayoritariamente mano de obra femenina como fue la industria de la conserva de pescado y la textil y en menor medida, en el comercio. Al respecto, consideramos que las experiencias de las trabajadoras en los diferentes ámbitos laborales contribuyeron a construir comportamientos sociales distintos y posiblemente, identidades también diferentes.The study consists of reconstructing between the sixty and forties, of a period of economic and commercial expansion for the city of Mar del Plata, the insertion of the women and its behaviors in activities that mainly required feminine manual labor as it were the industry of the fish conserve and the textile and to a lesser extent, in the commerce. On the matter, we considered that the experiences of the workers in the different labor scopes contributed to possibly construct different social behaviors and, also different identities.Dossier: El trabajo femenino en el siglo XX: nuevas miradas y planteos de la historia de la mujer y los estudios de géneroDepartamento de Histori

Modeling the European crust for seismic wave propagation

Looking into the structure, composition and behaviour of the Earth is one of the main goals of the seismic studies. Many geophysical problems — such as surface wave, group velocity and full waveform tomography , determination of mantle flows, gravity studies, source inversion — need plausible models as starting point for such studies. Crustal structure varies greatly over small scale length and has a strong effects on seismic waves. A priori models of the crust are thus often used to model seismic wave propagation at large distance and to account for shallow structure when imaging upper mantle structure. Focusing on forward earthquakes simulations, plausible crustal and mantle models are the first step to obtain realistic seismograms and results. Recent development in computer facilities and numerical methods — Spectral Element Method, ADER-DG method, Finite Difference method — enable to solve the wave equation in 3D complex media with high accuracy. These methods require a discrete representation of the investigation domain (mesh) through which we propagate wave. To model seismic wave propagation at the scale of a continent — i.e. signals travelling to stations a few hundred or thousand kilometers from the earthquake source — we have a problem connected to the detail and reliability of current models, that are sufficiently accurate when we look at the global scale, but often miss significant features at the scale of sedimentary basins and mountain ranges, that become very important as we zoom closer. Reliable and detailed information on these structures exist, for instance deriving from active-source studies, but are often not integrated in wide-area compilations such as desirable. At the European scale, it becomes clear that current crustal models are not adequate for modeling regional datasets with enough detail. The global model CRUST2.0 is frequently used for crustal correction and wave propagation, but its resolution is too low for continental-scale studies. Many other detailed information are available, but at different scales, with different information contents, and following different formats: this information needs to be merged into a larger-scale, coherent representation. The other important issue is that connected to the faithful implementation of a known structure in computational meshes used in forward simulations of wave propagation. The shallow crustal discontinuities indeed are difficult to represent, because of the small size of the shallower elements of the mesh that lead to a very short time step. In this study, I am mostly interested in addressing these two fundamental issues, i.e. how to retrieve a ’good’ crustal model for Europe, on the basis of existing knowledge, and how to best represent it for efficient, but accurate, numerical simulation of seismic wave propagation. In the first part (Chapter 1), we analyse the surface wave sensitivity to the crustal structure presenting an exercise, based on surface wave dispersion matching, to reparameterize CRUST2.0 global model in a simpler grid that can be considered equivalent to CRUST2.0 in modeling surface waves. The models is tested from a wave propagating point of view with SPECFEM-3D code. We collect all the informations available on the this region and we create a new comprehensive reference crustal model for the European plate (Chapter 2) that describes the complex structure of the Europe with higher resolution and more plausibility than previous models. However, we can improve the resolution of such large scale compilation: we collect tens of seismic lines in the East Alps region (Chapter 3) building up, applying a geostatistics technique, a complete regional crustal model of that area that was included in EPcrust. This would be an example in which new local models could be developed and integrated in the continental one. The results are available on www.bo.ingv.it/eurorem/EPcrust. Since new models are available, before starting a 3D implementation of the models in numerical methods, in Chapter 4 we quantitatively analyse in 2D the influence of the representation and uncertainties in the knowledge of crustal parameters on simulated wave field. We evaluate different synthetic test cases respect to the reference, analysing the frequency and source-receiver-distance dependence of our approximations. For the simulations, we use an high order ADER-DG scheme implemented in the SeisSol2D code able to honour the discontinuities in the crust with high fidelity. From a seismological point of view the next step after developing a model would be a validation of the model itself. In chapter 5, we go through a validation process of EPcrust. The main goal is to understand if our new model is able to give a better fit of the real data. We use the Spectral Element Method as implemented in SPECFEM3D-Globe. This choice would be a compromise between accuracy of the representation of the crustal structure and computational cost. The ADER-DG methods, well suited for an accurate representation of the sharp interface within the crust, is at the moment computationally too expensive for 3D simulations at continental scale. At the and of this thesis, we give a brief overview on methods and theory applied to obtain our results

The crustal structure of South Eastern Europe in the new European Plate reference model

The new European Plate crustal model (EPcrust) represents a continental-scale, a priori, compilation of current knowledge on the structure of the upper layers of the earth, designed as a large-scale reference for further seismo- logical studies. Here we review some of the contributions used, and test and compare the model in detail for the Carpathians- Pannonian region with orogene, platform and basin structures (Hungary, Romania), Black Sea, Balkan area (Bul- garia, Greece and Turkey) and the western margin of the East European Platform (Ukraina). We specifically address thickness of sediments, Moho depth and Vp in upper and lower crust, and run comparisons with local compila- tions and individual studies mostly deriving from analysis of active source experiments. Among the most notable features in this region are Moho depths below the Carpathians range, generally between 32 and 37 km (but with some reported values as high as 45 km), and consolidated sediments in the Black Sea reaching thickness from 3 to 12 km. We compare maps and profiles based on the EPcrust model (cristalline basement and Moho surfaces) along great-circle cross-sections across the major tectonic structures in the SE Europe such as Pannonian-Carpathians system, with extension to the E in the East European Platform, from Balkans to the Black Sea or in the south from Greece towards Turkey. Along the profiles the local crustal parameters are mentioned as they were provided by local studies in each area

Land cover validation game

Land cover data constitutes highly useful information to monitor the extension and status of land resources, hence it has been realized how important it is to have accurate land cover data. Here, an interactive WebGIS is built in order to validate GlobeLand30 global land cover data. The Game with a Purpose (GWAP) human-based computation technique is adopted. The system is based on crowdsourcing, i.e. multiple users play the game to validate land cover classifications, thus increasing the confidence level of the validation

3D crustal structure of the Eastern Alpine region from ambient noise tomography

The tectonic evolution of the European Eastern Alps within the Alpine orogeny is still under debate. Open questions include: the link between surface, crustal and mantle structures; the nature of the Moho gap between the two plates; the relationship between the Alps, the adjacent foreland basin and the Bohemian Massif lithospheric blocks. We collected one year of continuous data recorded by ~250 broadband seismic stations –55 of which installed within the EASI AlpArray complementary experiment– in the Eastern Alpine region. Exploiting surface wave group velocity from seismic ambient noise, we obtained an high-resolution 3D S-wave crustal model of the area.The Rayleigh-wave group-velocity from 3 s to 35 s are inverted to obtain 2-D group velocity maps with a resolution of ~15 km. From these maps, we determine a set of 1D velocity models via a Neighborhood Algorithm, resulting in a new 3D model of S-wave velocity with associated uncertainties. The vertical parameterization is a 3-layer crust with the velocity properties in each layer described by a gradient. Our final model finds high correlation with specific geological features in the Eastern Alps up to 20 km depth, the deep structure of the Molasse basin and important variations of crustal thickness and velocities as a result of the Alpine orogeny post-collisional evolution. The strength of our new information relies on the absolute S-wave crustal velocity and the velocity gradient unambiguously sampled along the Moho, only limited by the amount and quality distribution of the data available

robotic am system for plastic materials tuning and on line adjustment of process parameters

Abstract Additive Manufacturing (AM) techniques based on thermoplastic polymer extrusion allow the manufacture of complex parts, but their slow printing speed limits their use for mass production. To overcome this drawback, an industrial screw-based extruder has been mounted on an anthropomorphic robot, realizing a flexible AM platform for big objects. The most important process parameters have been set by a suitable experimental campaign, ensuring a regular deposited layer geometry. A closed-loop control has been implemented to further improve the process parameter setting based on data measured during the deposition, in this way compensating the material withdrawal or other unexpected defects

Microstratigraphic Records as Tools for the Detection of Climatic Changes in Tana di Badalucco Cave (Liguria, NW Italy)

Tana di Badalucco cave is located in Imperia (Liguria, Italy), not far from the French border. This site is scarcely known and it has never been studied accurately, even though dierent archaeological excavations have returned really important elements, both in the archaeological and the paleoenvironmental aspects. Its stratigraphy ranges from Middle Paleolithic to Metal Ages, thus it has registered important climate and environmental variations specific to the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene. From 2012, the Soprintendenza Archeologia della Liguria, the Museo di Archeologia Ligure, and DiSTAV (University of Genova) have been collaborating in order to finally study this promising and complex stratigraphy, trying to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental context of the region. In this work, we present what we were able to assess thanks to the use of micromorphology, the study of undisturbed thin soil sections. This technique has proven useful in recognizing the alternating of cold and warmer conditions during the Quaternary, as well as in identifying primitive signs of human and animal occupation