Too big, will fail. Megaevents and protest participation

The paper examines the relationship between "social democratic megaevents" (Olympic Games and World Expos) and political protests. It tries to analyze the reasons that led these popular ceremonies to act in our societies as catalysts of social conflict and activators of an "agonistic citizenship". Today some structural characteristics of the network society - growth of urban populations; increase in migration flows; widening of socioeconomic disparities - determined a renewed "political" interest for these great public rituals, which in a previous season of the modernity had shown themselves capable to patch up the lacerations of the social fabric. But in recent years something is broken in the relationship between megaevents and urban populations and we are witnessing a growing antagonism against events historically conceived with a function of social "glue". The aim is therefore to reflect on the meaning of this "antagonistic drift" of "social democratic megaevents" through the analysis of a specific case study: the Attitudine NoExpo Network (Milan 2015). We identified four crucial dimensions to trace the NoExpo movement's physiognomy and define the reasons for its opposition to the world fair: the historical relation between Milan and a cultural form of antagonism; the crucial role of the territorial factor in the formation and evolution of the movement; the centrality of the practices in the structuring of the movement's identity; the adoption of an instrumental and tactical approach in the choice and use of media

Transitions involving conical magnetic phases in a model with bilinear and biquadratic interactions

In a previous work a model was proposed for the phase transitions of crystals with localized magnetic moments which at low temperature have a "conical" arrangement that at higher T transforms into a more symmetrical structure (depending on the compound) before becoming totally disordered. The model assumes bilinear and biquadratic interactions between magnetic moments up to the fifth neighbours, and for any given T the structure with the least free energy is obtained by a mean-field approximation (MFA). The interaction constants are derived from ab initio energy calculations. In this work we improve upon that model modifying the MFA in such a way that a continuous (instead of discontinuous) spectrum of excited states is available to the system. In the previous work, which dealt with LaMn_2Ge_2 and LaMn_2Si_2, we found that transitions to different structures can be obtained for increasing T, in good qualitative agreement with experiment. The critical temperatures, however, were exaggerately high. With the new MFA we obtain essentially the same behaviour concerning the phase transitions, and critical temperatures much closer to the experimental ones.Comment: 8 pages, no figure

Design Exchanges in Mid-Twentieth Century Buenos Aires: The Programme Parque Almirante Brown and its Process of Creative Appropriation

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article offers a critical analysis of planning and housing design in mid-twentieth century Buenos Aires, Argentina, within the wider global context of modern design and architecture. In particular, the article focuses on an urban development programme, Parque Almirante Brown (PAB), and on its design plans for slums, shantytowns and social housing. The PAB creatively intertwined elements from different design and planning traditions, including urban design approaches fostered by the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). This article argues that the way in which the PAB incorporated these approaches implies the selection of concepts that responded to the government’s political agenda. In other words, it was only through their intersection with local political anxieties that international ideas were included in the actual design of the programme. Specifically, with regard to informal settlements, the PAB followed modern architectural practices based on slum clearance. Simultaneously, it filtered out those ideas which celebrated the vernacular, registered positive aspects in slum life, or granted agency to grassroots groups. Thus, despite contemporaneous discussions which engaged with bottom-up participation, such as those of Team 10, the PAB ultimately proposed the eradication of the shantytowns and the forced displacement of their inhabitants

Electronic properties of EuB6 in the ferromagnetic regime: Half-metal versus semiconductor

To understand the halfmetallic ferromagnet EuB6 we use the Kondo lattice model for valence and conduction band. By means of a recently developed many-body theory we calculate the electronic properties in the ferromagnetic regime up to the Curie temperature. The decreasing magnetic order induces a transition from halfmetallic to semiconducting behavior along with a band broadening. We show the temperature dependence of the quasiparticle density of states and the quasiparticle dispersion as well as the effective mass, the number of carriers and the plasma frequency which are in good agreement with the experimental data

Estimating the New Keynesian Phillips Curve for Italian Manufacturing Sectors

The purpose of this paper is to test the general validity of the NKPC previsions for the Italian manufacturing industries. In particular we are interested in estimating the extent to which the degree of nominal inertia and the fraction of backward-looking price-setters differ from industry to industry. We attempt to address this issue by testing three different model specifications: a pure forward-looking model versus a hybrid model where an income labour share marginal cost measure is considered, and a modified hybrid model specification where marginal costs are corrected to include intermediate inputs. Our results show that the backward-looking component is statistically significant and quantitatively large for all industries. Moreover, this estimate does not depend on the model’s specification. Conversely, the parameter measuring the extent of price rigidity is sensitive to the definition of firms’ cost. Interpreting the overall results, we conclude that price-setting behaviour is not totally homogeneous among Italian firms.Phillips curve, Inflation, Unit labour cost

A panel estimation of the relationship between income, electric power consumption and CO2 emissions

This paper aims to give a contribution on the still questioned bell-shaped relationship between carbon dioxide polluting emissions and economic growth, which is commonly known in the literature as the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis. In particular, it develops a panel analysis for a group of 77 countries, including 22 OECD and 55 NON-OECD units, over the period 1971-2006. We specify the estimated model by taking into account the role of electric power consumption and compare the performance of alternative panel estimators for a quadratic and cubic specification of the empirical model. Our findings seem to go in favor of the EKC relationship for the entire sample. However, this outcome is not confirmed when moving the analysis at sub-sample level where results highlight a non homogeneous picture across different groups of nations.Panel analysis, Environmental Kuznets Curve, CO2 emissions and Energy use

Maximally-localized Wannier Functions in Antiferromagnetic MnO within the FLAPW Formalism

We have calculated the maximally-localized Wannier functions of MnO in its antiferromagnetic (AFM) rhombohedral unit cell, which contains two formula units. Electron Bloch functions are obtained with the linearized augmented plane-wave method within both the LSD and the LSD+U schemes. The thirteen uppermost occupied spin-up bands correspond in a pure ionic scheme to the five Mn 3d orbitals at the Mn_1 (spin-up) site, and the four O 2s/2p orbitals at each of the O_1 and O_2 sites. Maximal localization identifies uniquely four Wannier functions for each O, which are trigonally-distorted sp^3-like orbitals. They display a weak covalent bonding between O 2s/2p states and minority-spin d states of Mn_2, which is absent in a fully ionic picture. This bonding is the fingerprint of the interaction responsible for the AFM ordering, and its strength depends on the one-electron scheme being used. The five Mn Wannier functions are centered on the Mn_1 site, and are atomic orbitals modified by the crystal field. They are not uniquely defined by the criterion of maximal localization and we choose them as the linear combinations which diagonalize the r^2 operator, so that they display the D_3d symmetry of the Mn_1 site.Comment: 11 pages, 6 PostScript figures. Uses Revtex4. Hi-res figures available from the author

Estate lab: proposta per un nuovo design della struttura del trough

Nel rapporto si analizza con tecniche numeriche un nuovo design della struttura del trough parabolico usato negli impianti solari a concentrazione. La struttura è realizzata tramite pannelli compositi, permettendo maggiori rigidità e resistenza rispetto alle soluzioni commerciali

Theoretical investigation of FeTe magnetic ordering under hydrostatic pressure

We investigate the pressure phase diagram of FeTe, predicting structural and magnetic properties in the normal state at zero temperature within density functional theory (DFT). We carefully examined several possible different crystal structures over a pressure range up to $\approx 30$ GPa: simple tetragonal (PbO type), simple monoclinic, orthorhombic (MnP type), hexagonal (NiAs and wurzite type) and cubic (CsCl and NaCl type). We predict pressure to drive the system through different magnetic ordering (notably also some ferromagnetic phases) eventually suppressing magnetism at around 17GPa. We speculate the ferromagnetic order to be the reason for the absence of a superconducting phase in FeTe at variance with the case of FeSe.Comment: 11 figure