The town as a concentrated source of reclaimable water and materials. Opportunities for an engineered conservation strategy.

A fierce theoretical debate is ongoing about the human species’ existence itself being sustainable for Earth and for living world. In the meanwhile cities, which are considered to concentrate the mankind’s ecological footprints, are steadily growing and gathering huge populations worldwide. This paper assumes that margins do exist to relieve the man’s burden on Nature to some extent, and that – regardless of our general concept of the matter – these margins should be exploited. The focus of this note is on beneficial use of waste water and waste to spare new resources and to create filter areas close to towns or belts around them. A brief reference is made to some official declarations and indices published on biodiversity in anthropic environments, such as the one from UNEP

Social and place-focused communities in location-based online social networks

Thanks to widely available, cheap Internet access and the ubiquity of smartphones, millions of people around the world now use online location-based social networking services. Understanding the structural properties of these systems and their dependence upon users' habits and mobility has many potential applications, including resource recommendation and link prediction. Here, we construct and characterise social and place-focused graphs by using longitudinal information about declared social relationships and about users' visits to physical places collected from a popular online location-based social service. We show that although the social and place-focused graphs are constructed from the same data set, they have quite different structural properties. We find that the social and location-focused graphs have different global and meso-scale structure, and in particular that social and place-focused communities have negligible overlap. Consequently, group inference based on community detection performed on the social graph alone fails to isolate place-focused groups, even though these do exist in the network. By studying the evolution of tie structure within communities, we show that the time period over which location data are aggregated has a substantial impact on the stability of place-focused communities, and that information about place-based groups may be more useful for user-centric applications than that obtained from the analysis of social communities alone.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Geo-Spotting: Mining Online Location-based Services for Optimal Retail Store Placement

The problem of identifying the optimal location for a new retail store has been the focus of past research, especially in the field of land economy, due to its importance in the success of a business. Traditional approaches to the problem have factored in demographics, revenue and aggregated human flow statistics from nearby or remote areas. However, the acquisition of relevant data is usually expensive. With the growth of location-based social networks, fine grained data describing user mobility and popularity of places has recently become attainable. In this paper we study the predictive power of various machine learning features on the popularity of retail stores in the city through the use of a dataset collected from Foursquare in New York. The features we mine are based on two general signals: geographic, where features are formulated according to the types and density of nearby places, and user mobility, which includes transitions between venues or the incoming flow of mobile users from distant areas. Our evaluation suggests that the best performing features are common across the three different commercial chains considered in the analysis, although variations may exist too, as explained by heterogeneities in the way retail facilities attract users. We also show that performance improves significantly when combining multiple features in supervised learning algorithms, suggesting that the retail success of a business may depend on multiple factors.Comment: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, Chicago, 2013, Pages 793-80

PLASTICS RECOVERY FROM MUNICIPAL WASTE: MAINSTREAMS AND BY-PRODUCTS IN A CASE STUDY IN NORTHERN ITALY.

In the case study dealt with here, the factory treatments of dry Municipal Solid Waste are aimed primarily at materials recovery; restraining energy recovery to the hardly recyclable by-products. The main input consists of the so-called multipak from MSW source-sorted collection; plus packaging waste, paper and cardboard and other similar waste from curb-side collection. The principal fractions produced by the selection plant, own and operated by the Public Company in charge of MSW management, in the Year 2012 were 27 064 tonnes of plastics, 5 066 of paper, 3 014 of tin coated steel and 4 886 tonnes of extraneous fraction to dispose of. A minor – though valuable – product was aluminium. The immediate energy consumption indices were calculated for multipak processed in the factory; the homogeneous overall index is 238 MJ / t

Applications of Temporal Graph Metrics to Real-World Networks

Real world networks exhibit rich temporal information: friends are added and removed over time in online social networks; the seasons dictate the predator-prey relationship in food webs; and the propagation of a virus depends on the network of human contacts throughout the day. Recent studies have demonstrated that static network analysis is perhaps unsuitable in the study of real world network since static paths ignore time order, which, in turn, results in static shortest paths overestimating available links and underestimating their true corresponding lengths. Temporal extensions to centrality and efficiency metrics based on temporal shortest paths have also been proposed. Firstly, we analyse the roles of key individuals of a corporate network ranked according to temporal centrality within the context of a bankruptcy scandal; secondly, we present how such temporal metrics can be used to study the robustness of temporal networks in presence of random errors and intelligent attacks; thirdly, we study containment schemes for mobile phone malware which can spread via short range radio, similar to biological viruses; finally, we study how the temporal network structure of human interactions can be exploited to effectively immunise human populations. Through these applications we demonstrate that temporal metrics provide a more accurate and effective analysis of real-world networks compared to their static counterparts.Comment: 25 page

Saint Agatha Religious Festival in Catania: Stakeholders’ Functions and Relations

The purpose of the paper is to develop an explorative analysis of the functions and relations among actors involved in the organization and implementation of the Saint Agatha Religious Festival in Catania attracting nearly one million presences during the first week of February. The research is based on the survey of different sources of information, such as literature, news, media, and deep interviews with key informants pertaining to civil and religious institutions. The survey is designed to profile the Festival in terms of history, the character of the stakeholders, size, origin of assets, venues used, decision-making structure, and programs. The Festival’s use of volunteers and sponsors is specifically addressed. Empirical research sketches the network of stakeholders, the relationship between organizations, the importance of local social actors and strategies in enhancing local culture and sustainable tourism, regarding, in particular, the socio-cultural impacts of religious tourism. The local society has historical peculiarities which impose prudential considerations in generalizing about findings, and a comparative study with other Sicilian and/or Italian religious festivals will be important, mainly in order to delineate the actual sustainability of Festivals. The framework developed in this study can be helpful in the application of local social policies and also help comparative festival studies

Physical dispersion and disappearance of bacteria in the Golfo di Palermo: the results of two surveys.

This paper reports on some results of two surveys at sea carried out in the surroundings of a urban wastewater discharge on the coast of the Golfo di Palermo, western Sicily (Italy). At the time of the surveys (year 2005) the stretch of water lying before the central part of the capital town received the untreated wastewater originating from about 200 000 inhabitants, which was discharged on-shore without any prior treatment by the free-surface outfall of “Porta Felice main sewer”. This outfall has crucial importance in the water quality; indeed, the Municipality is steadily implementing a plan featuring an intercepting main sewer along the coast and some pumping stations to connect all the main sewers to the main wastewater treatment plant, located in the SE boundary area of the town. At the moment of the surveys, however, no mitigation measure had been applied yet and the quality of the Gulf was still largely affected by it. Part of the Sanitation Plan was the characterization of the seawater; to this aim, in August and November, 2005, the Università degli Studi di Palermo - on behalf of the Municipality’s Ufficio del Centro Storico - carried out two survey cruises in which the most important seawater quality features were investigated. What will be reported on herein is the part dealing with microbiological indicators, taking the salinity field as background

Health Care Waste production: measures and estimates in “V. Cervello” Hospital, Palermo, Italy.

A monitoring work was carried out in May/June 2007 in one large hospital located in Palermo. The monitoring consisted in weighing the infectious waste containers filled in some Departments purposely chosen. As a second stage of the work a comparison was attempted between the results obtained from the waste production monitoring and the Hospital’s purchases recorded in the same time. A restricted list of purchased products out of the general one was extracted. Such list allows one to calculate approximately the mass of medical devices purchased and their composition. To these materials a reasonable change in humidity after use was attributed. It was possible in this deductive way to draw a probable amount and composition of waste materials really arising from health care activities (commonly – though not rigorously – considered all infectious), whose characters is forbidden to ascertain by direct inspection

A LAB-SCALE MICROWAVE SYSTEM FOR EXPERIMENTS OF HIGH TEMPERATURE WASTE PYROLYSIS

The reactor designed and assembled at Università degli Studi di Palermo - presented here - was conceived to explore high unit power input, high temperature reductive processes. Its main field of use therefore is likely to be the destruction of liquid waste fed as an aerosol; or of VOCs; or of granular waste making a fluidized bed. If required, a 3 - phase system including a solid catalyst could also be set up. These waste should be free of low - melting or boiling metals. Incidentally, a literature review shows that the compounds taken as benchmark in thermal VOC destruction are trichloroethylene, benzene and toluene. At lower unit power rates this MW - based system lends itself also to recovering useful fractions from complex waste like WEEE (Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment), through pyrolysis and gasification

Experimental sorting of municipal-like waste in the hospital “Civico”, Palermo (IT)

An experiment of source sorting - based management of Health Care Waste (HCW) was carried out in 2011 in 4 Departments of the Public Hospital “Civico” (Palermo, IT), where the basic mandatory separation between hazardous and non-hazardous waste was already going on since year 2000.The experiment consisted in weighing every day for 15 days 4 predefined fractions collected in the Infirmaries (namely paper, plastics, glass and unsorted fraction), and the bags with unsorted waste from the patient’s stay room. Furthermore, in 1 of the 4 Departments also the boxes of Infectious Waste (IW)were weighed for a week.As a result a weighted average value of 0.56 kg of Municipal-like Waste (MLW) per bed and per day was obtained for the Infirmaries of the 4 Departments (1.89 kg for the whole Department). The potentially recoverable waste fractions of MLW were about 65.7 %, the balance being unsorted waste.The actual production of IW − monitored in just one of the Departments, OU 1− brought to a generation rate of 0.74 kg/bed-day with a range 0.50−1.00. This production represents the 54 % of total waste from that Infirmary but just 34 % of the overall waste stream from the Unit. This pilot experiment confirms the wide finding that IW are a minor part of the overall waste stream produced in a health care structure