Specialized Discourses of Well-Being and Human Development. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

This volume brings together different kinds of expertise and disciplinary approaches to human development and well-being, crucial issues in today’s world threatened by such diverse problems as climate change, natural catastrophes, unequal distribution of wealth and economic exploitation of developing countries, uncontrolled technological progress, systematic violations of human rights, discrimination and racism, health emergencies. The language analysis toolkit ̶ e.g., cross-cultural pragmatics, corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics ̶ has been enriched by the analytical tools and frameworks volunteered by scholars in demography, economics, international relations, law and political geography. The analysis of the specialized discourses of well-being and human development has meant to investigate to what extent different communities of practice share approaches and methodologies around these current issues

Negotiating Power between Civil Society and the State: the Formulation of Asylum Policies in Italy and in the United Kingdom

The research focuses on the formulation of asylum policies in two contrasting countries, the United Kingdom and Italy. The overall aim of the thesis is to account for the pattern of similarities and differences between asylum legislation in the two countries via an examination of the context and processes of policy making. The hypothesis is twofold. Firstly, that differences in the nature of the state result in dissimilar policy outcomes and legislation. States vary according to their political and welfare systems and may be categorised on such bases. Although the EU Commission is strongly advocating the harmonization of asylum policies, member states still retain the power to decide who enters their territory and how to best deal with asylum claims, refugees and migrants. Secondly, that policy is the product of interactions between governments and a range of stakeholders, in which each actor has a vested interested in the result and is able to deploy a particular kind, level and direction of power and influence. The effect is that asylum policy in one country may be dissimilar to that of another because of the interests and power of each state’s stakeholders and the nature of the interaction between them and the government. The stakeholders include governments and their local and national officials, social partners, local and community organisations, migrant organisations, Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) and other institutions and groups such as employers, trade unions, religious groups, etc. The research aims to identify how stakeholders in the two countries interact with each other in creating asylum policy and how the nature of the interaction varies between different types of state. The methods employed are mainly qualitative. They include documentary evidence on parliamentary debates, NGOs reports, newspapers’ articles analysis and in-depth interviews with stakeholders including élite interviewing

Self-adaptive thermal modulation of gas sensors

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Stable odor recognition by a neuro-adaptive electronic nose

Sensitivity, selectivity and stability are decisive properties of sensors. In chemical gas sensors odor recognition can be severely compromised by poor signal stability, particularly in real life applications where the sensors are exposed to unpredictable sequences of odors under changing external conditions. Although olfactory receptor neurons in the nose face similar stimulus sequences under likewise changing conditions, odor recognition is very stable and odorants can be reliably identified independently from past odor perception. We postulate that appropriate pre-processing of the output signals of chemical sensors substantially contributes to the stability of odor recognition, in spite of marked sensor instabilities. To investigate this hypothesis, we use an adaptive, unsupervised neural network inspired by the glomerular input circuitry of the olfactory bulb. Essentially the model reduces the effect of the sensors' instabilities by utilizing them via an adaptive multicompartment feed-forward inhibition. We collected and analyzed responses of a 4 × 4 gas sensor array to a number of volatile compounds applied over a period of 18 months, whereby every sensor was sampled episodically. The network conferred excellent stability to the compounds' identification and was clearly superior over standard classifiers, even when one of the sensors exhibited random fluctuations or stopped working at all

Parametric X-Ray detection in UA9 experiment

Parametric X-Ray radiation (PXR) is a phenomenon due to the interaction of charged particles inside a crystal well ordered lattice. The passage of the particles inside the potential field into the crystal causes small deflections which result in radiation emissions. By this way the emission is diffracted by the crystal planes. In this work the results of the last five years of activity on PXR detection during UA9 experiment are reported. The beam provided in H8 area, protons or Pb ions, is channeled inside different crystals and PXR emission is detected

The Detector Control Systems for the CMS Resistive Plate Chamber

The Resistive Plate Chamber system is composed by 912 double-gap chambers equipped with about $10^4$ front-end boards. The correct and safe operation of the RPC system requires a sophisticated and complex online Detector Control System, able to monitor and control 2$\cdot10^4$ hardware devices distributed on an area of about 5000 m$^2$. The RPC DCS acquires, monitors and stores about $10^5$ parameters coming from the detector, the electronics, the power system, the gas, and cooling systems. The DCS system and the first results, obtained during the 2007 and 2008 CMS cosmic runs, will be described in this paper

Hobson’s choice? Constraints on accessing spaces of creative production

Successful creative production is often documented to occur in urban areas that are more likely to be diverse, a source of human capital and the site of dense interactions. These accounts chart how, historically, creative industries have clustered in areas where space was once cheap in the city centre fringe and inner city areas, often leading to the development of a creative milieu, and thereby stimulating further creative production. Historical accounts of the development of creative areas demonstrate the crucial role of accessible low-cost business premises. This article reports on the findings of a case study that investigated the location decisions of firms in selected creative industry sectors in Greater Manchester. The study found that, while creative activity remains highly concentrated in the city centre, creative space there is being squeezed and some creative production is decentralizing in order to access cheaper premises. The article argues that the location choices of creative industry firms are being constrained by the extensive city centre regeneration, with the most vulnerable firms, notably the smallest and youngest, facing a Hobson’s choice of being able to access low-cost premises only in the periphery. This disrupts the delicate balance needed to sustain production and begs the broader question as to how the creative economy fits into the existing urban fabric, alongside the competing demands placed on space within a transforming industrial conurbation

Facile sensors replacement in optical gas sensors array

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Gas Analysis and Monitoring Systems for the RPC Detector of CMS at LHC

The Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC) detector of the CMS experiment at the LHC proton collider (CERN, Switzerland) will employ an online gas analysis and monitoring system of the freon-based gas mixture used. We give an overview of the CMS RPC gas system, describe the project parameters and first results on gas-chromatograph analysis. Finally, we report on preliminary results for a set of monitor RPC.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures. Presented by Stefano Bianco (Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati dell'INFN) at the IEEE NSS, San Diego (USA), October 200