Book reviews [1979, Vol. 6, no. 2]

Books reviewed are: David A. R. Forrester, Schmalenbach and After: A Study of the Evolution of German Business Economics Reviewed by Konrad W. Kubin; Tito Antoni, II Bilancio di una Azienda Laniera del Trecento Reviewed by Alvaro Martinelli; Heinrich Sieveking, Die Casa di S. Giorgio: Genueser Finanzwesen mit besonderer Beruecksichtigung der Casa di S. Giorgio, II Reviewed by Norlin G. Rueschhoff; Emanuel Benjamin Ocran, Jr., Transportation Costs and Costing 1917-1973: A Select Annotated Chronological Bibliography Reviewed by David B. Vellenga; James Don Edwards, History of Public Accounting in the United States Reviewed by Frederic M. Stiner, Jr.; Geo [rge] Soule\u27s New Science and Practice of Accounts Reviewed by James J. Linn

O Público entendimento da ciência nos Congressos da Associação para o Progresso das ciências: Portugal e Espanha. Estratégias e realidades institucionais

Both the Portuguese and the Spanish Scientific Societies elected in the 20th century the “Progress of Science” as their common goal. This shared objective can be demonstrated by the periodical organization of scientific meetings in several cities of the Iberian Peninsula. The results of the researches achieved by the Portuguese and the Spanish scientific communities and pre sented to these congre s s e s received the support of the two countries’ official authorities. However, the Iberian issue was never discussed; the joint meetings were always centred on the “national” activities of each scientific communityFCT - CEPESE - Centro de Estudos da População, Economia e Sociedade, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Universiade do Porto, Governo Civil do Porto, Fundación Rei Afonso Henrique

DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND CHARACTERIZATION OF NOVEL BIOMATERIALS FOR PERIODONTAL TISSUE ENGINEERING

Periodontium is a complex system of different tissues, such as connective tissue, cartilage and bone, which work together to sustain the tooth. Gingivitis and periodontitis are devastating diseases that could affect the structure and function of the periodontal tissue. When the gingivitis are not treated and controlled with a correct oral hygiene, they could evolve in periodontitis, which could seriously damage the tissue surrounding the tooth and lead tooth loss. The main objective of periodontal tissue engineering is to regenerate the tooth’s supporting tissues. Periodontal tissue regeneration involves formation of new connective tissue (cementum and periodontal ligament) and new alveolar bone. The restoration of tooth by using a titanium dental implant is nowadays a quite common procedure. However, the positive fate of a surgical procedure that involves an insertion of titanium screw depends on the quality and quantity of alveolar bone which is present in the extraction site. The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to develop a set of novel biomaterials, designed to improve periodontal bone regeneration in patients and to control or prevent the bacterial infection in the wound site, via a sustained in situ drug release. Three different materials have been developed and characterized: 1. Three-dimensional porous scaffold coated with a polyelectrolyte complex for periprosthetic infection prevention 2. Bioceramic-reinforced hydrogel for alveolar bone regeneration 3. Antiadhesive guided tissue regeneration membrane The results demonstrated that they could be used in periodontal tissue engineering with predictable and excellent outcomes. With this set of biomaterials it is possible to control or prevent possible bacterial growth, achieve the correct alveolar bone quantity and quality and guide the tissue regeneratio

Ultimi studi sul Nord Africa e sulla Sardegna in età romana

L’autore accoglie l’invito a presentare il volume contenente le relazioni che sono state tenute nelle giornate del IV Convegno su «L'Africa Romana» del 1986 e, con questo, il volume contenente le relazioni degli scavi condotti nel 1979-80 nell'area della necropoli meridionale di Porto Torres, Turris Libisonis, a non molta distanza dalla basilica di S. Gavino

Audit, tax compliance and undeclared work: an empirical analysis

To encourage tax compliance towards the Italian tax contributive system, the Italian Social Security Institute (INPS) develops a number of audits intothe Italian firms. The aim of these inspections is to detect possible evasions and to threaten cheating enterpreneurs with penalties, if necessary. In our case "to cheat" means to hide a part of the labor forces to the authority, underdeclaring their real dimensions and thus to evade a certain amount of social-insurance taxes. In this paper we particularly focus on showing how it is possible to use individual audit data to better understand the relation between inspections and tax compliance, and consequently the relation between the policy of auditing and undeclared work. A new source of data was built for this purpose, merging information about firms with individual audit data. Our analysis is developed as follow: after a brief introduction, we describe the dataset and we give some details on the procedures used by inspectors. Then we show a simple model of auditing in order to enlighten relation between audit policy and work force declaration. The second part of the analisys, mainly empirical, attempts to explain how to estimate undeclared work starting from our new source of data, after that, we assess two microeconometric policy evaluation analysis. Our aim is to nderstand the relation that lies between the policy of auditing and a) the propensity to declare workers; b) the number of black workers implied in the labour market.Audit, undeclared work, sample selection, microdata.

La "Tavola Strozzi" della Napoli Aragonese come progetto di Francesco di Giorgio

Dopo una breve ricostruzione del periodo storico ed una sintetica rassegna degli studi sulla Tavola Strozzi, custodita al museo di San Martino di Napoli, si fa riferimento alla attività di Francesco di Giorgio a Napoli, prima come inviato dal Duca di Urbino e poi come, oggi diremmo, libero professionista e si pone l’ipotesi che la tavola sia una esposizione grafica del suo progetto per mostrare e quindi poter poi far approvare un radicale cambiamento del porto e delle nuove opere di difesa da realizzare a Napoli. Si hanno così motivi per allargare lo spazio temporale della rappresentazione pensando ai momenti più significativi del regno Aragonese, superando le varie obiezioni degli studiosi che hanno contestato la contemporaneità degli eventi rappresentati. Da un attento esame dell’opera, delle cedole Aragonesi, dei dispacci degli ambasciatori, della Croniche di Notar Jacopo e del Ferraiolo, delle tante analogie con il dipinto della predica di San Bernardino, dal confronto con la città ideale di Berlino, si conferma l’impressione che si ha quando si vede la tavola per la prima volta e cioè che riguardi un progetto per il nuovo ciclopico porto, per opere di difesa della città e che sia frutto dell’intelligenza di Francesco di Giorgio

Physical Interaction of Autonomous Robots in Complex Environments

Recent breakthroughs in the fields of computer vision and robotics are firmly changing the people perception about robots. The idea of robots that substitute humansisnowturningintorobotsthatcollaboratewiththem. Serviceroboticsconsidersrobotsaspersonalassistants. Itsafelyplacesrobotsindomesticenvironments in order to facilitate humans daily life. Industrial robotics is now reconsidering its basic idea of robot as a worker. Currently, the primary method to guarantee the personnels safety in industrial environments is the installation of physical barriers around the working area of robots. The development of new technologies and new algorithms in the sensor field and in the robotic one has led to a new generation of lightweight and collaborative robots. Therefore, industrial robotics leveraged the intrinsic properties of this kind of robots to generate a robot co-worker that is able to safely coexist, collaborate and interact inside its workspace with both personnels and objects. This Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the generation of a pipeline for fast object pose estimation and distance computation of moving objects,in both structured and unstructured environments,using RGB-D images. This pipeline outputs the command actions which let the robot complete its main task and fulfil the safety human-robot coexistence behaviour at once. The proposed pipeline is divided into an object segmentation part,a 6D.o.F. object pose estimation part and a real-time collision avoidance part for safe human-robot coexistence. Firstly, the segmentation module finds candidate object clusters out of RGB-D images of clutter scenes using a graph-based image segmentation technique. This segmentation technique generates a cluster of pixels for each object found in the image. The candidate object clusters are then fed as input to the 6 D.o.F. object pose estimation module. The latter is in charge of estimating both the translation and the orientation in 3D space of each candidate object clusters. The object pose is then employed by the robotic arm to compute a suitable grasping policy. The last module generates a force vector field of the environment surrounding the robot, the objects and the humans. This force vector field drives the robot toward its goal while any potential collision against objects and/or humans is safely avoided. This work has been carried out at Politecnico di Torino, in collaboration with Telecom Italia S.p.A

"Quello splendido faber". Sui destini moderni di una citazione dantesca

L'articolo prende in considerazione la metafora del poeta-fabbro, a partire dall'espressione dantesca “miglior fabbro” (usata nel XXVI canto del Purgatorio per Arnaut Daniel), e ne segue l'itinerario fino alla poesia di Giorgio Caproni, che il collega Mario Luzi già definiva uno “splendido faber”. L'immagine rivela che quello del poeta, occupato a martellare e limare i versi nella sua officina, è un mestiere artistico ma anche artigianale: lo dimostrano anche gli echi danteschi contenuti in The Waste Land di Thomas Stearns Eliot.This article will analyze the poeta-fabbro (poet-blacksmith) metaphor in various texts throughout time, starting with the analysis of Dante's expression “miglior fabbro” (used to refer to Arnaut Daniel in Purgatory , canto XXVI), up to Giorgio Caproni. Indeed, Mario Luzi – Giorgio Caproni's colleague – already called him a “splendido faber”. This image puts forward the idea that writing poems not only is an artistic process, but also implies artisanal work. In fact, like an artisan, the poet hammers and polishes lines in his workshop. This is also proved by T. S. Eliot's allusions to Dante in The Waste Land

Study of an innovative joining solution for the wheel system

The objective of this thesis research is to develop an adhesive bonding solution in order to remove the classic welding technology exploited nowadays in the automotive steel wheel system. The examined solution is an hybrid joint, based on adhesive boding combined with the presence of an interference fit. This hybrid joining technology consists in coupling two cylindrical components together by force-fitting one into the other after having placed an adhesive on the mating surfaces. This technique would allow the joining of dissimilar material to enable the design of hybrid lightweight wheels. Moreover, it would provide a better stress distribution in the joint area that could induce fatigue life improvement. The contributions of the adhesive and the interference on the performance of the final hybrid joint is still not completely clear. In particular, the effect of the adhesive nature and of its mechanical and adhesive responses on the performance of the hybrid joint is under concern in this research. A study of the phenomena acting at the interference level is conducted at the laboratory level before industrial case application. An experimental method is set up in order to test the adhesives in a press fit joint. Static and dynamic tests are carried out examining the behavior of different adhesives, including rigid epoxies and flexible polyurethanes, and fractographic analysis are then performed. The second part of the study is focused on the feasibility of the hybrid technology on the wheel system. Exploiting the outcomes of the laboratory analysis, bonded wheel prototypes are assembled and tested statically and dynamically, according to component validation in MW. From the laboratory scale analyses it is found that the adhesive type mainly affects the static resistance of the hybrid joint. In particular the curing technology affects the decoupling behavior and the rheology influences the quantity of adhesive that remains inside the joint despites the interference levels. On the other hand, the interference rules the stiffness of the assembly and strongly affects the fatigue behavior of the cylindrical joint. The study conducted on the wheel component confirms the laboratory scale outcomes. For what concern the feasibility study, the bonded wheel shows similar performances compared to the welded wheel without design modifications of the components. However, the joint geometry has to be redesigned to exploit all the advantages of the adhesive bonding

Da Τάρραι πóλισ al <i>portus sancti Marci</i>: storia e archeologia di una città portuale dall’antichità al Medioevo

Nella tradizione degli studi antichistici su Tάρραι le analisi sulla portualità della città rimontano al secolo XIX, con una localizzazione univoca dello scalo di Tharros (definito come bimaris) nel bacino orientale del “Mare morto” del Golfo di Oristano. Il presente lavoro ripercorre cronologicamente la storia del porto di Tάρραι, dalla protostoria al Medioevo, soffermandosi sulle fonti medievali, portolaniche e documentali, e sulle carte nautiche relative al portus sancti Marci