A neo-liberal housing policy? Convergence and divergence between Italian local housing policy and European trends

24th AESOP Annual Conference, Finland, 7 - 10 July 2010 Anchor Paper Track 11 Housing and Regeneration Policies HOUSING AND REGENERATION POLICIE

A neo-liberal housing policy? Convergence and divergence between Italian local housing policy and European trends

24th AESOP Annual Conference, Finland, 7 – 10 July 2010 Anchor Paper Track 11 Housing and Regeneration Policies HOUSING AND REGENERATION POLICIE

EVIDENCE AND METHODS FROM AN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE ABOUT AREA- BASED URBAN REGENERATION

Abstract EVIDENCE AND METHODS FROM AN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE ABOUT AREA- BASED URBAN REGENERATION Cristiana Rossignolo and Silvia Saccomani This paper refers to an education experience developed within the BA in Territorial, Urban, Landscape and Environmental Planning of Politecnico di Torino (Italy). Actually, all the study organisation of both the BA and the Master with the same title, which the BA graduates can attend, are strongly inspired by the goal to make students aware of the inter and trans-disciplinary nature of Planning, and of the necessity for a planner to cooperate with different experts and different stakeholders. Interdisciplinary Studios are one of the means used to reach this educational goal. In these Studios students have to develop proposals/plans/designs/policies for future interventions. The specific experience this paper deals with is a Studio about themes such as urban regeneration, local and sustainable development with a place-based approach. It proposes to groups of students a sort of simulation: they are asked to behave as a team to which the public administration gave the task to produce a proposal in order to participate in a real regional tender for the allocation of European funds to a regeneration programme dealing with a neighborhood in the city periphery. The programme must include and integrate physical, economic, social and cultural actions, with a special attention to sustainable urban development goals and participation processes needs and thus asks for the contributions of different teachers who interact during the Studio development. The methodology of this Studio has proved to be efficient and meaningful for either the student's awareness of the importance of interdisciplinary in real spatial planning tasks and their ability to face these tasks in a almost professional ways

Riorganizzazione istituzionale e pianificazione del territorio. Riflessioni a partire dalle prossime riforme e dall’esperienza torinese

The DdL 1542/2013, known as Ddl “Delrio”, because of the name of the minister that has promoted this new law, represents a further step in the long and complex history of the Italian reorganisation of local authorities. Its peculiarity is on the clearly reformist approach that foresee an organisational model of local autonomies that is based on two levels of government that are directly elected (Regions and Municipalities) and a level of governance for sub-regional areas. The latter can refer to both metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. In the Italian panorama, this law could represent a complete change taking into account opportunities arising from the shortened decision-making chain and from the possibility to concretely proceed in co-planning among different institutions. The Ddl “Delrio”, on another hand, has shifted also the on-going process of institution of metropolitan cities from the spending review perspective (as in the previous law 135/2012) to a more complete and coherent reform. In this framework, the Torino experience is interesting for at least two characteristics: the territorial specificity of the Provincia di Torino, a province with 315 municipalities – a larger part of which are in mountain and national border areas – that will become the metropolitan city from the 1st of January 2014; the simultaneous strategic planning process for the core area of the province and not for the whole territory

Elimination Theory for Nonlinear Parameter Estimation

The work presented here exploits elimination theory (solving systems of polynomial equations in several variables) [1][2] to perform nonlinear parameter identification. In particular show how this technique can be used to estimate the rotor time constant and the stator resistance values of an induction machine. Although the example here is restricted to an induction machine, parameter estimation is applicable to many practical engineering problems. In [3], L. Ljung has outlined many of the challenges of nonlinear system identification as well as its particular importance for biological systems. In these types of problems, the model developed for analysis is typically a nonlinear state space model with unknown parameter values. The typical situation is that only a few of the state variables are measurable requiring that the system be reformulated as a nonlinear input-output model. In turn, resulting the nonlinear input-output model is almost always nonlinear in the parameters. Towards that end, differential algebra tools for analysis of nonlinear systems have been developed by Michel Fliess [4][5] and Diop [6]. Moreover, Ollivier [7] as well as Ljung and Glad [8] have developed the use of the characteristic set of an ideal as a tool for identification problems. The use of these differential algebraic methods for system identification have also been considered in [9], [10]. The focus of their research has been the determination of a priori identifiability of a given system model. However, as stated in [10], the development of an efficient algorithm using these differential algebraic techniques is still unknown. Here, in contrast, a method for which one can actually numerically obtain the numerical value of the parameters is presented. We also point out that [11] has also done work applying elimination theory to systems problems

The relationship between quality of life and compliance to a brace protocol in adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis: a comparative study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Corrective bracing for adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) has favourable outcomes when patients are compliant. However, bracing may be a stressful and traumatic experience and compliance with a bracing protocol is likely to be dependent upon patients' physical, emotional and social wellbeing. The Brace Questionnaire (BrQ), a recently-developed, condition-specific tool to measure quality of life (QOL) has enabled clinicians to study relationships between QOL and compliance.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The BrQ was administered to 31 AIS patients after a minimum of 1 year of wearing a brace. Subjects were 13–16 year old South African girls with Cobb angles of 25–40 degrees. Participants were divided into two groups according to their level of compliance with the bracing protocol. Brace Questionnaire sub- and total scores were compared between the two groups using the t-test for comparison of means.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Twenty participants were classified as compliant and 11 as non-compliant. Mean total BrQ scores (expressed as a percentage) were 83.7 for the compliant group and 64.4 for the non-compliant group (p < 0.001), and on analysis of the 8 domains that make up the BrQ, the compliant group scored significantly higher in the 6 domains that measured vitality and social, emotional and physical functioning.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Poor compliance with a brace protocol is associated with poorer QOL, with non-compliant patients lacking vitality and functioning poorly physically, emotionally and socially. Quality of life for adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis may relate more to psychosocial coping mechanisms than to physical deformity and its consequences. It is important to establish whether remedial programmes are capable of addressing personal, group and family issues, improving QOL and promoting compliance.</p

CACNA1E Variants Affect Beta Cell Function in Patients with Newly Diagnosed Type 2 Diabetes. The Verona Newly Diagnosed Type 2 Diabetes Study (VNDS) 3

Background: Genetic variability of the major subunit (CACNA1E) of the voltage-dependent Ca 2+ channel Ca V2.3 is associated to risk of type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance and impaired insulin secretion in nondiabetic subjects. The aim of the study was to test whether CACNA1E common variability affects beta cell function and/or insulin sensitivity in patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes. Methodology/Principal Findings: In 595 GAD-negative, drug naïve patients (mean6SD; age: 58.5610.2 yrs; BMI: 29.965 kg/m 2, HbA1c: 7.061.3) with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes we: 1. genotyped 10 tag SNPs in CACNA1E region reportedly covering,93 % of CACNA1E common variability: rs558994, rs679931, rs2184945, rs10797728, rs3905011, rs12071300, rs175338, rs3753737, rs2253388 and rs4652679; 2. assessed clinical phenotypes, insulin sensitivity by the euglycemic insulin clamp and beta cell function by state-of-art modelling of glucose/C-peptide curves during OGTT. Five CACNA1E tag SNPs (rs10797728, rs175338, rs2184945, rs3905011 and rs4652679) were associated with specific aspects of beta cell function (p,0.0520.01). Both major alleles of rs2184945 and rs3905011 were each (p,0.01 and p,0.005, respectively) associated to reduced proportional control with a demonstrable additive effect (p,0.005). In contrast, only the major allele of rs2253388 was related weakly to more severe insulin resistance (p,0.05). Conclusions/Significance: In patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes CACNA1E common variability is strongl

Structural identifiability of dynamic systems biology models

22 páginas, 5 figuras, 2 tablas.-- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.A powerful way of gaining insight into biological systems is by creating a nonlinear differential equation model, which usually contains many unknown parameters. Such a model is called structurally identifiable if it is possible to determine the values of its parameters from measurements of the model outputs. Structural identifiability is a prerequisite for parameter estimation, and should be assessed before exploiting a model. However, this analysis is seldom performed due to the high computational cost involved in the necessary symbolic calculations, which quickly becomes prohibitive as the problem size increases. In this paper we show how to analyse the structural identifiability of a very general class of nonlinear models by extending methods originally developed for studying observability. We present results about models whose identifiability had not been previously determined, report unidentifiabilities that had not been found before, and show how to modify those unidentifiable models to make them identifiable. This method helps prevent problems caused by lack of identifiability analysis, which can compromise the success of tasks such as experiment design, parameter estimation, and model-based optimization. The procedure is called STRIKE-GOLDD (STRuctural Identifiability taKen as Extended-Generalized Observability with Lie Derivatives and Decomposition), and it is implemented in a MATLAB toolbox which is available as open source software. The broad applicability of this approach facilitates the analysis of the increasingly complex models used in systems biology and other areasAFV acknowledges funding from the Galician government (Xunta de Galiza, Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria http://www.edu.xunta.es/portal/taxonomy/term/206) through the I2C postdoctoral program, fellowship ED481B2014/133-0. AB and AFV were partially supported by grant DPI2013-47100-C2-2-P from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO). AFV acknowledges additional funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 686282 (CanPathPro). AP was partially supported through EPSRC projects EP/M002454/1 and EP/J012041/1.Peer reviewe