Beyond core-periphery relationship in the EC cooperation

During the current process of EU enlargement, regions are confronted with a need to revise their relative position within the newly formed socio-economic, spatial and cultural spaces. As existing equilibria are severely affected, the type and direction of developmental trends of member states (and regions) are increasingly questioned. Concerns are being raised about the risks that the annealing process would trigger a number of undesirable processes, i.e. loss of comparative advantages, regions lagging behind, accentuation of socio-economic gaps, social unbalances resulting from migration flows of poor population. These might hamper the path of European integration and eventually result in a reinforcement of the more accessible well developed areas and a loss of more peripheral and relatively underdeveloped ones. In this context, cooperation amongst the member states, and in particular, their local governments, may play a significant role to both overcome those risks and favouring the EU integration process. Information on cooperation (and integration) for the European countries is extensive and provides detailed accounts of the initiatives which have been undertaken since the establishment of EU programs in the early sixties. Although the variety of cooperation (integration) programs which have been launched as the EU unification progressed are well documented, existing studies have rarely questioned the kind of evolution ( i.e. type and extent of the changes underlying the various initiatives) those programs underwent. The aim of this paper is to undertake a preliminary step in this analysis. A claim is made that: a. on the one hand, the widening of the scopes of cooperation programs and increasing number of eligible actors involved are significantly reinforcing the potentials of cooperation in favouring the integration process not only among the member countries but also different kind of areas (i.e. between metropolitan and peripheral cities); b. on the other hand, there is a need to refine the current approaches to cooperation and develop a conceptual framework which serves as a basis for both formulating the various initiatives and defining effective benchmarks for their evaluation. The paper is organized in three main sections. The first addresses some methodological questions about the definition of what should be understood as a cooperation situation. An effort is made to identify a conceptual framework which might be relevant for dealing with cooperative actions in a institutionalised setting. This is then used in the second section to provide an account of the evolution of the EU programs on cooperation. Finally, in the last section attention is turned to the strengths (i.e. greater attention to the spatial dimension of cooperation programs, more equalitarian relationships amongst the participants) and weaknesses (i.e. lack of a shared model of cooperative actions) of the current approaches to cooperation. An effort is made to emphasize a few relevant questions which can be challenging in the current EU policies and thinking.

REVISTING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN BROADBAND DIFFUSION AND REGIONAL SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT: A PRIMER

As they create generative conditions for socioeconomic development ICTs and broadband technology, can be understood as an innovation kernel for system evolution. Whereas for a regional system (a local area), technological progress may at certain times be regarded as exogenous, information endowments and expected level of functionalities are not. An innovation kernel, in fact, cannot exist outside the organization of the regional/local system which it belongs to. To grow and deploy its potentials, a fertile environment capable to adapt pro-actively to the changes it produces is needed. In this paper the conceptual underpinnings of an innovation kernel are overviewed and their relationships with those conventionally addressed in regional science studies briefly discussed. Bbuilding upon the IRES research undertaken as a part of the Piedmont ICT Observatory activities, an effort is made to pinpoint the determinants and processes of regional development on which an innovation kernel would encroach. A conceptual framework is outlined which makes it possible to elicit some main relationships between ICTs, broadband and developmental processes in a regional system.

Simulating a Post-Fordist urban system: Results from the PF.US model

In a previous we argued that some major novelties to be addressed by a new generation of urban models should be related to: i) the knowledge expectations connected with the use of a model (i.e. epistemological background), ii) the feasibility of its application domain (i..e. the operational underpinnings) and iii) the urban phenomena and perceptions characterizing the present cities ( i.e. the so-called Post-Fordist cities). We also emphasized that many drawbacks and limitations which nowadays make the classical urban modelling unsatisfactory were not caused so much by their methodological underpinnings but rather by the limited scope of the whole model application. This paper presents an operational simulation model (the PFUS model) which broadens the focus of the classical model application and allows to explore some features of the new kind of development taking place in modern cities (i.e. the local-global interactions, the role of localized resources). The paper is articulated into three parts. Part 1 outlines the conceptual and formalised structure of the model. Part 2 presents the results of its application to the Piedmont region. Finally in part 3 the main novelties of the PFUS model application are discussed emphasizing in particular their implicattions for planning purposes.

The tradition of Brandi

This essay embraces an idea from Giulio Carlo Argan that identifies transparency as both a component and a way of reading the writings of Cesare Brandi. Beginning with the entry for the item “Restoration” in the Enciclopedia Universale dell’Arte which is translated into Spanish in this issue of Conversaciones..., it then proposes a transparent reading of other texts by Brandi on restoration, at times finding comfort in writings more dedicated to aesthetics. Two pairs of themes seem to clearly emerge from this methodology: reintegration, and, in transparency, the potential unity of the work of art; the relationship between the humanistic and the scientific disciplines and, reading in transparency, the possibility of founding a theory of restoration. Finally, the theme of transparency opens onto reflections on space, or rather on space, and – once again in transparency – on objects. This last reflection constitutes the element for a possible line of flight, a way out of the work of Cesare Brandi, but in order to continue to practice the tradition of Cesare Brandi

Sinking the Caroline: Why the Caroline Doctrine\u27s Restrictions on Self-Defense Should Not Be Regarded as Customary International Law

This Comment will show how the Caroline doctrine came to exist, argue that no real doctrine was created as to an imminence requirement, and show that what is known today as the true Caroline doctrine is really obsolete international law and not a current standard by which to judge the legality of a state\u27s use of force in self-defense

KPZ universality for last passage percolation models

In this thesis we consider models of last passage percolation on the ℤ2. These models belong to the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang universality class, a class of stochastic growth models that have been widely studied in the last 30 years. Last passage percolation models provide a “physical” description of combinatoric problems, such as the Ulam’s problem, in terms of zero temperature directed polymers, but also a geometrical interpretation of an interacting particle system, the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP). Moreover, in the large time limit, they share statistical features with certain ensembles of random matrices. We investigate the universality of the limit distributions of the last passage time for different settings. First, we study TASEP starting from a periodic configuration and show the universality of the GOE Tracy-Widom distribution for generic particle density. This result is proved in the last passage percolation framework and is obtained with soft probabilistic arguments, as the convergence of the last passage time to a variational formula involving the limit Airy2 process. Then, we analyze the correlations of two last passage times for different ending points in a neighbourhood of the characteristic. For the standard settings (step, flat and stationary), using similar techniques, we prove the converge of the covariance of the last passage times to the covariance of the limiting processes. For a more general class of random initial conditions, we prove the universality of the first order correction when the two observation times are close and provide a rigorous bound of the error term. Finally, we consider a model of last passage percolation on half-space. We show that the stationary initial condition can be realized by adding weights on the axis and on the diagonal, and we obtain the distribution of the last passage time for this configuration. The limit distribution is analogous to the Baik–Rains distribution from the case of stationary full-space last passage percolation, but in our case, it depends on a parameter, the strength of the weights on the diagonal

Los libros de texto de ciencias como objeto de investigación : una revisión bibliográfica

Los libros de texto han sido objeto de investigaciones desde diversas perspectivas, lo cual ha producido una gran dispersión de conocimiento sobre las características de estos materiales y de su impacto en la enseñanza de las ciencias. Por ello, se observa la necesidad de sistematizar las principales aportaciones que registran estos trabajos, para lo cual se investigaron trece revistas científicas específicas y se seleccionaron los artículos vinculados a los libros de texto en función de las palabras clave, el título y el resumen. Se analizaron los objetivos, el marco teórico y metodológico, los resultados y las conclusiones. Se realizó una caracterización general que mostrara las dificultades más frecuentes y los desafíos que representan para la enseñanza de las ciencias. Una síntesis de esta naturaleza puede brindar información para la producción de los libros de texto y pone en evidencia aspectos que requieren nuevas investigaciones.Textbooks have been research objects from different perspectives; consequently, much knowledge about the characteristics of textbooks and their impact on science education has been dispersed. Therefore, the need to organize the main contributions of these papers is observed. To achieve this, 13 specific scientific journals were analyzed and the articles related to science textbooks were selected according to their titles, abstracts and keywords. The objectives, framework, methodology, results and conclusions were considered. The papers were characterized, and our findings about the most frequent difficulties and challenges of science education were shown. A synthesis of this nature can provide information for the production of science textbooks, and it can expose the aspects that require further research