One Last Austrian Cigarette: Italo Svevo and Habsburg Trieste

In "La Coscienza di Zeno", Svevo inscribes himself within the Habsburg literary tradition: A Habsburg subject writing in Italian more than an exclusively Italian national. Zeno’s behaviour towards Italian nationalism could be read as indifferent, while his allegiance is towards Trieste’s metropolitan identity under the Austrian empire. Svevo’s own pen name was culturally hybrid: it placed a strong emphasis on his identification with both Italian and German communities, seen as a merging of two equal cultures and their literary traditions. The essay focuses on the fact that Zeno challenges the Italian cultural nationalism of Irredentist Trieste by means of an epistemology of the vernacular, thus it discusses the tension between Italian standard and dialect in Svevo’s earlier novels. The analysis then concerns "La Coscienza", where the protagonist’s autobiographical account springs from a seminal Ur-memory: the clandestine smoking of an Austrian brand of cigarettes that displayed the Habsburg coat of arms. Finally the author proposes a closer reading of the confessions presented as a diary. This last study might reveal a set of rhetorical strategies that aim at undermining the very cultural politics of Italian nationalists to which Zeno allegedly subscribes

Participatory GIS in Mapping Ecosystem Services: Two Case Studies from High-Biodiversity Regions in Italy and Peru

Assessing ecosystem services (ES) and mapping their values are of paramount importance. Here we present two case studies where the participatory mapping of social values of landscape ecosystem services is used in territories with high levels of cultural and biological diversity (Adamello Brenta Natural Park in Italy and the Alto Mayo basin in the Western Amazon, Peru). A mixed-method approach combining social geography fieldwork (participatory mapping) and desk work (GIS analyses) is adopted to improve ES mapping by including multiple actors and to increase awareness. Mapping ecosystem services is not just a technical task; it also highlights social implications of the cartographic process, a key issue in human geography. By taking into account the controversial and multiple roles of maps, and by involving actors in attributing values and mapping their spatial relations to landscape and ES, it is possible to enrich technical knowledge with local knowledge

Agrosystems and Ecosystem Services: an agroenvironmental assessment of vegetated systems for phytoremediation of water from agricultural drainage

Relationships between Ecosystem Services and agrosystems are extremely important both to understand the bidirectional flow of services from/to agriculture and to quantify goods and benefits for human societies. Wetland systems nowadays represent an important cornerstone for beneficial Ecosystem Services, especially in intensive agricultural landscapes characterized by shallow water and a dense minor channel network like the territory of the Venice Lagoon drainage system. Wetlands provide a crucial suite of regulating, supporting, provisioning and cultural services to regulate water flows and nutrient cycling, remove and detoxify excess fertilizers and pesticides, sequester carbon, enhance biodiversity and provide cultural benefits to local communities. By three experimental study cases this research present results about the assessment of the water purification service provided by wetlands in mitigating agricultural contamination; moreover, estimation of a provisioning service such as bioenergy derived from wetland vegetation was performed. In the study case “a constructed wetland for water purification services from pesticide in an intensive cropping system” results show that the system can reduce runoff concentration of metolachlor and terbuthylazine by a factor of 45-80 even in extreme flooding conditions. Herbicides retention in the constructed wetland was reversible, and the second and third floods mobilized 14-31% and 3.5-7.0% respectively, of the amount detected in the first flood. In the second experimentation “vegetated ditches as water purification systems to mitigate contamination from pesticides runoff” results show that the ditch can immediately reduce runoff concentration of herbicides by at least 50% even in extreme flooding conditions; as a general rule, a runoff of 1 mm from 5 ha is mitigated by 99% in 100 m of vegetated ditch. In the study case “Assessing phytoremediation performance of an integrated agricultural wetland” results show that median concentrations of total nitrogen were 2.43 ppm at the inlet and 1.79 at the outlet, while after an extreme rainfall event, total nitrogen concentrations were 6.34 ppm at the inlet and 1.29 ppm at the outlet. In general, wetland systems perform a high buffer capacity both for nutrient and herbicides, capable to provide water purification service, protecting downstream surface water. Moreover, this project confirms that the implementation of constructed wetlands and offsite mitigation measures like vegetated ditches in agro-systems can improve the sustainability of agricultural production

Human Mobility Modelling:Exploration and Preferential Return Meet the Gravity Model

AbstractModeling the properties of individual human mobility is a challenging task that has received increasing attention in the last decade. Since mobility is a complex system, when modeling individual human mobility one should take into account that human movements at a collective level influence, and are influenced by, human movement at an individual level. In this paper we propose the d-EPR model, which exploits collective information and the gravity model to drive the movements of an individual and the exploration of new places on the mobility space. We implement our model to simulate the mobility of thousands synthetic individuals, and compare the synthetic movements with real trajectories of mobile phone users and synthetic trajectories produced by a prominent individual mobility model. We show that the distributions of global mobility measures computed on the trajectories produced by the d-EPR model are much closer to empirical data, highlighting the importance of considering collective information when simulating individual human mobility

Modeling immune system control of atherogenesis

Abstract Motivation: Atherosclerosis is a disease that is present in almost all humans, typically beginning in early adolescence. It is a human disease broadly investigated, that is amenable to quantitative analysis. Oxidized low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) and their autoantibodies are involved in the development of atherosclerosis in animal models, but their role in humans is still not clear. Computer models may represent a virtual environment to perform experiments not possible in human volunteers that can provide a useful instrument for monitoring both the evolution of atherosclerotic lesions and to quantify the efficacy of treatments, including vaccines, oriented to reduce the LDLs and their oxidized fraction. Results: We report the application of an agent-based model to model both the immune response to atherogenesis and the atheromatous plaque progression in a generic artery wall. The level of oxidized LDLs, the immune humoral response with production of autoantibodies, the macrophages activity and the formation of foam cells are in good agreement with available clinical data, including the formation of atheromatous plaques in patients affected by hypercholesterolemia. Availability: The model is available at http://www.immunogrid.eu/atherogenesis/ Contact: [email protected]

Observed Risk and User Perception of Road Infrastructure Safety Assessment for Cycling Mobility

The opportunities for data collection in smart cities and communities provide new approaches for assessing risk of roadway components. This paper presents and compares two different methodological approaches for cycling safety assessment of objective and perceived risk. Objective risk was derived from speed and direction profiles collected with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and camera installed on an instrumented bicycle. Safety critical events between cyclists and other road users were identified and linked to five different roadway components. A panel of experts was asked to score the severity of the safety critical events using a Delphi process to reach consensus. To estimate the perceived risk, a web-based survey was provided to the city bicyclist community asking them to score the same five roadway components with a 4-point Likert scale. A comparison between perceived and objective risk classification of the roadway components showed a good agreement when only higher severity conflicts were considered. The research findings support the notion that it is possible to collect information from bicycle probe data that match and user perceptions and thus, utilizing them to take advantage of such data in advancing the goals of in smart cities and communities

Intumescent flame retarded polypropylene systems containing sepiolite clays: properties and synergic effects.

IL presente lavoro di ricerca ha avuto come obiettivo quello di migliorare le caratteristiche di resistenza al fuoco del polipropilene tramite l’uso di ritardanti di fiamma commerciali e sepiolite, tal quale oppure organicamente modificata. Inoltre sono state analizzate le proprietà meccaniche e reologiche dei compositi realizzati, per comprendere l’effetto degli additivi sulle caratteristiche della matrice

Sentinel-2 Data Analysis and Comparison with UAV Multispectral Images for Precision Viticulture

Precision viticulture (PV) requires the use of technologies that can detect the spatial and temporal variability of vineyards and, at the same time, allow useful information to be obtained at sustainable costs. In order to develop a cheap and easy-to-handle operational monitoring scheme for PV, the aim of this work was to evaluate the possibility of using Sentinel-2 multispectral images for long-term vineyard monitoring through the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Vigour maps of two vineyards located in northeastern Italy were computed from satellite imagery and compared with those derived from UAV multispectral images; their correspondence was evaluated from qualitative and statistical points of view. To achieve this, the UAV images were roughly resampled to 10 m pixel size in order to match the spatial resolution of the satellite imagery. Preliminary results show the potential use of open source Sentinel-2 platforms for monitoring vineyards, highlighting links with the information given in the agronomic bulletins and identifying critical areas for crop production. Despite the large differences in spatial resolution, the results of the comparison between the UAV and Sentinel-2 data were promising. However, for long-term vineyard monitoring at territory scale, further studies using multispectral sensor calibration and groundtruth data are required

In-vehicle stereo vision system for identification of traffic conflicts between bus and pedestrian

Abstract The traffic conflict technique (TCT) was developed as "surrogate measure of road safety" to identify near-crash events by using measures of the spatial and temporal proximity of road users. Traditionally applications of TCT focus on a specific site by the way of manually or automated supervision. Nowadays the development of in-vehicle (IV) technologies provides new opportunities for monitoring driver behavior and interaction with other road users directly into the traffic stream. In the paper a stereo vision and GPS system for traffic conflict investigation is presented for detecting conflicts between vehicle and pedestrian. The system is able to acquire geo-referenced sequences of stereo frames that are used to provide real time information related to conflict occurrence and severity. As case study, an urban bus was equipped with a prototype of the system and a trial in the city of Catania (Italy) was carried out analyzing conflicts with pedestrian crossing in front of the bus. Experimental results pointed out the potentialities of the system for collection of data that can be used to get suitable traffic conflict measures. Specifically, a risk index of the conflict between pedestrians and vehicles is proposed to classify collision probability and severity using data collected by the system. This information may be used to develop in-vehicle warning systems and urban network risk assessment