Analysis and Market Prospects of a Traditional Calabrian Product

The strategies for exploiting typical production represents a theme of great interest, above all in the measure in which exploitation brought about via adequate marketing strategies allows these products to shed their anonymity. This paper constitutes a contribution in this direction, since it analyses the potential of a traditional product ('Nduja) using multivariate analysis techniques on a sample of consumers, identified by a specific market research survey. This made it possible to define the main characteristics of the type of consumer of this product and to define suitable market segmentation strategies.Traditional product, Rural development, Marketing strategies, Factor Analysis, Consumer/Household Economics,

ICT and Typical Products: An Analysis of Italian Farms

The paper discusses the final results of research into the use and impact of ICT on a sample of firms in the Calabria region of southern Italy processing typical food products (salami, citrus fruits, oil, cheese) certified as PDO or PGI. The specific sample was chosen for two reasons: on the one hand to assess the compatibility of ICT in firms where production follows historic and territorial traditions, and on the other to test the hypothesis that the use of ICT in firms processing food products of certified quality should ideally present a greater, more significant impact. The results let us know some characteristics concerning with the introduction and usage of new technology in the examined farms.computer use, typical Italian products, intensity of innovation, agricultural software use, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Q12, Q16, O33,

Relire l’histoire coloniale au XVIIIe siècle. L’édition critique de l’Histoire des deux Indes

En 1781, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713-1796), ancien directeur du “Mercure de France” et l’un des membres les mieux connus de la République des Lettres, s’exile de Paris pour se soustraire au décret du Parlement (25 mai) qui voulait son emprisonnement. Il ne regagnera la France qu’en 1784, et Paris seulement en 1790. Qu’est-ce qui lui avait attiré la rage du Parlement? La Cour de Paris s’en était prise à quatre volumes qui venaient de paraître sous le nom de Raynal: l’Histoire politique et philosophique de l’établissement et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. Cette oeuvre, célèbre à l’époque, est aujourd’hui l’objet d’une importante édition critique – la première qui en a jamais été faite. Cette entreprise éditoriale récente se saisit d’un moment important de la vie intellectuelle de la France d’Ancien Régime et de la circulation d’informations à l'échelle non seulement européenne mais mondiale. L’Histoire des deux Indes (comme elle fut appelée à l’époque et comme on l’appellera ici) fut en effet un épisode remarquable à maints égards: elle eut un énorme succès commercial et suscita un débat national et international touchant non seulement l’Europe, mais aussi les Amériques. Sa diffusion tient d’un côté aux stratégies publicitaires mises en oeuvre par Raynal et ses éditeurs, mais aussi à l’actualité du sujet dont ils se saisirent: l’expansion coloniale et le développement du commerce extérieur décidaient de la fortune de nombreux citoyens (administrateurs, commerçants, ingénieurs, matelots) et des finances des états; les découvertes géographiques et anthropologiques suscitaient la curiosité du public et maintes controverses autour des peuples et des civilisations jusqu’alors inconnus

Reliable and timely event notification for publish/subscribe services over the internet

The publish/subscribe paradigm is gaining attention for the development of several applications in wide area networks (WANs) due to its intrinsic time, space, and synchronization decoupling properties that meet the scalability and asynchrony requirements of those applications. However, while the communication in a WAN may be affected by the unpredictable behavior of the network, with messages that can be dropped or delayed, existing publish/subscribe solutions pay just a little attention to addressing these issues. On the contrary, applications such as business intelligence, critical infrastructures, and financial services require delivery guarantees with strict temporal deadlines. In this paper, we propose a framework that enforces both reliability and timeliness for publish/subscribe services over WAN. Specifically, we combine two different approaches: gossiping, to retrieve missing packets in case of incomplete information, and network coding, to reduce the number of retransmissions and, consequently, the latency. We provide an analytical model that describes the information recovery capabilities of our algorithm and a simulation-based study, taking into account a real workload from the Air Traffic Control domain, which evidences how the proposed solution is able to ensure reliable event notification over a WAN within a reasonable bounded time window. © 2013 IEEE

Il turismo fra sostenibilità e recessione. La resilienza econoomica delle destinazione tusristiche urbane in Sicilia

El turismo se percibe generalmente como una fuerza motriz económica que permite a una comunidad acelerar los procesos de desarrollo económico y social. Por otro lado, crea presión y transforma el ambiente (tanto urbano como natural), especialmente cuando su crecimiento es rápido. Varios estudios analizan en profundidad el papel del turismo en el desarrollo de los lugares señalando que los efectos son diferentes y dependen de dónde se manifiesta la presión. En las ciudades, además del riesgo de superar cargas sostenibles en términos sociales y medioambientales, estamos sobre todo ante una pérdida de identidad. Esto es aún más cierto ante los shocks económicos, donde la reducción repentina de los flujos turísticos y la necesidad de contención de costes para las empresas pone en riesgo la sostenibilidad del destino turístico. En este sentido, el caso de Sicilia es emblemático pues en los últimos años ha crecido en los flujos turísticos internacionales sobre la base de una mayor apreciación de sus elementos naturales y culturales. Por tanto, el objetivo de este trabajo es describir el comportamiento de los principales destinos de turismo urbano en Sicilia en comparación con las crisis económicas ocurridas en Italia en 2008, a través de un análisis cuantitativo, evidenciando de este modo la capacidad de resiliencia de las ciudades a los cambios de los flujos turísticos.Il turismo è generalmente percepito come un volano economico che consente ad una comunità di accelerare i processi di sviluppo economico e sociale. D’altro canto crea pressione e trasforma l’ambiente (sia urbano che naturale), soprattutto quando la trasformazione è veloce. Diversi studi analizzano in profondità il ruolo del turismo nello sviluppo dei luoghi. Gli effetti sono diversi e dipendono anche da dove si manifesta la pressione. Nelle città, oltre al rischio di superare i carichi sostenibili in termini sociali e ambientali, stiamo assistendo soprattutto a una perdita di identità. Questo è ancora più vero in prossimità di shock economici, dove l’improvvisa riduzione dei flussi turistici e la necessità del contenimento dei costi per le imprese mette a rischio la sostenibilità della destinazione turistica. In questo senso è emblematico il caso della Sicilia, che negli ultimi anni è cresciuta nei flussi turistici internazionali, con un gradimento crescente per i suoi elementi naturali e culturali. Scopo del paper è dunque quello di descrivere il comportamento delle principali destinazioni di turismo urbano in Sicilia rispetto allo shock economico avvenuto in Italia nel 2008, attraverso un’analisi quantitativa che evidenzi così la resilienza delle città ai cambiamenti dei relativi flussi turistici

Madagascar ‘possession française’? L’historiographie coloniale en débat: une mise en perspective

This article traces the development of the major historical narrative of French colonization of Madagascar and questions the capacity of this narrative to account for local culture and local history. Since its very beginning in seventeenth century up to late twentieth century, this narrative looked at Madagascar from a national and Eurocentric point of view: indeed, the history of Madagascar was confused with the history of France in Madagascar, or oriented by the French interests in Madagascar. Given this general settings, the article pleas for a closer recognition of different moments and actors that constructed French historical imagination of Madagascar. Focusing on some major historical writings, it provides examples of the tensions, ruptures, and criticism that agitated the production of colonial historiography. By doing so, the article suggests that non-retrospective and non-teleological study of the transformations and diversity of historical writings on non-European cultures can indeed cast a new light on European culture itself, and increase dialogue with other cultures. This consideration brings to the recognition that the writing of colonial history has undergone a sharp transformation since the last twenty years at least

Ordering, timeliness and reliability for publish/subscribe systems over WAN

In the last few years, the increasing use of the Internet and geo-political, sociological and financial changes induced by globalization, are paving the way for a connected world where the information is always available at the right place and the right time. As such, applications previously deployed for ``closed'' environmets, are now federating into geographically distributed systems connected through a Wide Area Network (WAN). By this evolution, in the near future no system will be isolated: every system will be composed by interconnected systems, i.e., it will be a System of Systems (SoS). Example of SoS are the Large-scale Complex Critical Infrastructure (LCCIs), such as power grids, transport infrastructures (airports and seaports), financial infrastructures, next generation intelligence platforms, to cite a few. In these systems, multiple sources of information generate a high volume of events that need to be delivered to all intended destinations by respecting several Quality of Service (QoS) constraints imposed by the critical nature of LCCIs. As such, particular attention is devoted to the middleware solution used to disseminate information in the SoS. Due to its inherently scalability provided by space, time and synchronization decoupling properties, the publish/subscribe paradigm is becoming attractive for the implementation of a middleware service for LCCIs. However, scalability is not the only requirement exhibited by SoS. Several services need to control a broader set of QoS requirements, such as timeliness, ordering and reliability. Unfortunately, current middleware solutions do not address QoS constraints required by SoS. Current publish/subscribe middleware solutions for the WAN environment offer only a best effort event dissemination, with no additional control on QoS. Just a few implementations try to address some isolated QoS policy, making them not suitable for a SoS scenario. The contribution of this thesis is to devise a QoS layer that can be posed on top of a generic publish/subscribe middleware that enriches its service by addressing: (i) ordering, (ii) reliability and (iii) timeliness in event dissemination in SoS over WAN. Specifically, we first analyze several real case studies, by highlighting their QoS requirements in terms of ordering, reliability and timeliness, and compare these requirements with both current research prototypes and commercial systems. Then, we fill the gap by proposing novel algorithms to address those requirements. The proposed protocols can also be combined together in order to provide the QoS level required by the particular application. In this way, QoS issues do not need to be addressed at application level, so as to leave applications to implement just their native functionalities

Ordering, timeliness and reliability for publish/subscribe systems over WAN

In the last few years, the increasing use of the Internet and geo-political, sociological and financial changes induced by globalization, are paving the way for a connected world where the information is always available at the right place and the right time. As such, applications previously deployed for ``closed'' environmets, are now federating into geographically distributed systems connected through a Wide Area Network (WAN). By this evolution, in the near future no system will be isolated: every system will be composed by interconnected systems, i.e., it will be a System of Systems (SoS). Example of SoS are the Large-scale Complex Critical Infrastructure (LCCIs), such as power grids, transport infrastructures (airports and seaports), financial infrastructures, next generation intelligence platforms, to cite a few. In these systems, multiple sources of information generate a high volume of events that need to be delivered to all intended destinations by respecting several Quality of Service (QoS) constraints imposed by the critical nature of LCCIs. As such, particular attention is devoted to the middleware solution used to disseminate information in the SoS. Due to its inherently scalability provided by space, time and synchronization decoupling properties, the publish/subscribe paradigm is becoming attractive for the implementation of a middleware service for LCCIs. However, scalability is not the only requirement exhibited by SoS. Several services need to control a broader set of QoS requirements, such as timeliness, ordering and reliability. Unfortunately, current middleware solutions do not address QoS constraints required by SoS. Current publish/subscribe middleware solutions for the WAN environment offer only a best effort event dissemination, with no additional control on QoS. Just a few implementations try to address some isolated QoS policy, making them not suitable for a SoS scenario. The contribution of this thesis is to devise a QoS layer that can be posed on top of a generic publish/subscribe middleware that enriches its service by addressing: (i) ordering, (ii) reliability and (iii) timeliness in event dissemination in SoS over WAN. Specifically, we first analyze several real case studies, by highlighting their QoS requirements in terms of ordering, reliability and timeliness, and compare these requirements with both current research prototypes and commercial systems. Then, we fill the gap by proposing novel algorithms to address those requirements. The proposed protocols can also be combined together in order to provide the QoS level required by the particular application. In this way, QoS issues do not need to be addressed at application level, so as to leave applications to implement just their native functionalities

Authentic and Fake Italian Food Products in the World

Counterfeiting is a growing and increasingly dangerous phenomenon. There has recently been an enormous growth in the illegal market for designer goods with a 'name' or trademark (counterfeit goods), as well as goods made without paying for the intellectual property rights (pirated goods). Quite apart from having economic consequences, counterfeited and pirated articles threaten the health and safety of EU citizens, their jobs, Community competitiveness, trade, and investment in research and innovation. The agrofood italian production , famous all over the world for their qualitative characteristics, it reenters among the products that are imitated. The imitation of such products certainly risks to damage the Italian productions, above all in comparison to the parameters of the quality and the food safety, both instruments of marketing used by the Italian producers in the international markets. The purpose of the paper is develop a collective understanding of the extent of the food (agro-food) counterfeit problem. The carrying out of the study foresees, initially, to consider the volumes of counterfeit commodities to world level and the politics harvest in action from the various countries to oppose this phenomenon. Subsequently the agrofood productions will be analyzed, and particularly those Italian, object of imitation trying to quantify their characteristcs and to measure its effects on the economic systems.counterfeit, Italian food production, Agribusiness,

How people share information about food: Insights from tweets regarding two Italian Regions

Sharing information about food through Twitter contributes to the evolution of food cultures, accelerating the exchange of information and knowledge about food. The aim of this study is to describe the type of information regarding food shared on Twitter and what kind of network is established between Twitter users in those cases when the #food in question is associated to a geographical area (#Tuscany or #Sicily). Using two different methodological approaches, combining quantitative tools with Network Analysis, the study highlights the fact that there are differences between the two networks surveyed, both with regard to the actors involved and to the way in which they share information on Twitter