among bananas and backyards a statistical analysis of the effect of risk and scientific literacy on the attitude towards a waste co incinerator in italy

Abstract: This paper, based on a social impact research and the possible NIMBY-effect of the Turin, Italy, co-incinerator, deals with risk perception, scientific literacy and their influence on the attitude towards high-tech and controversial industrial plants. The paper argues that plant and infrastructure settlements having a substantial ecological impact represent a highly sophisticated and diverse social phenomenon in which risk plays an important but not unique role. Taking into account some important concomitant variables (such as trust, mass media use, political culture in decision-making processes), it is first of all shown that risk is not a mono-dimensional concept, as assumed by the psychometric tradition, and that two dimensions of the concept are to be found. The collective dimension has a positive monotonic association with a critical attitude towards the co-incinerator, whereas the individual dimension has an unexpectedly negative correlation, which will be explained in further detail. It also demonstrates that scientific literacy has no statistical significance for attitude in our model, confirming the well-known limits of the so called 'knowledge deficit' model

Il Petrarca dell'ingegnere.

This paper focuses on a sonnet by Giovanni Casoni, who worked as engineer in Venice during the first half of the nineteenth century and developed some methods about medieval venetian Archeology. From his literary production, mostly still unpublished, are here slected some verses on the recognition, in 1843, of Francesco Petrarca tomb in Arquà. The composition is interesting for some new elements that it provides around this circumstance, and as evidence of the political inclinations of Casoni