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Giovani, media e civic engagement. La rete da luogo di socialità a spazio di attivazione civica?
No full textObiettivo della tesi è individuare le forme di attivazione e partecipazione civica che i giovani sperimentano in rete, e ricostruire le modalità attraverso cui essi si confrontano su questioni di pubblico interesse. Tale percorso si intreccia con una riflessione sulle nuove forme di impegno civico e sulle definizioni di civic engagement, con particolare riferimento al ruolo delle tecnologie nella costruzione di pratiche di civicness.
La domanda principale che muove il lavoro di tesi è incentrata sul possibile ruolo della rete nella promozione di forme di dibattito e di attivazione civica dei giovani e sull'eventuale ricaduta nei confronti del dibattito pubblico.
La tesi si compone di due parti. Nella prima viene definito lo scenario di riferimento del tema attraverso un’analisi puntuale dei concetti di cittadinanza, cultura civica e civic engagement con particolare attenzione al ruolo dei media e della rete nella costruzione di ambienti culturali e di processi di costruzione di identità e di attivazione civica.
Nella seconda parte, attraverso una web survey rivolta a giovani internauti (fascia d’età 18-29) che frequentano alcuni siti particolarmente visibili ed attivi anche sui social media, vengono esaminate alcune dinamiche legate alla socialità ed alla relazionalità da un lato, e forme di attivazione civica dall’altro, individuando alcuni tipi di utenti “social-media oriented ” e “civic engaged”. L’analisi mette a fuoco alcuni aspetti attraverso i quali si dipana il rapporto (in termini di pratiche principalmente) tra giovani e social media e quale ruolo può avere la dimensione civica nel ridefinirlo. Le dimensioni indagate riguardano in particolare l’area dei consumi e delle pratiche mediali e l’area delle pratiche di civic engagement con particolare attenzione alle possibili relazioni che si determinano tra queste e il rapporto che gli intervistati hanno con le regole e con il vissuto di cittadini, sia on line che off line
La [18F]-fluorocolina PET/TC nel carcinoma della prostata: ruolo in fase di stadiazione nella definizione dei protocolli radioterapici dose-escalation nei pazienti ad alto rischio
No full textBREA: UNA COMUNITA' IN TRASFORMAZIONE TRA PASSATO, PRESENTE E FUTURO.
No full textIl lavoro di dissertazione, dal titolo “Brea: una comunità in trasformazione tra passato, presente e futuro”, un territorio del meridione d’Italia, rientra nella tradizione storica della sociologia interessata agli studi di comunità, considerando che una ricerca empirica di questo tipo ha l’intenzione di recuperare nell’attualità lo strumento sociologico dell’inchiesta sociale, per effettuare un lettura critica delle problematiche sociali esistenti nella realtà. L’obiettivo della ricerca, essenzialmente di natura esplorativa e descrittiva, è quello di affrontare la complessa tematica del “benessere”, per come esso viene concepito all’interno della comunità, provvedendo a delinearne le dimensioni costitutive e al tempo stesso facendo emergere il ruolo esercitato da alcune credenze particolarmente radicate nella cultura meridionale del paese, riflettendo anche circa le conseguenze della crisi economica sugli attuali assetti socio-economici della comunità, ipotizzandone i possibili scenari futuri.
Le ipotesi di lavoro provengono sia da alcuni classici della letteratura sociologica di comunità, come il “familismo amorale” di Banfield, o la distinzione delle attività di base, dei coniugi Lynd, sia dalla teoria dell’azione di J. Elster e dalla teoria della “privazione relativa” di R.K. Merton. A questi riferimenti antropologici e sociologici si affianca materiale teorico extra-sociologico, con particolare riferimento alla teoria del “benessere e dell’uguaglianza”, elaborata da A. Sen e alle analisi della P.I.F. (Personal Income Function) di B. Van Praag.
La strumentazione adoperata nel corso della ricerca è di natura qualitativa e comprende, oltre che un’approfondita ricognizione storica inerente la comunità, l’uso dell’osservazione non partecipante, l’utilizzo di colloqui e la somministrazione di interviste in profondità a testimoni privilegiati e a cittadini, campionati, per quanto possibile, per mezzo dello “snowball sampling”. Dopo l’introduzione, sono esplicitati i fini e gli obiettivi della ricerca; si approfondisce il concetto di “benessere”, considerandone le interpretazioni, in modo critico, per poi ricostruire la storia della comunità, in base a documentazione, interviste in profondità, rilevanza di accadimenti che l’hanno segnata; si delineano i modi in cui viene concepito e vissuto il “benessere” dai soggetti, sia personalmente, sia rispetto ai problemi in cui essi sono coinvolti (la famiglia, il lavoro, la salute, l’abitazione, la politica), sia rispetto alle risorse esistenti nel territorio, per giungere alla descrizione di quale sia l’ethos della comunità (individualismo vs. associazionismo). Le conclusioni sottolineano il fatto che nella strutturazione dell’idea di “benessere comunitario” viene esercitato un ruolo assai pesante dalle credenze culturali radicate, le cui conseguenze determinano un profondo individualismo, un’elevata sfiducia verso lo Stato e verso il prossimo, e una bassissima propensione all’associazionismo, che hanno come effetto la tendenza a mantenere artificialmente basso il livello di accesso e di fruizione delle risorse disponibili. Da ciò consegue l’estrema importanza dell’implementazione delle attività delle amministrazioni statali periferiche, la cui domanda di sostegno è enormemente aumentata a seguito della crisi economica attuale. In definitiva, i cambiamenti derivanti dalla riduzione delle risorse e dal peggioramento delle condizioni materiali di vita sembrano determinare una trasformazione dei valori culturali comunitari di riferimento, che se prima premiavano il clientelismo e il personalismo, oggi si spostano verso l’efficienza legata al merito personale, a tutti i livelli
RUOLO DELLA RISONANZA MAGNETICA MULTIPARAMETRICA NELLA GESTIONE OTTIMALE DEI RISULTATI ONCOLOGICI E FUNZIONALI IN PAZIENTI CON CARCINOMA PROSTATICO CANDIDABILI A PROSTATECTOMIA RADICALE NERVE SPARING
No full textDensità sostenibile: forma, ambiente costruito, energia
No full textThis research aims at exploring meaning, quality and analytical capacity of density concept and its potential interpretations in architecture and sustainability fields. Its goal is to determine the relationships among built environment, energy and form of urban textures in Mediterranean compact city, taken density as useful parameter to illustrate their features. Despite the growing unsustainability of today’s city facing an effective energy and environmental crisis, recent statistics have confirmed the increasing attractive power of metropolitan areas. Within the context of European compact city, new building models, based on energy conservation, account for an insignificant percentage compared to existing city whose functioning remarkably affects the efficiency of the whole metropolitan system. Therefore, an approach determining instruments and design methods at both urban and architectural scale, should be found in order to set out conditions more appropriate to the compact city. In respect of this kind of scale, the relationship between energy and form takes a central role in the variation of energy performances; at the same time the concept of density has showed itself as an efficient instrument of analysis of the morphological performances of the built form. This research is composed by five interconnected parts. The first one examines urban and energy dynamics’ current conditions to comprehend the role and contribution of the building industry considering the scientific progress and the implementation of present operational instruments. The second one investigates role and evolution of the density concept as parameter, design instrument and basis of theoretical categories, especially referring to interactions with urban form and sustainability. In the third part the analytical abilities of density are employed to prove the environmental implications and verify the existence of interactions among urban sustainability indicators and density. Then, the fourth one enquires into the relationships among density and energy at the urban scale. Finally, the fifth part investigates such relationships in the compact fabrics in Rome and Barcelona by models and simulations set up in order to control the correspondent factors. The influence of urban morphology, built-form and constructive features on solar access and energy demand for heating and cooling is shown by different definitions of density indicators. Among these, are determined those more suitable to express reliable trends in relation with solar access and energy demand. Firstly results point out that the contribution of the built environment to the complex energy issue arisen by metropolitan systems must be focused on the reduction of the demand - even before on the consumption and impact - operating with multi-scale methods and instruments for the transformation of existing city. Density has a preferred role in the relationship between sustainability and form, thanks to its interpretative skills and meanings undertaken as theoretical and design category. At the metropolitan scale, urban sustainability indicators and density do not always show evident relationships with energy and environmental implications. Built-form, typology and constructive features are the main factors that occur on energy performances variation of urban fabrics. The investigation of these kinds of performances by density parameters permit the comprehension of the different energy behaviors in each urban texture, offering a contribution to the instruments of energy analysis at urban scale and permitting more efficient conditions for the built environment leading to the concept of sustainable density. Methodological structure and the determined parametrical instruments show themselves as knowledge base for aware transformations of Mediterranean compact city
Il tessuto edilizio di espansione nel primo Seicento a Roma: il caso della Suburra. Vicende, caratteri e aspetti di salvaguardia urbana
No full textModelling of MEMS/NEMS Resonators and Functional Design of a Mechanical Transistor
No full textThe most basic example of charge transport is represented by the collective motion of free charge carriers in a conductive medium. In the context of electromechanical devices, more complex forms of charge transport, labeled with the umbrella term electron shuttle, exist.
The simplest system exhibiting a shuttle mechanism comprises a set of three conductors: two fixed electrodes and a vibrating element between them. Under certain boundary conditions a limit-cycle is established, and the oscillator alternatively takes and releases a finite amount of electrons while approaching the electrodes. Since this form of charge transport relies on the presence of mechanical vibrations, the described phenomenon constitutes the archetype of a “mechanical charge carrier”.
Although the first concept of electron shuttle is over two centuries old, only in recent times [Gorelik and Isacsson, 1998] it found reinvigorated interest in the field of nanotechnology, producing a novel branch of both theoretical and experimental research. In fact, the introduction of quantum effects in shuttle devices produces interesting motion regimes peculiar of nanoscale. Refer to such systems as Quantum Shuttle Modules (QSMs).
Many original architectures have been conceptualized and realized in the last decade. A promising application is contained in a patent [Blick and Marsland, 2008] which proposes a switching element based on electron shuttle and capable of reproducing the main functionalities of a conventional transistor, depicted as composed by an array of mechanically coupled QSM subsystems, whose vibrating elements are nanocantilevers. Refer to this invention as the NanoMechanical Transistor (NMT). At the present day, the NMT is an unexplored concept: no experimental setup has been realized nor theoretical model has been proposed yet.
The research work contained in this thesis is intended to provide a first theoretical description and an early design stage for such NMT device. Notice that, since the NMT is composed by a set of QSMs, a preliminary study of these systems is needed. This work is consequently divided in two Parts: the first one focuses on the QSMs with an exquisitely theoretical approach, while the second one is intended to assess the feasibility of a real application, the NMT.
A brief description of the thesis contents is presented ahead.
Part One begins by introducing the fundamental concepts of quantum tunneling and Coulomb blockade. Then, the general scheme of a QSM is presented. As usual in literature, a concentrated parameters model is used, and the state of the system is reduced to a couple of lagrangian descriptors: the oscillator position and charge. Conductive and dynamical properties are investigated with both analytical and numerical approaches. Then, a systematic study of QSMs is attempted by considering two basic shuttle mechanisms: in the first case, the oscillator is self-excited by a shuttle current between electrodes at different voltages; in the second case, the oscillator vibrates under parametric resonance and a shuttle current is established between two electrodes at the same voltage. The portrayed phenomenologies are complementary, meaning each QSM presents a combination of these two fundamental forms of electron shuttle.
Part Two opens with an overview of the conventional transistors and an analysis of the NMT patent. Follows the choice of the characteristic scales of the device and the typology of QSM to be the best candidate as NMT subsystem. Under suitable approximations, closed-form formulae for capacitances, quantum tunneling and electrostatic force are produced. A flexible set of equations is obtained, allowing to perform a large number of numerical experiments. First, a single QSM subsystem is considered: a predictive model is proposed in which a QSM is related to a Turing machine whose admitted states are represented by the feasible motion regimes. Then, more QSM subsystems are arranged to realize the NMT: each module is electrostatically independent but mechanically coupled with its nearest neighbors. A functional analysis of the whole system is presented, in which peculiar motion regimes are investigated, and a set of design and control strategies aimed to correctly reproduce switching and amplification functionalities is proposed. Last, the black-box electrical characterization of the device is outlined.
In conclusion, the main original contributions of this research work are: i) the theoretical study of a novel device – the NMT – which has led to synthetize a series of design requirements and control strategies; II) the conceptualization of a parametric resonant QSM, which – differently from the self-excited one – constitutes a new archetype of electron shuttle
Statistical methods for the analysis of climatic phenomena
No full textStatistical Climatology investigates the application of statistics to atmospheric and
climate science. This Thesis is intended to contribute some developments in this
field. The Thesis is composed of two distinct applied problems: the first presents
a functional clustering procedure applied to meteorological time series to obtain
homogeneous climate zones; the second builds a hierarchical Bayesian model aiming
at the prediction of 15- and 30-minutes cumulated precipitation at unknown locations
and time using information on lightnings in the same area
Devoluzione e Sovranismo. Studi di Caso in Europa: la Catalogna e la Scozia
No full textThe thesis focuses on Regionalisms and Nationalisms in Europe with particular reference to the Catalan and Scottish cases. Following an historical and juridical approach the author debates on nationalism movements in Catalonia and Scotland through a comparative analysis of these two different nationalisms and it dedicates part of the research to the study of the European Union policies and orientation in promoting regional participation and devolution processes. In the thesis is stressed the existing link between regional/national movements and the European Union integration process and it is developed the discussion about the European Union's regulation for regions, regional communities and sub-state actors. Lastly the author traces the possible scenarios in Europe after the referendum in Scotland in 2014 and the reflections in Catalonia as well
La domanda abitativa dimenticata: gli slums a Roma
No full textThe problem of inadequate housing and the lack of basic water and sanitation infrastructures is not new but goes back to the formation of the first cities. However nowadays 31,6% of the world urban population lives in slums, in other words one urban citizen out of three lives in an inadequate housing condition. Slums are not anymore marginalized parts of the city, but on the contrary in many developing countries they have become the main type of human settlement. Slums are the physical and spatial manifestation of urban poverty and intra-city inequalities and they are the result of the lack of low cost houses for the urban poor.
There is an extensive literature on slums of Developing Countries, however this phenomenon is still not documented or studied in “Developed Countries”, where slums are presents but in a smaller extent.
The present work wants to document the presence of slums in Rome, which has become the “capital city of the housing crisis”. In fact the most vulnerable parts of the population cannot afford to rent or buy a house on the market and they do not receive any support from the State. These people form the “forgotten” housing demand, a part of the housing demands that is not fulfilled by the market or the Welfare State.
The hypothesis of this work is that the presence of an unsatisfied demand for low cost houses has forces those excluded from the housing market and abandoned by the State to find informal housing solutions as the slums. However, in Rome this “forgotten” housing demand is very diversified and each segment of this demand has built slums with different characteristics.
The work is structured in three parts. The first part contains the theoretical background of the thesis and it presents the slums as a global phenomenon. First of all, the international definition of slum elaborated by UN-Habitat is presented together with the main critics that have been raised by scholars. Secondly the evolution of theories and practices concerning slums is analyzed. Finally an overview of the presence of slums in the world is made.
The second part is the central part of the work in which the research hypothesis is tested and the presence of slums in Rome is documented. At first an historical reconstruction of the housing problems of the city of Rome is presented in order to contextualize the problem of slums also in an historic point of view. However the actual housing crisis in Rome is not due, as in the past, to an housing shortage but has deeper roots to be found in the neoliberal system that has cancelled urban planning and transformed our cities from common goods to economic assets. The general causes of the housing crisis in Rome are analyzed: the end of housing public policies and the process of finanziarization of cities.
In order to understand the different components of the forgotten housing demand both the demand and the supply of low cost housing are analyzed. Specifically, for the supply side are studied the rental and the purchase markets. Concerning the demand side, the main categories of people that compose the forgotten housing demand are analyzed: young people, migrants and political refugees.
A new definition of slum, suitable to the context of Rome, is presented and used to identify the different types slums present in Rome. Slums are then classified regarding to: type of settlement; main characteristics of the dwellers; regularity or irregularity of Visa; temporality which has to be considered as the expected time of staying in the city of Rome. The most descriptive slums visited during the field work, conducted from January 2010 to February 2012, are presented with a fact sheet describing the main characteristics of the settlement and the dwellers.
In the third part the possible and feasible solutions to the problem of slums in Rome are outlined. Slums are multi-dimensional phenomena and need to be addressed with an integrated approach that combines political, technical and socio-economic solutions. Only a multi-sectoral approach can bring a real improvement in the quality of life of slum dwellers and not only to a physical renewal of houses and infrastructures. In this part the political, technical and socio-economic solutions identified are analyzed and adapted to the different types of slums previously identified