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Politica islamica e propaganda fascista in Siria e Libano (1932-1940)
Get PDFThis dissertation analyses the policy of fascist Italy towards Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate in the 1930s, and especially the propagandistic activities carried out by the Italian government, in order to achieve his specific political aims in the Levant. In the early 1930s,
Mussolini’s regime started an “Islamic policy” with new characteristic, in comparison with the traditional “Arab policy” of pre-fascist Italy. Mussolini’s ambitions in the Mediterranean sea were, in fact, the same of the Italian governments in the liberal age, i. e. the conquer of a political, economical and strategic hegemony in the so-called “mare nostrum”. Fascist “Islamic policy” tried
to fight French and British influence in the Near East, not only by traditional diplomatic and political means, but appealing directly to the Arab peoples, to their political and intellectual élites, and to their public opinion. This policy was carried out mostly by a massive propagandistic
campaign in the Arab world, conducted through modern media such as press, radio and, to a lesser extent, cinema. In Lebanon and Syria, where the press was more developed and influent than in the rest of the Arab countries (with the exception of Egypt), Italian subventions to the newspapers
played a central role, in the attempt to gain political influence, and to curb that of France. But, in order to compete with French cultural influence in the Levant, Italian government also promoted the creation and improvement of Italian schools, charities, and all the activities that could earn prestige to Italy, like sport associations, and the society life of the Italian communities. The French authorities, worried for the blows that Italian propaganda could inflict to their prestige,
contrasted it with an increasing decision, especially after the Popular Front’s victory. But the final failure of fascist “Islamic policy”, before World War II, was not due to the French reaction, or – as some historians wrote – to the fact that Mussolini’s “Arab policy” was just a means to exert pressure on Great Britain, in order to achieve a “general agreement” in the Mediterranean sea. The
Italian “Islamic policy” failed because the Arabs were not attracted by fascist ideology, and even less by Mussolini’s policies. The ephemeral consent gained by the “duce” in the Arab world, between the conquer of Ethiopia and the Easter Pact, was due to the illusion that fascist Italy could
be an ally for the Arab nationalism, against French and British presence in the Near and Middle East. This hope was wiped out by a series of Italian actions, in foreign and colonial policy; and in 1939, after the aggression to Albania, Italian prestige in the Arab world was virtually as low as it was at the beginning of the decade, when ‘Umar al-Mukhtar had been hanged in Cyrenaica
Power laws in software systems
Get PDFThe main topic of my PhD has been the study of power laws in software systems within the perspective of describing software quality. My PhD research contributes
to a recent stream of studies in software engineering, where the investigation of power laws in software systems has become widely popular in recent years, since
they appear on an incredible variety of different software quantities and properties, like, for example, software metrics, software faults, refactoring, Java byte-code, module dependencies, software fractal dimension, lines of code, software packages and so on.
The common presence of power laws suggests that software systems belong to the much larger category of complex systems, where typically self organization, fractality and emerging phenomena occur. Often my work involved the determination of a complex graph associated to the software system, defining the so called “complex software network”. For such complex software networks I analyzed different network metrics and I studied their relationships with software quality. In this PhD I took advantage of the theory of complex systems in order to study, to explain and sometimes to forecast properties and behavior of software systems. Thus my work involved the empirical study of many different statistical properties of software, in particular metrics, faults and refactorings, the construction and
the application of statistical models for explaining such statistical properties, the implementation and the optimization of algorithms able to model their behavior, the introduction of metrics borrowed from Social Network Analysis (SNA) for describing relationships and dependencies among software modules. More specifically, my research activity regarded the followings topics: Bugs, power laws and software quality
In [1] [7] [16] [20] [21] [22] module faultness and its implications on software
quality are investigated. I studied data mining from CVS repositories of two large OO projects, Eclipse and Netbeans, focusing on “fixing- issue” commits, and compared static traditional approaches, like Knowledge Engineering, to dynamic approaches based on Machine Learning techniques. The work compares for the first time performances of Machine Learning (ML) techniques to automatic classify
“fixing-issues” among message commits. Our study calculates precision and recall of different Machine Learning Classifiers for the correct classification of issue-
reporting commits. The results show that some ML classifiers can correctly classify up to 99.9% of such commits. In [22] Java software systems are treated as complex graphs, where nodes represent a Java file - called compilation unit (CU) - and an edges represent a relations
between them. The distribution of the number of bugs per CU, exhibits a power-law behavior in the tail, as well as the number of CUs influenced by a specific bug.
The exam of the evolution of software metrics across different releases allows to understand how relationships among CUs metrics and CUs faultness change with time.
In [1] module faultness is further discussed from a statistical perspective, using as case studies five versions of Eclipse, to show how log-normal, Double Pareto
and Yule-Simon statistical distributions may fit the empirical bug distribution at least as well as the Weibull distribution proposed by Zhang. In particular, I discuss how some of these alternative distributions provide both a superior fit to empirical data and a theoretical motivation to be used for modeling the bug generation process. Further studies reported in [3] present a model based on the
Yule process, able to explain the evolution of some properties of large object- oriented software systems. Four system properties related to code production of
four large object-oriented software systems – Eclipse, Netbeans, JDK and Ant are analyzed. The properties analyzed, namely the naming of variables and methods, the
call to methods and the inheritance hierarchies, show a power-law distribution. A software simulation allows to verify the goodness of the model, finding a very
good correspondence between empirical data of subsequent software versions, and the prediction of the model presented. In [18], [19] and [23] three algorithms for
an efficient implementation of the preferential attachment mechanism lying at the core of the Yule process are developed, and their efficiency in generating power-
law distribution for different properties of Object Oriented (OO) software systems is discussed.
Software metrics and SNA metrics In [2] [8] [13] [17] software metrics related to quality are analyzed and some
metrics borrowed from the Social Network Analysis are applied to OO software graphs. In OO systems the modules are the classes, interconnected with each other
by relationships like inheritance and dependency. It is possible to represent OO systems as software networks, where the classes are the network nodes and the
relationships among classes are the network edges. Social Networks metrics, as for instance, the EGO metrics, allow to identify the role of each single node in the
information flow through the network, being related to software modules and their dependencies. In [2] these metrics are compared with other traditional software
metrics, like the Chidamber-Kemerer suite, and software graph metrics. The exam of the empirical distributions of all the metrics across the software modules of
several releases of two large Java systems systematically shows fat-tails for all the metrics. Moreover, the various metric distributions look very similar and consistent across all system releases and are also very similar in both systems. Analytical distribution functions suitable for describing and studying the observed distributions are also provided. The work in [17] presents an extensive
analysis of software metrics for 111 object-oriented systems written in Java. For each system, we considered 18 traditional metrics such as LOC and Chidamber and
Kemerer metrics, as well as metrics derived from complex network theory and social network analysis, computed at class level. Most metrics follow a leptokurtotic
distribution. Only a couple of metrics have patent normal behavior while some others are very irregular, and even bimodal. The statistics gathered allow to study and discuss the variability of metrics along different systems.
In [8] a preliminary and exploratory analysis of the Eclipse subprojects is presented, using a joint application of SNA and traditional software metrics. The
entire set of metrics has been summarized performing a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and obtaining a very reduced number of independent principal
components, which allow to represent the classes into a space where they show typical patterns. The preliminary results show how the joint application of
traditional and network software metrics may be used to identify subprojects developed with similar functionalities and scopes. In [13] the software graphs of
96 systems of the Java Qualitas Corpus are anlyzed, parsing the source code and identifying the dependencies among classes. Twelve software metrics were analyzed,
nine borrowed from Social Net- work Analysis (SNA), and three more traditional software metrics, such as Loc, Fan-in and Fan-out. The results show how the metrics can be partitioned in groups for almost the whole Java Qualitas Corpus, and that such grouping can provide insights on the topology of software networks. For two systems, Eclipse and Netbeans, we computed also the number of bugs, identifying the bugs affecting each class, and finding that some SNA metrics are highly correlated with bugs, while others are strongly anti-correlated. Software fractal dimension
In [6] [12] [14] [15] the self similar structure of software networks is used to introduce the fractal dimension as a global software metric associated to software
quality, at the system level and at the subproject level. In [6] the source code of various releases of two large OO Open Source (OS) Java software systems, Eclipse and Netbeans is analyzed, investigating the complexity of the whole release and of its subprojects. In all examined cases there exists a scaling region where it is possible to compute a self-similar coefficient, the fractal
dimension, using “the box counting method”. Results show that this measure looks fairly related to software quality, acting as a global quality software metric. In
particular, we computed the defects of each software system and we found a clear correlation among the number of defects in the system, or in a subproject, and its
fractal dimension. This correlation exists across all the subprojects and also along the time evolution of the software systems, as new releases are delivered.
In [14] software systems are considered as complex networks which have a self- similar structure under a length-scale transformation. On such complex software networks a self-similar coefficient is computed, also known as fractal dimension, using "the box counting method”. Several releases of the publically available
Eclipse software system were analyzed, calculating the fractal dimension for twenty sub-projects, randomly chosen, for every release, as well as for each release as a whole. Our results display an overall consistency among the sub-
projects and among all the analyzed releases. The study founds a very good correlation between the fractal dimension and the number of bugs for Eclipse and
for twenty sub-projects. This result suggests that the fractal dimension could be considered as a global quality metric for large software systems. Works [12] and
[15] propose an algorithm for computing the fractal dimension of a software network, and compare its performances with two other algorithms. Object of study
are various large, object-oriented software systems. We built the associated graph for each system, also known as software network, analyzing the binary relationships (dependencies), among classes. We found that the structure of such software networks is self-similar under a length-scale transformation. The fractal
dimension of these networks is computed using a Merge algorithm, first devised by the authors, a Greedy Coloring algorithm, based on the equivalence with the graph
coloring problem, and a Simulated Annealing algorithm, largely used for efficiently determining minima in multi-dimensional problems. Our study examines
both efficiency and accuracy, showing that the Merge algorithm is the most efficient, while the Simulated Annealing is the most accurate. The Greeding
Coloring algorithm lays in between the two, having speed very close to the Merge algorithm, and accuracy comparable to the Simulated Annealing algorithm. 1.b Further research activity In [4] [9] [10] [11] the problem of software refactoring is analyzed. The study reported in [4] analyzes the effect of particular refactorings on class coupling
for different releases of four Object Oriented (OO) Open Source (OS) Java software systems: Azureus, Jtopen, Jedit and Tomcat, as representative of general Java OS
systems. Specifically, the “add parameter” to a method and “remove parameter” from a method refactorings, as defined according to Fowler’s dictionary, may influence
class coupling changing fan-in and fan-out of classes they are applied to. The work investigates, both qualitatively and quantitatively, what is the global
effect of the application of such refactorings, providing best fitting statistical distributions able to describe the changes in fan-in and fan-out couplings. A
detailed analysis of the best fitting parameters and of their changes when refactoring occurs, has been performed, estimating the effect of refactoring on coupling before it is applied. Such estimates may help in determining refactoring costs and benefits . In [9] a study of the effect of fan-in and fan-out metrics is performed from the
perspective of two refactorings, “add parameter to” and “remove parameter from” a method, collecting these two refactorings from multiple releases of the Tomcat
open source system. Results show significant differences in the profiles of statistical distributions of fan-in and fan-out between refactored and not refactored classes. A strong over-arching theme emerged: developers seemed to
focus on the refactoring of classes with relatively high fan-in and fan-out values rather than classes with high values in any one. In [10] is considered for the first time how a single refactoring modified these metric values, what happened when refactorings had been applied to a single class in unison and finally, what influence a set of refactorings had on the shape of FanIn and FanOut
distributions. Results indicated that, on average, refactored classes tended to have larger FanIn and FanOut values when compared with non-refactored classes.
Where evidence of multiple (different) refactorings applied to the same class was found, the net effect (in terms of FanIn and FanOut coupling values) was negligible. In [11] is shown how highly-coupled classes were more prone to
refactoring, particularly through a set of ‘core’ refactorings. However, wide variations were found across systems for our chosen measures of coupling namely,
fan-in and fan-out. Specific individual refactorings were also explored to gain an understanding of why these differences may have occurred. An exploration of open
questions through the extraction of fifty-two of Fowler’s catalog of refactorings drawn from versions of four open-source systems is accomplished, comparing the
coupling characteristics of each set of refactored classes with the corresponding set of non-refactored classes.
In [7] I presented some preliminary studies also on the relationships about Micro- patterns, more specifically anti-patterns, and software quality, while in [5] and
[21] I analyzed the role of Agile methodologies in software production and the relationships with software quality and the presence of bugs
Some proposals for combining ensemble classifiers
Get PDFMost real-world pattern recognition problems are too complex to be efficiently handled using standard classification methods. Large number of classes or feature vectors, dataset sparsity, classes having high overlap, low number of samples available, and the need for online-training and classification are just some of the complexity issues that should be considered while designing a classification system. Some important examples that come from real-world applications are text categorization (characterized by large number of categories and words, sparsity of data and hierarchical relationships between class concepts) and cancer cell diognosis based on gene expression microarray information (HDLSS1 problem).
Combining classifiers (in pattern recognition) or ensemble learning (in machine learning), based on the divide and conquer principle, has proved to be efficient in many of these complex situations. Ensemble methods such as bagging, boosting, Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC), Mixture of Experts (ME) and random forests use a combination of simple
classifiers, working in a cooperative manner, instead of a single classifier responsible for the entire task. These approaches are able to obtain better recognition rates (bias reduction) and furthermore stabilize predictions (variance reduction). This PhD thesis mainly focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of ensemble learning
and multiple classifier systems. The novelty comes from developing new ideas by extending some classical approaches and standard algorithms, such as ME, random oracles, and ECOC. Two newer versions of ME, HME and random oracle have been proposed with the result of boosting their accuracy and efficiency. The standard ECOC method has also been extended, giving rise to the Multi-Label ECOC (ML-ECOC, hereinafter). The proposed ideas and methods have been assessed not only using publicly available benchmark datasets (from the UCI repository), as some real-world application areas have also been used for experiments.
The thesis is organized as follows: in chapter 1, a quick introduction to multiple classifier systems is given and some important algorithms described in the literature (such as bagging, boosting, random oracle, ME and ECOC) are briefly recalled. The main characteristics, pros, and cons of these algorithms different algorithms are also reported (this information may be helpful to identify which methods are expected to work better for a given problem). Chapter 2 describes the proposed Random Prototype-based Oracle (RPO) method, which is an ensemble of miniensembles. Inspired by the random linear oracle model, the proposed method divides the problem space (i.e., the sample space) into smaller and hopefully simpler subspaces using randomly selected prototype points, rather than using hyperplanes as done
with standard linear oracles. RPO has the advantage of decomposing the orginal problem into two or more subspaces, whereas linear oracles have the limitation of enforcing only
binary decomposition. Continuing with the idea of random decomposition of a complex problem, chapter 3 proposes Mixture of Random Prototype-based Experts (MRPE), together with its hierarchical version. Embedding a random prototype for each expert in the ME framework is the main
idea of this method. In so doing, a simple distance-based rule can be used in both training and operation phases of an ME ensemble instead of a trainable gating network that needs to be trained together with the rest of experts. This simple modification boosts accuracy while
reducing the overall time required for training the ensemble. Finally, chapter 4 is about ECOC, applied to a text categorization problem. In the first subsection, we propose a metric extracted from ECOC decoding to better evaluate the label assigned by the classifier. This ECOC-based reliability measure can be used to increase the
confidence of the classifier’s output on the inputs with high risk of mislabeling. The second part of the chapter extends the ECOC algorithm to multi-label problems. To validate the proposed ML-ECOC and compare its performance with the state-of-the-art methods, we apply the ML-ECOC on the real-world problem of multi-label text categorization
Condizioni di conservazione dei suoli su substrati carbonatici assoggettati ad intensa pressione antropica
Get PDFIn Sardinia carbonate environments are present on a surface of 7.2%. In these environments there are phenomena of regression of plant cover (typically Mediterranean) and soil (Alfisol-mollisol-inceptisol-entisol). The causes of the deterioration was due to over-grazing of goats (Capra hircus) of forest cutting and more generally to human activities. The aim of the thesis has been the search for a set of indices of soil degradation and vegetation present in
a basin with an area of 3,377 located in Central East Sardinia, in the resort of Cala Gonone, City of
Dorgali. The research was conducted at a basin scale and detail with a scale of 8 experimental sites dimensions of
5 x 5 m. The basin scale was investigated with the CORINE Soil Erosion Risk method. It was determined the degree of danger potential and current of erosion of the soil with a scale of values ranging from 1 to 3. The High Risk (Level 3) is present on the 0.13% of the basin and is located where the vegetation is sparse and not very structured, with the aggravating circumstance of high gradients. In basin formation most common vegetable, and ecologically more stable, are the woods of holm oak (Quercus ilex L.)
investigated in 8 experimental areas, both in the vegetation (mean height,% cover of soil, density and
biological diversity) with subdivision into 4 layers of vegetation (tree layer, shrub layer, herbaceous layer
and layer of forest regeneration), and organic matter in soil (pH, conductivity, C, CO,% SOM and humic substances). The holm-oak woods are closed formations dominated the tree layer. The forest regeneration is poor because of grazing, however, shows cyclicality. Lacking all the intermediate stages of forest regeneration and mature forest. In the experimental areas there are reports (133 statistically significant correlations with p-level ≤ 0.05 and with R> of 0.7) between the SOM and plant parameters. At present (Poor bibliography) as a general hypothesis, these relationships are due to nutritional aspect. It was concluded that, in the catchment area of Cala Gonone, you must give more attention to the loads of goats, so the effect on soil and vegetation and in particular on forest regeneration. The lack of an adequate stage of regeneration of the forest trees, in the coming decades, with the death of the forest now present, will be a big problem of soil conservation. The major actions should be aimed at containing the grazing
and conversion of different plant formations high trees
Zircon U-PB and LU-HF isotopic data from some peri-gondwana variscan terranes (Sardinia-Corsica block and calabropeloritan arc): new insights on the cenozoic geodynamic evolution of the central mediterranean basin
Get PDFThe reconstruction of pre-Variscan plates configuration in the Mediterranean area, is still poorly understood. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain the relationships between peri-Tyrrhenian blocks such as Sardinia-Corse block (SCB) and Calabrian-Peloritain Arc (CPA), which before the opening of South Tyrrhenian Basin belonged to a branch of Southern Variscan Realm (Alvarez & Shimabukuro, 2009). Is still ambiguous if the CPA in the early time was formed by an amalgamation of two or more continental terranes that collided during Tertiary (Bonardi etal., 1980; Scandone, 1982) or was a single terrane during the middle and late Tertiary (Amodio-Morelli et al., 1976).
With the aim to provide a contribution in unraveling the peri-Tyrrhenian area evolution of the peri-Gondwana terranes, amalgamated during Variscan and widespread during Cainozoic opening (and closing) of Tethys, both Variscan and Tertiary rocks cropping out in the two Blocks have been
investigated, either magmatic or sedimentary. The first part of the research was focused on the magmatic bodies supposed belonging to the European Variscides with the aim to provide more constrains to the Variscan magmatic evolutionand so to draft the analogies between the present-day, separated blocks. In detail, the geochemical
data from magmatic and detrital zircons of the basement rocks highlight analogies or differences between the tectono-sedimentary sectors of the Sardinian Variscides (nappe and foreland zones) and between them and the Calabria Variscides. The geochemical whole rocks analyses and U-Pb data obtained show that the Variscan basement which crops out in the Northern part of the CPA
(Sila region) is characterized by the similar features of that in the SCB: the Middle Ordovician and Late Palaeozoic magmatic products recognized in the two blocks look similar. Some of these data can provide new insights also about the Ordovician evolution of the Northern Gondwana margin. To compare the and better constrain the relationships between the two blocks, detrital zircons
were sampled in Tertiary rocks in NE Sardinia, E Corsica and Calabria, commonly regarded as closely related to the tectonic evolution of the Central-western Mediterranean. The analyses performed suggest some differences on the classical paleo-geographic positions of the SCB respect
to the CPA and some assumptions can be made also about their relationships with other peri-Gondwana terranes. The association of U-Pb and Lu-Hf study performed on Tertiary detrital zircon populations is a good tool to furnish more data for recognize the pre-Variscan inputs suffered by the
peri-Tyrrhenian area, and to highlight differences and similarities between them. The first consideration that can be made is that the two blocks suffered different crustal
evolution. The main difference between them has given by the Grenvillian zircons input studied in the Tertiary deposits. The Southern part of CPA (Aspromonte and Peloritani) is characterized by the lacking of Mesoproterozoic age, whereas the Northern part of CPA (Sila) together with the SCB, are characterized by an important Grenvillian input. These considerations have a geodynamic implications about the misunderstood early evolution of the studied zones The Southern part of
CPA shows strong similarities with Cadomiam terranes, which permit to correlate it with the evolution of Variscides now cropping out in North Africa. The SCB and the Northern part of CPA could be associated to the other European Variscan terranes (e.g. Iberia) characterized by widespread Grenvillian zircons. A supplementary assumption that stem out from these analyses is that the early position of SCB and Northern part of CPA, were possibly close to the Amazonian craton or nearness to the West African craton (Arabian-Nubian shield and the Sahara Metacraton),
quite different from more of the proposed reconstructions.
Finally, considering all these data in the complicated evolution of southern Tyrrhenian basin, here is supported the “two-terrane model” (slightly different from that proposed by Alvarez and Shimabukuro, 2009) which considers the CPA composed by a northern CPA terrane connected with
the SCB from the end of the Variscan orogeny until the almost the Eocene. The southern CPA terrane suffered a different evolution before the opening of the Tyrrhenian Sea. According to the roll-back model of the westward subduction of Adria plate under Europe during Neogene-Pliocene the whole CPA, likely amalgamated in the early Miocene, was then tear apart from SCB and drifted
away eastwards during the open of the South Tyrrhenian basin
Siti istituzionali e trasparenza: dalla legge 241/90 alla legge 69/2009 e alle riforme del Codice dell’amministrazione digitale
Get PDFThis work addresses a theme back in the limelight both in the lexicon and in the community feeling: administrative transparency. “Glass House”, as he said Filippo Turati in 1908 about manner how all public bodies should be; or “House with tinted windows”, as Aldo Sandulli denounced
in an article in 2007, a bitter commentary on the reforms introduced by legislator regarding the right of access?
I have tried to figure out what was the legislative policy that has been lead in relation to these two extremes.
Moreover, if it is true, as taught by the doctrine, by Arena on, that the absolute transparency is a myth unattainable as well as not advisable - because there may
be interest that, in fact, may require confidentiality to protect their best, even temporarily – however, the relationship between transparency and secret can not
be identified just by finding in the first one the rule and in the second one a limited exception. From this study it was found that the administrative transparency, as category
broader than advertising, which relates to a relationship between “genus” and “species”, is mainly an aspect of the administration, an aspiration of public authorities, which is incompatible with the attempt to compress into a single
legal institution. The administrative transparency has its murky origins in the insights of two giants lived in the eighteenth century: Rousseau who was convinced of the
absolute need for visibility of the acts of public bodies, and especially Kant who, in a strong opposition to the absolute rulers and their dominant “arcana imperii”,
go beyond the mere political value in order to assign it a moral significance, by using the famous maxim “All actions relating to the right of other men, whose maximum penalty is not susceptible to advertising, are unjust”. From philosophy through history, and reaching out the right, this work came across the “arcana burocratici”. In fact, investigating since the pre-Unification of Italy, I took both the persistent immanence of the secret and its mutation: born first as synonymous with professional secret, as a consequence of the fiduciary relationship that develops between administrators and administered; however, with the emergence of modern States and of bureaucratic administration, it assumes the guise of a specialized knowledge of the public employee, and this marks the landing to “arcana burocratici”. However, this indomitable strength of the administrative secret must be reckoned, especially since 1948, with the new values introduced by the Constitutional Charter which, even if it never explicitly mentions the transparency, contemplates it again and again as a result of the elasticity of its
principles: from the democratic one to the manifestation of thought one, or to the political rights or the association and assembly rights, and to advertising right,
not to mention the crucial relationship with the principle of impartiality, which all require to resize the strength of administrative secret. This work then gave importance to transparency in ordinary legislation, especially in the Law 241 of 1990, with particular attention to the comparative
perspective of the influences arising from the American FOIA, with its model of free access of public documents without subjective filters, in order to detect the
distance, since the first hour, between the law project designed by the Subcommittee Nigro and the legislator, regarding the right of access to administrative documents, long time considered as the teaching tool that can
perform two functions: to protect individual situations and check public action in a democratic sense. Do not think so the legislator who, since the beginning, relegates it to the mere operation of self-interest and diminish its democratic value, introducing a filter to its use by all citizens that, not only will never fail, but indeed, in subsequent reforming steps, especially in the law n. 15 of 2005, will be accentuated. But these legislative policies, going in the direction opposite to the constitutional
requirements, forcing me to investigate other sources, in particular the Digital Administration Code of 2005 and the operation “Trasparenza” launched by the Minister Brunetta in 2009, in order to assess how the system recovers
constitutional consistency. And so, on the basis of the emergence since the early 90's of the new standard of
communication and maximizing the standard of publicity, this work has noticed that the Italian system was marked by an inexorable passing of the torch of transparency instruments, from the right of access to documents, never too loved by the legislator in terms of transparency, to the on-line publication of information on institutional websites of public bodies. It emerged, based on the new possibilities offered by ICT, a model of transparency as a synonym of potential total accessibility. We move from access to documents to any information accessibility, both the one concerning the activities carried out by institutions, both the one relating to employees. Information that is potentially infinite in number, favoured by the slow passage of the Italian administration to digitization. It is “the triumph of transparency?” Not really: the identified risks are many. From the possible information overload, to the risk of its quality: the accumulation does not guarantee the reliability or fact, nor its significance and hence no guarantee on increasing transparency. Legal issues, such as the adversarial relationship with privacy, that are carried by the counterparties, and technological issues; think of the digital divide still suffered from many Italian citizens who have no access to broadband internet. Finally, in the background, the great fundamental question: why the legislator has staked everything on transparency, as a synonym for release of information on the entities in the network, and cut out of the game the right of access? In the opinion of the writer, when you think in terms of high aspirations, who aspire to ethics and, ultimately, to virtuous behaviours, it would be better to proceed by accumulation and never by exclusion
Gis and mathematical groundwater simulation as tools for hydrogeological conceptual modeling and vulnerability assessment of Porto Torres industrial zone aquifer (nw Sardinia)
Get PDFThe object of this study has been to develop an integrated technique of GIS and groundwater modeling program to improve hydrogeological setting understanding of Porto
Torres industrial zone and to perform intrinsic vulnerability evaluation of the aquifer to contamination. To reach this purpose, GIS interfaced to the hydrogeological software GMS has been used to efficiently manage a wide range of geographical information and data.
Hydrogeological understanding has been facilitated by a tree-dimensional schematization of aquifer domain and by numerical modeling, that has been finalized to provide proof to support or dismiss assumptions made on conceptual model implementation. Finally, based on GIS elaborations and groundwater simulation, SINTACS method has been applied to evaluate vulnerability degree of the Mesozoic aquifer
Studying, developing, and experimenting contextual advertising systems
Get PDFThe World Wide Web has grown so fast in the last decade and it is today a vital daily part of people. The Internet is used for many purposes by an ever growing number of users, mostly for daily activities, tasks, and services.
To face the needs of users, an efficient and effective access to information is required. To deal with this task, the adoption of Information Retrieval and Information Filtering techniques is continuously growing. Information Re-trieval (IR) is the field concerned with searching for documents, information within documents, and metadata about documents, as well as searching for structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web. Infor-
mation Filtering deals with the problem of selecting relevant information for a given user, according to her/his preferences and interest. Nowadays, Web advertising is one of the major sources of income for a large number of websites. Its main goal is to suggest products and services to the still ever growing population of Internet users. Web advertising is aimed at suggesting products and services to the users. A significant part of Web ad-vertising consists of textual ads, the ubiquitous short text messages usually
marked as sponsored links. There are two primary channels for distributing ads: Sponsored Search (or Paid Search Advertising) and Contextual Ad-vertising (or Content Match). Sponsored Search advertising is the task of
displaying ads on the page returned from a Web search engine following a query. Contextual Advertising (CA) displays ads within the content of a generic, third party, webpage. In this thesis I study, develop, and evaluated novel solutions in the field of Contextual Advertising. In particular, I studied and developed novel text summarization techniques, I adopted a novel semantic approach, I studied and adopted collaborative approaches, I started a conjunct study of Contex-tual Advertising and Geo-Localization, and I study the task of advertising
in the field of Multi-Modal Aggregation. The thesis is organized as follows. In Chapter 1, we briefly describe the
main aspects of Information Retrieval. Following, the Chapter 2 shows the problem of Contextual Advertising and describes the main contributes of the literature. Chapter 3 sketches a typical adopted approach and the eval-uation metrics of a Contextual Advertising system. Chapter 4 is related to the syntactic aspects, and its focus is on text summarization. In Chapter 5 the semantic aspects are taken into account, and a novel approach based on ConceptNet is proposed. Chapter 6 proposes a novel view of CA by the
adoption of a collaborative filtering approach. Chapter 7 shows a prelim-inary study of Geo Location, performed in collaboration with the Yahoo! Research center in Barcelona. The target is to study several techniques
of suggesting localized advertising in the field of mobile applications and search engines. In Chapter 8 is shown a joint work with the RAI Centre for Research and Technological Innovation. The main goal is to study and
propose a system of advertising for Multimodal Aggregation data. Chapter 9 ends this work with conclusions and future directions
Group recommendation with automatic detection and classification of groups
Get PDFThis PhD thesis presents ART (Automatic Recommendation Technologies), a set of group recommendation algorithms that detect groups of users with similar preferences. With respect to classic group recommendation, the first step that such systems have to compute is the detection of groups of people with similar preferences, in order to respect the constraint on the number of recommendations that can be produced and maximize users’ satisfaction
Emissione e dispersione in atmosfera di polveri derivanti da sorgenti diffuse nelle attività estrattive e di ripristino ambientale
Get PDFThe research deals with the emissions of particulate matter, arising from fugitive dust sources in mining remediation activities, and the analysis of dust atmospheric dispersion. The thesis is based on field measurements carried out in some abandoned mines in the south of Sardinia, where reclamation activities are currently in progress. The sampling campaign was performed in order to characterize typical emission sources and assess the dust exposure of the workers employed in the
sampled activities. The environmental impact of the activities under examination has been studied by using a dispersion model, which has allowed to predict ground level dust concentrations on potential receptors located in surrounding areas. The on-site measurements, aimed at characterizing dust emissions, were performed during transit
along a haulage road, operations of material handling and maintenance of tracks and yards. The application of the exposure profile method during the transit along the road has allowed to calculate emission factors, in terms of grams for travelled kilometre, both for PM2.5 and PM10 fractions. The results were comparable with the emission factors suggested by U.S. EPA (U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency). By considering the overall results, the emissions resulted widely variable, depending on the particle size distribution and the moisture content of the surface material. For all sources under examination, the emissions comprise a relevant percentage of coarse particles, with an aerodynamic diameter greater than 10 μm.
As regards working exposure conditions, dust samples, collected during typical work tasks, have been analysed in order to detect silica and metals content. Silica has been found in a few number of samples; the content of As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Mn, Ni, Pb, Sb, Sn, Tl, Zn has been measured in
inhalable dust samples. The contents of lead, zinc and chromium were found to be the highest but all metal concentrations are lower than suggested limit values. A limited number of samples has been analysed in order to study size distribution of metals in the collected dust; all elements under examination tends to concentrate in the finest fraction of the particulate. The dust dispersion phenomenon, arising from the sampled activities, was analysed by using the Gaussian model ADMS. The predicted ground level dust concentrations near potential receptors
were lower than limit values recommended by the current regulations, both for PM2.5 and PM10 fractions. The results can be explained by considering the low emission values, assumed to be representative for the analysed activities, and the instable atmospheric conditions, occurring during
the on-site measurements. These conditions aid plume vertical dispersion, resulting in low ground
level concentrations. The case study under exam does not have important consequences, either for workers health or for environmental impact; the dust concentration values are lower than limit values suggested by current regulations. However, the high content of metals detected in collected dust suggests the need of a continuous monitoring, aimed at assessing occupational exposure and potential environmental impacts on the surrounding areas. The present study confirms the findings of previous researches: the emissions of fugitive dust sources are difficult to quantify because of the diffuse nature of these sources and the large number
of parameters which influence the dust emission rates. Moreover, the atmospheric dispersion phenomenon of fugitive dust is strongly affected by the topography, because the emitting sources have low release heights