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Immagini del mondo e forme della politica in Max Weber
No full textL’idea della redenzione era di per sé antichissima, se in essa si include la liberazione dal bisogno, dalla fame, dalla siccità, dalla malattia e – infine – dalla sofferenza e dalla morte. Tuttavia la redenzione acquistò un significato specifico soltanto dove fu espressione di un’''immagine del mondo'' razionalizzata sistematicamente e di una presa di posizione in base a questa. Infatti ciò che la redenzione, secondo il suo senso e la sua qualità psicologica, voleva e poteva significare, dipendeva appunto da quell’immagine del mondo e da questa presa di posizione. […] L’immagine del mondo stabiliva infatti “da che cosa” e “per che cosa” si volesse e – non si dimentichi – si potesse essere “redenti”: da una servitù politica e sociale, in vista di un futuro regno messianico nell’aldiqua […] oppure dai limiti della finitezza che si manifestano nella sofferenza, nella necessità e nella morte, e dalla minaccia delle pene infernali, in vista di un'eterna beatitudine in un'esistenza futura, terrena o paradisiaca (Weber 2002).
Questo appena citato è sostanzialmente l'unico passaggio esplicitamente programmatico e vagamente definitorio che Weber dedica al concetto di “immagine del mondo” [Weltbild]; eppure la scommessa su cui si basa questo lavoro è che sia possibile rintracciare in Weber un uso costante, sotterraneo e implicito del dispositivo “immagine del mondo” nel concreto dell'analisi sociale e storica, nonostante la ritrosia definitoria e il “basso profilo” teorico. Di fatto, è possibile e almeno in parte addirittura inevitabile leggere l'intera Sociologia della religione come una grandiosa galleria di immagini del mondo: una panoramica delle diverse interpretazioni del mondo elaborate dalle religioni universali e delle differenti soggettività che tali Weltbilder hanno plasmato.
Sinteticamente, l'immagine del mondo è una spiegazione e un'interpretazione dell'esistente, una rete di assunti cognitivi sul mondo stesso in grado di definire priorità e gerarchie; pur essendo teoricamente indimostrabili, le immagini del mondo sono praticamente ineludibili, in quanto costituiscono un necessario sistema di orientamento: esse definiscono gli obiettivi da perseguire e i mali da fuggire e in questo modo plasmano il nostro atteggiamento nei confronti di ciò che ci circonda, incentivano determinati comportamenti ed escludono altri dall'orizzonte di ciò che è “sensato”.
Due sono i principali obiettivi della tesi: in primo luogo estrarre e astrarre dal lavoro weberiano uno schema, una “teoria delle immagini del mondo” in grado di essere strumento concettuale utile per l'analisi sociale anche nella contemporaneità; in secondo luogo testare le potenzialità esplicative del concetto di “immagine del mondo” in ambito politico: interpretare cioè le diverse forme politiche come precipitato di differenti immagini del mondo.
1) Non bisogna farsi ingannare dal contesto: le religioni sono solamente un sottoinsieme – per quanto archetipico e particolarmente chiaro – della più ampia categoria delle “immagini del mondo”. Anzi, punto di partenza della riflessione sociale weberiana è che il rapporto tra uomo e mondo è sempre mediato da immagini, non necessariamente religiose; ogni società elabora una propria idea teoreticamente indimostrabile di “bene” e di “male”, e definisce un orizzonte del possibile. Insomma, che si tema la dannazione eterna o la miseria terrena, che si aspiri alla pace dei santi nell'aldilà o alla ricchezza su questa terra, che si pensi il mondo come un cosmo immutabile o come un terreno di scontro tra classi in marcia verso il progresso: si tratta di variabili decisive per lo studio e la comprensione dei comportamenti degli attori sociali, e si tratta di variabili definite esattamente dall'immagine del mondo. Per afferrare il senso degli atteggiamenti e delle dinamiche di una società è quindi necessario rappresentarsi preliminarmente la sua immagine del mondo.
2) Definendo incubi e obiettivi, paure e speranze, l'immagine del mondo plasma l'agire degli individui e di conseguenza impatta necessariamente con la politica. I santi puritani sconfiggono il Leviatano ridicolizzando le sue minacce e le sue promesse: chi temeva solo la dannazione e aspirava solo alla salvezza dell'anima era completamente indifferente alle persecuzioni e alle lusinghe del potere mondano, poiché chi teme Dio non può avere paura di piccoli re. Il socialismo è riuscito ad arruolare nell'esercito proletario masse che per secoli avevano accettato con santa rassegnazione la propria condizione materiale: ciò è stato possibile nel momento in cui il Weltbild socialista è riuscito a tradurre la miseria in sfruttamento; gli “ultimi” cominciano a provare ira nel momento in cui percepiscono la propria subordinazione come ingiusta ed evitabile, eleggendo a nemici non le macchine o il destino, ma specifici rapporti di produzione. Nella tesi si compiono tre carotaggi nella storia politica della modernità europea dimostrando la loro relazione con tre differenti immagini del mondo: Puritanesimo e genesi dei diritti di libertà; armonia degli interessi e liberalismo; socialismo e movimento operaio.
Ultima precisazione: la “teoria delle immagini del mondo” non si configura come un idealismo mascherato. Piuttosto essa costituisce la terza via tra i riduzionismi opposti di tipo materialista (e al giorno d'oggi economicista) e latamente idealista. Essa concepisce dimensione materiale e dimensione immaginativa come ambiti tra loro in reciproca osmosi, ma pure dotati di una loro autonomia. Nell'analisi della contemporaneità, ad esempio, il riferimento al concetto di immagine del mondo consente di tematizzare le mutazioni della soggettività evitando tanto di ridurle a mero riflesso delle trasformazioni del capitalismo contemporaneo, quanto di enfatizzare il lato unicamente culturale senza focalizzare la dimensione materiale
Dionigi Bussola 1612-1687: "moderno Annibale Fontana in questi nostri tempi"
Get PDFLa tesi ricostruisce per la prima volta in modo sistematico il vasto catalogo delle opere realizzate dallo scultore lombardo Dionigi Bussola tra il 1648 e il 1687. Il lavoro è impostato secondo la formula dello studio monografico. Il capitolo introduttivo è dedicato alla fortuna critica dell'artista, a cui seguono il profilo biografico e una serie di capitoli dedicati ai cantieri in cui Bussola ha lavorato: il duomo di Milano, la Certosa di Pavia, l'Accademia Ambrosiana, i sacri monti di Domodossola, Varese, Orta, Varallo e il santuario del Varallino. Un capitolo è inoltre dedicato alle opere realizzate all'interno di svariati edifici religiosi dello stato di Milano. Ogni capitolo è corredato dalle schede delle opere
STS: a Security Requirements Engineering methodology for socio-technical Systems
No full textToday’s software systems are situated within larger socio-technical systems, wherein they interact — by exchanging data and delegating tasks — with other technical components, humans, and organisations. The components (actors) of a socio-technical system are autonomous and loosely controllable. Therefore, when interacting, they may endanger security by, for example, disclosing confidential information, breaking the integrity of others’ data, and relying on untrusted third parties, among others. The design of a secure software system cannot disregard its collocation within a socio-technical context, where security is threatened not only by technical attacks, but also by social and organisational threats. This thesis proposes a tool-supported model-driven methodology, namely STS, for conducting security requirements engineering for socio-technical systems. In STS, security requirements are specified — using the STS-ml requirements modelling language — as social contracts that constrain the social interactions and the responsibilities of the actors in the socio-technical system. A particular feature of STS-ml is that it clearly distinguishes information from its representation — in terms of documents, and separates information flow from the permissions or prohibitions actors specify to others over their interactions. This separation allows STS-ml to support a rich set of security requirements. The requirements models of STS-ml have a formal semantics which enables automated reasoning for detecting possible conflicts among security requirements as well as conflicts between security requirements and actors’ business policies — how they intend to achieve their objectives. Importantly, automated reasoning techniques are proposed to calculate the impact of social threats on actors’ information and their objectives. Modelling and reasoning capabilities are supported by STS-Tool.
The effectiveness of STS methodology in modelling, and ultimately specifying security requirements for various socio-technical systems, is validated with the help of case studies from different domains. We assess the scalability for the implementation of the conflict identification algorithms conducting a scalability study using data from one of the case studies. Finally, we report on the results from user-oriented empirical evaluations of the STS methodology, the STS-ml modelling language, and the STS-Tool. These studies have been conducted over the past three years starting from the initial proposal of the methodology, language, and tool, in order to improve them after each evaluation
Essays on Microfinance, Copperatives and their Impact on Smallholders' Agricultural Technology Use and Efficiency in Ethiopia
No full textFinancial constraints and limited access to markets are the most important obstacles for economic development in developing economies that are largely dependent on agriculture. Lack of access to credit and output markets, in particular, is frequently identified as a key barrier to transformation of subsistence agriculture. The fundamental problems are related to information asymmetry, lack of collateral and limited economies of scale. Innovative institutional mechanisms, in the form of microfinance and producer organizations, offer ways to address information asymmetry and increase scale economies. This dissertation examines the outreach, financial performance and impact of microfinance institutions as well as the key drivers of agricultural cooperatives and its impact on smallholder farmers efficiency in Ethiopia. To meet these objectives four data sets from Ethiopia, one institutional and three household survey data, are used. The analysis of microfinance generally focuses on examining the trade-offs between outreach to the poor and financial sustainability by ownership forms (shareholder owned vs. memberowned). The outreach-financial sustainability trade-offs analyzed first using the institutional survey data. The empirical results show that serving the poor and financial sustainability are challenging objectives to achieve together. There is also evidence that suggests the presence of mission drift. Second, the role of ownership form on outreach, financial performance and cost-efficiency is analyzed within the framework of efficient ownership assignment theories using regression and stochastic cost frontier approaches. This analysis aims at testing whether the commonly held proposition of greater efficiency of shareholder firms in microfinance by policy advocates is empirically supported. The results reject the superiority of shareholder-owned microfinance over financial cooperatives. In fact, the evidence here supports the advantages of member-owned microfinance on cost efficiency and balancing the double bottom-lines of microfinance. Third, the impact of access to microfinance credit on farmers investment on agricultural inputs is assessed using propensity score matching (PSM) and control-function-regression methods that address potential participation selection biases. Results from both approaches show that access to credit increased the use of productivity enhancing inputs among borrower farmers. Indeed, farmers that borrow from financial cooperatives tend to invest more on modern inputs. The analysis of agricultural cooperatives tested theoretical propositions from organizational and the new institutional economics theories on the drivers of agricultural cooperatives incidence and farmers membership and patronage decisions. Discrete choice models are employed for the empirical analysis. The results indicate that the incidence of agricultural cooperatives in Ethiopia is more related to the countervailing market power argument than to the transaction cost reduction hypothesis. Despite open membership polices, the analysis on farmers participation indicates that membership and patronage decisions are related and significantly influenced by location, asset and relational specificities. Finally, the impact analysis estimated technical efficiency gains of membership in agricultural cooperatives and employed matching and stochastic production frontier techniques. The evidence suggests that membership in agricultural cooperatives significantly enhances efficiency gains among smallholder farmers
Spatial assessment of multiple ecosystem services in an Alpine region
Get PDFEcosystem Services (ESs) are the goods and services supplied by ecosystems. In order to fully understand their contribution to human wellbeing, there is a need to identify them, assess their supply, recognise areas where they appear together repeatedly and analyse the
interactions that may exist among them. Most of these tasks are also specifically required by the European Biodiversity Strategy for 2020, which asks Member States, by 2014, to identify key ESs and to spatially assess their supply and demand (European Commission, 2011).
Nevertheless, these are difficult tasks and to date they have been only partly performed: existing studies in fact have typically focused on a small sub-set of ESs and made use of information that poorly reflects the actual variability of the ESs distribution across a region.
The present research aims to fill these gaps, by developing methods involving a wide set of ESs and providing a detailed ESs assessment, based on spatial and statistical analyses. The methods have been tested on an Alpine region of Italy, Trentino. The Alps present a
heterogeneous landscape, resulting from the combination of natural and urbanized environments, that allows the supply of a wide range of ESs. The research has four specific objectives. The first objective focuses on the selection and the representation over specific spatial units of the real supply of multiple ESs. Operatively, 51
experts from the local administrative offices and research institutes have been involved in the selection of the most important ESs and spatial indicators for the case study. The experts identified 25 ESs and 57 representative spatial indicators (1 to 5 indicators for each service), and provided data for indicators mapping. To consider the heterogeneity of the ESs supply across the region, indicators were mapped over 20 different spatial units, including: land cover classes, cadastral parcels, fishing zones and catchments.The second objective is to develop and test a statistical method for identifying key indicators that are spatially-explicit and able to measure the biophysical, socio-cultural and economic values of ESs (both in terms of stock and flow). Spearman pairwise correlation analysis was performed among the indicators of the same service in order to identify the highly correlated ones, hence deemed to provide redundant information. Key indicators were selected among the lowly correlated ones. 35 indicators were selected for the case study (out of the 57 initial
indicators). The analysis showed that there is a minimum number of key indicators for each ES. Accordingly, three general rules were identified for the selection: (i) if the supply of an ES is regulated, both its biophysical-stock and biophysical-flow indicators must be selected, (ii) if multiple stock (flow) biophysical indicators for a single ES are mapped over different spatial units, all stock (flow) indicators must be maintained, (iii) socio-cultural or economic indicators are always selected as key indicators. The third objective is to develop and test a statistical method for defining bundles of ESs, as
sets of spatially correlated services. Principal Component Analysis was used to summarize the information of the 35 indicators, while hierarchical clustering was applied to identify 11 ESs clusters. Clusters were turned into bundles by analyzing the spatial variability of the services due to biophysical (e.g. morphological conditions) and human (e.g. land use) factors. The
results of the analysis show that in Trentino multiple ESs can be grouped in a few number of bundles with a complex shape. In particular, areas with poor ESs supply are grouped in one single bundle and the largest bundle follows the spatial distribution of a single land cover class: i.e. forest.The fourth objective is to develop a method to study interactions among ESs, by combining
statistical and spatial analyses. In fact, the supply of a given ES is correlated with the supply of other ESs and it is affected by multiple external factors. Correlations may be positive when an increase in the supply of one service corresponds to higher supplies of other services (i.e. synergies), or negative when an increase in the supply of one service corresponds to lower supplies of other services (i.e. tradeoffs). The degree of interactions among 35 key indicators is determined by performing a Spearman pairwise correlation analysis. The latter enabled to identify six patterns of ESs interactions, one pattern of tradeoffs and five of synergies. The analysis showed that the local land use management has not compromised the capacity of
ecosystems to provide regulating services while supplying the provisioning ones. The external factors causing the variability of the services across the region were identified and explained by means of spatial and Spearman correlation analyses among the ESs principal components.
Principal components were turned into drivers of change by analyzing the spatial variability of the ESs due to biophysical (e.g. forest density) and human (e.g. land use) factors. Land use management was found as the external factor that causes the greatest variability of the ESs distribution across the region. Within forest areas, forest management activities that involve
loss of vegetation were found as the main drivers of ESs change. This research aimed to consider a wide set of ESs and information able to reflect the actual variability of the services distribution across a region. It proposed a scientifically sound methodology to deal with the main issues of the ESs spatial assessment, that may reveal
efficiently applicable in other geographical areas where ESs are heterogeneously supplied
Effects of using pictures for L2 learning with physical activity in bilinguals
No full textThe aim of this study was to investigate the effects on English vocabulary learning by late Chinese-English bilingual using the picture-association method while performing physical activity. Participants were 40 undergraduate students (18-24 years old) enrolled at Dali University in the 2013 academic year. Both the English proficiency level and the fitness level were determined in order to obtain two comparable groups of participants, the experimental group being requested to perform a physical activity during learning while the control group was in a stationary condition during learning. There were 8 sessions of L2 lexical learning and testing in total, once per week. In addition, there was a delayed test on both experimental tasks one month after the 8th session, without intervening learning trials. Response times (RTs) and accuracy rates were recorded for each task. A two-way repeated measure ANOVA and a t-test were performed for data analysis.
The results showed that the Chinese-English bilingual learner using picture for L2 learning with physical activity performed better not only in the experienced not only in the Word-Picture Verification Task, that tapped the lexical level, but also in the Grammaticality Judgment Task, that tapped the untrained sentence level. This indicates that the physical activity promoted generalization even to the untrained task. The better performance regarded both the Rts and the accuracy, and emerged from the first session in the Word-Picture Verification Task but only from the fourth session in the Grammaticality Judgment Task. This indicates that the effects of the physical activity are modulated by the mode of training and/or complexity of the task. Finally, the better performance of the experimental group emerged also in the delayed condition. This indicates that the effects of the physical activity on vocabulary learning are long-lasting. The patter of results obtained are accounted for by a model that predicts a better L2 vocabulary memory consolidation under physical activity as a consequence of increase cerebral blood flow and/or a more pronounced action of neurotransmitter involved in verbal learning
Prova informatica e diritti fondamentali della persona nel processo penale
No full textLa tesi si propone di approfondire il tema dell’incidenza che le innovazioni in campo tecnologico e informatico hanno sui mezzi di ricerca della prova.
Preliminare all’esame della disciplina positiva è una riflessione sui diritti fondamentali – costituzionali e convenzionali (CEDU e CDFUE) - che le indagini informatiche sono suscettibili di comprimere e limitare. A tal fine vengono esaminati innanzitutto i “classici” diritti fondamentali alla libertà personale, all’inviolabilità del domicilio, alla libertà e segretezza delle comunicazioni e alla libertà di circolazione, inoltre diritti di “nuova generazione”, come i diritti di privacy - riservatezza e tutela dei dati personali -. Infine, prendendo spunto dall’esperienza comparata, e in particolare dalla giurisprudenza costituzionale tedesca, si vaglia l’opportunità di creare nuovi diritti fondamentali, in grado di tutelare la persona di fronte alle sfide poste dal progresso tecnologico.
Una volta delineata la cornice costituzionale di riferimento, vengono presi in considerazione i mezzi di ricerca della prova informatici tipici, così come disciplinati a seguito della ratifica della Convenzione Cybercrime e vengono messe in luce le carenze dell’intervento legislativo che lasciano aperte alcune questioni fondamentali: la natura giuridica dell’attività di clonazione dell’hard disk, cui è strettamente collegato il problema dell’attuazione del contraddittorio con la difesa, le conseguenze derivanti dall’inosservanza delle best practices nel condurre le indagini informatiche, la persistenza dell’interesse al riesame del decreto di sequestro di computer, restituito dopo la clonazione dell’hard disk, il rischio di perquisizioni esplorative, che muovono alla ricerca della notitia criminis. Per quanto riguarda quest’ultimo aspetto, si suggerisce una possibile soluzione, che prende spunto dalla ricerca comparata, ed in particolare dal sistema statunitense. Vengono poi esaminate altre questioni lasciate irrisolte dal legislatore, quali la captazione di comunicazioni vocali effettuate con sistemi VoIP e l’apprensione in tempo reale della posta elettronica. Infine, viene approfondita la complessa tematica della conservazione dei dati di traffico telefonico e telematico – c.d. data retention.
Sul versante delle indagini informatiche non disciplinate dalla legge – pedinamento satellitare e c.d. perquisizioni online – il quesito centrale cui si è cercato di dare risposta è se, allo stato, si tratti di prova atipica oppure piuttosto di prova incostituzionale, propendendo per quest’ultima conclusione.
Da ultimo si sono presi in considerazione i delicati profili di cooperazione giudiziaria, con particolare attenzione alla tutela dei diritti fondamentali della persona. Una cooperazione giudiziaria in materia di acquisizione probatoria che sia rispettosa dei diritti fondamentali dei soggetti coinvolti e che porti a risultati utilizzabili e ammissibili in giudizio presuppone, infatti, l’esistenza di standards investigativi comuni. Con l’entrata in vigore del Trattato di Lisbona, l’Unione europea possiede gli strumenti per dettare disposizioni comuni agli Stati membri in materia di acquisizione probatoria (art. 82 TFUE). A tal fine, riteniamo che la giurisprudenza della Corte di Strasburgo relativa in particolare all’art. 8 CEDU possa costituire una buona base giuridica da cui prendere le mosse
Life Cycle Thinking: Strategies for Sustainable Renovation of Existing Buildings
Get PDFThe project focuses on developing strategies for interventions of sustainable renovation, with the awareness that re-using existing buildings allows to reduce the impact on the environment and also to maintain our cultural sources and ecosystems.
The largest part of the European building stock is composed of buildings older than 30 years that will continue to account for the major portion of it also for the decades to come. These buildings are very important because of their economic, social-cultural and environmental value. Often
built stock needs interventions of renovation in order to meet the actual standard of performance, both from energetic and functional point of view. Recent changes in human life style oblige to modify spaces in a quick way and this necessity has reduced the life of our buildings. For this reason it is fundamental operate on existing buildings reducing the waste production, by using the strategies of the design for de-construction and the reversible
design. To do this, LCA is the best method, because it allows measuring objectively the buildings impact and the environmental benefits of renovations and also it can help in defining the most appropriate materials.
This work presents the analysis of the restoration projects of two industrial buildings in a sustainability perspective. Industrial buildings were chosen as case studies because of their big sizes, good accessibility, flexible internal partitions and large pertinence areas, features which make them good candidate for rehabilitation. The focus point is how to convert this existing estate in a sustainable way, in order to reduce the need for new constructions and optimize the intrinsic qualities of forsaken industrial spaces
Methods, Policies and Technologies for Compliance-aware Management of electronic Health Records
No full textMedical record sharing across healthcare organisations is fundamental for improving quality of care and reducing assistance costs. However, healthcare organisations are still struggling in building cross-organisation data sharing solutions due to strict data protection regulations that varies across states and regions, availability of a variety of technical standards for medical record sharing, and differences among organisations’ IT infrastructures that have been built over the years to satisfy organisations’ specific needs and requirements.
This thesis reports our findings based on various research and industrial projects aiming at connecting healthcare organisations. The primary contributions of this dissertation are:
• A methodology and an execution environment to define and execute cross- organisation data sharing processes in compliance with both data protection regulations and organisations’ requirements. The methodology consists of multiple steps that start with the extraction of compliance requirements from regulations and gathering of business requirements from the involved stakeholders, and end with the definition of data sharing processes and policies to satisfy the collected requirements. The modelling framework that supports the methodology provides to users the modelling tools and guidelines to define the business processes and policies for sharing privacy-sensitive data. The execution framework maps the business processes into actionable operations to manage privacy-sensitive data and data protection policies.
• An event-driven service integration approach to support cross-organisation data sharing. The integration approach focuses on identifying data dependencies among institutions (i.e., data they produce, consume and would like to exchange) in form of events rather than analysing internal data structures. To support this approach, we propose a privacy-aware event-driven data-sharing protocol and a system architecture based on combination of Service Oriented (SOA) and Event Driven (EDA) architectural patterns. The data-sharing protocol and the underlying fine-grained access control policies provide control on the access and dissemination of sensitive information among the involved organisations.
• A set of algorithms to detect and to prevent access control policy violations in data integration caused by the presence of functional dependencies. In data integration typically each source specifies its local access control policies and cannot anticipate the
functional dependencies among sets of attributes (or any other type of data inference) that can arise when data is integrated. Functional dependencies can allow malicious users to obtain prohibited information by linking multiple queries and thus violating the local policies. To solve such issues, we propose algorithms to identify the sets of queries that can lead to such privacy violations. We then propose algorithms to identify additional policies that are able to prevent the identified queries from completion and thus prevent policy violations.
We show how the proposed solutions have been applied in practice in building Electronic Health Record and Business Intelligence systems that involve cross-organisation sharing of privacy-sensitive data. The thesis reports also the validations of the proposed technologies with end-users and privacy experts, and the lessons learned after deploying an instance of the developed system in a multi-organisation scenario in Trentino, Italy
A network medicine approach on microarray and Next generation Sequencing data
No full textThe goal of this thesis is the discovery of a bioinformatics solution for network-based predictive analysis of NGS data, in which network structures can substitute gene lists as a more rich and complex signature of disease. I have focused on methods for network stability, network inference and network comparison, as additional components of the pipeline and as methods to detects outliers in high-throughput datasets. Besides a first work on GEO datasets, the main application of my pipeline has been on original data from the FDA SEQC (Sequencing Quality Control)project. Here I will report some initial findings to which I have contributed with methods and analysis: as the corresponding papers are being submitted. My goal is to provide a comprehensive tool for network reconstruction and network comparison as an R package and user-friendly web service interface available on-line at https://renette.fbk.eu The goal of this thesis is the discovery of a bioinformatics solution for network-based predictive analysis of NGS data, in which network structures can substitute gene lists as a more rich and complex signature of disease. I have focused on methods for network stability, network inference and network comparison, as additional components of the pipeline and as methods to detects outliers in high-throughput datasets. Besides a first work on GEO datasets, the main application of my pipeline has been on original data from the FDA SEQC (Sequencing Quality Control)project. Here I will report some initial findings to which I have contributed with methods and analysis: as the corresponding papers are being submitted. My goal is to provide a comprehensive tool for network reconstruction and network comparison as an R package and user-friendly web service interface available on-line at https://renette.fbk.eu