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Proposta e sviluppo di nuovi strumenti informali per la didattica e la comunicazione delle Scienze Fisiche
No full textLaboratori per le scuole "Scienza per gioco".
Attività per il pubblico "La Scienza è servita".
Progetto "Esperiteca": la biblioteca degli esperimenti
Cultural diversity and indigenous peoples' land claims: argumentative dynamics and jurisprudential approach in the Americas
No full textThe present study is divided in two differentiable but conceptually interrelated sections. Within the first section (Chapters I, II, and III), the focus is on the assessment of the argumentative logic behind the multiculturalist proposal for equally divided societies, among equally positioned ethno-cultural groups. A critical and analytical review of the multiculturalist argumentative constructions shows that its justification lies on the dogmatic assumption of the equal worth or dignity of cultures, which is ontologically incorrect. Cultures cannot be axiologically compared. Instead, this study proposes a new approach focused on the equal functional value of each culture vis-à-vis the cultural producer and beneficiary (the individual). Therefore, it is argued that multiculturalism plea for equal ethno-cultural partition of the public societal space is based on political aspirations and then subjected to –in open, pluralist and democratic societies– the dynamics and methodological procedures of the so-called ‘democratic game’. The second section of this work (Chapters IV, V, and VI) focuses on the specific case of indigenous peoples from both a theoretical and jurisprudential point of view. First, the very notion of indigenous peoples is deconstructed and critically examined. Their special relationship with their traditional lands has been identified as the main objective characteristic that sustains their claims for cultural distinctiveness and differential legal treatment. Then, Chapters V and VI refer to a critical legal analysis of the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in connection with indigenous peoples’ land claims, and the role that the element of ‘special relationship with traditional lands’ has played in the recognition of their right to communal property over traditional lands as protected by the American Convention on Human Rights (Article 21 ACHR). In this sense, special attention is given to the interpretative methods applied by the Court, and –in particular– its underlined ontological assumptions
Integrated solar thermal facade component for building energy retrofit
No full textIn the perspective of the "Net Zero Energy Buildings" as specified in the EPBP 2010/31/EU, herein a modular unglazed solar thermal facade component for facilitating the installation of active solar thermal facades has been conceived and designed to answer three considerations: (1) easily installable elements, offering high modularity to be sized for the specific needs of the buildings considered, (2) low-price unglazed technology, given by the industrial process already developed for the fridge evaporators, and (3) versatile modules to be used for both new buildings and for existing buildings for energy retrofitting.
The existing buildings stock offers a high-potential opportunity to improve the energy efficiency when using such a system. Indeed, the building envelope elements have a significant impact on energy consumptions and performances of the building, and this is a key aspect to consider during renovation.
Considering buildings integrating solar thermal (BIST) by the means of facade retrofitting of solar thermal collectors (STC) opens up new challenges for engineers. Facade usage, compared to the traditional roof installations, offers two interesting potentialities: (1) increased available surfaces, and (2) minimization of the unwanted overheating problem, that appears in summer, thanks to the vertical tilt (as the energy production is almost constant over the year). This allows sizing the STC according to the actual heat needs and avoids as much as possible energy fluxes mismatch.
The design methodology of such a modular component is the main contribution of the PhD work.
The challenges are tackled via a parametric approach. Dynamic simulation tools support the design choices for the energy systems of BIST and to optimize the interactions between the envelope and the STC with the criteria of reducing the overall energy consumption. This methodology is described and applied to the design of a modular prototype of an innovative facade component integrating unglazed STC.
We first analyze a variety of typologies of buildings as potential commercial targets of the facade component of unglazed STC integrated facade element. Both residential and non residential buildings are considered. The purpose of this analysis is to match the heat loads for properly sizing the facade elements for each typology.
Benchmark models of buildings from the Department of Energy are used such as multifamily houses, hospitals, big and small hotels, schools, offices. These are simulated through EnergyPlus in three European locations (Stockholm, Zurich and Rome) in order to define the yearly heat loads for domestic hot water (DHW) and space heating (SH) needs.
Finally, the prototype is conceived and designed as a low-cost product to implement into facades with the criteria of optimizing the energy production. The unglazed STC is combined with a simple configuration of combisystem in order to define some rule of thumbs through Trnsys. By the fact that the energy is produced at lower temperatures, if compared with glazed flat plate collectors, this technology is potential applicable to those buildings having the proper heat loads and the suitable system layout
"Fugienda petimus": la "Phaedra" di Seneca come sistema complesso di antitesi
No full textIl progetto di tesi intrapreso in questi anni si inserisce nel solco dei fecondi studi sul teatro senecano e si concentra in special modo su un dramma: la Phaedra.
L'obiettivo dell'analisi messa in atto sulla tragedia è quello di porre in evidenza l'esistenza di un sistema di antitesi costruito su più livelli sia sotto il profilo formale che contenutistico, individuando in questo sistema una delle chiavi di lettura privilegiate del dramma.
La complessa impalcatura antitetica sulla quale l'opera si fonda risente in larga misura dei modelli e delle influenze che maggiormente agirono su Seneca nella costruzione e nelal scelta stessa di trattare il dramma di Fedra. Il modello greco dell'Ippolito Coronato e la stessa tradizione del conflitto tragico greco oltre ad offrire a Seneca un punto di partenza per costruire la vicenda, costituiscono altresì un interessante modello per quanto concerne la realizzazione di situazioni contrastive oltre che per l'elaborazione di personaggi, sia di natura divina che umana, completamente antitetici (basti pensare alla significativa opposizione fra Afrodite a Artemide).
Sul piano formale, ma non solo, ad influenzare in maniera massiccia l'operazione messa in atto dal Cordovese è sicuramente il modello della Controversia, largamente operante nella Roma del suo tempo. La tradizione del conflitto e l'abitudine a strutturare gli argomenti per antitesi rappresenta in effetti un importante portato della tradizione retorica che riguarda sia il piano dell'inventio che quello della dispositio oltre ad manifestare la sua influenza sull'aspetto più propriamente stilistico sino alle microstrutture delle sententiae antitetiche.
Benché la vasta critica senecana non abbia mancato di mettere in luce taluni elementi di antitesi presenti all'interno della Phaedra, la novità dell'analisi svolta consiste nell'inserire questi contrasti all'interno di un vero e propria sistema di antitesi. L'indagine trasversale svolta sulla tragedia ha infatti permesso di delineare una serie di ampli percorsi antitetici relativi ad alcuni temi fondanti del dramma stesso.
In maniera originale rispetto a quanto effettuato sinora dalla critica, le antitesi maggiori e, per così dire, costitutive, della Phaedra – l'opposizione fra le divinità di Diana e e Venere, le antitesi spaziali fra aula e silva e fra mare e terra e quella fra vita secondo o contro natura; il conflitto parentale, per citare solo alcuni dei contrasti affrontati – sono state trattate a fondo ed esaminate nel loro andamento nel corso dell'intera tragedia individuando gli sviluppi, i mutamenti, i ribaltamenti che avvengono al loro interno, tenendo sempre conto dei modelli latini più significativi e istituendo, ove ciò sia sia rivelato possibile, un proficuo confronto con il resto della drammaturgia senecana, senza mai trascurare il necessario richiamo al modello euripideo
Notes from the Suburb: the Image of Helsinki in the works by Kjell Westö
No full textMy doctoral thesis aims at analysing the suburbs of Helsinki as the urban space where the social, economic, cultural and linguistic transformations of the Finnish post-war society took place.
Starting with the neo-marxist discourse elaborated by Marshall Berman in his essay "All that is solid melts into air", and taking into account contributions from the neo-marxist school, such as Pierre Bourdieau's, Terry Eagleton's and Rickard Graneau's, my thesis explores a selection of the works by the Finnish-Swedish writer Kjell Westö (1961), where the transformations of Helsinki during the second half of the century seem to reflect the country's opening to post-war capitalism.
After a survey about Finnish modern history,my study focuses on the linguistic contraposition between the Finnish-speaking majority and the the Swedish-speaking minority as it has evolved during the Nineteenth and Twentieth century, trying to re-consider the concept of official language as a reliable means to help different communities to live side by side in the same space
Distributed Identity Management
No full textSemantics is a local and a global problem at the same time. Local because is in the mind of the people who have personal interpretations, and global because we need to reach a common understanding by sharing and aligning these personal interpretations.
As opposed to current state-of-the-art approaches based on a two layer architecture (local and global), we deal with this problem by designing a general three layer architecture rooted on the personal, social, and universal levels. The new intermediate social level acts as a global level for the personal level, where semantics is managed around communities focusing on specific domains, and as local for the universal level as it only deals with one part of universal knowledge.
For any of these layers there are three main components of knowledge that helps us encode the semantics at the right granularity. These are:
i) Concrete knowledge, which allows us to achieve semantic compatibility at the level of entities, the things we want to talk about;
ii) Schematic knowledge, which defines the structure and methods of the entities; and
iii) Background knowledge, which enables compatibility at the language level used to describe and structure entities.
The contribution of this work is threefold:
i) the definition of general architecture for managing semantics of entities,
ii) the development components of the system based on the architecture; these are structure preserving semantic matching and sense induction algorithms, and
iii) the evaluation of these components with the creation of new gold standards datasets
Privacy elicitation and utilization in distributed data exchange systems
No full textRecently we are assisting to the advent of many data integration projects to allow the cooperation of systems in the more disparate fields (healthcare, finance, education, public security). This trend responds to the increasing needs of data to monitor, compare, correlate and analyse the distributed business processes managed by different institutions and companies for different purposes. As the availability of data in electronic form increases, the risk of improper use of sensitive information is raising also.
In this thesis work we focus on the problem of realising an infrastructure for the data and application integration of systems in the healthcare domain. Our solution is compliant with the privacy regulations, reconciling the visibility requirements of the institutional data consumers with the needs of control and protection of the data subjects. It is an event-based solution which allows to capture the processes going on between the systems to be integrated in a way that is flexible, decoupled and adherent to reality. Our solution enables the sharing of very fine-grained pieces of information to a wide range of consumers still allowing the producers to control who can see what and for what purposes. The architecture minimizes the transit of sensitive information and controls the distribution of events and of their content at a very fine-grained level. In this thesis work we take into account also the impact of the proposed solution on the existing systems ensuring to minimize the effort of companies and institutions in adopting the infrastructure.
As legal privacy regulations are most of the time quite distant from unambiguous IT requirements we investigate the problem of privacy constraints elicitation. Typically privacy constraints are defined manually with a tedious procedure by the IT experts based on the desiderata of the users. This approach is not always yielding the best results as designers lacks the domain knowledge required to produce complete, meaningful and not over-constraining privacy requirements. We believe the user holds the knowledge of the domain and of the data that is necessary to define privacy constraints at the right level of granularity. In particular, we provide a novel approach to privacy constraints elicitation based on the interaction with the user. Our approach derives from high level indications given by the user a concise definition of the privacy constraints directly applicable to the underlying database. Such constraints can be used to further restrict the data values that can appear in a report
Immigrant-native educational gaps: A systematic inquiry into the schooling of children of immigrants throughout the Italian education system
No full textThis dissertation provides an empirical inquiry into the schooling of children of immigrants in Italy. Combining two distinct research strands—i.e., studies on immigrant adaptation and research on social stratification—I regard education as a key factor for the structural integration and the chances of social mobility of children of immigrants in the receiving society. The study contributes to the empirical literature in several respects. First, it adds fresh evidence from a novel destination of international migration, like Italy, which has attracted impressive numbers of immigrants in the past recent years, and which differs from more traditional receiving countries in regard to some key institutional settings and features of the migratory phenomenon. Second, it extends to the national level the empirical research on Italy, which has been almost entirely limited to small-scale and local studies so far. The empirical analyses point to a pronounced disadvantage for children of immigrants in both learning achievement and educational attainment and throughout all educational levels, from primary to upper secondary education. Youths with immigrant background exhibit lower learning achievements, especially in reading; obtain lower marks; and enrol in shorter and vocational oriented schools—which substantially reduce their chances to access tertiary education. Also, they are more likely to leave the education system without obtaining any qualification and thus are more at risk of entering the lower segments of the labor market with limited chances of upward mobility. Although, in general, second-generation children (i.e., native-born children with foreign-born parents) outperform their first-generation counterparts (i.e., foreign-born children with foreign-born parents)—indicating that immigrant generational status is an important determinant of education—differences in the educational outcomes of the first and the second generation appear rather small and are often insignificant. However, highly diverging generational patterns are tacking place between different national-origin groups. Whereas some groups (e.g., Northern and sub-Saharan Africans) display severe disadvantages as well as inconsistent generational gains, some other groups (i.e., Eastern Asians) display a strong progress across generations and are undistinguishable from their native counterparts. In line with previous research carried out in other European countries, social background accounts for large parts of the observed immigrant-native differences—underscoring the key role played by socioeconomic resources in affecting children's educational outcomes in Italy. However, the contribution of social background is heterogeneous across groups, being stronger for the least disadvantaged national-origin groups and weaker for the most disadvantaged ones. Further research is needed to disentangle the mechanisms underlying these diverging patterns as well as to provide an empirical test for hypotheses related to the different social capital endowments of families
Synthesis, Characterization and Functionalization of Iron Oxide Magnetic Nanoparticles for Diagnostics and Therapy of Tumors
No full textIn the last decade nanotechnologies have greatly developed in many research fields such as engineering, electronic, biological and many others. They can offer several possibilities to design tools, to create new techniques or improve the already existing ones, to discover innovative applications. And nanotechonology research is just at the beginning.
One of the most interesting thing of this topic is the size of nanostructures. These materials are thousand times smaller than a cell and have a compatible size with proteins, enzymes and a lot of biological molecules.
For this reason many research groups specialized in biotechnology started to invest people and resources in this new scientific possibility. Following this very promising trend, BIOtech, a research group for biotechnology at the University of Trento, has proposed the Nanosmart project.
Developed together with many prestigious institutes all over the world, this project aims to exploit the nanotechnology possibilities in biological research.
The purpose of this challenge is the design, development and production of magnetic nanoparticles to use them in diagnostics and therapy of cancer disease.
Magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) are spherical agglomerates of iron oxide, few tens of nanometers, which can be exploited in many ways. Being magnetic they can be used as contrast agents in magnetic resonance imaging MRI. Together having a high absorbing coefficient in the radio frequency band, they can locally increase the temperature of the tissues hosts and this being used for hyperthermia treatments.
Entrapping some drugs in one of their multilayers, MNP can be used as inert carriers for drug delivery: due to their small size they can enter biological tissues, cross the plasma membrane of cells and release the drug only on predetermined targets.
My Ph.D. started together with the project; so I had the possibility to follow this research from the beginning. In this years many problems have been handled, many errors have been made, many brilliant ideas have been shelved but also new abilities have been acquired, important collaborations were born and alternative structures have been thought and, fortunately, realized.
Trying to eliminate unnecessary things and focusing on main purpose of this work, in this thesis I want to illustrate just the long “fil rouge” that connects the idea of producing a nanoparticle that can cure tumor to the point of verify its effectiveness
Labor Migration from Uzbekistan: Social and Economic Impacts on Local Development
No full textToday millions of people are working abroad, away from their families and sending money to support the daily needs of their family members in food, clothes, etc. Currently, migrants comprise 3.0% of world population and annually they send more than USD 300 billion, which creates welfare in receiving countries. This research work was mainly concerned with the study of social and economic impacts of external labor migration and incoming remittances on local development in Uzbekistan. The study consists of seven chapters, where a thorough analysis of existing literature and studies in field was done and based on empirical analysis and survey results and case study findings graphic models of the impact of labor migration on sending country was elaborated. Moreover, the work provides recommendations on how to mitigate negative outcomes of out migration of labor force on Uzbekistan and on the ways to increase efficient use of incoming remittances to create sustainable income generation sources for migrants’ households