960 research outputs found
A House in the Form of a City. Casa Ceccarelli in Bologna (1962-63)
No full textThe Casa Ceccarelli in Bologna was designed by Giancarlo De Carlo for the astrophysicist and educator Marcello Ceccarelli in 1961-62, a time when the architect was working on the university settlement Collegio del Colle in Urbino, while his patron was completing the Croce del Nord (Northern Cross) - the first Italian radio telescope - in the Po valley. Born as a sort of experiment between two like-minded and unusual intellectuals, this building was, in De Carlo's words, “a flagrant case of a project-process, or in other words, of architecture” but also a laboratory for studying and testing new spatial inventions in a playful way. The author of this essay has lived in the house since he was a boy, experiencing it as a miniature city surrounded by its countryside and populated by numerous friends who were always there
Introduction. The culture of predictability and the nature of the unpredictable. Life sciences at the crossroad
No full text“Una domanda ai compositori”
No full textLuigi Ceccarelli takes into account the prerogatives of the current technologies referring to the elements pointed out by the critical commentary of the authors quoted inside the proposed “A question to the composers”. Noting that the remarks are more aimed at certain kinds of use, made to cover a lack of ideas, rather than at technology itself, the author points out how, to make music, a level of complexity of higher “logical standard” should be really reached
Toward a New Historiography
No full textThe history of evolutionary biology presents well-established categorizations and
labels that have significantly influenced the imaginary of evolutionism. The
somewhat uncritical understanding and use of such labels demand a thorough
reconsideration of traditional narratives, thus paving the way for new research
avenues to emerge
Problems and issues for service robots in new applications
No full textService robots give the possibility of new fields
of applications for Robotics by wide spreading robots also
into no technical areas. But requirements and goals need to
be carefully revised both in designing and operating specific
solutions. In this paper, main aspects and challenges are discussed
both as problems and advantages in using robots in
service operations for new areas of applications, by taking
particular attention to non engineering aspects that are deduced
from new service areas. In particular, two novel applications,
with direct experience of the author and his team,
are discussed as referring to robots for restoration activity of
historical goods, and robots for physiotherapy rehabilitation
and training, as examples with many very different aspects
and backgrounds, but even with common issues. Key problems
for developing service robots for a successful acceptance
and use by even no technical users can be considered
in terms of specific technical problems for low-cost useroriented
operation systems, but mainly in terms of implications
for human-machine interactions
Oltre la storia delle assicurazioni: rischio e incertezza in età preindustriale
No full textIl saggio discute tre ambiti di storia del rischio verso cui, chi scrive, ha orientato i suoi studi recenti. Il primo sfrutta il potenziale delle digital humanities e riguarda la costruzione di un esteso database on-line di premi assicurativi.
Il secondo affronta la natura composita e plurale che la gestione dei rischi marittimi ha avuto in età preindustriale, dando nuova centralità a forme diverse dall’assicurazione. Il terzo adotta una prospettiva di storia globale per riconsiderare il modo con cui i rischi marittimi erano affrontati nelle economie del Mediterraneo e dell’Estremo Oriente.The essay discusses three lines of research concerning the history of risk that the author has recently developed. The first exploits the potential digital humanities provide and is related to the building of a large on-line database of insurance premiums. The second explores the multiple and composite world of maritime risk management in pre-modern economies, providing a
new light on tools that were alternative to insurance. The third uses a global history approach to reassess the way in which maritime risks have been tackled in the Mediterranean and East-Asian economies
Francesco Umberto Saffiotti and the measuring of children’s intelligence
No full textIn the present work are first outlined the main features of the testing movement in Italy, since the pioneering studies of Ferrari and of Guicciardi and, later, of De Sanctis and Bolaffi.
After reviewing the basic steps of international testing and its main roots, anthropometric and psychiatric, it is stated, on the basis of documents, that seems prevalent in the Italy the second, given the nature of the formation of the first scholars in the field. Are also identified two "generations" of tests in Italy, the first of which appears more closely linked to the experimental laboratory procedures, distinguishing itself from these poorly, while the second has a much smaller connections with such procedures.
In the second part of the work is proposed and analyzed the contribution of Francesco Umberto Saffiotti (1882-1927) on the problems of measuring intelligence in children. After a brief biographical note, are presented the studies of this author, beginning with its historical and methodological analysis. Continuing with the detailed scrutiny that Saffiotti dedicated to the Metric Scale of intelligence of Binet and Simon. Is then exposed, in its salient features, the revision of the Scale advanced by Saffiotti and Zaccaria Treves, then director of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology in Milan. Closes the contribution a brief survey of the views expressed by foreign scholars on the Saffiotti’s revision
Unity and Disunity in Evolutionary Biology : Deconstructing Darwinism
No full textIt is not uncommon to see in major areas of research concerned with science that historical studies are accompanied by the rise of complementary or contradictory historiographies. With time, it seems, scholars discover new approaches to study topics, thus questioning old concepts, traditions, periodizations and historical labels. Apparently, this has not been the case in evolutionary thought. In that area, the main historiographic labels such as Darwinian Revolution, Eclipse of Darwinism, and Modern Synthesis have been in place and largely uncontested for about 50 years. Such labels seem to work as irrefutable, and often hidden, premises of many historical reconstructions, philosophical analyses, and scientific conceptualizations.
This volume aims to move beyond this state of affair, opening new thinking avenues by revisiting the traditional historiography and laying the groundwork for establishing a “new historiography” that considers the intertwined threads that compose evolutionary biology. Notably, evolutionary studies seem to have been marked by the tension between unification attempts and the proliferation of approaches, methodologies, and styles of thinking. As the contributors to this volume illustrate, research traditions branched off throughout the history of evolutionary thought, before and after Charles Darwin. The resulting complexity challenges traditional thinking categories, throwing a somewhat different light on a more recent label like the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.
More than 40 years after the now classic, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (1980), edited by Ernst Mayr and William Provine, the contributors to this volume aim to reevaluate where evolutionary biology stands today
Uncompromising Empiricism Once Again : Big Data and the Case of Numerical Taxonomy
No full textBig Data are not rough data or mere tools. They foreshadow epistemological
and ethical changes and raise issues as to the nature of knowledge and the
categorization of reality. In this paper, we aim to analyse the so-called “data
science” from a historical and epistemological perspective. We will first consider
how, in the name of a new and uncompromising empiricism, a reconfiguration
of the traditional view of causality in science is claimed on the basis
of data analytics. Secondly, we will investigate a historical antecedent of the
current debate by comparing these claims with the ones raised by Numerical
Taxonomy, or Phenetics, in the second half of the twentieth century. This will
allow us to highlight how the opposition between knowledge-driven science
and data-driven science resurfaces in the debate about Big Data science
SEL: A unified algorithm for salient entity linking
No full textThe entity linking task consists in automatically identifying and linking the entities mentioned in a text to their uniform resource identifiers in a given knowledge base. This task is very challenging due to its natural language ambiguity. However, not all the entities mentioned in the document have the same utility in understanding the topics being discussed. Thus, the related problem of identifying the most relevant entities present in the document, also known as salient entities (SE), is attracting increasing interest. In this paper, we propose salient entity linking, a novel supervised 2-step algorithm comprehensively addressing both entity linking and saliency detection. The first step is aimed at identifying a set of candidate entities that are likely to be mentioned in the document. The second step, besides detecting linked entities, also scores them according to their saliency. Experiments conducted on 2 different data sets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art competitors and is able to detect SE with high accuracy. Furthermore, we used salient entity linking for extractive text summarization. We found that entity saliency can be incorporated into text summarizers to extract salient sentences from text. The resulting summarizers outperform well-known summarization systems, proving the importance of using the SE information
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