305,535 research outputs found

    Sperduto nel buio

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    Review of the book Sperduto nel buio, edited by Renzo Renzi in collaboration with Michele Canosa, Gian Luca Farinelli and Nicola Mazzanti

    Polis, Metropolis e/o Ecopolis

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    Dalla tradizione positivista ottocentesca è derivato, come è noto, il mito dello sviluppo continuo dell’industrialesimo e dell’onnipotenza dell’uomo rispetto all’equilibrio biologico del pianeta. Di fatto, i principali sistemi di sviluppo sociale, economico e tecnologico si sono strutturati nella convinzione che le risorse di energia della terra fossero illimitate. Oggi, questa convinzione è palesemente in crisi. I “segnali di allarme” che vengono emessi dai sistemi biologici da cui dipende la vita del pianeta autorizzano Lester Brown ad affermare: “il bisogno di adattare la vita umana simultaneamente alle capacità di rigenerazione dei sistemi biologici della terra è ai limiti delle risorse rinnovabili e richiederà una nuova etica sociale. L’assenza di questa nuova etica è l’adeguamento: l’adeguamento del numero e delle aspirazioni degli esseri umani alle risorse e alla capacità della terra” (1992). L’esplosione a catena della bomba demografica innescata dalla rivoluzione industriale e dilatatasi con legge esponenziale, ha trascinato con se una conseguente esplosione urbana che, potenziata dall’economia consumistica, ha determinato una pressione dell’ambiente naturale, praticamente incontrollabile. In pratica: “la gente sta contemporaneamente in due modi. Come tutte le cose viventii noi abitiamo il mondo naturale, creato lungo 5 miliardi di storia della Terra da processi fisici, chimici e biologici. L’altro mondo è creato da noi; case automobili, fattorie, fabbriche, laboratori, vestiti, cibi, libri, dipinti, musica, poesia (e) poiché vivono entrambi i modi gli uomini sono coinvolti nello scontro fra l’ecosfera e la tecnosfera. Quella che chiamiamo crisi ambientale una sfilza di problemi irrisolti che vanno dagli accumuli di rifiuti tossici allo sconvolgimento del clima planetario, è un prodotto dell’innaturale accoppiamento tra processi ciclici, conservatori e perfettamente coerenti dell’ecosfera e quelli lineari, innovativi, ma ecologicamente disarmonici delle tecnosfere” (B.C.)

    Econeapolis: the park of Sebeto (1987 & 1989)

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    The basin of the Sebeto covers a triangular area of about 20km2, bordered to the north-east by the “Pendino” which saw the first settlement of Neapolis, in 474 B.C., and the hill of Capodichino, now the site of the airport; to the south-east the slopes of Vesuvius; and to the south, the sea. The subsoil is alluvional and volcanic, while the surface soil is prevalently volcanic. The area was always marshy, and it conserved its natural state of equilibrium until it was built over during the last century. In the recent past three factors in particular have compromised this equilibrium: the imposition of a road network, the location of highly polluting factories and the sharp increase in residential density and building activity. The first proposal for the Park of Sebeto goes back to 1987, and was presented during the Exhibition celebrating the 500th Anniversary of the Faculty of Architecture. It derived from the urgent need to liberate the city centre by decentralising factories that produced pollution and redistributing the urban modal points throughout the metropolitan area. The area which can still be safeguarded of the Sebeto basin covers some 900 hectares and was proposed as a Great Park with naturalistic, agricultural and recreational attributes. The project included the repristination of the extant water courses and those which had been suppressed, and the creation of an artificial lake as a catchment area for the flood waters which cause periodic flooding in the eastern area of the city

    Local Restoration for Trees and Arborescences

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    Protocols belonging to the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) route traffic demands on tree topologies that are evaluated through shortest path procedures. In this paper we deal with the problem of assigning costs to the arcs of a network in order to guarantee that SPT protocols efficiently re-route traffic demands in failure situations: namely, without redirecting traffic demands that are not affected by the failure. We say that a communication network has the local tree-restoration property if there exists a set of costs for its arcs such that the above property holds. We show that an undirected network has the local tree-restoration property if and only if it is 2-connected. In particular, we provide a quite simple procedure for assigning costs to the arcs of a 2-connected network so that the property holds. For the directed case, we show that deciding whether a network has the local tree-restoration property is NP-hard, even in some “simple” cases.DISOP

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author, publisher and bookseller : a tripartite synergy in Nigerian book industry

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    This work is about the roles of Author, Publisher and Bookseller in Book development in Nigeria. The paper started by delving into the history of Book Publishing in Nigeria after which it proceeded by defining who an author, a publisher, and a bookseller is and expatiated on the indispensable roles of these key actors in Nigerian Book Industry and in the emerging Information Society. Furthermore, the various constraints to book development were identified while the paper advised on how the Book Industry can be further promoted in Nigeria. However, the paper concluded and made recommendations on how the Book sector can help in enhancing scholarship in the country
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