Search results for "COMMUNITIES"
showing 10 items of 355 documents
Branding as a lever for resilient transformation
2020
The branding impulse can catalyse tourism and community’s resilience promoting the reactivation of small towns through targeted transformations of built heritage and unused building stock, social innovation initiatives, and new forms of production. It can create a more adaptive process and opportunities for networks of small villages in inner areas where tourism can merge with different work/life models. The B4R work in Sicani hills in Sicily offers a framework for the region’s development and manages to describe a path for activate “reserves of resilience” for new sustainable lifestyles. The settlement development options that the study displays can be used as a model for similar considera…
Have information technologies forgotten pedestrians?
2018
Worldwide, pedestrians make up close to half of all motor-vehicle related fatalities but disproportionally little of the research in Information Technologies (IT) in general and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in particular has aimed at pedestrian safety improvements. This paper analyses and compiles three different ways so that IT and ITS can be used in order to improve mobility and safety of pedestrians in urban spaces: (a) for contacting and/or being localized, (b) for guidance (leading/navigating), (c) for alerting or informing of a danger. The aim is to categorize recent experiences where ITS can improve pedestrians’ mobility and safety so that new ideas based on ITS will be d…
From the Blogosphere into Real Politics: The Use of ICT by the Five Star Movement
2014
Research on ICT and the public discourse often focuses on how ICT can be used to increase citizen participation in political decision-making processes. The Italian Five Star Movement (5SM) represents a novel approach to using ICT to include citizens, and a big challenge for the traditional political actors. The 5SM was initiated outside the established political systems, with the use of Internet tools as cornerstones to promote political actions based on the directly expressed will of citizens. In this paper, based on an exploratory case study approach and informed by the introduction of E-Democracy models, we investigate the role of ICT in various phases of the 5SM, from its birth through …
Tensions in Online Communities: The Case of a Mass Size eParticipation Initiative
2017
Part 4: Critical Reflections; International audience; While Online Communities (OCs) are increasingly used to involve people in organizations and societies, few studies focus on how OC influence political decision making within eParticipation initiatives. This issue is explored through an interpretive case-study of the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), a mass-size eParticipation political initiative recently founded by private citizens. The use of OCs is a common strategy to involve groups of people to easily connect on-line, cooperating on common and shared interests. We here focus on understanding the internal and external forces influencing on the OCs, to better understand how to manage …
A microcosm experiment to evaluate the influence of location and quality of plant residues on residue decomposition and genetic structure of soil mic…
2007
The effects of location (soil surface vs. incorporated in soil) and nature of plant residues on degradation processes and indigenous microbial communities were studied by means of soil microcosms incubation in which the different soil zones influenced by decomposition i.e. residues, soil adjacent to residues (detritusphere) and distant soil unaffected by decomposition (bulk soil) were considered. Plant material decomposition, organic carbon assimilation by the soil microbial biomass and soil inorganic N dynamics were studied with 13 C labelled wheat straw and young rye. The genetic structure of the community in each soil zone were compared between residue locations and type by applying B- a…
REAL HUMANS? : Affective imaginaries of the human and its Others in the Swedish TV series Äkta människor
2019
According to the Swedish science fiction TV series Äkta människor (Real Humans, SVT and Matador film 2012-2014), humanoid robots called “hubots” are replacing the human workforce in care work and assembly line industries. Against the backdrop of current debates about immigration and citizenship in the Nordic countries, this article does a close, contextual reading of the series, exploring how the hubots influence work and family life. We are particularly interested in how hubots tie in with the cultural circulation of affect in relation to Otherness and how responses towards the “not-quite” human or dehumanized Other are negotiated in the present-day Nordic cultural imaginaries. What kinds …
Crop type and altitude are the main drivers of species composition of arable weed vegetation in Tajikistan
2015
Summary The influence of broad-scale environmental factors on the species composition of segetal weed communities in Tajikistan was investigated. The research was conducted throughout the country, analysing plots of root crops as well as cereals from all phytogeographical regions of Tajikistan, with the exception of the eastern Pamir. The study was based on 440 phytosociological relevees sampled between 2009 and 2013 and analysed using direct and indirect ordinations. A set of environmental variables was obtained for each plot: altitude, mean annual precipitation, mean annual temperature, pH, crop type, longitude, latitude and date of sampling (seasonality). Crop type was the major factor d…
Correlation of wood-based components and dewatering properties of waste activated sludge from pulp and paper industry.
2010
Large amounts of wet sludge are produced annually in municipal and industrial wastewater treatment. Already in pulp and paper industry, more than ten million tons of primary sludge, waste activated sludge, and de-inking sludge is generated. Waste activated sludge contains large quantities of bound water, which is difficult to dewater. Low water content would be a matter of high calorific value in incineration but it also has effects on the volume and the quality of the matter to be handled in sludge disposal. In this research waste activated sludges from different pulp and paper mills were chemically characterised and dewatered. Correlations of chemical composition and dewatering properties…
Fostering resilience in Inner Areas. The Sicani case study in Sicily
2022
In recent years, the theme of the regeneration of small centres in fragile and marginal areas has returned to the centre of the Italian debate and public policies, as well as resilience practices in which culturally-based regenera-tion projects, community cooperatives and resettlement processes are based on a spatial dimension capable of playing an active and unprecedented role. The COVID-19 pandemic we are currently experiencing has reignited the debate on fragile areas, reinforcing the perception of those territorial ine-qualities between metropolitan and inner areas exacerbated by the crisis. In fact, the pandemic has further highlighted the serious shortcomings in the provision of servi…
WebTribe: Implicit Community Clustering by Semantic Analysis
2010
International audience; Since the advent of Web 2.0, any user becomes a content provider through personal websites, posts on wikis and forums, recommendations, annotations, etc. In this paper, we propose a method to analyze the interests of users based on their publishing activities, by positioning them into a semantic graph. We describe the WebTribe system that allows to extract topic information from collaborative websites and to query the resulting clusters of users.