Relying on previously undisclosed confessions of former mafia members now cooperating with the police, Letizia Paoli provides a clinically accurate portrait of mafia behavior, motivations, and ...structure in Italy. The mafia, Paoli demonstrates, are essentially multifunctional ritual brotherhoods focused above all on retaining and consolidating their local political power base. A truly interdisciplinary work of history, politics, economics, and sociology, Mafia Brotherhoods reveals in dramatic detail the true face of one of the world's most mythologized criminal organizations.
The book provides a chronological account of Sicilian history, interwoven with a series of discussions of Sicilian identity: to show Sicily as a centre of affairs from the Iron Age to the Augustan ...Empire within the context of a fundamentally regional ancient world.
The story-takers Salvio, Paula M
The story-takers,
2017, 2017, 2017-10-13, 2017-10-31
eBook
The Story-Takers charts new territory in public pedagogy through an exploration of the multiple forms of communal protests against the mafia in Sicily. Writing at the rich juncture of cultural, ...feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, Paula M. Salvio draws on visual and textual representations including shrines to those murdered by the mafia, photographs, and literary and cinematic narratives, to explore how trauma and mourning inspire solidarity and a quest for justice among educators, activists, artists, and journalists living and working in Italy. Salvio reveals how the anti-mafia movement is being brought out from behind the curtains, with educators leading the charge. She critically analyses six cases of communal acts of anti-mafia solidarity and argues that transitional justice requires radical approaches to pedagogy that are best informed by journalists, educators, and activists working to remember, not only victims of trauma, but those who resist trauma and violence.
Reading essays, articles, interviews and occasional writings, written between the 60s and the 80s, a substantially constant picture is drawn of what Sciascia says about his region, its identity, the ...history that made it as it is. At the beginning of the period under review, at least in part, there seems to be some optimism about the possibility of achieving positive change. In any case, the writer only made minor changes to the image of a negative condition unaltered through the centuries, which in the face of the disappointments for the present, in turn extends the shadows of him even at the moment lived, already in the mid-60s. Despite the perplexities sometimes declared as to the fact that the Sicilian identity has been able to remain unchanged for centuries, the writer accepts it and sometimes gives in to some clichés.
•Probabilistic models to forecast SPI drought class transitions are proposed.•The models may include exogenous variables (e.g. NAO).•The proposed approach is applied to Sicily region (Italy).•Results ...suggest that drought transitions in Sicily can be affected by NAO index.•Forecasting performance increases when current NAO values are considered.
Since the mid-90s the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) has found widespread use to monitor drought periods at different time scales. Recently, some efforts have been made to analyze the role of SPI for drought forecasting, as well as to estimate transition probabilities between SPI drought classes.
In the present paper probabilistic models for short and middle term forecasting of SPI drought class transition probabilities are presented and extended in order to include information provided by an exogenous variable, such as an index of large scale atmospheric circulation pattern like, for instance, the North Atlantic Oscillation index (NAO). In particular, the proposed models result from evaluating conditional probability of future SPI classes with respect to current SPI (and NAO) classes or current SPI (and NAO) values, under the hypothesis of multivariate normal distribution of the underlying joint variables.
SPI series are computed on average areal precipitation in Sicily region (Italy). As a significant negative correlation exists between NAO and SPI series in Sicily during recent decades, the proposed models are calibrated on the period from 1979 to 2008. Both SPI and NAO values are categorized in four classes. Transition probabilities to future SPI classes are evaluated based on SPI and NAO current classes or values and compared to the corresponding probabilities when NAO is neglected. Results indicate that drought transition probabilities in Sicily are generally affected by NAO index. In particular, transition probabilities related to persisting or worsening drought conditions significantly increase as NAO index tends toward extremely positive values. On the other hand transition probabilities to a less severe drought class decrease as NAO values increase.
Furthermore, application of a simple score approach to quantitatively assess the skill in forecasting of the proposed models shows that assessing transition probabilities to future SPI classes from current SPI and NAO values leads to better results than considering current classes.
Starting in the 1970s, agriculture in Western countries began to progressively lose the critical success factors on which it based its competitive advantage, which was localization. The development ...of both the food industry and organized distribution, the intensification of trade, and the speed of information transfer led to new needs and new scenarios within which new agricultural systems emerged. This research analyzed the changes imposed on the agricultural system by the economic development process and determined the trajectories taken by some agricultural entrepreneurs. The study shows that those agricultural entrepreneurs who have been able to adapt their business strategy to the new production scenarios that have emerged remain competitive in the market, while those who have been passively affected by economic development have resulted in agriculture that in many ways only manages to survive thanks to the contribution of the Common Agricultural Policy and without which it would be ousted from the market.
•We assessed the hazard faced by Sicily coasts related to potential oil spill events.•We simulated 4380 spills using a suite of high resolution models.•Hazard indexes were computed from statistic ...analysis of model results.•Vulnerability of marine protected area has been considered.•A risk index was computed by combining hazard and vulnerabilities.
This work gives an assessment of the hazard faced by Sicily coasts regarding potential offshore surface oil spill events and provides a risk assessment for Sites of Community Importance (SCI) and Special Protection Areas (SPA). A lagrangian module, coupled with a high resolution finite element three dimensional hydrodynamic model, was used to track the ensemble of a large number of surface trajectories followed by particles released over 6 selected areas located inside the Sicily Channel. The analysis was carried out under multiple scenarios of meteorological conditions. Oil evaporation, oil weathering, and shore stranding are also considered. Seasonal hazard maps for different stranding times and seasonal risk maps were then produced for the whole Sicilian coastline. The results highlight that depending on the meteo-marine conditions, particles can reach different areas of the Sicily coast, including its northern side, and illustrate how impacts can be greatly reduced through prompt implementation of mitigation strategies.
A new work-flow is proposed to unify the way the community shares Logistic Regression results for landslide susceptibility purposes. Although Logistic Regression models and methods have been widely ...used in geomorphology for several decades, no standards for presenting results in a consistent way have been adopted; most papers report parameters with different units and interpretations, therefore limiting potential meta-analytic applications. We first summarize the major differences in the geomorphological literature and then investigate each one proposing current best practices and few methodological developments. The latter is mainly represented by a widely used approach in statistics for simultaneous parameter estimation and variable selection in generalized linear models, namely the Least Absolute Shrinkage Selection Operator (LASSO). The North-easternmost sector of Sicily (Italy) is chosen as a straightforward example with well exposed debris flows induced by extreme rainfall.
•A standardization of Binary Logistic Regression analyses for landslide susceptibility is proposed.•A novel variable selection procedure is described.•Rescaled coefficients, variable importance, Jackknife tests, cutoff probability choice and response plots produce comparable results.•Simulations show that k-fold cross-validation with balanced landslide/no-landslide data affects probabilities and overestimate variance.
Low-to-medium temperature fluid reservoirs hosted in carbonate rocks are some of the most promising and unknown geothermal systems. Western Sicily is considered a key exploration area. This paper ...illustrate a multidisciplinary and integrated review of the existing geological, geochemical and geophysical data, mainly acquired during oil and gas explorations since the 1950s, specifically re-analyzed for geothermal purposes, has led to understanding the western Sicily geothermal system as a whole, and to reconstructing the modalities and particular features of the deep fluid circulation within the regional reservoir. The data review suggests the presence of wide groundwater flow systems in the reservoir beneath impervious cap rocks. We identified the main recharge areas, reconstructed the temperature distribution at depth, recognized zones of convective geothermal flow, and depicted the main geothermal fluid flow paths within the reservoir.
We believe that our reconstruction of geothermal fluid circulation is an example of the general behavior of low-to-medium enthalpy geothermal systems hosted in carbonate units on a regional scale. Due to the recent technological developments of binary plants, these systems have become more profitable, not only for geothermal direct uses but also for power production.
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