Equity in the City: On Measuring Urban (Ine)Quality of Life

We merge contributions from the New Urban Economics and inequality measurement to assess quality of life (QOL) in a given city. We take the point of view of a city planner in favor of an even accessibility to amenities within the city. Instead of the average value of amenities computed in the Roback (1982) QOL index, our index captures the value of its multidimensional "certainty equivalent". We apply this methodology to derive a QOL index for the city of Milan.Urban quality of life, amenities, hedonic prices, inequality index, just city.

The Italian expenditure in transport infrastructure: a survey

The aim of the paper is to analyse the most important quantitative data on Italian expenditures in transport infrastructures (investment and maintenance costs), linking the expenditure with traffic flows. The analysis concerns rail and road networks (both for national and local roads), over the last ten years, and a possible forecast for the next years, thanks to the official previsions of the “Objective Law”. The whole analysis is based on official data. The planned infrastructures will analyzed with taxonomical and cost – benefit approaches, in order to provide a ranking of priority. The results show how the planning of the investment expenditure is still based on different criteria than efficiency. So, the foreseen expenditure will not able to give relevant effects in order to improve the efficiency of the transport system and to obtain better allocative issues.transport expenditure; italy; infrastructure; investment

Business Process Modeling and Quick Prototyping with WebRatio BPM

We describe a software tool called WebRatio BPM that helps close the gap between the modeling of business processes and the design and implementation of the software applications that support their enactment. The main idea is to enhance the degree of automation in the conversion of business process models into application models, defined as abstract, platform-independent representations of the application structure and behavior. Application models are themselves amenable to the semiautomatic transformation into application code, resulting in extremely rapid prototyping and shorter time-to-market. Thanks to the proposed chain of model transformations it is also possible to fine tune the final application in several ways, e.g., by integrating the visual identity of the organization or connecting the business process to legacy applications via Web Services

A finite element method framework for modeling rotating machines with superconducting windings

Electrical machines employing superconductors are attractive solutions in a variety of application domains. Numerical models are powerful and necessary tools to optimize their design and predict their performance. The electromagnetic modeling of superconductors by finite-element method (FEM) is usually based on a power-law resistivity for their electrical behavior. The implementation of such constitutive law in conventional models of electrical machines is quite problematic: the magnetic vector potential directly gives the electric field and requires using a power-law depending on it. This power-law is a non-bounded function that can generate enormous uneven values in low electric field regions that can destroy the reliability of solutions. The method proposed here consists in separating the model of an electrical machine in two parts, where the magnetic field is calculated with the most appropriate formulation: the H-formulation in the part containing the superconductors and the A-formulation in the part containing conventional conductors (and possibly permanent magnets). The main goal of this work is to determine and to correctly apply the continuity conditions on the boundary separating the two regions. Depending on the location of such boundary -- in the fixed or rotating part of the machine -- the conditions that one needs to apply are different. In addition, the application of those conditions requires the use of Lagrange multipliers satisfying the field transforms of the electromagnetic quantities in the two reference systems, the fixed and the rotating one. In this article, several exemplary cases for the possible configurations are presented. In order to emphasize and capture the essential point of this modeling strategy, the discussed examples are rather simple. Nevertheless, they constitute a solid starting point for modeling more complex and realistic devices

Temporal analysis of social media response to live events: The Milano fashion week

Social media response to catastrophic events, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, has received a lot of attention. However, social media are also extremely important in the context of planned events, such as fairs, exhibits, festivals, as they play an essential role in communicating them to fans, interest groups, and the general population. These kinds of events are geo-localized within a city or territory and are scheduled within a public calendar. We consider a specific scenario, the Milano Fashion Week (MFW), which is an important event in our city. We focus our attention on the spreading of social content in time, measuring the delay of the event propagation. We build different clusters of stakeholders (fashion brands), we characterize several features of time propagation and we correlate it to the popularity of involved actors. We show that the clusters by time and popularity are loosely correlated, and therefore the time response cannot be easily inferred. This motivates the development of a predictor through supervised learning in order to anticipate the space cluster of a new brand

Textual and content-based search in repositories of Web application models

Model-driven engineering relies on collections of models, which are the primary artifacts for software development. To enable knowledge sharing and reuse, models need to be managed within repositories, where they can be retrieved upon users’ queries. This article examines two different techniques for indexing and searching model repositories, with a focus on Web development projects encoded in a domain-specific language. Keyword-based and content-based search (also known as query-by-example) are contrasted with respect to the architecture of the system, the processing of models and queries, and the way in which metamodel knowledge can be exploited to improve search. A thorough experimental evaluation is conducted to examine what parameter configurations lead to better accuracy and to offer an insight in what queries are addressed best by each system.</jats:p

A remark on 'Decomposition of bivariate inequality indices by attributes' by Abul Naga and Geoffard, Economics Letters 90 (2006), pp. 362-367

We correct the generalized version of the decomposition of multivariate inequality indices by attributes proposed by Abul Naga and Geoffard "Abul Naga, R. H. and Geoffard, P. Y., 2006. Decomposition of bivariate inequality indices by attributes. Economic Letters 90, pp. 362-367."Multidimensional inequality; Correlation increasing transfers