Suchergebnisse

"Le terre che tremano" di Mario Appelius narra del viaggio in Centroamerica fra il 1928 e il 1929. Asse della narrazione è l'ingerenza degli Stati Uniti nella vicenda storica delle sei repubbliche, sviluppato secondo i dettami del nazionalismo fascista e del progetto di egemonia politica, ideologica e culturale sui paesi del subcontinente. Lo sviluppo della rappresentazione è governato dall'equivalenza fra instabilità politica e instabilità del suolo, fra terremoti e rivoluzioni. Si seguirà pertanto la configurazione narrativa di tale equivalenza che trasforma la geologia in ideologia, riconducendo i segni della natura entro la pratica del discorso coloniale. ; "Le terre che tremano" is a report of Mario Appelius' 1928-1929 travel through Central America.The narration revolves around the USA's interference in the historical development of the six republics. The report embraces the precepts of fascist nationalism with and its aims to establish political, ideological and cultural hegemony on those subcontinental countries. The representation rests on the equivalence, suggested by Appelius, between political and geological instability, between earthquakes and revolutions. The article will trace the narrative design underlying such equivalence in which geology becomes ideology and natural signs are framed within the practices of colonial discourse.

Archivo personal de Franz Hinkelammert. ; Conferencia pronunciada en la inauguración de la segunda promoción del Postgrado Centroamericano en Economía y Planificación del Desarrollo, de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras, Tegucigalpa, marzo de 1980

The Organization of American States (OAS) is an international organization build to promote solidarity and political cooperation among American States. In order to achieve its purposes, it provides a procedure of suspension/expulsion of a member State in case of violation of human rights and fundamental liberties. The chronicle analyzes the procedure and deals with specific cases of Cuba and Honduras.

In this work there is an analysis based on historical inauthentic Information Operations (IOs) detected by Twitter and removed from the social, used as a ground truth, to study patterns of inauthentic and harmful coordination and to compare them with a dataset of Twitter messages recovered using the Twitter APIs and based on the most used hashtags in the selected IOs. These can be considered authentic and harmless, because surely they don't come from users involved in the campaign, banned by Twitter. From the archive, the selected IOs come from Honduras and United Arab Emirates (UAE), which used different information strategies. The first was focused only on political aspects and is based on retweets; the second concerned both political and religious contents and exploited classic conversations. First of all highly coordinated communities (HCCs) are extracted from the whole datasets, composed by the union of authentic and inauthentic tweets, to analyze indexes and behaviours and to see if communities of banned users are isolated from the others. Then, some classifiers are applied to each single user of the datasets. The final purpose is to try to predict through supervised machine learning if users are involved in an inauthentic information operation or not, with high precision score.

Seizing the energy access gap is a central objective in the international agenda, as it is a required precondition to enable sustainable growth, and is it positively interlinked with all other developmental goals. While rural electrification is steadily progressing in many developing areas, a change of pace is in order to achieve universal access in the next ten years. Alongside grid extension and standalone systems, mini-grids are considered a key technical solution to provide cost-effective, high-quality power to hundreds of thousands of people. Their diffusion is, however, hampered by many barriers and constraining factors, such as the lack of adequate governmental policies and unclear regulatory framework, limited access to financing due to unproven business models, and the high capital and operating costs due to lack of effective, standardized practices in the development and design phase. Academic knowledge production should contribute effectively to this complex scenario, by addressing the multiple governmental and industrial stakeholders, with the ultimate goal of establishing an enabling environment in which investments for rural electrification projects are attractive for private developers without relying on grants. The methodological and technical contributions proposed in this work have therefore the specific objective of helping increase the feasibility of mini-grids for rural electrification. The first challenge faced when setting up this research, was the one of data scarcity, that affects the rural electrification sector at multiple levels and makes difficult to develop academic contributions. Therefore, a first, cross-sectoral objective of the research work has been to overcome these limitations by streamlining data acquisition pathways through field missions in developing countries in East Africa (Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda) and Central America (Honduras, Costa Rica). This allowed to establish connections not only with rural communities but also with local universities, governmental entities and companies. These multiple-sided interactions between different entities coming both from developed countries and the global south have been part of the research method and entailed much more than one-sided data transfer. Therefore, they have been studied and conceptualized under the Triple Helix framework. As a first application of this approach, a critical analysis of existing business models for decentralized renewable energy solutions in sub-Saharan Africa has been carried out in partnership with non-profit and private actors, making use of actual operating data obtained from 21 mini-grids. Then, load profile estimation and modeling are tackled, as they are pivotal elements in the mini-grid development process, and are suffering from a lack of general understanding, data and tools to perform them. Two complementary approaches are presented, one based on effective field survey methodologies for the energy need assessment of rural communities and the other based on a clusterization and characterization of load profiles, built upon a unique, open-access database created for this purpose. Then, the optimal design of mini-grids integrating advanced, predictive operating strategies is addressed, with a contribution aimed at increasing their viability by reducing their computational requirements. This line of research, despite being conceived for and applied to case studies from developing countries, is relevant for hybrid mini-grids as a technological solution per se. Therefore, to demonstrate the extension of mini-grid application to isolated areas of developing countries, the case study of an hybridization and demand side management proposal for the mediterranean island of Ustica (Italy) is presented.