Giuseppe Pagano: a rationalist caught between theories & practices of fascist Italy

The architecture of a modern building is viewed and defined as a whole: the so-called decorative detail does not exist, only the intelligent and strictly controlled technical detail. The aesthetic basis—both social and technical at the same time—of modern architecture is reproduced in the three-dimensional composition.

The institutional concealment of the Romanies’ culture: the ongoing legacy of Fascist Italy

This paper presents the case of the Romanies in Italy and the ‘forgotten’ nature of their genocide. The crimes committed by the Fascist regime towards these peoples during the Second World War were not disclosed until recently. In past decades it was commonly believed that Fascism had targeted Romanies merely as a problem of ‘public order’, rather than as a racial issue. This study argues that a lack of official acknowledgement, together with recent authoritarian approaches towards them (such as the introduction of 2008 ‘Nomad Emergency’ and the ongoing adoption of the highly criticized ‘camps policy’), could all be interpreted as an indirect consequence of the government's incapacity to deal with a shameful past and its unbroken ties. The existence of ‘gaps’ in Italian collective memory is now harming the health of Italy's democratic polity, allowing racism to re-emerge, while resuscitating a deep-seated belief in the ‘legendary generosity’ of Italians.

The core of the global warming problem: energy

From the thermodynamic point of view, the global warming problem is an ''energy balance'' problem. The heat (energy) accumulation in the earth and its atmosphere is the cause of the global warming. This accumulation is mainly due to the imbalance of (solar) energy reaching and the energy leaving the earth, caused by ''greenhouse effect'' in which the CO₂ and other greenhouse gases play a critical role; so that balance of the energy entering and leaving the earth should be the key to solve the problem. Currently in the battle of tackling the global warming, we mainly focus on the development of CO₂-related measures, i.e., emission reduction, CO₂ sequestration, and CO₂ recycle technologies. It is right in technical aspect, because they are attempting thinner the CO₂ ''blanket'' around the earth. However, ''Energy'' that is the core of the problem has been overlooked, at least in management/policy aspect. This paper is proposing an ''Energy Credit'' i.e., the energy measure concept as an alternative to the ''CO₂ credit'' that is currently in place in the proposed emission trading scheme. The proposed energy credit concept has the advantages such as covering broad activities related to the global warming and not just direct emissions. Three examples are given in the paper to demonstrate the concept of the energy measure and its advantages over the CO₂ credit concept.

Mussolini and the idealisation of empire : the Augustan exhibition of Romanita

The Augustan Exhibition of Romanita`, held in Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni between 1937 and 1938, exemplifies the aestheticisation, ritualisation and sacralisation of politics during the Fascist era in Italy. This article conducts a multi-layered spatial analysis of the exhibition that considers space as passively experienced, as an agent to re-map memory, as a mediator between intention and reception and as having both physical and mental characteristics. The relative sizes of the spaces, their sequence and their axial placement within the Palazzo’s plan were the most powerful forces that conveyed the exhibition’s overall political and social aims. The Mostra Augustea della Romanita` (MAR) is here analysed as a form of historical representation with a specific narrative which is played out within an orchestrated space in order to create and reinforce a (Fascist) political identity. The idea of Rome took on material aspects through a kind of ‘recognition effect’ for the visitor by presenting Romanita` as a collective mirror in which to view an image of their own social visage. Thus an active connection would, according to the organisers, be forged between a Roman past and a Fascist present, and its two leaders and creators, Augustus and Mussolini, as well as between the individual and society. The MAR also demonstrates the prevalence of the cult of Il Duce in Fascist society and its importance for maintaining high levels of consent. With its focus on a particular view of the ancient world, the MAR was an ephemeral event that acted as teleological justification for the advent and supposed permanence of Fascism, which at the same time presented itself as a unique archaeological, scientific and educational document of the Roman world.

How Differences of Opinion Influence Students’ Capacity to Think Geographically

Currently, the Australian Government is working towards the development and implementation of a national geography curriculum for Australian Schools. A common response to the question of what geography education is based upon is ‘maps’ (Sorenson, 2009). Geography teachers, curriculum designers and educational researchers alike face the battle of broadening the perception of geography education beyond this view (Sorenson, 2009; Maude, 2009; McInerney, Berg, Hutchinson, Maude & Sorenson, 2009). The Shape of the National Curriculum for Geography (Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority 2011, p8) states that the new curriculum will “develop students’ broader ability to think critically about contemporary events”. This new direction demonstrates a focus in on students’ capacity to ‘think geographically’ (Jackson 2006). This study engages with this new curriculum direction and explores the influence of an approach to group learning pedagogy based around students’ differences of opinion on students’ capacity to think geographically. A sample of 43 Year 9 Geography students participated in a two week learning sequence investigating the impacts of large scale earthquakes.
This paper communicates the findings from a comparative case study analysis of two student group conversations of different group types. According to the results of this study, organising students into groups around their differences of opinion encourages students to engage in and sustain higher levels of geographical thinking.

Genome sequence of Ensifer medicae Di28; an effective N2-fixing microsymbiont of Medicago murex and M. polymorpha

Ensifer medicae Di28 is an aerobic, motile, Gram-negative, non-spore-forming rod that can exist as a soil saprophyte or as a legume microsymbiont of Medicago spp. Di28 was isolated in 1998 from a nodule recovered from the roots of M. polymorpha growing in the south east of Sardinia (Italy). Di28 is an effective microsymbiont of the annual forage legumes M. polymorpha and M. murex and is capable of establishing a partially effective symbiotic association with the perennial M. sativa. Here we describe the features of E. medicae Di28, together with genome sequence information and its annotation. The 6,553,624 bp standard draft genome is arranged into 104 scaffolds of 104 contigs containing 6,394 protein-coding genes and 75 RNA-only encoding genes. This rhizobial genome is one of 100 sequenced as part of the DOE Joint Genome Institute 2010 Genomic Encyclopedia for Bacteria and Archaea-Root Nodule Bacteria (GEBA-RNB) project.

Multi-core security defense system (MSDS)

Today's security program developers are not only facing an uphill battle of developing and implementing. But now have to take into consideration, the emergence of next generation of multi-core system, and its effect on security application design. In our previous work, we developed a framework called bodyguard. The objective of this framework was to help security software developers, shift from their use of serialized paradigm, to a multi-core paradigm. Working within this paradigm, we developed a security bodyguard system called Farmer. This abstract framework placed particular applications into categories, like security or multi-media, which were ran on separate core processors within the multi-core system. With further analysis of the bodyguard paradigm, we found that this paradigm was suitable to be used in other computer science areas, such as spam filtering and multi-media. In this paper, we update our research work within the bodyguard paradigm, and showed a marked improvement of 110% speedup performance with an average cost of 1.5 ms.

Modelling the linkages between the Australian and G7 stock markets : common stochastic trends and regime shifts

This paper examines whether the Australian equity market is integrated with the equity markets of the G7 economies by applying both the Johansen (Statistical analysis of conintegrating vectors, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 12, 231-54, 1988) and Gregory and Hansen (Residual-based tests for cointegration in models with regime shifts, Journal of Econometrics, 70, 99-126, 1996) approaches to cointegration. Some evidence of a pairwise long-run relationship between the Australian stock market and the stock markets of Canada, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom is found, but the Australian equity market is not pairwise cointegrated with the equity markets of France, Germany or the USA.

Radical conservative experiment in New South Wales education

This study, written from the perspective of a parent activist, articulates the 'battle of ideas' or struggle 'around the truth' of public education in New South Wales since the conservative Greiner government came to power in 1988 and instituted the 'new right' agenda. Political control is theorised in the light of debates about hegemony, power, ideology and truth. Documents what happened in 'consultations' about educational reform between the Ministers and their appointees on on the one hand, and the public education lobby, on the other.

Messages from Long Tan, Vietnam: memorialisation, reconciliation, and historical justice

This article explores the changing ways in which Australians and Vietnamese remember and memorialize their involvement in the Vietnam War and how these processes intersect with notions of reconciliation and historical justice in postwar contexts. It uses the Battle of Long Tan of August 1966 as an entrée into these considerations and questions how heritage-making and memorialization processes can facilitate the achievement of reconciliation between parties formerly in conflict. Not surprisingly, the Australian and Vietnamese veterans of the battle and the two states, the Commonwealth of Australia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have different motivations for wanting to remember Long Tan. On the Australian side, a sense that reconciliation and atonement are needed is often reflected in official government and veterans’ statements about the war and Australia-Vietnam relations, in the memorialization process at Long Tan and in the involvement of Australian veterans groups engaged in local economic development and community building in Vietnam. On the Vietnamese side, where the Vietnam War played out as a civil as well as an international war, efforts by those who actively supported the former Republic of Vietnam based in Saigon in the south and among the overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) to memorialize their engagement in the conflict have been frustrated. The usefulness of the notion of seeking historical justice is therefore questioned in post–civil war situations where people are locked into fixed histories and are unprepared or unable to revisit and retell personal and collective memories and histories.