Habilitationsschrift-Innsbruck. / Bibliography: p. 135-147.

Habilitationsschrift-Innsbruck. / Bibliography: p. 135-147.

Texte remanié de: Diplomarbeit--Institut für Politikwissenschaft--Innsbruck--Universität Innsbruck, 1989. / Bibliogr. p. 163-172.

The thesis speaks about the multilingual region Trentino-Alto Adige in Italy. The aim of the research was to define regional and linguistic identity, specifically in the context of this region. In order to do so, I relied on theoretical and empirical data collected through interviews. After having analyzing and interpreting them, I compared them to give my final conclusion.

No description available.

Since the end of the Second World War, scholars have attempted to understand why Fascist Italy chose to adopt the racial laws in 1938. For sixteen years, Benito Mussolini rejected the existence of antisemitism in Italy, leading many to assert that the antisemitic program was a foreign import. The rise of Nazi Germany, expansion of Fascist Italy's colonial empire, and the desire to create the new fascist man are generally believed to be the main factors that pushed Italian fascism towards a racial program. Yet these factors do not fully explain the radical shift in Fascist Italy's approach to its Jewish minority. This dissertation argues that the turn towards official racism should also take into consideration the development of fascism's other long-standing minority program. Beginning in 1923, the Fascist government instituted policies to "Italianize" the Germanic and Slavic ethno-linguistic minority communities of South Tyrol (Venezia Tridentina) and the Adriatic (Venezia Giulia), known as the allogeni. To "make Italians" of the allogeni the Fascist government stripped them of their linguistic, cultural and political rights, and attempted to absorb them into the national community. However, by the end of the 1920s, Fascist officials began to question whether the assimilation of these ethno-linguistic Others was sufficient or even desirable. I argue that the failures of Italianization led to the delegitimization of assimilation - the foundation upon which Jewish inclusion had been built. The decline of assimilation was an important precursor to the rise of fascism's racial program. This dissertation posits that the borderland Italianization program and racial laws were different phases of the Fascist "redemptive struggle," aimed at redeeming the Italian people and nation through their unification in both being and spirit. The borderland Italianization programs also established some of the methods and procedures that would be adopted for the implementation of the racial laws.

This study aimed at describing the characteristics of daily precipitation and discharge extremes in the Adige river basin at the city of Trento. Annual maximum series for the period 1975−2014 were analyzed in terms of trends, seasonality indices and L-moments. A Mann-Kendall trend analysis showed a weak but significant signal of decreasing ex-tremes; the percentages of sites with significant negative trends were overall larger than the significance levels. Precipitation extremes were characterized primarily by autumn storms, while floods had a stronger seasonality with peaks occurring predominantly in June and July which indicated that the timing not solely explained by rainfall maxima. The Adige basin was found to be a homogenous region with respect to precipitation, but the results did not support a corresponding assumption for discharge. A regional fre-quency analysis was performed for precipitation data and found both the Pearson type III and generalized normal distributions to be adequate regional frequency distributions. The extreme daily precipitation at Trento with a 100-year return period was estimated to be between 114 and 148 mm/d. / Egenskaperna hos extremvärden av dygnsnederbörd och -vattenföring i Adigeflodens av-rinningsområde vid staden Trento undersöktes. Serier med årsmaxima för perioden 1975–2014 analyserades med avseende på trender, säsongsindex och L-moment. Trendanalys med Mann-Kendallmetod antydde en svag men signifikant signal om minskande extrem-värden, då andelen mätstationer med signifikant negativa trender överlag var större än signifikansnivån. Den extrema nederbörden karakteriserades huvudsakligen av höststor-mar, medan vattenföringen hade en starkare säsongsbundenhet då maxima inträffade främst under juni och juli. Vattenföringens extremvärden kunde därmed inte enbart för-klaras av nederbördsmaxima. Avrinningsområdet kunde betraktas som en homogen reg-ion för nederbörd, men resultaten gav inte stöd åt ett motsvarande antagande för vatten-föring. En regional frekvensanalys genomfördes för nederbördsdata och visade att Pear-son typ III och den generaliserade normalfördelningen var lämpliga regionala sannolik-hetsfördelningar. Över Trento uppskattades den extrema dygnsnederbörden med en åter-komstperiod på 100 år till mellan 114 och 148 mm/d.

There is a constant trend in the European Union for heightened pride, desire of extended autonomy and even national independence of regions. The master thesis intends to investigate the relations of selected regions in the EU member states with the European policy level. The general research question to answer is "Which regions are more successful in representing their interests vis-à-vis the European policy level?" The investigation is undertaken in a form of a comparative case study combining qualitative and quantitative research; the examined regions are - following the research hypotheses and intention to provide a multi-perspective analysis of the problem - Scotland (United Kingdom), Hessen (Germany), Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol (Italy) and Středočeský kraj (Czech Republic). Based on the comparative analysis the thesis concludes that "regions with wide scope of powers on the national level (usually coming from federal or regionalized member states) with strong economic background are generally more successful in representing their interests vis-à-vis the European policy level."

The interest in structural health monitoring (SHM) has grown considerably in the past half century, due to an explosive growth in the availability of new sensors, the development of powerful data analysis techniques, and the increasing number of civil infrastructure that are approaching or exceeding their initial design life. In SHM, we acquire observation on the behavior of a structure to understand its condition state, based on which we decide how to manage it properly. However, this optimistic view of SHM is in contrast with what happen in real life: infrastructure operators are typically skeptical about the capacity of monitoring to support decisions, and instead of following the suggestions provided by SHM, they often act based on their experience or common sense. The reason is that at present it is not fully clear how in practice to make decisions based on monitoring observation. To fill this gap between theory and practice, I propose to consider SHM as a logical process of making decision based on observation consisting of two steps: judgment, in which the condition state of structures is inferred based on SHM data, and decision, in which the optimal action is identified based on a rational and economic principle. From this perspective, a monitoring system should provide information that can improe he managers knoledge on he srcral condiion sae enough to allow them to make better decision on the structure management. Therefore, in designing a monitoring system, the design target must be the accuracy in the knowledge of structural state achieved analyzing the observations provided by it. However, when an engineer designs a monitoring system, the approach is often heuristic, with performance evaluation based on experience or common sense rather than on quantitative analysis. For this reason, I propose a performance-based monitoring system design, which is a quantitative method for the calculation of the expected performance of a monitoring solution a pre-posteriori and for checking it effectiveness in the design phase. It is based on the calculation of the monitoring capacity and the monitoring demand the counterparts of structural capacity and demand in the semi-probabilistic structural design, and like in structural design, the solution is satisfactory if the capacity is equal or better than the demand. The choice in whether to invest a limited budget on a monitoring system or in a retrofit is another critical choice for infrastructure managers: a retrofit work can increase the capacity and the safety of a structure, while sensors do not change the capacity, nor reduce the loads. Recently, the SHM-community has acknowledged that the benefit of installing a monitoring system can be properly quantified using the concept of Value of Information (VoI). A typical assumption in the VoI estimation is that a single decision-maker is in charge for decisions on both the investment in SHM for a structure, and its management based on SHM data. However, this process is usually more complex in the real world, with more individuals involved in the decision chain. Therefore, I formalize a rational method for quantifying the conditional value of information when two different actors are involved in the decision chain: the manager, who operate the structure based on monitoring data; and the owner, who chooses whether to install the monitoring system or not, before having access to these data. The results are particularly interested, showing that under appropriate conditions, the owner may be willing to pay to prevent the manager to use the monitoring system. Application to case studies are presented for all the research contribution presented in this doctoral thesis.