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This work explores how the narrative on immigration changes when society is threatened by “real” risks, i.e., during the COVID-19 health crisis. We compared the frequency and engagement of over 348,684 posts published on Facebook between December 2019 and November 2020 by Italian politicians and news media. We identified two waves of “tangible crisis” assuming that in these two periods the risk stemming from COVID-19 was strongly perceived by the Italian population, contrasting our observations to the periods preceding the first wave and between both waves. Our findings suggest that the political discourse and risk narratives on immigration decreased during times of “tangible crises” for right-wing populist parties and news media. This happened at a time when key policies regarding immigration and regularization of migrants were highly discussed by the Italian government, receiving unexpectedly low reactions. This leads us to theorize that anti-immigrant communication decreases during times of “tangible crises.”

This article investigates a trend toward integration between print and digital forms of information that is detectable in specific segments of the Italian news industry. This tendency might be connected to the news groups’ acknowledgement of the limits of a digital-only approach. This results in strategies of integration and differentiation of digital and print news that we observe through the analysis of four news outlets, «The Post Internazionale», «Domani», «Scomodo» and «Dinamopress». The focus is on how production routines, business models, conceptions of audiences, and relations with platforms of a news outlet have to be adapted to contemporary information ecosystem.

Platform capitalism brings several processes to completion that were already apparent during post-industrial capitalism. One of these involves images and their gradual loss of a symbolic dimension. The mechanisms that platforms employ to direct the production of media content reduce images to objects of immediate use and consumption. Consequently, images fail to synthetise the multiplicity of the social reality: instead of inscribing it within a horizon of meaning, they simply reflect it. This article reconstructs the “de-symbolising” process of images during the various phases of capitalism and explains why a post-symbolic aesthetics should also be viewed as “impolitical”. If the political is indeed symbolic, since the giving of meaning and direction to society (a political task par excellence) also takes place through the construction of symbolic systems, the post-symbolic aesthetic is instead imposed by platforms for purely economic reasons.

The structural connection between gamification processes and the dissemination of information in online environments created by the affordances of digital media has led to the rise of newsgames in journalism. These are computerized games intended to illustrate a specific, concrete news item to a participatory, interactive audience. This development has sparked discussion, with some believing that it is harmful to treat serious news using methods typical of entertainment, and others calling attention to the expressive and learning opportunities that derive from applying videogames to journalistic reporting on reality. In this article, I argue that the debate on gamification processes in news information can be enriched by considering the narratives conveyed by newsgames as “techno-aesthetic narratives.” The concept of techno-aesthetics, developed by Gilbert Simondon, refers to the extension of human sensibility into technological artifacts that prolong its faculties, allowing them to enter into relationship with a wider social and cultural reality, thanks to the technological extension. The techno-aesthetic paradigm has been investigated in many fields, from literature to the visual arts, including forms of communication mediated by digital devices, but it has never been applied thus far to news narratives. Through an analysis of the work of Pietro Montani, who has modernized thought on techno-aesthetics by updating it to include digital media, I show that the essential traits of this paradigm can also be applied to journalistic narratives conveyed by newsgames. More specifically, I focus on the following four characteristics of the techno-aesthetic paradigm: 1. The interactive imagination; 2. The conception of gamification as a tool for reflecting on reality; 3. The transformation of users’ experience and schemas through the techno-aesthetic experience; 4. The role of the “performance of sensibility” in this transformation of subjectivity. In tracing out the connection between these four characteristics and newsgames, I examine both major studies on the narratives conveyed by these journalistic productions and two case studies: The Refugee Challenge, produced by the British newspaper The Guardian; and Rebuilding Haiti, created by the European Journalism Centre. I then explain why I believe it would be useful to extend the techno-aesthetic paradigm to journalistic narratives, which have not yet been considered from this angle. First of all, they can prompt reflection on the role of digital journalism in the implementation of a “techno-aesthetic education” as envisaged by Montani (2015). Furthermore, discussing techno-aesthetic narratives can help shed light on some of the informational and ethical potential of a journalism that conveys news to its audience through “ludic” methods, thereby furthering reflection on the link between journalistic information and gamification processes. Techno-aesthetic narratives also find a place in studies on the changing concept of objectivity in digital journalism, such as Michael Schudson’s notion of an “objectivity of empathy” (2018). I conclude by setting out the potential risks, especially the ideological ones, inherent in techno-aesthetic narratives conveyed by newsgames and suggest types of studies that will be needed in the future to evaluate the real impact of these narratives.

In journalism studies, the development of the web and the beginning of online journalism are generally interpreted as getting past a normative, objective paradigm, which led to the beginning of philosophical and scientific modernity. Instead, they are linked to the arrival of a postmodern paradigm focused on subjectivity and relativism. This paper proposes an alternative reading of the epistemology of online journalism: the fragmentation of the audience in homophilic networks, the formation of ideological bubbles and the increasing polarization caused by algorithms often transform the contents circulating online in a restatement of the metanarratives of modernity. Thus they evade the principles of equivalent interpretations and openness to dialogue which are characteristic for the postmodern age. This includes journalistic content as well, especially due to the process of ‘platformization of information’. For these reasons a new definition of web journalism is advanced: not as postmodern journalism, but as a subjective accomplishment of the principles found at the base of the modern paradigm.

The spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has enormously increased the media exposure of scientists, some of whom have become well-known and even popular. However, it may also have signaled the beginning of an unexpected decline in public trust towards them. Responsibility for this can be ascribed not only to distortions in the communication of scientific knowledge by the media, but also to dynamics that exist within the scientific community and how they have been expressed in the media. In fact, frequently during the pandemic, not only did scientists publicly display a high level of conflict, but they also made claims that were outside their specific areas of expertise. From a pilot study conducted on about 4,000 readers of two online newspapers, five latent dimensions emerged with respect to attitudes towards science and scientists. A consistent element of people (between 20% and 30%, so still largely a minority) seems to share a non-scientist epistemological model, unmoored to presumed certainties and absolute truths. This phenomenon, based on the responses of those interviewed, seems to be associated particularly with a critical attitude regarding the public exposure of scientists and their way of communicating in the mass media, and not with a general skepticism towards science and its role in society.

The pathway toward the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is dependent upon increasing Renewable Energy Sources (RESs), demand response, and electrification of public and private transportation. Energy management techniques are necessary to coordinate the operation in this complex scenario, and in recent years several works have appeared in the literature on this topic. This paper presents a study on multi-household energy management for Smart Neighborhoods integrating RESs and electric vehicles participating in Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) and Vehicle-to-Neighborhood (V2N) programs. The Smart Neighborhood comprises multiple households, a parking lot with public charging stations, and an aggregator that coordinates energy transactions using a Multi-Household Energy Manager (MH-EM). The MH-EM jointly maximizes the profits of the aggregator and the households by using the augmented ϵ-constraint approach. The generated Pareto optimal solutions allow for different decision policies to balance the aggregator’s and households’ profits, prioritizing one of them or the RES energy usage within the Smart Neighborhood. The experiments have been conducted over an entire year considering uncertainties related to the energy price, electric vehicles usage, energy production of RESs, and energy demand of the households. The results show that the MH-EM optimizes the Smart Neighborhood operation and that the solution that maximizes the RES energy usage provides the greatest benefits also in terms of peak-shaving and valley-filling capability of the energy demand.

The Southern Europe Thomson Backscattering Source for Applied Research (STAR) is a compact hard Xray source designed by INFN, for advanced applied materials-science research. It is funded by Progetto MaTeRiA, a partnership between the University of Calabria and CNISM (Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Scienze fisiche della Materia). The machine has been installed at the University of Calabria (UNICAL); the X-ray beam is produced using the Thomson Back-scattering process, where relativistic electron bunches, accelerated by a 60 MeV Linear Accelerator (LINAC), interact with very short photon pulses, produced a by a 30 mJ@5 ps IR (Infrared) Pulsed Laser. The EPICS-based command/control system (ComConS) of the STAR machine has been designed and currently is under commissioning, using state of the art technologies and making extensive use of COTS hardware and software, assuring full control and supervision of the whole machine and all relevant subsystems: Beam diagnostics, Magnets power supplies, RF devices, Laser systems, Vacuum subsystem, Machine Protection System, Personnel Protection System and Trigger and Timing system. A growth potential has been considered since design phase, in order to take into account any future expansions of the control system during the lifecycle of the facility, without impact on the performance. Scalability of systems is also a crucial issue. The current design allows to generate tunable collimated monochromatic X-rays in the range between 10 and 200 keV. Possible future evolution will be to obtain a machine to generate higher energy X-ray beams, towards the MeV. The control system from both SW and HW points of view has to accommodate this need, as well as operating the machine for a long lifecycle.

We present an analysis of the FEL performances of several working points belonging to three different classes of electron beams driven by the same infrastructure: two high flux working points are relevant to the operation with a linac up to 1 GeV, while both LWFA and PWFA beams have been considered at this same energy for low charge operation. Soft X rays in single spike mode with fluxes up to 10 12 electrons per shot have been found.

In this paper I use concepts of Georg Simmel’s social aesthetics to investigate and describe several relational and communicative dynamics that occur in the digital public sphere—where the aesthetic dimension has now assumed great importance. Specifically, Simmel’s work proves to be more suited than Habermas’s for understanding the mechanisms of “typification” and “gamification” found in online interactions between individuals. I further argue that, on the Web, these mechanisms in particular are responsible for blocking the exchange of opinions and meanings on subjects of public interest, thereby betraying the universal, societal outcomes of Simmel’s social aesthetics.

The aim of this work is to study news narratives on the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy. Its point of departure is the accusation that scholars and institutions such as the WHO levelled against media outlets around the world for creating a drift defined as “infodemic”: too many news items in circulation that are not properly verified or are deliberately misleading. During the pandemic, media outlets in Italy as elsewhere were accused of oversimplifying messages from the scientific community and experts, creating effects such as undue alarmism in the population. I will assess the accuracy of this accusation by analysing articles published in Italian news outlets, focusing specifically on elements in news narratives whose conformation makes them prone to a high degree of simplification: namely, headlines and ancillary content such as teasers appearing in social networks. As I will show, even in the context of the pandemic, distinctions must be made between unwarranted journalistic simplifications, which border on unfounded news, and simplifications that, on the contrary, allow content in the public interest to reach a larger number of readers, thus heightening the level of awareness of pandemic-related issues. My thesis is that in the context of the digital public sphere, linguistic and conceptual simplification is sometimes necessary, and that it is therefore appropriate to distinguish between cases that produce beneficial effects for public understanding of a phenomenon such as Covid-19 from those that can be classified as infodemic.

Perché le fake news si diffondono più delle notizie vere? Possiamo proteggere le elezioni democratiche dai tentativi di manipolazione sul web? Qual è l’impatto reale del digital marketing? Sinan Aral ci guida con rigore scientifico e acume analitico in un viaggio attraverso questi e altri interrogativi, attingendo a un’ampia evidenza empirica frutto di vent’anni di ricerche. Per cogliere le potenzialità delle tecnologie digitali ed evitarne i rischi, ci addentriamo nel meccanismo che governa la «Hype Machine», il sistema integrato dei social media che ci stimola a mantenerci sempre attivi online, mentre ci espone ai condizionamenti dei grandi brand o degli hacker russi, in un frenetico mercato della persuasione e dell’eccitazione emotiva. In questo universo ipersocializzato, l’autore mette però in luce come, agendo su quattro specifiche «leve di comando» (modelli di business, codice informatico, norme sociali e leggi), sia ancora possibile orientare verso il bene comune la tecnologia che sta rivoluzionando il nostro mondo.

European physical journal special topics 229(24), 3675 - 4284 (2020). doi:10.1140/epjst/e2020-000127-8, This report presents the conceptual design of a new European research infrastructure EuPRAXIA. The concept has been established over the last four years in a unique collaboration of 41 laboratories within a Horizon 2020 design study funded by the European Union. EuPRAXIA is the first European project that develops a dedicated particle accelerator research infrastructure based on novel plasma acceleration concepts and laser technology. It focuses on the development of electron accelerators and underlying technologies, their user communities, and the exploitation of existing accelerator infrastructures in Europe. EuPRAXIA has involved, amongst others, the international laser community and industry to build links and bridges with accelerator science — through realising synergies, identifying disruptive ideas, innovating, and fostering knowledge exchange. The Eu-PRAXIA project aims at the construction of an innovative electron accelerator using laser- and electron-beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration that offers a significant reduction in size and possible savings in cost over current state-of-the-art radiofrequency-based accelerators. The foreseen electron energy range of one to five gigaelectronvolts (GeV) and its performance goals will enable versatile applications in various domains, e.g. as a compact free-electron laser (FEL), compact sources for medical imaging and positron generation, table-top test beams for particle detectors, as well as deeply penetrating X-ray and gamma-ray sources for material testing. EuPRAXIA is designed to be the required stepping stone to possible future plasma-based facilities, such as linear colliders at the high-energy physics (HEP) energy frontier. Consistent with a high-confidence approach, the project includes measures to retire risk by establishing scaled technology demonstrators. This report includes preliminary models for project implementation, cost and schedule that would allow operation of the full Eu-PRAXIA facility within 8—10 years., Published by Springer, Heidelberg