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"Ferrara, Alessandro"
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Rousseau and critical theory
\"In Rousseau and critical theory, Alessandro Ferrara argues that among the modern philosophers who have shaped the world we inhabit, Rousseau is the one to whom we owe the idea that identity can be a source of normativity (moral and political) and that an identity's potential for playing such a role rests on its capacity for being authentic. This normative idea of authenticity brings unity to Rousseau's reflections on the negative effects of the social order, on the just political order, on education, and more generally, on ethics. It is also shown to contain important teachings for contemporary Critical Theory, contemporary views of self-constitution (Korsgaard, Frankfurt and Larmore), and contemporary political philosophy.\"--Abstract.
Book
The FAOSTAT database of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture, including crop and livestock production, forestry and associated land use changes, are responsible for a significant fraction of anthropogenic emissions, up to 30% according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet while emissions from fossil fuels are updated yearly and by multiple sources-including national-level statistics from the International Energy Agency (IEA)-no comparable efforts for reporting global statistics for agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) emissions exist: the latest complete assessment was the 2007 IPCC report, based on 2005 emission data. This gap is critical for several reasons. First, potentially large climate funding could be linked in coming decades to more precise estimates of emissions and mitigation potentials. For many developing countries, and especially the least developed ones, this requires improved assessments of AFOLU emissions. Second, growth in global emissions from fossil fuels has outpaced that from AFOLU during every decade of the period 1961-2010, so the relative contribution of the latter to total climate forcing has diminished over time, with a need for regular updates. We present results from a new GHG database developed at FAO, providing a complete and coherent time series of emission statistics over a reference period 1961-2010, at country level, based on FAOSTAT activity data and IPCC Tier 1 methodology. We discuss results at global and regional level, focusing on trends in the agriculture sector and net deforestation. Our results complement those available from the IPCC, extending trend analysis to a longer historical period and, critically, beyond 2005 to more recent years. In particular, from 2000 to 2010, we find that agricultural emissions increased by 1.1% annually, reaching 4.6 Gt CO2 yr−1 in 2010 (up to 5.4-5.8 Gt CO2 yr−1 with emissions from biomass burning and organic soils included). Over the same decade 2000-2010, the ratio of agriculture to fossil fuel emissions has decreased, from 17.2% to 13.7%, and the decrease is even greater for the ratio of net deforestation to fossil fuel emissions: from 19.1% to 10.1%. In fact, in the year 2000, emissions from agriculture have been consistently larger-about 1.2 Gt CO2 yr−1 in 2010-than those from net deforestation.
Journal Article
Novel Approaches for Energy Management Strategies of Hybrid Electric Vehicles and Comparison with Conventional Solutions
Well-designed energy management strategies are essential for the good operation of Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) in terms of fuel economy and pollutant emissions reduction, regardless of the specific powertrain architecture. The goal of this paper is to propose two innovative supervisory control strategies for HEVs derived from different optimization algorithms and to assess HEVs’ fuel consumption reduction (compared to conventional vehicles). These approaches are derived from the literature and modified by the authors to present novel algorithms for the optimization problem. One is based on Dynamic Programming (DP), here referred to as the Forward Approach to Dynamic Programming (FADP) and introduces a different implementation of the DP to achieve computational and accuracy benefits. The other is based on the Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (ECMS) approach, and it adapts to the latest driving conditions using information gathered in a finite-length backward-looking horizon. These techniques are used to achieve the optimal power share between the thermal engine and the battery of a parallel HEV. Their performances are compared and analysed in terms of achieved fuel economy and computational time with respect to conventional DP and Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle (PMP) approaches.
Journal Article
The impact of air travel on the precocity and severity of COVID-19 deaths in sub-national areas across 45 countries
Human travel fed the worldwide spread of COVID-19, but it remains unclear whether the volume of incoming air passengers and the centrality of airports in the global airline network made some regions more vulnerable to earlier and higher mortality. We assess whether the
precocity
and
severity
of COVID-19 deaths were contingent on these measures of air travel intensity, adjusting for differences in local non-pharmaceutical interventions and pre-pandemic structural characteristics of 502 sub-national areas on five continents in April–October 2020. Ordinary least squares (OLS) models of
precocity
(i.e., the timing of the 1st and 10th death outbreaks) reveal that neither airport centrality nor the volume of incoming passengers are impactful once we consider pre-pandemic demographic characteristics of the areas. We assess
severity
(i.e., the weekly death incidence of COVID-19) through the estimation of a generalized linear mixed model, employing a negative binomial link function. Results suggest that COVID-19 death incidence was insensitive to airport centrality, with no substantial changes over time. Higher air passenger volume tends to coincide with more COVID-19 deaths, but this relation weakened as the pandemic proceeded. Different models prove that either the lack of airports in a region or total travel bans did reduce mortality significantly. We conclude that COVID-19 importation through air travel followed a ‘travel as spark’ principle, whereby the absence of air travel reduced epidemic risk drastically. However, once some travel occurred, its impact on the severity of the pandemic was only in part associated with the number of incoming passengers, and not at all with the position of airports in the global network of airline connections.
Journal Article
Optimal Calibration of an Adaptive and Predictive Energy Management Strategy for Fuel Cell Electric Trucks
Energy management strategies have a significant impact on the hydrogen economy of fuel cell trucks and the lifetime of battery and fuel cell systems. This contribution presents the design and optimal calibration of an energy management strategy that is adaptive to the battery and ambient temperatures. Indeed, fuel cell trucks face critical operating conditions due to high ambient temperatures or high loads on long uphill roads. However, the presented adaptive energy management strategy shifts the electric loads to the fuel cell system to limit the battery usage, avoiding accelerated degradation due to battery temperature peaks without hindering the hydrogen economy. The strategy design and calibration involves a multi-objective optimization of performance indicators related to hydrogen consumption, fuel cell degradation, battery thermal state, equivalent charge/discharge cycles, and charge control. This work uses AVL CAMEO to systematically vary the adaptive curve parameters to explore the trade-off between the key performance indicators. The calibration considers real-world driving cycles of road freight vehicles, including measured speed, road elevation, and variable vehicle mass. Moreover, the energy management design is robust because the performance indicators are evaluated over 8935 km, covering an extensive range of real-world driving scenarios. Eventually, the adaptive and predictive energy management strategy proposed in this work can meet all the performance targets thanks to the optimal calibration, and it is particularly effective in avoiding battery temperature peaks.
Journal Article
Multichannel Sensor Array Design for Minimizing Detector Complexity and Power Consumption in Ionoacoustic Proton Beam Tomography
Ionoacoustic tomography exploits the acoustic signal generated by the fast energy deposition along the path of pulsed particle beams to reconstruct with sub-mm precision the dose deposition, with promising envisioned applications in hadron therapy treatment monitoring. State-of-the-art ionoacoustic detectors mainly rely on single-channel sensors and time-of-flight measurements to provide 1D localization of the maximum dose deposition at the so-called Bragg peak. This work investigates the design challenges of multichannel sensors for ionoacoustic tomography in terms of their ability to accurately reconstruct the dose deposition of a 200 MeV clinical proton beam, highlighting the impact of the number of channels in the array and their directivity. A complete acoustic model of the sensors and environment has been developed and used to find an optimum tradeoff between accuracy, evaluated numerically through the gamma index, and hardware complexity due to higher channel numbers, thus minimizing the system-level power consumption of the detector.
Journal Article
Law and violence
Christoph Menke is a third-generation Frankfurt School theorist, and widely acknowledged as one of the most interesting philosophers in Germany today. His lead essay focuses on the fundamental question for legal and political philosophy: the relationship between law and violence. The first part of the essay shows why and in what precise sense the law is irreducibly violent; the second part establishes the possibility of the law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence. The volume contains responses by María del Rosario Acosta López, Daniel Loick, Alessandro Ferrara, Ben Morgan, Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Alexander García Düttmann. It concludes with Menke's reply to his critics.
eBook
Moral Duties and Juridical Duties: The Ambiguity of Legal Ethics Considered Through the Prism of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals
My article aims to analyze the conflict between the duties deriving from the supranational deontological codification under a philosophical point of view. Specifically, I will discuss both rules implying the independence of a lawyer and the obligation to ensure that the legitimate interests of the client and the proper administration of justice are protected. I will conduct an analysis about the relationship between moral and juridical duties through a few parts from The Metaphysics of Morals , published by Immanuel Kant in 1797. Afterwards, I will try to verify if Kant’s conception of moral and juridical duties can provide a lawyer with the guidelines for the conflict resolution. I will suggest a meeting point capable of satisfying at the same time those interests whose protection is conflictingly established by the ethical code, and which is represented by the Alternative Dispute Resolution , precisely by the Assisted Negotiation procedure. Ultimately, I will propose an approach based on the identification of an agreement as a way to solve the conflict between the lawyer’s duties.
Journal Article