Presentation @ WSU: Breaking out of Legacy Mobilization Networks
This study explores the Internet’s role in mobilizing outside traditional social capital networks, focusing on Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) and its use o...
Posts by Year
2024
Social media is not like cigarettes or alcohol
The Australian government has just announced its intention to ban social media for children and early teens. Social media is then added to a list of restrict...
The Conversation: Meta just closed a vital online research tool. It’s bad news for the fight against misinformation Permalink
Presentation @ ICA 2024: Affording Fragmented Audiences: Multi-Platform Deliberation Within the Five Star Movement
The online ecosystems of political movements are not confined to single platforms; rather, they span multiple platforms, each offering unique affordances and...
The Conversation: Conspiracy theorist tactics show it’s too easy to get around Facebook’s content policies Permalink
Meta wants to get politics out of its platforms. Is this good or bad for democracy?
For Meta, politics is bad for business. And for two reasons. First, politically charged content and the toxicity surrounding it do not create an attractive s...
Radio Interview w/t SBS: Relazioni tra Italia e Australia, un nuovo libro esamina il presente guardando al futuro
Focus on personal networks, social capital, and the Internet’s role in mobilising Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S).
2023
Presentation @ ASQPS 2023: Levelling at the margin: Personal networks, social capital and the Internet in the mobilisation of the Five Star Movement
Focus on personal networks, social capital, and the Internet’s role in mobilising Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S).
Presentation @ APSA 2023: Online and offline social capital as catalyst for political mobilisation
We investigate whether this is the case using responses to an online survey (n = 698) administered to participants at face-to-face meetings organised to supp...
Presentation @ ASNAC 2023: Measuring information disorder
In this paper, I introduce a robust framework for quantifying ‘information disorder’ within diverse information spaces, detailing its measurement methodology...
Using r/exams in SSPS4102 Data Analytics in the Social Sciences
In October 2023, I was one of the recipients of the Teaching Innovation Awards of the the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Sydney...
Twitter: Riding information crisis Permalink
🚨 New paper out with @icsjournal with @ameliajohns13 and @andrei_rizoiu on information crises and disorders. 🚨We find that far-right accounts overperformed o...
2020
2019
Il successo della Lega, i media e le “crisi” migratorie
La crescita di Salvini e della Lega è forse per la politica italiana l’evento più significativo del 2018. Nel gennaio 2018, prima delle elezioni di marzo, la...
Il voto per le europee a Milano
La geografia socio-politica delle grandi città italiane del centro-nord è radicalmente cambiata negli ultimi 25 anni. Se osserviamo la distribuzione dei voti...
How to sync your Zotero library (and files) with WebDAV
In this post, I explain how to use an online file storing and sharing service like AARNet’s CloudStor (but any WebDAV service will do) to access and update y...
recogeo: A new R package to reconcile changing geographic boundaries (and corresponding variables)
Demographics information is usually reported in relation to precise boundaries: administrative, electoral, statistical, etc. Comparing demographics informati...
Are you parallelizing your raster operations? You should!
If you plan to do anything with the raster package you should definitely consider parallelize all your processes, especially if you are working with very lar...
2018
The two alternatives to the monasterisation of the World wide web
Saint Michael's Abbey, in the Susa Valley, Piedmont. Source: Wikipedia
Local participation and not unemployment explains the M5S result in the South
The abundance of economic data and the scarcity of social data with a comparable level of granularity is a problem for the quantitative analysis of social ph...
2018 Italian general election: Details on my simulation
This simulation of the results for the 2018 general election is based on the results from the last two national elections (the Italian parliament election in...
2016
Quick analysis of the Italian referendum results
The 2016 Italian referendum torpedoed the constitutional reform presented by the government presided by Matteo Renzi (41). According to the final count, whic...
Cosa possiamo imparare dal M5S
Leggo e rispondo al post di Massimo Mantellini (Il M5S, il wifi e il principio di precauzione) in cui si evidenzia con preoccupazione come il Movimento abbia...
Road to Rome: The organisational and political success of the M5S
The Five Star Movement (M5S) obtained two major victories in the second round of municipal elections on 19 June 2016 in Rome and Turin. Rome attracted the mo...
Explicit semantic analysis with R
Explicit semantic analysis (ESA) was proposed by Gabrilovich and Markovitch (2007) to compute a document position in a high-dimensional concept space. At the...
2015
Italy’s Five Star Movement - a spectral analysis of its political composition
To talk about identity and soul of the Five Star Movement (M5S) is not only politically contentious but also practically challenging because of the different...
2013
NDVI, risk assessment and developing countries
The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) estimates the greenness of plants covering the surface of the Earth by measuring the light reflected by the...
2009
Eyes on Guatemala
The Economist has published an article on malnutrition in Guatemala. Hunger is not new in the country, with half of the children population not eating enough...
Back into Poverty
Increase in food prices has pushed back into poverty at least 100 million people in 2008 and, according to the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition...
Selva Amazónica, More Valuable Standing Than Felled
An article published on Science this week analyzes the development of the region across the Amazon deforestation frontier. In three words: boom and bust. It ...
On the Evolution of Thinking
What if we are becoming the very same Artificial Intelligence that we are trying to design? The doubt has has been raised by Nicholas Carr in an article publ...
If the Asian Growth Model is not Working Anymore
In 1981 poverty rate in China was 64% of the population, in 2004 the rate was 10%: it means that 500 million people stepped out of poverty (look here and her...
Economic Gains Do Not Mean Political Gains
In this post Dani Rodrik explains why trade theories suggest that the U.S. should liberalize trade for agricultural products (especially cotton and sugar) an...
The Dirt Floats
The Kosovo Liberation Army (Albanian acronym UÇK) supposedly run, during the conflict of 1999, torture camps in northern Albania. According to an investigati...
WikiPrices
Let’s try to imagine how a platform to collect and share market price information could work in a country where 46% of the children are malnourished and 80% ...
Hard Numbers, Hard Times
In a report published today, Oxfam predicts that by 2015 the average number of people affected by climate-related disasters every year will increase by 54%. ...
Information Flows on Mobiles
The idea to use mobile phones (here and here) to help economic development in the most remote corners of the world is fascinating and definitely smart. For o...
Human Rights in Guatemala
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has published the Annual Report 2008 on Guatemala. And hardly could have been worse. Last year murder r...
Understanding Capitalism
Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen argues, in an article published on The New York Review of Books, that the way out from the crisis passes through a better...
Detained and Dismissed
Human Rights Watch has just published a detailed report on Women’s Struggles to Obtain Health Care in United States Immigration Detention. Immigration detent...
Wars in the Backyard
The National Security Archive has just declassified eleven documents on the extra judicial arrests conducted 25 years ago by the government of Guatemala. It ...
Crisis from the South /3
The Inter-American Development Bank publishes today on its web-site previsions for remittance flows in 2009 to Latin America: they will go down for the first...
Brain matters
Saying that education strengths economic growth sounds good old common sense. But proving and measuring this relation is not immediate and therefore interest...
Crisis from the South /2
And it appears that the problem is not just limited to remittances. According to The Institute of International Finance, private financial flows from rich c...
Truth, finally. Maybe
Guatemalan newspaper La Hora affirms that, for the first time, the government will hand to the ministerio público (attorney general) the military archives r...
Crisis from the South
According to Banco de Guatemala, for the first time since 1999, in January 2009 remittances from abroad decreased by 7.75% compared to the same month in 2008...