Abstract-Collective awareness platforms (CAPs) are internet and mobile tools for collaboration, sustainability and social innovation that can allows drastic improvement of our lifestyle, beyond the standard economic model. However, their development is often driven (and motivated) by technology, while their adoption and usage characteristics are determined by the social interactions and can be affected by many items, up to failure. We describe here our approach to CAPs modelling that includes elements from cognitive and evolutionary sciences, in the hope of providing instruments for the improvement and the assessment of CAPs.

In this paper we describe the results of some experiments about using surprising physics demonstrations, presented as magical phenomena followed by scientific explanations, for introducing physics topics in several teaching contexts. All the demonstrations have been designed to be implemented with easy to get and cheap materials, so that students can reproduce them at home. This approach has been exploited in Italian high schools, Italian elderly people education and French primary schools, with good results.

Water quality two-dimensional models are often partitioned into separate modules with separate hydraulic and biological units. In most cases this approach results in poor flexibility whenever the biological dynamics has to be adapted to a specific situation. Conversely, an integrated approach is pursued in this article, producing a two-dimensional hydraulic-water quality model, named Shallow Water Analysis and Modeling Program (SWAMP) designed for shallow water bodies. The major objective of the work is to create a comprehensive two-dimensional water quality assessment tool, based on an open framework and combining easy programming of additional procedures with a user-friendly interface. The model is based on the numerical solution of the partial differential equations describing advection-diffusion and biological processes on a two-dimensional rectangular finite elements mesh. The hydraulics and advection-diffusion modules model were validated both with experimental tracer data collected at a constructed wetland site and a comparison with a commercial hydrodynamic software, showing good agreement in both cases. Moreover, the model was tested in critical conditions for mass conservation, such as time-varying wet boundary, showing a considerable numerical robustness. In the last part of the article water quality simulations are presented, though validation data are not yet available. Nevertheless, the observed model response demonstrates general consistency with expected results and the advantages of integrating the hydraulic and quality modules. The interactive graphical user interface (GUI) is also shown to represent a simple and effective connective tool to the integrated package.

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Abstract. In this paper we provide two introductory analyses of CAPs, based exclusively on the analysis of documents found on the Internet. The first analysis allowed us to investigate the world of CAPs, in particular for what concerned their status (dead or alive), the scope of those platforms and the typology of users. In order to develop a more accurate model of CAPs, and to understand more deeply the motivation of the users and the type of expected payoff, we analysed those CAPs from the above list that are still alive and we used two models developed for what concerned the virtual community and the collective intelligence.