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Periodic inspection of large tonnage vessels is critical to assess integrity and prevent structural failures that could have catastrophic consequences for people and the environment. Currently, inspection operations are undertaken by human surveyors, often in extreme conditions. This paper aims to present an innovative system for the automatic visual inspection of ship hull surfaces, using a magnetic autonomous robotic crawler (MARC) equipped with a low-cost monocular camera.

MARC is provided with magnetic tracks that make it able to climb along the vertical walls of a vessel while acquiring close-up images of the traversed surfaces. A homography-based structure-from-motion algorithm is developed to build a mosaic image and also produce a metric representation of the inspected areas. To overcome low resolution and perspective distortion problems in far field due to the tilted and low camera position, a “near to far” strategy is implemented, which incrementally generates an overhead view of the surface, as long as it is traversed by the robot.

This paper demonstrates the use of an innovative robotic inspection system for automatic visual inspection of vessels. It presents and validates through experimental tests a mosaicking strategy to build a global view of the structure under inspection. The use of the mosaic image as input to an automatic corrosion detector is also demonstrated.

This paper may help to automate the inspection process, making it feasible to collect images from places otherwise difficult or impossible to reach for humans and automatically detect defects, such as corroded areas.

This paper provides a useful step towards the development of a new technology for automatic visual inspection of large tonnage ships.

Looks at the first 100 years of Italian cinema examining its role in Italy’s recent history. Provides a bibliography of major film directors, Italian cinema sources, reference works, histories, themes, theory and criticism and articles in journals.

This essay aims at retracing the intellectual and biographical events of the economist Gino Arias (1879–1940), examining more in detail the two seasons at the opposite ends of his life: the early one that saw him considerably committed to the Zionist cause and the one that, thirty years later, would force him to confront the racial laws of the Fascist regime.

Despite the seeming tragic continuity of these two phases, Arias’s case is a real historiographical paradox since, over the long span between the opposite ends of his biography, not only did he distance himself from the Zionist movement, but he also gradually laid the foundations for his upcoming and immediate dedication to Fascism; indeed, within the Fascist regime he would stand out as an authoritative and influential theorist of corporatism, the institutional solution Mussolini tried to exploit to organize the national economic life.

After carefully examining Arias’s early contributions to the Zionist cause (that include the establishment of the Florentine Zionist Group and that led him toward strongly nationalistic stances), this essay sums up Arias’s intellectual biography during the next years and then, thanks to unprecedented documents from the Italian Ministry of Interior, closely looks into his fate after his conversion to Catholicism in 1932 and up against the racial laws of 1938, as well as into his attempts to escape persecution. A few final observations will then try to highlight the dramatic exemplarity of his case.

Application of operations management in healthcare is particularly promising to improve the overall organisational performance, although the Italian system is behind in introducing related techniques and methods. One of the recent experiments in healthcare is the implementation of “Lean Thinking”. The purpose of this paper is to investigate which exogenous forces are driving knowledge transfer on Lean, both in the private and public healthcare sectors.

Informed by institutional sociology (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991), the paper builds on the case study methodology (Yin, 2013) to elucidate the environmental pressures that are encouraging the adoption of Lean thinking by Italian hospitals and Local Health Authorities.

The study highlights the economic, coercive, mimetic and normative pressures that are triggering the adoption of Lean thinking in the Italian National Health System (INHS). At the same time, the authors reveal the pivotal importance and innovative roles played by diverse prominent key-actors in the different organisations investigated.

Considering that little is known to date regarding which exogenous forces are driving the transfer of knowledge on Lean, especially in the public healthcare sector, the paper allows scholars to focus on patterns of isomorphic change and will facilitate managers and policy makers to understand exogenous factors stimulating the transfer of Lean thinking and the subsequent innovation within health organisations and systems.