Converging technologies in the Italian daily press 2002–2006: preliminary results of an ongoing research project

The article introduces the preliminary results of an ongoing research project aiming to explore how the promises of NBIC to improve and cure the human mind and body are portrayed and what themes and actors the coverage makes salient in the public discourse. Focusing on the Italian daily press in the period 2002–2006, news stories about the two application areas of converging technologies related to brain enhancement and human–machine interfaces are examined here. Preliminary findings show an overwhelmingly positive coverage and a hegemonic position of natural and life scientists and medical doctors in the media discourse on converging technologies.     

A Fragile Guideline to Development Assistance

The concept of fragility has gained an increasing relevance in development discourse. Nevertheless, it remains a fuzzy and elusive concept. This article presents a review of the literature, and identifies two main sets of definitions of fragility, which substantially differ in their focus and breadth, and that reflect the evolution of the discourse around this developmental concept. The limited consensus that is found in the literature suggests that the analytical salience and the direct operational value‐added of the concept remain unclear. Nevertheless, the debate around state fragility has played an important advocacy role, and has offered key methodological insights with respect to the challenges that donors face, and what can be realistically achieved through external engagement.     

Desiring nature: Identity and becoming in narratives of travel

Abstract

This paper explores the cultural value of desiring nature through reading the travel narratives of Val Plumwood and Alphonso Lingis with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). As Game (1991) suggests this textual practice produces different ways of writing the social that undoes the nature/culture opposition informing popular discourses and much cultural theory. Rethinking the value of nature/culture relations has tended to be the domain of environmental philosophy. Yet a cultural analysis also has much to contribute to current debates around value and identity, embodiment and representations of desire. Such a shift requires rethinking the sensory relation between self and nature through the mediation of language. Two quite distinctive experiences of awe provide texts for this analysis. In the desire to know non‐human nature as other, Lingis and Plumwood are moved by a wish to become nearer, to move beyond the bounds of an identity premised on a cultural relation of mastery over nature. These are compelling narratives, for they do not simply indulge the reader in a romantic appreciation of nature's wildness, as if nature was simply an object of aesthetic contemplation and background to the unfolding drama of human identity. These journeys involve disturbing transformations of self; Plumwood travels into the dangerous waters of the crocodile's territory in Kakadu National Park, Australia, while Lingis encounters the uninhabitable terrain of the Antarctic. The reverberating effects of awe produce a movement of becoming ‐ becoming‐animal, becoming‐nature, which contests the Hegelian desire for mastery of nature and the teleological structure of desire itself aimed at unity. Awe as a profoundly disturbing relation, threatens to undo the dominant fantasy of human identity as pure culture, separate from the realm of nature, body and materiality.     

Green Care Farms Promote Activity Among Elderly People With Dementia

In the Netherlands, an increasing number of green care farms are providing day care to community-dwelling elderly people with dementia. Currently, it is unknown whether activities, activity participation, and facility use of elderly people with dementia at green care farms differ from those at regular day care facilities. The authors performed group and individual observations at 11 green care farms and 12 regular day care facilities. Activities of elderly people at green care farms were more frequent, occurred outdoors more often, were of a higher physical intensity, and more often were aimed at individuals than activities at regular day care facilities. Therefore, the green care farms’ environment may be more beneficial for elderly people with dementia than the regular day care facility environment.     

Characteristics of Gamblers Using a National Online Counselling Service for Problem Gambling

Immediate interventions for a range of health concerns are increasingly being delivered online due to their ease of access and potential to attract new treatment cohorts. This paper describes the development and implementation of a national Australian real time chat and email service for problem gambling. Between September 2009 and September 2011, over 85,000 people visited Gambling Help Online. In addition, 1,722 people engaged in real time chat with trained gambling counsellors, while 299 accessed the email support program. Almost 70 % of people accessing these programs were seeking treatment for the first time, with email contacts significantly more likely to be new treatment seekers (78.0 %) compared with chat clients (68.1 %). Chat clients were more likely to be male than female and aged under 40 years, while email clients, while still highly accessed by young males, were more often female and aged over 40 years. These initial findings suggest that online counselling provides an important alternate mode of service delivery, which is attractive to new treatment seekers. Further research is required to determine the efficacy and impact of this service type on long-term gambling outcomes.     

Cultural tourism and temporary art exhibitions in Italy: a panel data analysis

The main aim of this work is to study the relationship between cultural tourism and temporary art exhibitions by means of a panel data analysis. In literature, the capability of cultural attractions, e.g. art exhibitions, of increasing the tourist flow has not been investigated yet and we start to fill this gap. Our data set consists of monthly observed variables on 52 Italian provinces over the period 2003–2007. Our response variable is the amount of hotel arrivals and the set of covariates includes the amount of visitors of temporary exhibitions of ancient, modern and contemporary art plus a set of variables that contribute to tourist arrivals, like the kind of destination, the attraction capability of each province and so on. Of particular interest is to discover the art sector that has the strongest influence on the tourist flow towards Italy by keeping into account both the temporal dynamic and the heterogeneity of the Italian provinces. To this aim, we discuss the static and dynamic error component regression models from both the theoretical and practical point of view. The estimated two-way fixed effects regression models suggest that all the three sectors contribute to the tourist flow but in a quite different fashion. On the basis of our analysis we derive some indications for the policy maker in the field of cultural tourism.     

Infants' Individuation of Rigid and Plastic Objects Based on Shape

Recent research suggests that 12‐month‐old infants use shape to individuate the number of objects present in a scene. This study addressed the question of whether infants would also rely on shape when shape is only a temporary attribute of an object. Specifically, we investigated whether infants realize that shape changes reliably indicate identity changes only in the case of rigid objects, but not in the case of deformable plastic objects. Twelve‐month‐old infants observed how either a rigid or a plastic object was placed in a box. When searching the box, they retrieved either an object with the same (no‐switch event) or with a different shape (switch event). Infants correctly inferred two distinct objects in the switch event in the case of rigid objects, but not in the case of plastic objects. A control experiment confirmed that this result was not due to a lack of salience of the shape transformation. Thus, infants' re‐searching behavior indicated that they viewed shape as being diagnostic in the individuation process of rigid objects only.     

Edge-colouring of joins of regular graphs II

We prove that the edges of every even graph G=G ₁+G ₂ that is the join of two regular graphs G ₁ and G ₂ can be coloured with Δ(G) colours, whenever Δ(G)=Δ(G ₁)+|V ₂|. The proof of this result together with the results in De Simone and Galluccio (J. Comb. Optim. 18:417–428, 2009) states that every even graph G that is the join of two regular graphs is Class 1. The proof yields an efficient combinatorial algorithm to find a Δ(G)-edge-colouring of this type of graphs.     

Modelling spatio-temporal air pollution data from a mobile monitoring station

ABSTRACT

Environmental data is typically indexed in space and time. This work deals with modelling spatio-temporal air quality data, when multiple measurements are available for each space-time point. Typically this situation arises when different measurements referring to several response variables are observed in each space-time point, for example, different pollutants or size resolved data on particular matter. Nonetheless, such a kind of data also arises when using a mobile monitoring station moving along a path for a certain period of time. In this case, each spatio-temporal point has a number of measurements referring to the response variable observed several times over different locations in a close neighbourhood of the space-time point. We deal with this type of data within a hierarchical Bayesian framework, in which observed measurements are modelled in the first stage of the hierarchy, while the unobserved spatio-temporal process is considered in the following stages. The final model is very flexible and includes autoregressive terms in time, different structures for the variance-covariance matrix of the errors, and can manage covariates available at different space-time resolutions. This approach is motivated by the availability of data on urban pollution dynamics: fast measures of gases and size resolved particulate matter have been collected using an Optical Particle Counter located on a cabin of a public conveyance that moves on a monorail on a line transect of a town. Urban microclimate information is also available and included in the model. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed model over existing alternatives that do not model data over the first stage of the hierarchy.     

Does Religious Diversity in Health Team Composition Affect Efficiency? Evidence from Dubai

Team cultural diversity, the degree to which working team members differ in culture‐related factors, may affect healthcare teams’ outcomes. This paper focuses on one particular source of cultural diversity, namely religion, and examines its relation to the production efficiency of hospital wards. Building on the categorization‐elaboration model of organizational diversity, the authors test an empirical model positing that team religious diversity has non‐linear effects on efficiency, and considering the role of moderating variables of the relation diversity–efficiency. Empirically, the authors adopt a two‐step approach, whereby the first step applies data envelopment analysis to estimate efficiency scores for each team, and the second investigates the effect of diversity and of moderating variables. The model is tested on a sample of hospital wards from three large hospitals in Dubai. The results suggest an inverse U‐shaped relation between religious diversity and the wards’ efficiency. Evidence is provided that the relation is moderated by task complexity, task conflict, team leader tenure and diversity in nationality. This study advances research on the management of hospital team diversity by emphasizing the complexity of diversity effects and the importance of contextual factors.