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This paper intends to analyse conversational behaviour after quarrels in Latin literary texts.Taking the quarrels in Roman Comedy, Tragedy, and Novels (3rd–2nd BCE–1st–2nd CE) as a corpus, this analysis focuses on the consequences of these conflicts from an interactional and linguistic perspective. The items under investigation include the types of conversation that occur after quarrels – whether conflictual or not; its structure – in terms of openings and closings; and the interpersonal rela-tions between the interlocutors who participate in the fight – whether the quarrel changes their former relation, and how.In tackling such questions, Conversational Analysis and im/politeness theories serve to elucidate the use and distribution of the expressions used by the interloc-utors. The results of the analysis show that the trends for conflictual interactions differ from those of nonconflictual ones. The type of conversation thus impacts conversational behaviours and expectations. This suggests that the conception of standards according to the type of conversation reflects a more accurate grasp of the reality reflected in the texts.

New developments in the field of technology have led to the use of scanners in order to obtain anthropometric measurements. As a matter of fact, anthropometry finds its roots in the seventeenth century, currently its usage has been strengthened by the employment of scanners. 3D whole-body scanners allow to collect reliable data and to visualise the exact human body shape. Thus, this paper aims at exploring the combination of these topics, anthropometry and scan, through an innovative tool, the scientometrics analysis. This technique provides a clear overview of the existing literature in the field investigated. In our study we examined 1’652 papers from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Network analyses have shown an interesting scenario, emphasising the research evolution over time. Specifically, endocrinology and metabolism emerged as the most active publication domains. Accordingly, the two most high-impact journals and the most cited paper regard nutrition issues and metabolic risk factors respectively. However, the predominance of the USA for number of publications has not been confirmed by the institution’s analysis, which has shown the University of Copenhagen as the most influential one. On the other hand, Yumei Zhang currently appears as the main authority in the field and Leslie G. Farkas as the most influential author over the entire time span analysed. The relevant implications of the findings are discussed in terms of future research lines.

In the first part of this paper, the essential elements of the operational model of family group conferences will be presented. We will start from the idea that this model enhances the empowerment and participation of families in decision-making processes even within coercive institutional contexts, such as that of child protection. In the second part of the paper, the Family Group Conferences model will be analysed in light of some theoretical and methodological reference principles of Relational Social Work, and we will attempt to highlight if and to what extent Family Group Conferences can be considered an operating relational model.

This paper discusses German intonation and specifically pitch (F0) and pitch contour considering both functional (phonological) and formal (phonetic) aspects. Universal functional characteristics are put in relation with language-specific characteristics; the analysis is performed in a specific contrastive (here: German-Italian) perspective. The paper aims at showing the interaction between phonetic forms and phonological functions of German intonation and to point out similarities and differences between German and Italian. These are particularly relevant in intercultural communication between Gernman and Italian speakers and in GFL-courses in Italy.

Some authors have highlighted the close connection between Participatory Research and social work. Participatory Research has some similarities with social work both because, in most cases, aimed at social change, and because the researcher is interacting with people in difficulty, as well as the social worker. In this paper, a reflection on the connections between Participatory Research and the social work approach known as Relational Social Work is presented.

Family and social intergenerational relationships have experienced a major morphogenetic change following the significant socio-demographic transformations brought about by the mechanisms of natural variations in population (birth and death rates). These transformations have led to the formation of smaller families – i.e. having fewer family members –, which are characterized by the simultaneous presence of more than one generation – multigenerational families, made up of three or more generations, are the so-called beanpole families (Dykstra, 2010) – and have relatively few horizontal (intragenerational) relationships and numerous vertical (intergenerational) relationships (Saraceno, 2008). We aim to examine this morphogenesis from a generational standpoint (Boccacin, 2005), whose heuristic significance is represented by a (both structural and cultural) multidimensionality of the relationships between generations and, in particular, of the symbolic meaning generated through them and transmitted within the family and society. This paper also focuses on solidarity between generations by discussing the well-known Bengtson’s and Roberts’ paradigm (1991), which was later revisited from a relational perspective by Silverstein and Bengtson (1997). Elements of risk in intergenerational relationships that are not being considered in most postmodern analyses and reflections will also be emphasized. Conversely, relationships between generations are not immune from ambivalence (Lüscher, 2011) and can therefore be either generative or degenerative (thus generating relational goods or evils). Results from recent surveys conducted by our research team can eloquently exemplify the concepts presented in this chapter.

The issue of the local provision of public services has becoming important in Italy due to several changes that have been implemented in the last years by the national government in the regulation of state owned companies and in the regulation of public services (or services of general economic interest). The regulatory role of national or local government and the increasing role played in some large companies managing important services have to be accurately discussed in order to reconcile efficiency of the companies with the need of properly represent the political orientations. Potential conflict of inter- ests on one side but also the need to properly represent the interest of citizens, more than the interest of shareholders, are two issues that are discussed in the paper. A practical example of a small size Italian town is used in order to show the current situation in terms of regulations, planning of the service, pricing and management of the service in the most important sectors. Competition and public interest are not necessarily in conflict, but the whole setup must be reviewed.

This collection of original papers by international experts is devoted to illustrating the applications of logical and mathematical methods to a wide set of philosophical problems ranging from philosophy of mathematics, to philosophy of science, epistemology and metaphysics.

Choreographers may exploit digital technologies to create augmented choreographies where the behavior of dancers determines the behavior of projections, lighting and other scenographic effects. This paper presents the preliminary results of ethnographic studies about how choreographers work from an interaction design perspective. Finally the paper describes the first elements of a choreographers-oriented design process for an Augmented Choreography.

The strong integration triggered by the adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs) impacts many processes and tasks; more specifically, the way accounting data are collected, elaborated, communicated and used often changes even dramatically when an ERP system is adopted. This design-oriented paper stems from multi-year didactic experiences in the Italian context, where the Business Economics courses still poorly take into account the emerging educational needs stemming from this scenario: in most Italian universities, in fact, subjects such as accounting, administration, controlling and auditing are taught according to traditional approaches, which tend to see these activities as scarcely integrated with the operations, on the one side, and with the strategic management processes, on the other side. In other words, ERPs, despite their nature of integrated Accounting Information Systems (AIS), are often considered as a “subject for engineers” and, as a consequence, Italian companies have difficulties in finding economics graduates capable of an up-to-date, integrated view of accounting and administration issues. This paper proposes a framework for innovating the educational strategies for basic and advanced courses related to accounting, administration, controlling and auditing, in order to fill the identified gap between real-world demand and higher education supply in this context.

This paper describes features and outcomes of the Named Entity Recognition on Transcribed Broadcast News task at EVALITA 2011. This task represented a change with respect to previous editions of the NER task within the EVALITA evaluation campaign because it was based on automatic transcription of spoken broadcast news. In this paper, we present the training and test data used, the evaluation procedure and participants’ results. In particular, three participating systems are described and the results they obtained are discussed; special attention is given to the analysis of the impact of transcription errors on NER performance.

This paper makes an initial attempt to examine two product disclosure statements to ascertain what a typical consumer might understand, comprehend and learn from document. Through the use of insights and research in the fields of consumer behaviour and cognitive psychology, this paper provides an initial content analysis of these two PDS that takes into consideration a number of relevant theories (including processing capacity of the reader, framing, prospect theory, trust, branding, maintaining the status quo, the use of heuristics, expert opinion, and the optimism bias).

Theoretical studies that actually propose to use evolutionary paradigms in organizational/management studies are quite rare, as well as field studies ex-plicitly adopting them. Moreover, these rare writings tend to refer to classical, “Darwin+Mendel+DNA” thought, surprisingly overlooking the last decades’ ad-vancements in evolutionary research, although these recent studies are progres-sively explaining complex phenomena, which Darwin’s model did not encompass. This paper identifies three streams within recent evolutionary research, whose adoption may result in useful innovation for management, organizational and in-formation system research. These streams of studies present evolutionary, ecolog-ical and social processes in an integrated fashion, providing strong frameworks to understand learning processes, procedure creation, flexibility, decision making, networks evolution, cooperation, and the role of relationships, moods and non-rational triggers in change processes. This paper suggests that deeper insights into these factors not only would let us better understand how organizations evolve, but would also give us hints for building organizations which are more compatible with human nature.

Cultural Heritage and Tourism Development may be strong driving factors for local policies and may have great importance in strategic decision making at territorial level; then, they may be important subjects for eParticipation studies. But this paper demonstrates, through a literature review, that today’s disciplinary shape of eParticipation as a research field is not suitable to effectively investigate participatory processes related to Tourism and Cultural Heritage. Then, by presenting a field research, which took place in the Italian city of Genoa, and by confronting its outcomes with some most widespread disciplinary eParticipation underpinnings, the paper seeks to identify some areas where a widened disciplinary scope is particularly needed. Finally, we propose a new disciplinary framework, suitable to address also Cultural Heritage and Tourism Development eParticipation processes.

Lemlat is a morphological analyser for Latin, which shows a remarkably wide coverage of the Latin lexicon. However, the performance of the tool is limited by the absence of proper names in its lexical basis. In this paper we present the extension of Lemlat with a large Onomasticon for Latin. First, we describe and motivate the automatic and manual procedures for including the proper names in Lemlat. Then, we compare the new version of Lemlat with the previous one, by evaluating their lexical coverage of four Latin texts of different era and genre.

Emerging literature on crowdfunding, until now, is missing detailed empirical analyses on profiles of “crowdfunders”. Our paper aims to address this shortage, analyzing geographical and socio-economic characteristics of crowdfunders, looking at how crowdfunding influences the nature of geography and social contacts in new ventures. Our analysis concentrates on Italy, a country suffering for a huge economic crisis but that, at the same time, is showing a strong dynamism in crowdfunding. We collect data on donors of about 350 projects, estimating with a micro-econometric model not only which donors’ characteristics increase the likelihood of an investment, but also the role played by social media in the crowdfunding process. Our results give some remarkable indications about crowdfunding in different countries and cultural contexts.

In this paper, we intend to explore more in depth such a constitutive function of argumentation by examining its role in the discursive acts that human beings perform in order to give birth to an institutional entity. As a case in point, the Foedus Pactum Helveticum is analyzed. This Charter is at the origin of the Swiss Confederation. Some explanations about the reasons why Switzerland is today rightly considered one of the most stable and effective democratic states over the worlds can be found in the content of this document, in particular in the arguments brought by the “coniurati” to accomplish their alliance. Moreover, the reasons declared by the “Waldstätten” to justify their decision to promise mutual assistance have an important symbolic relevance and could hardly be detached from the factors having promoted the further relationships that over time gave shape to the modern Swiss Federal State.

In information and communication technology (ICT) trust has been considered as a crucial component of digital interactions. Trust has been dissected in a variety of potential meanings and dimensions and through the merging of trust in humans and trust in machines. In this paper, we investigate the role and the aggregation of trust in social networks and blogs and how it relates to knowledge production, and its connections to concepts such as reputation and sustainability in the European context. Moreover, we discuss knowledge production in information and communication technology and its relationship to user trust. We develop a view on the co-production of knowledge and trust and propose a policy management framework to support the users in their trusted use of social networks and blogs. This is presented based on an e-health use case analysis considering web based reputation and developing a new reputation scheme.

In this paper we propose a spatial latent factor model to deal with multivariate geostatistical skew-normal data. In this model we assume that the unobserved latent structure, responsible for the correlation among different variables as well as for the spatial autocorrelation among different sites is Gaussian, and that the observed variables are skew-normal. For this model we provide some of its properties like its spatial autocorrelation structure and its finite dimensional marginal distributions. Estimation of the unknown parameters of the model is carried out by employing a Monte Carlo Expectation Maximization algorithm, whereas prediction at unobserved sites is performed by using closed form formulas and Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. Simulation studies have been performed to evaluate the soundness of the proposed procedures.

A main problem in discrete tomography consists in looking for theoretical models which ensure uniqueness of reconstruction. To this, lattice sets of points, contained in a multidimensional grid $\mathcal{A}=[m_1]\times [m_2]\times\dots \times [m_n]$ (where for $p\in\mathbb{N}$, $[p]=\{0,1,...,p-1\}$), are investigated by means of $X$-rays in a given set $S$ of lattice directions. Without introducing any noise effect, one aims in finding the minimal cardinality of $S$ which guarantees solution to the uniqueness problem. In a previous work the matter has been completely settled in dimension two, and later extended to higher dimension. It turns out that $d+1$ represents the minimal number of directions one needs in $\mathbb{Z}^n$ ($n\geq d\geq 3$), under the requirement that such directions span a $d$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{Z}^n$. Also, those sets of $d+1$ directions have been explicitly characterized. However, in view of applications, it might be quite difficult to decide whether the uniqueness problem has a solution, when $X$-rays are taken in a set of more than two lattice directions. In order to get computational simpler approaches, some prior knowledge is usually required on the object to be reconstructed. A powerful information is provided by additivity, since additive sets are reconstructible in polynomial time by using linear programming. In this paper we compute the proportion of non-additive sets of uniqueness with respect to additive sets in a given grid $\mathcal{A}\subset \mathbb{Z}^n$, in the important case when $d$ coordinate directions are employed.

The current paper attempts to contribute to the study of argumentation in political debates. We propose an examination of the role of fallacies in political argumentation. In the first two sections we conduct a brief review of literature on the concepts of argumentation and fallacies to show that they both converge in emphasizing the role of discourse type when evaluating the efficacy of communicative strategies. This perspective is then applied in the analysis section to look at the role of fallacies in a political debate on nuclear energy held in Italy. We conduct a discourse analysis of the transcript based on which we identify a variety of relevant paths followed by speakers when constructing arguments. The findings demonstrate how several informal fallacies (argumentum ad baculum, argumentum ad hominem, argument from analogy, argumentum ad consequentiam) are strategically used by politicians in order to put forward coherent and strong positions.

In this paper we present the new release of CORPS (CORpus of tagged Political Speeches) that contains transcripts of political speeches tagged with audience reactions, such as APPLAUSE or LAUGHTER. The corpus has been built with the goal of allowing automatic processing of the stored data. These tags signal hot-spots about persuasive communication and can be usefully employed in many theoretical and applied fields, providing insights well beyond those of traditional word-count approaches. After introducing the main characteristics of the corpus and some quantitative descriptions, we discuss possible uses of this resource.

In Discrete Tomography there is a wide literature concerning (weakly) bad configurations. These occur in dealing with several questions concerning the important issues of uniqueness and additivity. Discrete lattice sets which are additive with respect to a given set $S$ of lattice directions are uniquely determined by $X$-rays in the direction of $S$. These sets are characterized by the absence of weakly bad configurations for $S$. On the other side, if a set has a bad configuration with respect to $S$, then it is not uniquely determined by the $X$-rays in the directions of $S$, and consequently it is also non-additive. Between these two opposite situations there are also the non-additive sets of uniqueness, which deserve interest in Discrete Tomography, since their unique reconstruction cannot be derived via the additivity property. In this paper we wish to investigate possible interplays among such notions in a given lattice grid $\mathcal{A}$, under $X$-rays taken in directions belonging to a set $S$ of four lattice directions.

In this paper the serial independence tests known as SIS (Serial Independence Simultaneous) and SICS (Serial Independence Chi-Square) are considered. These tests are here contextualized in the model validation phase for nonlinear models in which the underlying assumption of serial independence is tested on the estimated residuals. Simulations are used to explore the performance of the tests, in terms of size and power, once a linear/nonlinear model is fitted on the raw data. Results underline that both the tests are powerful against various types of alternatives.

In the emerging service-centred economy, even the most physical product is “wrapped” in services. Businesses tend, then, to become more and more information-intensive and networked. In this scenario, the business role of Information Management is crucial. This paper investigates management literature as to the role of the highest ranking executive in charge of Information Systems, i.e. the Chief Information Officer (CIO). We found that, in the 1980s and first 1990s, most literature suggested that CIOs were to be intended as staff, strategy-making managers, similar to CFOs; but since the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, CIOs are also expected to work side by side with line managers and to give perceivable contribution to profits. In this scenario, the active contribution of Information Management in developing value-added services may transform IT from a perceived cost center to a perceived profit center within the organization. In the Conclusions, some suggestions for further research are presented.

Distributed systems are characterized by a large number of similar interconnected objects that cooperate by exchanging messages. Practical application of such systems can be found in computer systems, sensor networks, and in particular in critical infrastructures. Though formalisms like Markovian Agents provide a formal support to describe these systems and evaluate related performance indices, very few tools are currently available to define models in such languages, moreover they do not provide generally specific functionalities to ease the definition of the locations of the interacting components. This paper presents a prototype tool suite capable of supporting the study of the number of hops and the transmission delay in a critical infrastructure. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

In this paper we use the algebraic approach to Discrete Tomography introduced by Hajdu and Tijdeman \cite{Ha-Ti} to find a characterization of functions $f:\mathbb{Z}^2\to \{-1,0,+1\}$ under certain sets of four directions.

In video surveillance, classication of visual data can be very hard, due to the scarce resolution and the noise characterizing the sensors' data. In this paper, we propose a novel feature, the ARray of COvariances (ARCO), and a multi-class classifcation framework operatingon Riemannian manifolds. ARCO is composed by a structure of covariance matrices of image features, able to extract information from data at prohibitive low resolutions. The proposed classication framework consists in instantiating a new multi-class boosting method, working on the manifold Sym+ of symmetric positive defnite d x d (covariance) matrices. As practical applications, we consider different surveillance tasks, such as head pose classifcation and pedestrian detection, providing novel state-of-the-art performances on standard datasets.

A growing stream of research in Information Systems – Organizational Studies is focusing on Design Sciences, not only because a deep understanding of design processes is perceived as fundamental in order to enhance artifacts quality, but also because design activity is more and more understood as a powerful opportunity to create new knowledge. But what are the relationships between design as a pragmatic, problem-solving activity, and design as a learning activity? Moreover, what are the relationships between design as a learning activity, and "proper" scientific research? Even more importantly, under what conditions does successful learning-by-building more probably take place? Natural sciences, and Konrad Lorenz in particular, have given important contributions to answer these questions. This paper seeks to demonstrate how eco-evolutionary thought, which has been quite overlooked in our disciplinary field so far, could be useful to build an effective, multi-disciplinary, epistemologically sound basis to Design Sciences.

In this paper we'll present a dimensional semantic model of emotion locating the former in a four axes space in the attempt to quantify emotion considered as constantly changing with time rather than to label it. The Multidimensional Emotional Appraisal Semantic Space (MEAS) is a method according to which the most relevant features to measure emotions are: a dimensional approach to emotion, the multimodality of expressive signals and the embodied nature of the emotional interaction. Four dimensions have been selected: novelty, pleasantness, coping and arousal. The componential organization all these different levels gives birth to multiple and fuzzy emotional experiences that are in part signalled through patterns of non verbal expression and that can change their intensity in relation to the relevance of the event for the individual and in relation to the arousal given by physiological signals.

The legal view of science has changed through time, moving from a more positivist and noncritical position of law towards science to a critical view of science – providing the potential for more objective knowledge, but value-laden as well - and of the role of society. This paper explores some judicial cases that illustrate these attitudes, suggesting that reference to science (particularly to EBM) can be rigourously and equitably made when it serves the cause of transparency and democratisation both in science and in law, as the tendency towards a policy-related science is suggesting.

il paper analizza le diverse tipologie di partnership pubblico privato e individua le variabili chiave per la progettazione di una relazione collaborativa stabile, duratura ed efficace. L'articolo evidenzia il contributo che questa forma innovativa di azione amministrativa può apportare alla modernizzazione del settore pubblico in Italia.

The paper interpret the evolution of the Italian nonprofit sector