Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile. Workshop Proceedings, Padova, 7 September 2017

Elena Ferrante is an internationally acclaimed Italian novelist whose real identity has been kept secret by E/O publishing house for more than 25 years. Owing to her popularity, major Italian and foreign newspapers have long tried to discover her real identity. However, only a few attempts have been made to foster a scientific debate on her work. In 2016, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele Cortelazzo led an Italian research team that conducted a preliminary study and collected a well-founded, large corpus of Italian novels comprising 150 works published in the last 30 years by 40 different authors. Moreover, they shared their data with a select group of international experts on authorship attribution, profiling, and analysis of textual data: Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki (Poland), Patrick Juola (United States), Vittorio Loreto and his research team, Margherita Lalli and Francesca Tria (Italy), George Mikros (Greece), Pierre Ratinaud (France), and Jacques Savoy (Switzerland). The chapters of this volume report the results of this endeavour that were first presented during the international workshop Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile in Padua on 7 September 2017 as part of the 3rd IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data. The fascinating research findings suggest that Elena Ferrante\u2019s work definitely deserves \u201cmany hands\u201d as well as an extensive effort to understand her distinct writing style and the reasons for her worldwide success

A treatise on Web 2.0 with a case study from the financial markets

There has been much hype in vocational and academic circles surrounding the emergence of web 2.0 or social media; however, relatively little work was dedicated to substantiating the actual concept of web 2.0. Many have dismissed it as not deserving of this new title, since the term web 2.0 assumes a certain interpretation of web history, including enough progress in certain direction to trigger a succession [i.e. web 1.0 → web 2.0]. Others provided arguments in support of this development, and there has been a considerable amount of enthusiasm in the literature. Much research has been busy evaluating current use of web 2.0, and analysis of the user generated content, but an objective and thorough assessment of what web 2.0 really stands for has been to a large extent overlooked. More recently the idea of collective intelligence facilitated via web 2.0, and its potential applications have raised interest with researchers, yet a more unified approach and work in the area of collective intelligence is needed. This thesis identifies and critically evaluates a wider context for the web 2.0 environment, and what caused it to emerge; providing a rich literature review on the topic, a review of existing taxonomies, a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the concept itself, an investigation of the collective intelligence potential that emerges from application usage. Finally, a framework for harnessing collective intelligence in a more systematic manner is proposed. In addition to the presented results, novel methodologies are also introduced throughout this work. In order to provide interesting insight but also to illustrate analysis, a case study of the recent financial crisis is considered. Some interesting results relating to the crisis are revealed within user generated content data, and relevant issues are discussed where appropriate

Proceedings of the International Conference ‘Between Data and Senses; Architecture, Neuroscience and the Digital Worlds’.

The cross-over between the digital and the physical is being increasingly addressed in design disciplines, architecture, arts and urban studies. Artists and designers increasingly make use of hard data to interpret the world and/or create meaningful and sensuous environments or design objects. Architects attempt to measure neurophysiological data to understand better the human experience in spaces. Designers script parametric processes to translate data into responsive, meaningful and/or aesthetically intriguing installations. Scientists and architects/ artists/ designers collaborate to visualise data in new and creative ways so as to trigger and reveal further connections, interpretations and readings. Practices such as the above attempt to break down the dichotomy between data and the sensuous (or else the digital and the physical). They translate elusive, ephemeral and intangible aspects of a place into solid data. In other instances the solid data are interpreted and represented in a way so as to be perceived by the different senses and/or experienced in a different manner. In this context, methods and conceptual frameworks of different disciplines need to engage in a dialogue; and through these cross-disciplinary practices, new strategies and processes emerge. This publication aims to present collaborative projects, where methods from more than one discipline are involved. This publication also addresses how collaborators from different disciplines can work together to deal with current design and social issues

In Search of the Creative Scientific Personality

This study investigates whether personality is a valid predictor of creativity in science above and beyond demographic characteristics, such as career age, gender, and scientific discipline. Creativity is an act of making something new, original, and useful. Creative achievement in science is the personal ability to generate original, useful, and adaptive scientific theories, research methods, or empirical findings. Personality characteristics can operate as valid predictors of creative achievement in science. This study surveyed 145 scientists throughout the United States. Total creativity index was computed by standardizing and summing the total number of publications, total number of citations, h-index, and Soler\u27s creativity index. As expected, openness and neuroticism were significantly positively correlated to creativity in science, while, interestingly, psychoticism was negatively correlated with creativity

The Waiting Room: Re-Making Adulthood Among America’s Underemployed

This dissertation takes as its starting point the problem of underemployment among young adults in the post-recession United States. Recent studies have shown that the number of college-educated Americans employed in positions not requiring a degree has reached historic highs. Such analyses are limited, however, in that they do not capture the lived effects of such trends—how underemployment insinuates itself into a person\u27s worldview and identity. This ethnographic study delves into the intimate correlates of macroeconomic change by investigating the impact of underemployment on notions of adulthood among recent college graduates working in the Minneapolis-St. Paul restaurant industry. For the young people that I interviewed and worked alongside for a year, a central question in their lives appeared to be, how does one become an adult without the stable pay and prestige that has defined legitimate, middle class adulthood for prior generations? My study found that, for many white collar hopefuls, the beginnings of their careers were defined by a period of precarious employment—a waiting room, as some called it—for wealth, self-actualization, and adulthood itself. For those workers without means to subsidize their wages during this period, restaurant work provided an essential income stream and bulwark against economic instability. This period of underemployment ultimately fostered a waiting room subjectivity, a stultifying, yet creative state in which workers dealt with the practical problem of becoming adults despite deficits in prestige and income. Their tactics were crystallized in the internet meme adulting and ranged from traditional consumer activities such as purchasing a bed frame to communalist householding arrangements. Overall, I argue that their waiting room world constitutes one refraction of an emerging generational subject, haunted by the norms of the twentieth century but birthed into an era where those norms have collapsed into a disordered state of adulthood, fertile with risk and possibility

Emotional intelligence and andragogic learning process of the students from the english competency course at San Ignacio de Loyola University, 2018

El objetivo general de esta investigación fue determinar la relación entre la inteligencia emocional y el proceso de aprendizaje andragógico de los estudiantes del Curso de Competencia en Inglés de la Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola, año 2018. Se utilizó una metodología cuantitativa, con un nivel descriptivo y un diseño no experimental, manejando una unidad de muestra de 30 estudiantes pertenecientes a dos secciones del Curso de Competencia en Inglés. Para la recolección de datos se utilizó el Inventario de Cociente Emocional Bar-On que consta de 133 ítems que fue adaptado al Perú por Ugarriza (2001), y una prueba que evaluó la comprensión auditiva, la comprensión lectora, la expresión escrita y la expresión oral. Los resultados mostraron que existe una relación directa y significativa entre las variables inteligencia emocional y el aprendizaje andragógico del idioma inglés, es decir, a mayor nivel de inteligencia emocional, mayores son las posibilidades de tener un mejor desempeño en el aprendizaje del idioma inglés. Las conclusiones indicaron que existe una relación directa entre la inteligencia emocional y el aprendizaje andragógico del idioma inglés en las dimensiones de comprensión auditiva, expresión oral, comprensión de lectura y expresión escrita.The general objective of this research was to determinate the relationship between emotional intelligence and the andragogic learning process of the students of the English Competency Course of the San Ignacio de Loyola University, year 2018. It was used a quantitative methodology, with a descriptive level and a non-experimental design, handling a sample unit of 30 students belonging to two sections of the English Competency Course. For the data collection was used the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory which consists of 133 items that was adapted to Peru by Ugarriza (2001), and a test that evaluated auditive comprehension, reading comprehension, written expression and oral expression. The results showed that there is a direct and significant relationship between the variables emotional intelligence and andragogic learning of the English language, that is to say, the higher emotional intelligence level, the greater are the possibilities of having a better performance in the learning of the English language. The conclusions indicated that there is a direct relationship between emotional intelligence and andragogic learning of the English language in the dimensions of auditive comprehension, oral expression, reading comprehension, and written expression

The Amphibian, Melioristic Agenda for Dividuals: Tropological Oscillations versus Tropological Settlements

Some people often identify themselves too strongly with one particular belief system. Others, throughout their lives, travel from one belief system to another without necessarily weaving their experiences and gained bodies of knowledge in a complementary manner. This thesis discusses different frequencies and principles of this sort of settlements or oscillations. I argue that it is impossible to believe in perfectly purist ideologies that would not deviate from their putative, pre-established, holistic inner order. Through multiple literary, cinematic, and philosophical examples it is shown that people are of dividual (not individual) nature. That is to say, potentially we contain multiple dividual poles such as hedgehog versus fox, character versus author/agent, and different levels of authorship/agency, and a very large number of tropologies – a small, coherent system of different tropes that revolve around one axial trope – such as noise, silence, laughter, etc. Our level of authorship/agency depends on how often we oscillate between different dividual and tropological poles and how close is our relationship with them. These terms also allow us to look at the problem of determinism and free will from a slightly different conceptual angle. This may pose two traditional questions: (i) Why act at all, if we are tropologically conditioned? (ii) What could be constructive principles for action? This thesis argues that even though we are incapable of controlling and predicted the consequences of people’s actions (entropology), we may still follow the principle of melioristic, amphibian, tropological and dividual oscillations and hope for serendipitous outcomes. Examples and cases from the areas of literature, arts, philosophy, and cultural studies used in this thesis seek to provide a rich conceptual framework and gain new synthesized perspectives. Comparisons of old and new intellectual production helps us understand why tropological and dividual oscillations are inevitable and more desirable than tropological and dividual settlements