Reflective functioning moderates the relationship between childhood trauma and psychopathology among adolescent outpatients

Mentalization has been considered a buffer against psychopathology in individuals exposed to trauma and abuse. The initial research on mentalizazion by Fonagy (1996), as well as subsequent empirical studies (e.g. Borelli, 2015; Chiesa & Fonagy, 2013), highlighted the role of reflective functioning (RF) as a protective factor for individuals exposed to trauma in childhood against maladpative outcomes. In recent years, association between mentalization and early traumatic experiences has gained an increasing interest among clinical and empirical studies. With regard to adolescence, literature on the relationship between traumatic experiences and RF is still scarce. Nonetheless, an evaluation of these adaptive and maladaptive developmental processes could have important clinical implications in adolescence. The aim of this study was to examine the role of RF as a resilience factor against the development of several psychiatric conditions in a sample of N = 60 adolescent outpatients. Participants were recruited in public mental health services. Each patient was evaluated, at the intake, with M.I.N.I. (Sheehan et al. 1994), SCID-II (First et al., 1997) and self-report tests: Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Bernstein & Fink, 1998), Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS; Sierra & Berrios 2000), Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D; Hamilton, 1960) and Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety (HAM-A; Hamilton 1959). During the first month of treatment the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, George et al., 1985) was also administered, and the AAI transcripts were assessed with the RF Scale (Fonagy et al., 1998). Findings showed that adverse experiences in childhood predicted several psychopathological dimensions; mostly, RF played as a moderator of the relationship between these variables. The clinical implications of these findings were addressed

Caractériser les pratiques de conception des PME pour mieux accompagner leurs projets d’innovation

Les principes d’organisation de l’activité de conception ont été élaborés dans les bureaux d’études des grandes entreprises. Aujourd’hui, la conception de produits nouveaux relève fréquemment de collaborations entre firmes. Les PME engagées dans des partenariats de ce type éprouvent des difficultés à adopter les méthodes de conception actuelles, faute de ressources suffisantes. L’auteur illustre cette situation à partir d’un dispositif d’accompagnement de projets d’innovation en PME. L’article vise à caractériser les pratiques effectives de conception interorganisationnelle en PME. La connaissance de ces pratiques peut être utile aux acteurs, publics ou privés, qui accompagnent l’innovation dans ces organisations.The organisational principles of the design activity were developed in the design offices of large companies. Today, the design of new products often comes under collaborations between firms. The SMEs involved in such partnerships experience difficulties to adopt the current design methods because of their limited resources. The author illustrates this situation from a programme dedicated to support SMEs’ innovation projects. The article aims to characterize the practices of interorganisational design in SMEs. The knowledge of these practices may be useful to public or private actors who support innovation in these organisations.Los principios de organización de la actividad de concepción han sido elaborados en las oficinas de proyectos de grandes empresas. Hoy día la concepción de nuevos productos es a menudo fruto de colaboraciones entre firmas. Las PyMEs involucradas en asociaciones de este tipo tienen dificultades para adoptar los actuales métodos de concepción, porque carecen de recursos suficientes. El autor ilustra la situación anteriormente evocada a partir de un dispositivo de acompañamiento de proyectos de innovación en las PyMEs. El artículo apunta a caracterizar las prácticas efectivas de concepción interorganizativa en las PyMEs. El conocimiento de tales prácticas puede ser útil a los actores públicos o privados que se dedican a acompañar la innovación en dichas organizaciones.Die Organisationsentwicklungskonzepte wurden vor allem in grösseren Unternehmen ausgearbeitet. Heutzutage geschieht die Entwicklung von neuen Produkten vielfach in Kooperationen von mehreren Unternehmen. Viele KMU die aktiv mit Kooperationsformen arbeiten, weisen Probleme in der Anwendung dieser Entwicklungskonzepte auf, da ihnen vielmals die nötigen Ressourcen fehlen. Der Autor zeigt diese Situation anhand des Innovationsprozesses für KMU auf. Der Artikel hat zum Ziel, effektive, unternehmensübergreifende Praktiken zur Entwicklung von Innovationen in KMU aufzuzeigen. Verantwortliche die Innovationsprojekte in KMU, öffentlichen Institutionen und Privatpersonen begleiten, können von diesen Praktiken profitieren

SPoT: Representing the Social, Spatial, and Temporal Dimensions of Human Mobility with a Unifying Framework

Modeling human mobility is crucial in the analysis and simulation of opportunistic networks, where contacts are exploited as opportunities for peer-topeer message forwarding. The current approach with human mobility modeling has been based on continuously modifying models, trying to embed in them the mobility properties (e.g., visiting patterns to locations or specific distributions of inter-contact times) as they came up from trace analysis. As a consequence, with these models it is difficult, if not impossible, to modify the features of mobility or to control the exact shape of mobility metrics (e.g., modifying the distribution of inter-contact times). For these reasons, in this paper we propose a mobility framework rather than a mobility model, with the explicit goal of providing a exible and controllable tool for modeling mathematically and generating simulatively different possible features of human mobility. Our framework, named SPoT, is able to incorporate the three dimensions - spatial, social, and temporal - of human mobility. The way SPoT does it is by mapping the different social communities of the network into different locations, whose members visit with a configurable temporal pattern. In order to characterize the temporal patterns of user visits to locations and the relative positioning of locations based on their shared users, we analyze the traces of real user movements extracted from three location-based online social networks (Gowalla, Foursquare, and Altergeo). We observe that a Bernoulli process effectively approximates user visits to locations in the majority of cases and that locations that share many common users visiting them frequently tend to be located close to each other. In addition, we use these traces to test the exibility of the framework, and we show that SPoT is able to accurately reproduce the mobility behavior observed in traces. Finally, relying on the Bernoulli assumption for arrival processes, we provide a throughout mathematical analysis of the controllability of the framework, deriving the conditions under which heavy-tailed and exponentially-tailed aggregate inter-contact times (often observed in real traces) emerge

Influence of the anodizing process variables on the acidic properties of anodic alumina films

In the present work, the effect of the different variables involved in the process of aluminum anodizing on the total surface acidity of the samples obtained was studied. Aluminum foils were treated by the electro-chemical process of anodic anodizing within the following variable ranges: concentration=1.5-2.5 M; temperature=303-323 K; voltage=10-20 V; time=30-90 min. The total acidity of the samples was characterized by two different methods: acid-base titration using Hammet indicators and potentiometric titration. The results showed that anodizing time, temperature and concentration were the main variables that determined the surface acid properties of the samples, and to a lesser extent voltage. Acidity increased with increasing concentration of the electrolytic bath, whereas the rest of the variables had the opposite effect. Theresults obtained provide a novel tool for variable selection in order to use synthetized materials as catalytic supports, adding to previous research based on the morphology of alumina layers.Fil: Boldrini, Diego Emmanuel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química; ArgentinaFil: Yañez, Maria Julia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca; ArgentinaFil: Tonetto, Gabriela Marta. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química; Argentin

A unifying concept for the dependence of whole-crop N:P ratio on biomass : theory and experiment

Background and Aims: Numerous estimates have been made of the concentrations of N and P required for good growth of crop species but they have not been defined by any unifying model. The aim of the present study was to develop such a model for the dependence of the N : P ratio on crop mass, to test its validity and to use it to identify elements of similarity between different crop species and wild plants. Methods: A model was derived between plant N : P ratio (Rw) and its dry biomass per unit area (W) during growth with near optimum nutrition by considering that plants consist of growth-related tissue and storage-related tissue with N : P ratios Rg and Rs, respectively. Testing and calibration against experimental data on different crop species led to a simple equation between Rw and W which was tested against independent experimental data. Key Results: The validity of the model and equation was supported by 365 measurements of Rw in 38 field experiments on crops. Rg and Rs remained approximately constant throughout growth, with average values of 11·8 and 5·8 by mass. The model also approximately predicted the relationships between leaf N and P concentrations in 124 advisory estimates on immature tissues and in 385 wild species from published global surveys. Conclusions: The N : P ratio of the biomass of very different crops, during growth with near optimum levels of nutrients, is defined entirely in terms of crop biomass, an average N : P ratio of the storage/structure-related tissue of the crop and an average N : P ratio of the growth-related tissue. The latter is similar to that found in leaves of many wild plant species, and even micro-organisms and terrestrial and freshwater autotrophs

Automatic best wireless network selection based on key performance indicators

Introducing cognitive mechanisms at the application layer may lead to the possibility of an automatic selection of the wireless network that can guarantee best perceived experience by the final user. This chapter investigates this approach based on the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE), by introducing the use of application layer parameters, namely Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are defined for different traffic types based on experimental data. A model for an ap- plication layer cognitive engine is presented, whose goal is to identify and select, based on KPIs, the best wireless network among available ones. An experimenta- tion for the VoIP case, that foresees the use of the One-way end-to-end delay (OED) and the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) as KPIs is presented. This first implementation of the cognitive engine selects the network that, in that specific instant, offers the best QoE based on real captured data. To our knowledge, this is the first example of a cognitive engine that achieves best QoE in a context of heterogeneous wireless networks