The Institute of Science of Bologna and The Royal Society in the eighteenth century

English astronomers had known of the astronomical studies of G.D. Cassini, F.R.S., in Bologna even before the foundation of The Royal Society, and throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, Fellows of the Society were kept informed of Bolognese science, whereas that in turn was often strongly influenced by ideas and discoveries in England. Fellows of the Society were from time to time elected from Bologna, and the Society had members of the Bolognese academy among its Italian Fellows

Personal experiences with the national healthcare system and institutional trust in times of COVID-19

We conducted two studies to analyze the relations between dissatisfaction with experiences with the national healthcare system and trust in political (political parties and parliament), super partes (judiciary and police), and international (European Union [EU] and United Nations [UN]) institutions via the mediation of trust in the national healthcare system. Study 1 (longitudinal study on a quota sample of the Italian adult population, N = 689, surveyed in April 2021, T-1, and in April 2022, T-2) showed that dissatisfaction with experiences with the national healthcare system was negatively associated with trust in the national healthcare system, which, in turn, was positively associated with an increase in trust in political, super partes, and international institutions. Study 2 (between-participant experimental design, N = 285) showed that priming a negative versus a positive experience with the national healthcare system decreased trust in this system, which, in turn, was positively associated with trust in political, super partes, and international institutions. The strengths, limitations, and possible development of this research are discussed

The gender-based stereotype about food is on the table. Food choice also depends on co-eater's gender

Previous research has shown that different foods are stereotypically associated with gender and that eating in a role-congruent way fulfills an impression management function. On the other hand, other studies revealed that adapting one's food consumption to that of the co-eaters is a means to gain social approval as well. In the present study, we bridge these two distinct lines of research by studying what happens when the two norms (conforming to the gender-based stereotype and imitating the co-eater) conflict, that is with opposite-sex co-eaters. Results indicated that the tendency to match the co-eaters' supposed consumption generally appeared over and above one's gender-congruent choice. In addition, as expected, gender differences also emerged: while men were always willing to adapt to the co-eaters, women's intention to eat the feminine food was independent from the co-eaters' gender

Ingredients of gender-based stereotypes about food : Indirect influence of food type, portion size and presentation on gendered intentions to eat

The association between certain foods and masculinity or femininity has been widely discussed in different disciplines. However, extant research has yet to clarify which are the critical dimensions lending this gender connotations to food and thus impacting on the willingness to eat it. We present a study on the role of food type, portion size, and dish presentation as potential factors constituting the gender-based stereotype about food, and their indirect or mediated effect on the intention of men and women to eat certain feminine/masculine stereotyped foods. We manipulated the three features cited above in a 2 (food type: Caprese vs. hamburger) x 2 (portion size: small vs. big) x 2 (presentation: elegant vs. rough) full factorial design. Results confirmed a model of moderated mediation: the Caprese salad, the small portion and the elegantly presented dish (in respect to the hamburger, the big portion and the roughly presented dish) tend to be considered \u201cfeminine food\u201d, and thus women expressed a more pronounced intention to eat it than men. The implications of the \ufb01ndings for both theory and practice are discussed

Aneuploidy in human eggs: contributions of the meiotic spindle

Human eggs frequently contain an incorrect number of chromosomes, a condition termed aneuploidy. Aneuploidy affects ∼10–25% of eggs in women in their early 30s, and more than 50% of eggs from women over 40. Most aneuploid eggs cannot develop to term upon fertilization, making aneuploidy in eggs a leading cause of miscarriages and infertility. The cellular origins of aneuploidy in human eggs are incompletely understood. Aneuploidy arises from chromosome segregation errors during the two meiotic divisions of the oocyte, the progenitor cell of the egg. Chromosome segregation is driven by a microtubule spindle, which captures and separates the paired chromosomes during meiosis I, and sister chromatids during meiosis II. Recent studies reveal that defects in the organization of the acentrosomal meiotic spindle contribute to human egg aneuploidy. The microtubules of the human oocyte spindle are very frequently incorrectly attached to meiotic kinetochores, the multi-protein complexes on chromosomes to which microtubules bind. Multiple features of human oocyte spindles favour incorrect attachments. These include spindle instability and many age-related changes in chromosome and kinetochore architecture. Here, we review how the unusual spindle assembly mechanism in human oocytes contributes to the remarkably high levels of aneuploidy in young human eggs, and how age-related changes in chromosome and kinetochore architecture cause aneuploidy levels to rise even higher as women approach their forties

Enhancing visual embeddings through weakly supervised captioning for zero-shot learning

Visual features designed for image classification have shown to be useful in zero-shot learning (ZSL) when generalizing towards classes not seen during training. In this paper, we argue that a more effective way of building visual features for ZSL is to extract them through captioning, in order not just to classify an image but, instead, to describe it. However, modern captioning models rely on a massive level of supervision, e.g up to 15 extended descriptions per instance provided by humans, which is simply not available for ZSL benchmarks. In the latter in fact, the available annotations inform about the presence/absence of attributes within a fixed list only. Worse, attributes are seldom annotated at the image level, but rather, at the class level only: because of this, the annotation cannot be visually grounded. In this paper, we deal with such a weakly supervised regime to train an end-to-end LSTM captioner, whose backbone CNN image encoder can provide better features for ZSL. Our enhancement of visual features, called 'VisEn', is compatible with any generic ZSL method, without requiring changes in its pipeline (a part from adapting hyper-parameters). Experimentally, VisEn is capable of sharply improving recognition performance on unseen classes, as we demonstrate thorough an ablation study which encompasses different ZSL approaches. Further, on the challenging fine-grained CUB dataset, VisEn improves by margin state-of-the-art methods, by using visual descriptors of one order of magnitude smaller

The IRIS network of excellence: future directions in interactive storytelling

The IRIS Network of Excellence (NoE) started its work in January 2009. In this paper we highlight some new research directions developing within the network: one is revisiting narrative formalisation through the use of Linear Logic and the other is challenging the conventional framework of basing Interactive Storytelling on computer graphics to explore the content-based recombination of video sequences

Exploring the scalability of character-based storytelling

Interactive Storytelling is establishing itself as a major application of virtual embodied characters. To achieve further progress in the field, some authors have suggested that it was necessary to break the 10minute barrier for story duration, while preserving story pace. In this context, understanding scalability issues is an essential aspect of the development of future Interactive Storytelling technologies. Scalability can be defined as the production of a richer narrative which follows the scaling-up of the Artificial Intelligence representations for plot structure or characters ’ roles. We have formalised narrative events in terms of “film idioms ” which are dynamically recognised as the story is generated. This enabled us to stage a number of experiments in which we modified several determinants of scalability, such as the number of feature characters or the complexity of their roles and recorded subsequent narrative extension, through the number of film idioms generated. 1