Training para interactuar interculturalmente sobre percepciones e identidades: la implementaci?n del an?lisis multimodal en un enfoque cultural del discurso

The impact of communication on society via computers (computer-mediated communication, or CMC) is still evolving, and our understanding of its social, psychological, political and economic implications is far from complete. Online communication systems structure interaction in accordance with new forms of relating that affect the different social organisations that have emerged through the use of these systems. The situation is even more complex if we consider how the different actors that participate in a negotiation process - often with different motivations and diverging interests - will react to this new environment. The aim of this article is to carry out an analysis of intragroupal processes in a scenario of virtual diplomacy in order to better understand the influence of regulations on groups. To this end, we observe an intercultural group to understand how - even in such a specific case as that of CMC - people construct the world with language instead of merely describing it as it is.El impacto en la sociedad de la comunicaci?n a trav?s de ordenador (computer-mediated communication ?CMC) todav?a est? evolucionando, y nuestra comprensi?n de sus implicaciones sociales, psicol?gicas, pol?ticas y econ?micas dista mucho de ser completa. Los sistemas de comunicaci?n en l?nea estructuran la interacci?n con arreglo a nuevas modalidades de relaci?n que afectan a las diferentes organizaciones sociales surgidas a partir del uso de estos sistemas. La situaci?n es todav?a m?s compleja si consideramos de qu? modo los diferentes actores que participan en un proceso de negociaci?n, a menudo con diferentes motivaciones e intereses divergentes, reaccionar?n ante este nuevo entorno. El objetivo de este trabajo que presentamos es llevar a cabo un an?lisis de procesos intragrupales en un escenario de diplomacia virtual con el fin de comprender mejor la influencia normativa en los grupos. Para ello, se recurre a la observaci?n de un grupo intercultural para comprobar c?mo, incluso en un caso tan espec?fico de CMC, las personas construyen el mundo con el lenguaje en lugar de limitarse a describirlo tal y como es

Capabilities and Limitations of Payment Channel Networks for Blockchain Scalability

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Predicting gully occurrence at watershed scale: Comparing topographic indices and multivariate statistical models

In this study, the ability of five topographic indices to predict the gully trajectories observed in two adjacent watersheds located in Sicily (Italy) was evaluated. Two of these indices, named MSPI and MTWI, as far as we know, have never been employed to this aim. They were obtained by multiplying the stream power index (SPI) and the topographic wetness index (TWI), respectively, by the convergence index (CI). The predictive ability of the topographic indices was measured by using both cut-off independent (AUC: area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) and dependent statistics (Cohen's kappa index κ, sensitivity, specificity). These statistics were calculated also for 100 MARS (multivariate adaptive regression splines) and 100 LR (logistic regression) model runs, which used as predictors the topographic variables (i.e. contributing area, slope steepness, plan curvature and convergence index) combined into the five indices. Performance statistics of both topographic indices and statistical models were calculated using 100 random samples of 2 m grid cells, which were extracted only from flow concentration lines. This was done in order to focus the validation process on where gully erosion is more likely to occur. MSPI achieved the best predictive skill (AUC > 0.93; κ > 0.71) among the topographic indices and exhibited similar and better accuracy than local (i.e. trained and validated in the same watershed) and transferred (i.e. trained in one watershed and tested in the other one) LR models, respectively. On the other hand, MSPI performed similarly to transferred MARS runs (AUC > 0.92; κ > 0.71) but slightly worse than local MARS runs (AUC > 0.95; κ > 0.77). Based on the results of this experiment, it can be inferred that (i) including CI helps in detecting hollow areas where gullies are more likely to occur and (ii) MPSI can be a valid alternative to a data driven approach for mapping gully erosion susceptibility in areas where a gully inventory is not available, which is necessary to calibrate statistical models

Carta Geomorfologica del bacino idrografico del Rio Spinasanta e note illustrative(Sicilia centro-settentrionale).

Geomorphological map of the Rio Spinasanta river basin and illustrative notes (Central-northern Sicily). The present paper aims to illustrate the geomorphological map of the Rio Spinasanta river basin, in which landforms recognizable on the area are mapped and distinguished according to the responsible geomorphological process. The Rio Spianasanta river is a tributary of the head sector of the Imera Settentrionale river and is contiguous to the regional water divide that separate the northward and southward flowing Sicilian rivers; the geomorphological map has been produced using as support a topographic map on scale 1:10,000. The geomorphological map has been carried out by means of different methodologies, namely geological and geomorphological field surveys, analysis of aerial photos and orthophotos.Moreover, the geomorphological characterization of the area has been supported by the study of the pluviometric conditions and by the analysis of the landforms’ spatial distribution; the latter, which has been carried out using a GIS software, allowed to evaluate the density of landforms on the classes of the lithology parameter and on the classes of slope angle and aspect. The GIS analysis showed that the combinations of the selected parameters control the intensity of the processes and the spatial distribution of the shaped landforms; this fact led to different landscapes recognizable in the studied area. The landforms mapped in the Rio Spinasanta river basin have been distinguished according to the modeling processes in: a) landforms shaped by water erosion processes; b) landforms produced by gravitational processes

Constant-SNR, rate control and entropy coding for predictive lossy hyperspectral image compression

Predictive lossy compression has been shown to represent a very flexible framework for lossless and lossy onboard compression of multispectral and hyperspectral images with quality and rate control. In this paper, we improve predictive lossy compression in several ways, using a standard issued by the Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems, namely CCSDS-123, as an example of application. First, exploiting the flexibility in the error control process, we propose a constant-signal-to-noise-ratio algorithm that bounds the maximum relative error between each pixel of the reconstructed image and the corresponding pixel of the original image. This is very useful to avoid low-energy areas of the image being affected by large errors. Second, we propose a new rate control algorithm that has very low complexity and provides performance equal to or better than existing work. Third, we investigate several entropy coding schemes that can speed up the hardware implementation of the algorithm and, at the same time, improve coding efficiency. These advances make predictive lossy compression an extremely appealing framework for onboard systems due to its simplicity, flexibility, and coding efficiency