Alternating (In)Dependence-Friendly Logic

Hintikka and Sandu originally proposed Independence Friendly Logic ([Formula presented]) as a first-order logic of imperfect information to describe game-theoretic phenomena underlying the semantics of natural language. The logic allows for expressing independence constraints among quantified variables, in a similar vein to Henkin quantifiers, and has a nice game-theoretic semantics in terms of imperfect information games. However, the [Formula presented] semantics exhibits some limitations, at least from a purely logical perspective. It treats the players asymmetrically, considering only one of the two players as having imperfect information when evaluating truth, resp., falsity, of a sentence. In addition, truth and falsity of sentences coincide with the existence of a uniform winning strategy for one of the two players in the semantic imperfect information game. As a consequence, [Formula presented] does admit undetermined sentences, which are neither true nor false, thus failing the law of excluded middle. These idiosyncrasies limit its expressive power to the existential fragment of Second Order Logic ([Formula presented]). In this paper, we investigate an extension of [Formula presented], called Alternating Dependence/Independence Friendly Logic ([Formula presented]), tailored to overcome these limitations. To this end, we introduce a novel compositional semantics, generalising the one based on trumps proposed by Hodges for [Formula presented]. The new semantics (i) allows for meaningfully restricting both players at the same time, (ii) enjoys the property of game-theoretic determinacy, (iii) recovers the law of excluded middle for sentences, and (iv) grants [Formula presented] the full descriptive power of [Formula presented]. We also provide an equivalent Herbrand-Skolem semantics and a game-theoretic semantics for the prenex fragment of [Formula presented], the latter being defined in terms of a determined infinite-duration game that precisely captures the other two semantics on finite structures

The impact of Covid-19 healthcare emergency on the psychological well-being of health professionals: a review of literature

Introduction. The Coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) was first identified in December 2019 in the city of Wuhan, China, and later caused a severe health crisis, causing massive disruptions to most healthcare systems worldwide. The Covid-19 health emergency has seen healthcare workers in the front line facing all the difficulties related to the care burden. One of the most significant and probably underinvestigated aspects is the psychological stress of the healthcare staff managing the emergency. The aim of the paper is to analyze the literature on the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the psychological well-being of health professionals. Methodology. We conducted a systematic review of articles published on this topic during the months from January 2020 to December 2020, searching on Pub Med, Scopus and Web of Science databases. Results. Most of the issues can be summarized into five conceptual categories: Stress, Depression and Infection Anxiety, Anguish, Insomnia, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Suicide. The literature identifies many factors contributing to the onset of anxiety, depression, and stress, like the fear of contracting the disease and transmitting it to family members and friends, stressful shifts, and little rest among several others. The literature highlights the needs for adequate measures, including proper psychological support. Conclusion. The conducted review suggests that the behaviours of healthcare professionals during the emergency phase of the Covid-19 pandemic show psychological disorders that can compromise mental health. Therefore, there is a call for those in chief like hospital managers and policymakers to take action, promoting measures like surveillance, monitoring, and psychological support among others, to increase the resilience of healthcare workers, limiting stress and anxiety and allowing them to keep their performance at work

The impact of Covid-19 healthcare emergency on the psychological well-being of health professionals: a review of literature

Introduction. The Coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) was first identified in December 2019 in the city of Wuhan, China, and later caused a severe health crisis, causing massive disruptions to most healthcare systems worldwide. The Covid-19 health emergency has seen healthcare workers in the front line facing all the difficulties related to the care burden. One of the most significant and probably underinvestigated aspects is the psychological stress of the healthcare staff managing the emergency. The aim of the paper is to analyze the literature on the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the psychological well-being of health professionals.Methodology. We conducted a systematic review of articles published on this topic during the months from January 2020 to December 2020, searching on Pub Med, Scopus and Web of Science databases.Results. Most of the issues can be summarized into five conceptual categories: Stress, Depression and Infection Anxiety, Anguish, Insomnia, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Suicide. The literature identifies many factors contributing to the onset of anxiety, depression, and stress, like the fear of contracting the disease and transmitting it to family members and friends, stressful shifts, and little rest among several others. The literature highlights the needs for adequate measures, including proper psychological support.Conclusion. The conducted review suggests that the behaviours of healthcare professionals during the emergency phase of the Covid-19 pandemic show psychological disorders that can compromise mental health. Therefore, there is a call for those in chief like hospital managers and policymakers to take action, promoting measures like surveillance, monitoring, and psychological support among others, to increase the resilience of healthcare workers, limiting stress and anxiety and allowing them to keep their performance at work

When are prime formulae characteristic?

In the setting of the modal logic that characterizes modal refinement over modal transition systems, Boudol and Larsen showed that the formulae for which model checking can be reduced to preorder checking, that is, the characteristic formulae, are exactly the consistent and prime ones. This paper presents general, sufficient conditions guaranteeing that characteristic formulae are exactly the consistent and prime ones. It is shown that the given conditions apply to various behavioural relations in the literature. In particular, characteristic formulae are exactly the prime and consistent ones for all the semantics in van Glabbeek's linear time-branching time spectrum

Earthquakes in a fault system embedded in an elastic body subject to increasing shear stress

We consider the faults of an elastic body subject to an increasing stress and the stress field generated by slip on a fault. The slip along the fault releases the stress component parallel to the slip, but the component normal to the fault is not released and increases in time at the same rate as the shear affecting the body. The effect is an increase of the value of the force necessary to cause the subsequent slip; and, if the shear increases linearly, it causes an increase of the time intervals between the earthquakes on the fault, that is between the stress drop p and the slip s. The density distribution of p in a given time interval is computed; it is found that rigorously it is not a power law although it is a decreasing function of p. It is also seen that, as in the cases in which it was assumed that the component of the stress field locking the fault, after each earthquake, in the time interval to the next earthquake, would be anelastically released, the logarithm of the density distribution of the moments of the earthquakes is a linear function of log (M0 ) and a linear function of M in any time interval; M0 and M being the scalar seismic moment and the magnitude, respectively. Conditions for the existence of these linear relationships are discussed finding that a sufficient condition, when the range of p is not exceptionally large, is that the density distribution of p be of the type log (p), which includes the case when it is independent of the fault linear size l. The Gutenberg-Richter frequency-magnitude relationship and the conditions to obtain aftershocks and seismic swarms generated by this model are presented and discussed. In order to obtain the observed density distribution of earthquakes one or several hypotheses can be done: 1) the stress locking the faults, between successive earthquakes of the same fault, is released anelastically; 2) the density distribution of the sizes of the faults is such as to cause the logarithm of the density distribution of log (M0) and of M to be linear; 3) the density distribution of log M0 (M) is linear and the linearity factor is related to the density distribution of the stress drop and not to that of the linear dimensions of the faults

Crustal blocks and seismicity in the Central Apennines of Italy

Kinematics and geodynamics of crustal-block structures separated by compliant zones with viscoelastic rheology play an important role in defining the conditions for many deformation events such as ordinary seismic ruptures, silent and slow earthquakes and aseismic fault creep phenomena. New seismological data from the Latium-Abruzzi carbonatic platform of central Italy fit a block-tectonic modelling previously proposed for this area on the basis of structural and paleomagnetic evidences

Renewable beta-elemene based cyclic carbonates for the preparation of oligo(hydroxyurethane)s

Conversion of β-elemene into new β-elemene dicarbonates through epoxidation and halide salt-catalyzed CO2 cycloaddition reactions is reported. Step-growth polyaddition of this dicarbonate to five different, commercial diamines was investigated under neat conditions at 150 °C yielding non-isocyanate-based low molecular weight oligo(hydroxyurethane)s with 1.3≤Mn≤6.3 kDa and 1.3≤Ð≤2.1, and with glass transition temperatures ranging from −59 to 84 °C. The preparation of one selected polyhydroxyurethane material, obtained in the presence of Jeffamine® D-2010 was scaled-up to 43 g. The latter, when combined in a formulation using Irgacure® 2100 and Laromer® LR 9000 allowed the preparation of coatings that were analyzed with several techniques showing the potential of these biobased oligourethanes towards the preparation of commercially relevant materials

Prompt interval temporal logic

Interval temporal logics are expressive formalisms for temporal representation and reasoning, which use time intervals as primitive temporal entities. They have been extensively studied for the past two decades and successfully applied in AI and computer science. Unfortunately, they lack the ability of expressing promptness conditions, as it happens with the commonly-used temporal logics, e.g., LTL: whenever we deal with a liveness request, such as \u201csomething good eventually happens\u201d, there is no way to impose a bound on the delay with which it is fulfilled. In the last years, such an issue has been addressed in automata theory, game theory, and temporal logic. In this paper, we approach it in the interval temporal logic setting. First, we introduce PROMPT-PNL, a prompt extension of the well-studied interval temporal logic PNL, and we prove the undecidability of its satisfiability problem; then, we show how to recover decidability (NEXPTIME-completeness) by imposing a natural syntactic restriction on it

Volcanic CO2 tracks the incubation period of basaltic paroxysms

The ordinarily benign activity of basaltic volcanoes is periodically interrupted by violent paroxysmal explosions ranging in size from Hawaiian to Plinian in the most extreme examples. These paroxysms often occur suddenly and with limited or no precursors, leaving their causal mechanisms still incompletely understood. Two such events took place in summer 2019 at Stromboli, a volcano otherwise known for its persistent mild open-vent activity, resulting in one fatality and damage to infrastructure. Here, we use a post hoc analysis and reinterpretation of volcanic gas compositions and fluxes acquired at Stromboli to show that the two paroxysms were preceded by detectable escalations in volcanic plume CO2 degassing weeks to months beforehand. Our results demonstrate that volcanic gas CO2 is a key driver of explosions and that the preparatory periods ahead of explosions in basaltic systems can be captured by precursory CO2 leakage from deeply stored mafic magma