The Trigger System of the ARGO-YBJ detector

The ARGO-YBJ experiment has been designed to detect air shower events over a large size scale and with an energy threshold of a few hundreds GeV. The building blocks of the ARGO-YBJ detector are single-gap Resistive Plate Counters (RPCs). The trigger logic selects the events on the basis of their hit multiplicity. Inclusive triggers as well as dedicated triggers for specific physics channels or calibration purposes have been developed. This paper describes the architecture and the main features of the trigger system.Comment: 4 pages, to be published in the Proceedings of the 28th International Cosmic Ray Conference (Tsukuba, Japan 2003

Women and Domestic violence in the professional experience of Italian General Practitioners

A number of studies have investigated the roots of the destructive power acting within the couple (Welzer Lang, 1991; Walker, 1979, 2000). Danis and Lockhart (2003) highlighted how social workers’ best practices, are not frequently used, especially in regards to contact with the victims of intimate-partner violence. We investigated how Italian general practitioners (IGPs) deal with this issue within their professional practice. A snowball sample of 268 IGPs was taken, in order to collect their beliefs concerning the victim, the aggressor and the violent couple’s relationship. Furthermore the experience in coping with both suspected and actual cases of domestic violence, as well as the GP’s needs and expectations was taken in consideration

Violence Against Women: A Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) Phenomenon

This study investigated the social and cultural representations that employees of the Municipality of Naples hold concerning violence against women. The aim of this research was to explore if and how they attribute blame for gender-based violence and their perception of the effectiveness of resolution strategies focused on either preventing or actively combating violence against women. Their results showed that when respondents attribute violence to sociocultural factors, they recognize the importance of implementing effective resolution strategies. Conversely, those who primarily place the blame for violence against women on male individual characteristics generally do not support and propose strategies to stop this kind of violence. Moreover, violence perpetrators not resulting in the work context or in the neighborhood of the respondents and implications of these data will be further discussed

Combatting intimate partner violence: representations of social and healthcare personnel working with gender-based violence interventions

Intimate partner violence (IPV) has been declared a global epidemic by the World Health Organization. Although the attention paid to both the perpetrators and victims of gender-based violence has increased, scientific research is still lacking in regard to the representations of operators involved in interventions and management. Therefore, the following study explores how the representations of operators affect how gender violence can be managed and combatted through an ecological approach to this phenomenon, in addition to highlighting the roles of organizationallevel services and their cultural and symbolic substrates. In total, 35 health and social professionals were interviewed and textual materials were analyzed by thematic analysis. The evidence suggests that services contrasting gender-based violence utilize different representations and management approaches. The authors hope that these differences can become a resource, rather than a limitation, when combatting gender-based violence through the construction of more integrated networks and a greater dialogue among different services, in order to make interventions designed to combat gender-based violence more effective

Children witnessing domestic violence in the voice of health and social professionals dealing with contrasting gender violence

Witnessing domestic violence (WDV) is recognized by the Istanbul Convention as psychological abuse that has dramatic consequences on the psychophysical health of children. Therefore, professionals who form the support network for WDV victims play a very fundamental role. In order to draw up useful guidelines for services dealing with WDV, and to give children more awareness of supportive settings, this study analyzes WDV in the perception of health and welfare professionals to enhance their skills and strategies for contrasting gender violence. Sixteen Neapolitan specialists dealing with WDV children were interviewed. A theoretical intentional sampling was used. Narrative focused interviews were carried out, transcribed verbatim and analyzed through the grounded theory methodology, using the ATLAS.ti 8 software (Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Germany). We assigned 319 codes and grouped these into 10 categories and 4 macro-categories. The analysis of the texts led to the definition of the core category as “The Crystal Fortress”. It summarizes the image of the WDV children as described by the professionals working in contrasting domestic violence. In this structure the parental roles of protection and care (fortress) are suspended and everything is extremely rigid, fragile and always at risk of a catastrophe. It also symbolizes the difficult role of health professionals in dealing with such children and their families. For WDV children, protective factors guarantee solid development and supportive settings help them to learn proper emotional responsiveness and expressiveness and to develop their skills in talking with adults while avoiding negative consequences

Chemically-specific dual/differential CARS micro-spectroscopy of saturated and unsaturated lipid droplets

We have investigated the ability of dual-frequency Coherent Antistokes Raman Scattering (D-CARS) micro-spectroscopy, based on femtosecond pulses (100 fs or 5 fs) spectrally focussed by glass dispersion, to distinguish the chemical composition of micron-sized lipid droplets consisting of different triglycerides types (poly-unsaturated glyceryl trilinolenate, mono-unsaturated glyceryl trioleate and saturated glyceryl tricaprylate and glyceryl tristearate) in a rapid and label-free way. A systematic comparison of Raman spectra with CARS and D-CARS spectra was used to identify D-CARS spectral signatures which distinguish the disordered poly-unsaturated lipids from the more ordered saturated ones both in the CH-stretch vibration region and in the fingerprint region, without the need for lengthy CARS multiplex acquisition and analysis. D-CARS images of the lipid droplets at few selected wavenumbers clearly resolved the lipid composition differences, and exemplify the potential of this technique for label-free chemically selective rapid imaging of cytosolic lipid droplets in living cell

“Kept in Check”: Representations and Feelings of Social and Health Professionals Facing Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

Social and health professionals facing gender-based violence in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) express feelings and thoughts closely connected to their place of work and the users of their services. However, research on professionals’ reflexivity and their implications has not been closely investigated. Therefore, this article will describe representations of IPV among social and health professionals facing gender-based violence as well as their personal feelings in accomplishing their job. Fifty interviews with health and social professionals were analyzed using grounded theory methodology supported by Atlas.ti 8.4. Five macrocategories will describe this phenomenon, leading to the final explicative core category that summarizes professionals’ attitudes toward it. Being “kept in check” among partners, partners and families, services, and institutional duties is the core category that best expressed their feelings. Therefore, implications for services and training will be further discussed

Is the World a Just Place? The Italian Adaptation of the Personal and General Belief in a Just World Scales

YesThe study presents the Italian adaptation of the Personal and General Belief in a Just World (P-BJW and G-BJW) Scales. Dalbert and colleagues developed these scales to capture the belief in a just world for oneself and a just world in general. After the translation and back-translation, the P-BJW and G-BJW scales were administered first to a pilot sample of 213 university students and then to a national sample of 2683 Italian people. Results showed that it was necessary to make some revisions to the predicted two correlated factor structure. These changes entailed correlating the error terms for some manifest variables and removing the first item of the P-BJW factor. The final structure of the P-BJW and G-BJW scales presented satisfactory indexes of model fit as well as high reliability and moderate validity values. Additionally, this structure proved to fit the data better than an alternative one-factor or a bi-factor model with two orthogonal-specific factors. As predicted, well-being strongly predicted scores on the BJW, but age and gender did not. Multigroup comparisons among Northern, Central, and Southern Italy respondents indicated that Italian people interpret scale items equivalently, regardless of their geographical location. Introducing the P-BJW and G-BJW scales to the Italian justice scholarship is very useful to unpack the reasons why Italy reports lower levels of social justice than other European countries and also to investigate the link between justice, well-being, and other socio-psychological variables.Open access funding provided by Università di Foggia within the CRUI-CARE Agreement