When the words are not everything: the use of laughter, fillers, back-channel, silence, and overlapping speech in phone calls

This article presents an observational study on how some common conversational cues – laughter, fillers, back-channel, silence, and overlapping speech – are used during mobile phone conversations. The observations are performed over the SSPNet Mobile Corpus, a collection of 60 calls between pairs of unacquainted individuals (120 subjects for roughly 12 h of material in total). The results show that the temporal distribution of the social signals above is not uniform, but it rather reflects the social meaning they carry and convey. In particular, the results show significant use differences depending on factors such as gender, role (caller or receiver), topic, mode of interaction (agreement or disagreement), personality traits, and conflict handling style

Minoranze e credito: il caso di Roma tra Medioevo e Rinascimento

L'immigrazione a Roma nel Rinascimento determinò la costituzione di comunità molto coese e, specialmente nel primo periodo di insediamento, con rapporti relativamente scarsi con la società ospitante. Ciò è particolarmente evidente nel settore creditizio, in particolare per le minoranze meno integrate i cui rapporti d'affari e dunque creditizi si risolvevano sostanzialmente all'interno della comunità. L'esempio più evidente è quello della comunità dei Corsi

Women Who Surf in Morocco

In 1960, the first wave of Europeans and Americans found their way to the now bustling Taghazout Bay. From Essaouira to Agadir, expatriates lived out of vans and/or inside the houses of the Amazigh villagers. Many of these expatriates made Morocco their home from upwards of ten to fifteen years, even giving birth to children in these rural villages. The American and Europeans shared with the locals and vice versa, bartering food, skills, athletics, language, and friendship. Naturally, as surfing became a popular pastime among hippies in the United States in the 1960s, the expatriates began to bring early models of surfboards and wetsuits to the villages of Taghazout Bay in 1975. In the forty-five years hence, Taghazout Bay has changed drastically. In the last fifteen years, the number of surf schools has skyrocketed from around five to eighty-two. This research acknowledges that many of these surf schools are run by English and Australian companies and entrepreneurs, that extreme development due to tourism has overtaken the area, and that explicit measures must be taken by the community to prevent the exploitation of the coastline and the people who live their. In talking to surf associations/NGOs and local business owners, the study explores the measures being taken to augment the community development, which arguably, has been overlooked in comparison to tourist infrastructure. Free and accessible opportunities for exercise and play is essential to community. Sport keeps people healthy and happy and help to solidify identity and place within a group. Taghazout bay is world renowned for surf, therefore the local youth should be given fair access to the sport. The waters are crowded with European tourists and twenty-something Moroccan men who instruct them. In addition, very few Moroccan women can be found in the waves on any given day. Although Morocco has famous female surf champions, it is difficult to find women out for a casual shred or employed as an instructor. This study also aims to give female Moroccan surfers and skaters voice. Their stories of first surf/skate, their group dynamics, perceived identity and source of support or lack thereof will be recorded

Synthesis and biological evaluation of novel therapeutic candidates for the treatment of infectious and rare diseases

In the current PhD thesis novel synthetic routes were developed for the synthesis of new compounds with the aim to identify therapeutic candidates for the treatment of rare and infectious diseases. Stereoselective synthetic methodologies were herein exploited to obtain compounds with selected features that would improve pharmacological activity and biological selectivity for the target pathogen or host enzymes. Based on the targeted disease for which the compounds have been conceived, this thesis consists of three main sections. The first section has been focused on Cystic Fibrosis (CF), a rare genetic disorder characterized by chronic infection and inflammation of the airways. Herein, the stereoselective synthesis of the unnatural N-Alkyl L-deoxyiminosugars was considered for their application as anti-inflammatory agents in CF. An efficient procedure was developed, involving the use of polymer-supported triphenylphosphine/iodine system (PS-TPP/I2) to prepare the alkyl chains to be assembled on the iminosugar core. Biological assays revealed a very interesting anti-inflammatory properties of these molecules also confirmed in murine models of lung infection. In the second section, the synthesis of novel candidates for the treatment of bacterial infections was reported with the aim to identify alternative therapeutics to face with the serious and global threat of antibacterial resistance. On one hand, N-alkyl D- and L-deoxyiminosugars and their cholesteryl-bearing derivatives were considered in order to evaluate the role of both the chirality and of the lipophilicity on the eventual anti-bacterial activity of these molecules. In this case, a synthetic procedure was finely tuned and the established PS-TPP/I2 activating system was exploited for the conjugation of the iminosugars with the cholesteryl moiety enabling to obtain the target compounds in a solid phase system and in one-pot procedure. On the other hand, a novel synthetic route, as alternative to the existing methods, aimed to the preparation of the corticosteroid anti-inflammatory drug Deflazacort was explored for it repurposing as antibacterial agent. For both classes of compounds, in vitro biological assays revealed a "lead" compound endowed with interesting antibacterial and antibiofilm activity. In the last section the attention has been focused on synthesis of nucleoside analogues for their use in viral diseases. Particularly, two class of sugar modified nucleosides was synthesized, cyclohexenyl nucleosides and piperidinyl nucleosides conceived as selective inhibitors of viral DNA and RNA polymerases. Eventually, propargylated purine nucleosides was prepared with the aim to exploit the potential of NAs for in vivo visualization of viral life cycle

Macroscopic Forces driven by Resonant Neutrino Conversion

We show that neutrino oscillations in matter are always accompanied by collective forces on the medium. This effect may produce interesting consequences for the background and the neutrino oscillations themselves. The force is maximal in the case of resonant neutrino conversion in the adiabatic regime. We study here the forces driven by $\nu_e-\nu_{\mu,\tau}$ and $\nu_e-\nu_s$ MSW conversion and shortly discuss their possible relevance for the dynamics of a type II supernova.Comment: 9 LaTeX pages, 1 ps figure file. Format changed. One formula corrected. Some comments added to the text. Accepted for publication on Phys. Lett.

How major depressive disorder affects the ability to decode multimodal dynamic emotional stimuli

Most studies investigating the processing of emotions in depressed patients reported impairments in the decoding of negative emotions. However, these studies adopted static stimuli (mostly stereotypical facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions) which do not reflect the way people experience emotions in everyday life. For this reason, this work proposes to investigate the decoding of emotional expressions in patients affected by Recurrent Major Depressive Disorder (RMDDs) using dynamic audio/video stimuli. RMDDs’ performance is compared with the performance of patients with Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood (ADs) and healthy (HCs) subjects. The experiments involve 27 RMDDs (16 with acute depression - RMDD-A, and 11 in a compensation phase - RMDD-C), 16 ADs and 16 HCs. The ability to decode emotional expressions is assessed through an emotion recognition task based on short audio (without video), video (without audio) and audio/video clips. The results show that AD patients are significantly less accurate than HCs in decoding fear, anger, happiness, surprise and sadness. RMDD-As with acute depression are significantly less accurate than HCs in decoding happiness, sadness and surprise. Finally, no significant differences were found between HCs and RMDD-Cs in a compensation phase. The different communication channels and the types of emotion play a significant role in limiting the decoding accuracy