Benefits from Long-Term Treatment in Irritable Bowel Syndrome

It is known that irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a chronic disease of cyclic nature characterized by recurrent symptoms. IBS patients should receive, as initial therapeutic approach a short course of treatment which, if effective, has the additional value of confirming the diagnosis. Long-term treatment should be reserved to diagnosed IBS patients with recurrent symptoms. Clinical trials with stabilized therapies and new active treatments showed an improvement of the symptoms over placebo that is often time-dependent but with high relapse rates (around 40%–50% when stopping treatment). Relapse is not always immediate after stopping treatment and the recent data from OBIS trial with otilonium bromide or with psychotherapy, showed that due to different chemico-physical characteristics of the drugs or the psychosomatic impact to the disease not all treatment gave the same relapsing rate if compared to placebo. Results of IBS clinical trials with different therapies tailored to the patient needs indicate that a cyclic treatment therapy is advisable to counteract the nature of the disease

Review: Kristin Mahoney, Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Among Richard Bruce Nugent’s papers in the Beinecke Library, there are multiple manuscripts of a story about a half-Japanese, half-American gender-fluid individual who works as a geisha, has a sexual relationship with their father (first accidentally and then by conscious choice), and travels around Europe and North America in pursuit of physical pleasure and beautiful objects to collect. ‘Geisha Man’ never saw the light of day during Nugent’s lifetime. But the author’s daring plan for this decadent story was to bring it out as an impossibly elaborate art book, in which each page should have been printed on paper of a different colour, with different-coloured ink. The intriguing ‘Geisha Man’ is emblematic of the decadent corpus that Kristin Mahoney brings to light in her fascinating new book, Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. It is a corpus that is, like Nugent’s story, made of cosmopolitan connections and projections, attempts to fashion and unmake complex racial and gender identities, baffling hybrids of aestheticism and taboo

Decadence and Translation

Decadence and Translation. Volupté 3.2 (December 2020) - full issue

Henry James’s Spectral Archaeology

Cet article s’intéresse aux représentations de l’archéologie dans « Le dernier des Valerii », nouvelle de Henry James publiée en 1874. En revisitant les usages du genre fantastique dans « La Vénus d’Ille » (1837) de Mérimée tout en anticipant le parallèle que Freud propose entre l’archéologie et la psychanalyse dans « L’Étiologie de l’hystérie » (1896), James met en place un jeu complexe de relations et de correspondances métaphoriques entre les pierres et le langage, la sculpture et la littérature, l’Antiquité et la modernité, l’esthétique et la psychologie. « Le dernier des Valerii » s’inscrit dans la tradition littéraire du fantastique archéologique, qui se développe à une époque où l’archéologie devient une véritable science de l’Antiquité (Altertumswissenschaft), et dont les intrigues fondées sur le retour d’objets antiques permettent d’explorer la question de la transgression du désir, du refoulement et de l’identité sexuelle.This article examines the depiction of archaeology in Henry James’s short story “The Last of the Valerii” (1874). Looking, at the same time, back to Prosper Merimée’s use of the fantastic in “La Venus d’Ille” (1837) and forwards to Sigmund Freud’s parallel between archaeology and psychoanalysis in “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), James sets up an intricate set of relations and metaphorical correspondences between stone and language, sculpture and literature, antiquity and modernity, aesthetics and psychology. “The Last of the Valerii” participates in a literary tradition of the archaeological fantastic that developed alongside the rise of classical archaeology as a tool of Altertumswissenschaft, in which authors employ narratives of the return of material objects from antiquity in order to explore difficult questions to do with transgressive desires, repression and sexual identity

Chapter Profiling visitors of a national park in Italy through unsupervised classification of mixed data

Cluster analysis has for long been an effective tool for analysing data. Thus, several disciplines, such as marketing, psychology and computer sciences, just to mention a few, did take advantage from its contribution over time. Traditionally, this kind of algorithm concentrates only on numerical or categorical data at a time. In this work, instead, we analyse a dataset composed of mixed data, namely both numerical than categorical ones. More precisely, we focus on profiling visitors of the National Park of Majella in the Abruzzo region of Italy, which observations are characterized by variables such as gender, age, profession, expectations and satisfaction rate on park services. Applying a standard clustering procedure would be wholly inappropriate in this case. Therefore, we hereby propose an unsupervised classification of mixed data, a specific procedure capable of processing both numerical than categorical variables simultaneously, releasing truly precious information. In conclusion, our application therefore emphasizes how cluster analysis for mixed data can lead to discover particularly informative patterns, allowing to lay the groundwork for an accurate customers profiling, starting point for a detailed marketing analysis

Management of the Neapolitan Public Banks' Crisis in the Late XVIIIth Century: The Model of "Banco Generale" as an Instrument of Going Concern Settlement

The troubled political and financial events of the Kingdom of Naples under the Bourbon dominion in the late 18th century outline the environmental perimeter in which the business phenomenon, subject of this investigation, will be deepened: the unification of the Neapolitan public banks under the shared aegis of “National Bank of Naples” in 1794. The analysis will aim to examine thoroughly the complex reasons underlying the last and irreversible crisis of the ancient Neapolitan public banks highlighting how the structural, functional as well as conceptual characteristics of these institutes changed in response to the socio-economic scenario shifts. Particularly, the contribution intends to critically discuss the social and political implications of the extensive reform promulgated by the central government, under King Ferdinand IV, for the restoration of the Neapolitan banking system. The normative corpus was reconstucted basing on a large collection of primary sources, collated through meticulous archival research, and secondary ones, arising from historiographical and academic literature. For this purpose, the work integrates into the research unit of History of Companies and Public Institution, by adopting a theoretical perspective of historical-administrative origins. According to the examined sources, the inadequacy of the royal measures led to a deep systemic crisis, which resulted to be fatal for the ancient Neapolitan banks

Multi-view Human Parsing for Human-Robot Collaboration

In human-robot collaboration, perception plays a major role in enabling the robot to understand the surrounding environment and the position of humans inside the working area, which represents a key element for an effective and safe collaboration. Human pose estimators based on skeletal models are among the most popular approaches to monitor the position of humans around the robot, but they do not take into account information such as the body volume, needed by the robot for effective collision avoidance. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D human representation derived from body parts segmentation which combines high-level semantic information (i.e., human body parts) and volume information. To compute such body parts segmentation, also known as human parsing in the literature, we propose a multi-view system based on a camera network. People body parts are segmented in the frames acquired by each camera, projected into 3D world coordinates, and then aggregated to build a 3D representation of the human that is robust to occlusions. A further step of 3D data filtering has been implemented to improve robustness to outliers and segmentation accuracy. The proposed multi-view human parsing approach was tested in a real environment and its performance measured in terms of global and class accuracy on a dedicated dataset, acquired to thoroughly test the system under various conditions. The experimental results demonstrated the performance improvements that can be achieved thanks to the proposed multi-view approach

Wave Celerity in Hydraulic Transients Computation for CIPP-Rehabilitated Pipes

[Abstract] Most of the water pipe infrastructure is outdated; therefore, frequent maintenance and repair works are required. To speed up the rehabilitation work and to have a more sustainable and efficient approach, trenchless methodologies have been developed in the last decades. One of the most cost-effective trenchless methods is the so-called Cured in Place Pipeline (CIPP) method, in which a resin-impregnated liner is pulled or inverted inside the host pipe and, when cured, it restores the old pipe structural and mechanical integrity. The aim of this study is to analyse the effects of the presence of a CIPP liner in a deteriorated pipe during unsteady flow for compressible fluids. In particular, the paper deals with a new formulation to compute the celerity of the wave which produces the overpressures, when the pipe wall is composed of both the host (old) pipe and the new liner, whose thickness depends on the required mechanical characteristics. The problem is strictly dependent on the mechanical properties of the liner. In order to obtain the new formula for celerity, the linear elastic problem for multi-layered pipes has been solved. The theoretical results have been validated by performing numerical simulation analysis using a Boundary Element model, with the software BEASY™. The resulting circumferential strain is integrated in the continuity equation, deriving the new formula to compute the wave celerity. The values of the celerity are dependent on the thickness and on the elastic properties of the liner. The behaviour of several combinations of thickness of the liner and Young’s modulus values has been studied and the results have been critically shown in the paper

Management of the Neapolitan Public Banks' Crisis in the Late XVIIIth Century: The Model of "Banco Generale" as an Instrument of Going Concern Settlement

The troubled political and financial events of the Kingdom of Naples under the Bourbon dominion in the late 18th century outline the environmental perimeter in which the business phenomenon, subject of this investigation, will be deepened: the unification of the Neapolitan public banks under the shared aegis of “National Bank of Naples” in 1794. The analysis will aim to examine thoroughly the complex reasons underlying the last and irreversible crisis of the ancient Neapolitan public banks highlighting how the structural, functional as well as conceptual characteristics of these institutes changed in response to the socio-economic scenario shifts. Particularly, the contribution intends to look critically at the general reorganisation of the banking institution, initiated by Ferdinand IV, reconstructing the normative corpus using a large collection of primary sources, collated through meticulous archival research, and secondary ones, arising from historiographical and academic literature. For this purpose, the work integrates into the research unit of History of Companies and Public Institution, by adopting a theoretical perspective of historical-administrative origins