Leader and Leadership from a psychological perspective

The issue of leadership is one of the most topical. The focus of the research is on identifying the characteristics a person must possess to be a leader, where the term indicates anyone who has a role in coordinating and guiding a group of people. In a globalised world in which production processes are carried out by teams of people, the possibility of identifying people with leadership skills or, better still, of training people to be leaders acquires fundamental importance. The article attempts to identify the intellectual, personality, emotional and relational characteristics of a leader and suggest ways to 'educate' for leadership, highlighting the centrality of psychology in the study, identification and enhancement of these characteristics

Aged people and tourism

The increase in the elderly population is a phenomenon of growing importance with various repercussions on the economic side, both in terms of costs that society has to bear from a social and healthcare point of view, and in terms of opportunities for the various economic sectors that can see the third age as a possible market. The change in attitudes towards ageing has led to an increase in the proportion of older people who are actively living in the third age. Travelling, visiting new places and/or spending time away from home, even abroad, are activities that are now part of the lives of older people, at least those with an adequate income level. Consequently, the elderly have become potential users of the tourism sector: this article attempts to outline the dimensions and characteristics of this phenomenon

New Trends in Philosophy of Mind and Epistemology: An Overview

The seven papers included in this special issue of Argumenta might be ideally divided into two parts. On the one hand, this issue collects four contributions dealing with some important topics in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of language: the modularity of mind (the connections between the “pragmatic” module and epistemic vigilance mechanisms), the problem of perception and its link with action (the alleged anti-representational character of enactivism), the nature of phenomenal content (the plausibility of naïve realism in explaining the phenomenology of veridical visual experience), and the alleged irreducibility of consciousness (the claim that anti-physicalist intuitions are just a by-product of certain epistemological features of phenomenal concepts). On the other hand, there are three more contributions discussing some relevant themes in Logic and Epistemology: the actuality of the ancient Master Argument (its consistency and relationship with contemporary tense logic), the problem of evidence (the kind of evidence, psychological or non-psychological, intuitions actually provide), and that of counterevidence (the possibility that undermining defeaters, contrary to overriding defeaters, require the subject to engage in some higher-order epistemic reasoning)

Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) è stato uno dei più importanti filosofi analitici del ventesimo secolo, non solo per la varietà dei temi affrontati (che vanno dalla filosofa della mente a quella dell'azione, dalla teoria della verità a quella del significato, da questioni epistemologiche a quelle estetiche), ma anche, e soprattutto, per la complessiva sistematicità del suo pensiero. Il presente saggio si concentra sugli argomenti più significativi della filosofia davidsoniana: il rapporto tra verità e significato, il ruolo centrale dell'interpretazione e della nozione di razionalità, il problema mente-corpo, la natura delle credenze e il legame tra pensiero e linguaggio

Quantum-gate implementation in permanently coupled AF spin rings without need of local fields

We propose a scheme for the implementation of quantum gates which is based on the qubit encoding in antiferromagnetic molecular rings. We show that a proper engineering of the intercluster link would result in an effective coupling that vanishes as far as the system is kept in the computational space, while it is turned on by a selective excitation of specific auxiliary states. These are also shown to allow the performing of single- and two-qubit gates without an individual addressing of the rings by means of local magnetic fields.Comment: To appear in Physical Review Letter

Year in review 2006: Critical Care – paediatrics

In 2006, paediatric intensive care-related subjects were discussed in a number of papers published in various journals, including Critical Care. Because they focused on the cardiovascular system and its support, we summarize them here. In particular, these papers highlighted the management of refractory septic shock, extracorporeal support, outcome markers in sepsis, and outcome after cardiac arrest

A Scalable and Secure Publish/Subscribe-based Framework for Industrial IoT

In the emerging Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) scenario machine-to-machine communication is a key technology to set up environments wherein sensors, actuators, and controllers can exchange information autonomously. However, many current communication frameworks do not provide enough dynamic interoperability and security. Hence, we propose a novel communication framework, based on MQTT broker bridging, which, in an Industrial IoT scenario, can foster dynamic interoperability across different production lines or industrial sites, guaranteeing, at the same time, a higher degree of isolation and control over the information flows, thereby increasing the overall security of the whole scenario. The solution we propose does also support dynamic authentication and authorization and has been practically implemented and evaluated in a proper small-scale IIoT testbed, encompassing PLCs, IIoT gateways, as well as MQTT brokers with novel and extended capabilities. The evaluation results demonstrate a linear time complexity for all the considered implementations and bridging modes of the extended brokers. Moreover, all considered access token encapsulation techniques demonstrate a minimum overhead in comparison with standard MQTT brokers

Molecular nanomagnets as quantum simulators

Quantum simulators are controllable systems that can be used to simulate other quantum systems. Here we focus on the dynamics of a chain of molecular qubits with interposed antiferromagnetic dimers. We theoretically show that its dynamics can be controlled by means of uniform magnetic pulses and used to mimic the evolution of other quantum systems, including fermionic ones. We propose two proof-of-principle experiments, based on the simulation of the Ising model in transverse field and of the quantum tunneling of the magnetization in a spin-1 system.Comment: Phys. Rev. Lett., in pres

Molecular engineering of antiferromagnetic rings for quantum computation

The substitution of one metal ion in a Cr-based molecular ring with dominant antiferromagnetic couplings allows to engineer its level structure and ground-state degeneracy. Here we characterize a Cr7Ni molecular ring by means of low-temperature specific-heat and torque-magnetometry measurements, thus determining the microscopic parameters of the corresponding spin Hamiltonian. The energy spectrum and the suppression of the leakage-inducing S-mixing render the Cr7Ni molecule a suitable candidate for the qubit implementation, as further substantiated by our quantum-gate simulations.Comment: To appear in Physical Review Letter

Antihydrogen formation dynamics in a multipolar neutral anti-atom trap

Antihydrogen production in a neutral atom trap formed by an octupole-based magnetic field minimum is demonstrated using field-ionization of weakly bound anti-atoms. Using our unique annihilation imaging detector, we correlate antihydrogen detection by imaging and by field-ionization for the first time. We further establish how field-ionization causes radial redistribution of the antiprotons during antihydrogen formation and use this effect for the first simultaneous measurements of strongly and weakly bound antihydrogen atoms. Distinguishing between these provides critical information needed in the process of optimizing for trappable antihydrogen. These observations are of crucial importance to the ultimate goal of performing CPT tests involving antihydrogen, which likely depends upon trapping the anti-atom