The Relationship between Intimacy and Marital Satisfaction in Christian Couples

Current literature suggests that a connection exists between intimacy and marital satisfaction; however, much of the research has only focused on non-Christian marriages and sexual intimacy. There is little research that proves how the various types of intimacy and marital satisfaction are related within Christian couples. This quantitative study examined the predictive relationship between intimacy and marital satisfaction in Christian adults. The research focused on the following main research question: (1) Do the six sub-scales of marital intimacy (emotional intimacy, social intimacy, physical intimacy, intellectual intimacy, recreational intimacy, and spiritual intimacy) collectively predict marital satisfaction in Christian couples? It was hypothesized that (1) The six sub-scales of marital intimacy (emotional intimacy, social intimacy, physical intimacy, intellectual intimacy, recreational intimacy, and spiritual intimacy) collectively predict marital satisfaction in Christian couples. Results of this study showed that the six sub-scales of intimacy collectively predicted marital satisfaction. Additionally, results showed that one of the sub-scales, emotional intimacy, individually predicted marital satisfaction

Interpreting the Oscar Night on Italian TV: an interpreters’ nightmare?

Simultaneous interpreting is recognised to be an extremely complex cognitive activity placing high demands on linguistic abilities, extra-linguistic knowledge and communication skills of those who perform it. Specific difficulties identified in literature as the main factors contributing to the complexity of the interpreters’ task include high information density, especially if combined with a high speed of talk and/or not well structured utterances, proper names, figures, culture-bound references, humorous, ironical or highly emotional passages, unfamiliar accents and pre-prepared speeches read out with no chance for the interpreter to have access to them. Simultaneous interpreting for live media ceremonies entails even more difficulties due to the peculiar features, structure and time constraints of the broadcast event. This study discusses simultaneous interpreting of two Academy Award Ceremonies – in 2000 and 2010 – focusing on two specific difficulties: proper names and culture-bound references. The interpreters’ performance is analysed using rendition categories based on the work by Wadensjö (1998). Results are discussed in the light of previous studies and Relevance Theor

El proyecto ImPLI, la interpretación en la etapa previa al juicio en Italia y la transposición de la directiva 2010/64/UE

This paper focuses on the right to court interpreting and police interpreting in Italy. The data presented about the situation in Italy are derived from the results of ImPLI (Improving Police and Legal Interpreting), a European research project funded by DG Justice which collected facts and figures about police interpreting in Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. The transposition of directive 2010/64/UE into Italian law is analysed to understand its impact on interpreting rights for people under investigation, accused persons and witnesses in Italy. The main drawbacks as well as improvements of the directive transposition are highlighted and discussedEl proyecto ImPLI, la interpretación en la etapa previa al juicio en Italia y la transposición de la directiva 2010/64/UE Este artículo está dedicado a la interpretación en tribunales y en entornos policiales en Italia. Los datos que presentamos sobre la situación en Italia proceden de los resultados del proyecto de investigación europeo ImPLI (Improving Police and Legal Interpreting), financiado por la DG Justicia, para el que se recogieron datos y cifras relativos a la interpretación en entornos policiales en Bélgica, la República Checa, Francia, Alemania, Italia y el Reino Unido. Se analiza la transposición de la Directiva 2010/64/UE a la legislación italiana para entender las consecuencias que tiene en el derecho a la interpretación de las personas sometidas a investigación, los acusados y los testigos en Italia. Se ponen de relieve y se debaten los problemas y las mejoras que trae consigo la transposición de la directiva

The best interest of the child in interpreter-mediated interviews – Researching children’s point of view

Children’s rights enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) can be substantiated only if children can understand them and can communicate their point of view effectively. Whenever children do not speak the same language of the country where they live, and no action is taken to guarantee their right to communicate in their mother tongue, their rights are at risk. Yet, interpreting is still generally considered as a service activity for adults also in research and interpreter education, and the perception of interpreting by children and adolescents is understudied so far. This paper contributes to filling this gap by giving voice to a group of 18 Italian children and adolescents aged between 6 and 17 who communicated via an interpreter for the first time and expressed their preferences and concerns. The aim was to collect information about their perception of some aspects of an interpreter-mediated interview, in particular how they felt during the interview, what was their perception of role and rapport building and their preferred seating arrangements. We hope with this study to inspire further research in thisarea and also, possibly, specialised training for interpreters who work with children

Earthquake-triggered landslide susceptibility in Italy by means of Artificial Neural Network

The use of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approaches has gained a significant role over the last decade in the field of predicting the distribution of effects triggered by natural forcing, this being particularly relevant for the development of adequate risk mitigation strategies. Among the most critical features of these approaches, there are the accurate geolocation of the available data as well as their numerosity and spatial distribution. The use of an ANN has never been tested at a national scale in Italy, especially in estimating earthquake-triggered landslides susceptibility. The CEDIT catalogue, the most up-to-date national inventory of earthquake-induced ground effects, was adopted to evaluate the efficiency of an ANN to explain the distribution of landslides over the Italian territory. An ex-post evaluation of the ANN-based susceptibility model was also performed, using a sub-dataset of historical data with lower geolocation precision. The ANN training highly performed in terms of spatial prediction, by partitioning the Italian landscape into slope units. The obtained results returned a distribution of potentially unstable slope units with maximum concentrations primarily distributed in the central Apennines and secondarily in the southern and northern Apennines. Moreover, the Alpine sector clearly appeared to be divided into two areas, a western one with relatively low susceptibility to earthquake-triggered landslides and the eastern sector with higher susceptibility. Our work clearly demonstrates that if funds for risk mitigation were allocated only on the basis of rainfall-induced landslide distribution, large areas highly susceptible to earthquake-triggered landslides would be completely ignored by mitigation plans.</p

Hourly Simulation of Energy Community with Photovoltaic Generator and Electric Vehicle

Europe has set the ambitious goal to become the first carbon-neutral continent by 2050. Therefore, it has undertaken several initiatives to promote the energy transition, including the active participation of citizens in the energy sector. In this context, recent European directives introduced the concept of energy community, whose members can consume, share, and store energy locally produced. This work proposes an energy and economic simulation of a renewable energy community powered by a 19.2 kWp photovoltaic system in the province of Cuneo, in Piedmont (Italy). The community consists of a prosumer, which owns the photovoltaic system and a charging station for electric vehicles, and other 17 energy users. Suitable indicators to assess the energy performance of the community (self-consumption and self-sufficiency) were evaluated starting from the estimated production and consumption power profiles. Then, an economic simulation was carried out to assess the economic return on the investment for the member who bore the initial costs and the annual economic savings for the others

HOLMeS: eHealth in the Big Data and Deep Learning Era

Now, data collection and analysis are becoming more and more important in a variety of application domains, as long as novel technologies advance. At the same time, we are experiencing a growing need for human–machine interaction with expert systems, pushing research toward new knowledge representation models and interaction paradigms. In particular, in the last few years, eHealth—which usually indicates all the healthcare practices supported by electronic elaboration and remote communications—calls for the availability of a smart environment and big computational resources able to offer more and more advanced analytics and new human–computer interaction paradigms. The aim of this paper is to introduce the HOLMeS (health online medical suggestions) system: A particular big data platform aiming at supporting several eHealth applications. As its main novelty/functionality, HOLMeS exploits a machine learning algorithm, deployed on a cluster-computing environment, in order to provide medical suggestions via both chat-bot and web-app modules, especially for prevention aims. The chat-bot, opportunely trained by leveraging a deep learning approach, helps to overcome the limitations of a cold interaction between users and software, exhibiting a more human-like behavior. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the machine learning algorithms, showing an area under ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve (AUC) of 74.65% when some first-level features are used to assess the occurrence of different chronic diseases within specific prevention pathways. When disease-specific features are added, HOLMeS shows an AUC of 86.78%, achieving a greater effectiveness in supporting clinical decisions

Local anesthesia for treatment of hernia in elder patients: Levobupicavaine or Bupivacaine?

BACKGROUND: Inguinal hernia is one of the most common diseases in the elderly. Treatment of this pathology is exclusively surgical and relies almost always on the use of local anesthesia. While in the past hernia surgery was carried out mainly by general anesthesia, in recent years there has been growing emphasis on the role of local anesthesia. METHODS: The aim of our study was to compare intra-and postoperative analgesia obtained by the use of levobupivacaine to the same obtained by bupivacaine. Bupivacaine is one of the main local anesthetics used in the intervention of inguinal hernioplasty. Levobupivacaine is an enantiomer of racemic bupivacaine with less cardiotoxicity and neurotoxicity. The study was conducted from March 2011 to March 2013. We collected data of eighty patients, male and female, aged between 65 and 86 years, who underwent inguinal hernioplasty with local anesthesia. RESULTS: Evaluation of intra-operatively pain shows that minimal pain is the same in both groups. Mild pain was more frequent in the group who used levobupivacaine. Moderate pain was slightly more frequent in the group who used bupivacaine. Only one reported intense pain. Two drugs seem to have the same effect at a distance of six, twelve, eighteen and twentyfour hours. Bupivacaine shows a significantly higher number of complications, as already demonstrated by previous studies. Degree of satisfaction expressed by patients has been the same in the two groups. Levobupivacaine group has shown a greater request for paracetamol while patients who experienced bupivacaine have showed a higher request of other analgesics. CONCLUSIONS: Clinical efficacy of levobupivacaine and racemic bupivacaine are actually similar, when used under local intervention of inguinal hernioplasty. In the field of ambulatorial surgery our working group prefers levobupivacaine for its fewer side effects and for its easy handling