The body re-imagined: the Bizzarie di Varie Figure and performative cycles of prints in seventeenth-century Florence

The Bizzarie di Varie Figure is a little known, enigmatic album of etchings that display countless performative bodies, transformed and reimagined to resist definitions and escape categorisations. Human, mechanical, even abstract forms and forces intersect, startling the viewer and opening infinite possibilities of interpretation. These images manipulate their own medium to produce new, unprecedented notions of movement and animation on the printed page, challenging, in this process, traditional concepts of imagination and representation. The first section of this article aims to provide a framework through which the Bizzarie album can be understood not only as a site of experimentation on the production of figures and forms, but also as one where performativity and animation encounter notions of knowledge of nature and production of meaning. The subsequent section focuses on an individual image from the album, an etching depicting the biblical figures of Adam and Eve in the form of trees. In this print, the article argues, the interconnection of nature and humanity complicates early modern ideas on human reproduction, and echoes the potential for infinite generation and creativity in image making

The Hartford-New Britain Judicial District Housing Court

Connecticut\u27s housing court, like other historically unique and experimental governmental agencies, was mid-wifed by a citizen\u27s lobby, long frustrated over the benign neglect accorded to housing issues. With a trial bench of one hundred judges confronting an annual case flow exceeding one million cases, it is easy to understand why housing-related complaints received the lowest judicial priority

‘Mantegna and Bellini’, National Gallery, London, 1 October 2018 - 27 January 2019

The ambitious exhibition ‘Mantegna and Bellini’ was held in London at the National Gallery from October 2018 to January 2019. Tracing the career of the two artists, it displayed, over six rooms, a large number of paintings and drawings, following a chronological structure. The main curatorial strategy consisted in juxtaposing paintings of similar content in order to compare and contrast the different styles and iconological concerns of the two artists. Despite the exhibition’s potential, however, its art historical scope remained restrictive: captions insisted on questions of attribution and patronage, constantly referring to nebulous canons of renaissance ‘beauty’. Such perspective, eventually, seemed to reinforce a problematic rhetoric of intellectualism rather than expanding the artworks’ interpretative possibilities

Using the Post—Widder formula to compute the Earth's viscoelastic Love numbers

The post-glacial or post-seismic relaxation of a Maxwell viscoelastic earth, 1-D or slightly laterally heterogeneous, can be calculated in a normal-mode approach, based on an application of the propagator technique. This semi-analytical approach, widely documented in the literature, allows to compute the response of an earth model whose rheological parameters vary quite strongly with depth, at least as accurately and efficiently as by 1-D numerical integration (Runge-Kutta). Its main drawback resides in the need to identify the roots of a secular polynomial, introduced after reformulating the problem in the Laplace domain, and required to transform the solution back to the time domain. Root finding becomes increasingly difficult, and ultimately unaffordable, as the complexity of rheological profiles grows: the secular polynomial gradually gets more ill behaved, and a larger number of more and more closely spaced roots is to be found. Here, we apply the propagator method to solve the Earth's viscoelastic momentum equation, like in the above-mentioned normal-mode framework, but bypass root finding, using, instead, the Post-Widder formula to transform the solution, found again in the Laplace domain, back to the time domain. We test our method against earlier normal-mode results, and prove its effectiveness in modelling the relaxation of earth models with extremely complex rheological profile

The relationship between perseverative thinking, proactive control, and inhibition in psychological distress: a study in a women's cohort.

Cognitive control is a core feature of several mental disorders. A recent account poses that health problems may derive from proactive forms of cognitive control that maintain stress representation over time. The working hypothesis of the present study is that psychological distress is caused by the tendency to select a particular maladaptive self-regulation strategy over time, namely perseverative thinking, rather than by transient stimulus-response patterns. To test this hypothesis, we asked 84 women to carry out a battery of standardized questionnaires regarding their tendency to undertake perseverative thinking and their level of psychological distress, followed by cognitive tasks measuring the tendency to use proactive versus reactive control modality and disinhibition. Through a series of mediation analyses, we demonstrate that the tendency to use proactive control correlates with psychological distress and that this relation is mediated by perseverative thinking. Moreover, we show that the relation between low inhibitory control and psychological stress is more strongly mediated by perseverative thinking than impulsiveness, a classical construct that focuses on more transient reactions to stimuli. The present results underline the importance of considering psychological distress as the consequence of a maladaptive way of applying control over time, rather than the result of a general deficit in cognitive control abilities. [Abstract copyright: © 2023. The Author(s).

A three-wave longitudinal study on the underlying metacognitive mechanism between depression and Internet gaming disorder

AbstractBackground and aims: Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) and depression have negative consequences on individuals' mental health, but their relationships are complex. This three-wave longitudinal study aimed to detect the metacognitive mechanisms underlying the association between IGD tendency and depression based on the self-regulatory executive function model. Methods: A total of 1,243 Chinese undergraduate student gamers (57% female, M = 19.77, SD = 1.29) were recruited at the baseline survey (Wave 1 [W1]), with 622 and 574 of them taking part in the two follow-up surveys (Wave 2 [W2] at 6 and Wave 3 [W3] at 12 months later), respectively. Results: The three-wave path model demonstrated, after controlling for the autoregressive effect of each variable, that depression consistently predicted IGD tendency but not vice versa, while negative but not positive metacognitions about online gaming (MOG) significantly predicted both depression and IGD tendency. Moreover, two statistically significant mediation paths: (i) negative MOG [W1] → depression [W2] → IGD tendency [W3]; and (ii) depression [W1] → negative MOG [W2] → IGD tendency [W3] were identified. Discussion and conclusions: These findings extend the understanding of the associations among depression, IGD tendency, and MOG, highlighting how negative MOG has a stronger prospective effect than positive MOG on depression and IGD tendency, and also reveal the mutual mediation effects of depression and negative MOG on IGD tendency. Integrated programmes with both emotional regulation training and Metacognitive Therapy are recommended for IGD treatment

Challenges in Dental Statistics: Survey Methodology Topics

This paper gathers some contributions concerning survey methodology in dental research, as discussed during the first Workshop of the SISMEC STATDENT working group on statistical methods and applications in dentistry, held in Ancona on the 28th September 2011. The first contribution deals with the European Global Oral Health Indicators Development (EGOHID) Project which proposed a comprehensive and standardized system of epidemiological tools (questionnaires and clinical forms) for national data collection on oral health in Europe. The second contribution regards the design and conduct of trials to evaluate the clinical efficacy and safety of toothbrushes and mouthrinses. Finally, a flexible and effective tool used to trace dental age reference charts tailored to Italian children was presented

Clinical case seminar - Hypogonadotropic hypogonadism as a presenting feature of late-onset X-linked adrenal hypoplasia congenita

Mutations in the orphan nuclear receptor DAX-1 cause X-linked adrenal hypoplasia congenita. Affected boys usually present with primary adrenal failure in early infancy or childhood. Impaired sexual development because of hypogonadotropic hypogonadism becomes apparent at the time of puberty. We report adult-onset adrenal hypoplasia congenita in a patient who presented with hypogonadism at 28 yr of age. Although he had no clinical evidence of adrenal dysfunction, compensated primary adrenal failure was diagnosed by biochemical testing. Semen analysis showed azoospermia, and he did not achieve fertility after 8 months of treatment with gonadotropins. A novel Y380D DAX-1 missense mutation, which causes partial loss of function in transient gene expression assays, was found in this patient. This case demonstrates that partial loss-of-function mutations in DAX1 can present with hypogonadotropic hypogonadism and covert adrenal failure in adulthood. Further, an important role for DAX-1 in spermatogenesis in humans is confirmed, supporting findings in the Dax1 (Ahch) knockout mouse

Twisted memories: Addiction-related engrams are strengthened by desire thinking.

Associative learning plays a central role in addiction by reinforcing associations between environmental cues and addiction-related information. Unsupervised learning models posit that memories are adjusted based on how strongly these representations are coactivated during the retrieval process. From a different perspective, clinical models of addiction posit that the escalation and persistence of craving may depend on desire thinking, a thinking style orienting to prefigure information about positive addiction-related experiences. In the present work, we tested the main hypothesis that desire thinking is a key factor in the strengthening of addiction-related associations. A group of adult smoking volunteers (N = 26) engaged in a period of desire thinking before performing an associative learning task in which neutral words (cues) were shown along with images (smoking-related vs. neutral context) at different frequencies. Two retrieval tests were administered, one immediately after encoding and the other after 24 h, to test how the recall of associations changed as a function of retention interval. Two control groups, smokers (N = 21) and non-smokers (N = 22), performed a similar procedure, with a neutral imagination task replacing desire thinking. Participants who engaged in desire thinking increased their performance from the first to the second retrieval test only for the most frequent smoking-related associations. Crucially, this selective effect was not observed in the two control groups. These results provide behavioral evidence in support of the idea that desire thinking plays a role in strengthening addiction-related associations. Thus, this thinking process may be considered a target for reconsolidation-based conceptualizations of, and treatments for, addiction. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.