The orientation towards the common good: an exploratory study.

The research presents a practical method for assessing what kind of orientation to the common good people express in public ethics situations. The study defines four types of orientation to the common good (personal, group, national and global) and describes the construction of a measure to study individual differences in an adult population. The questionnaire is based on story dilemmas – designed to elicit moral judgment and to invoke a conflict between the different orientations – using a mixed-method that links recognition and production measures. The measure were administered to one hundred and fifty adolescents and displays an high inter-rater reliability, showing an acceptable association with socio-moral reasoning, intended as the main reference construct for the measurement

Measurements by A LEAP-Based Virtual Glove for the hand rehabilitation

Hand rehabilitation is fundamental after stroke or surgery. Traditional rehabilitation requires a therapist and implies high costs, stress for the patient, and subjective evaluation of the therapy effectiveness. Alternative approaches, based on mechanical and tracking-based gloves, can be really effective when used in virtual reality (VR) environments. Mechanical devices are often expensive, cumbersome, patient specific and hand specific, while tracking-based devices are not affected by these limitations but, especially if based on a single tracking sensor, could suffer from occlusions. In this paper, the implementation of a multi-sensors approach, the Virtual Glove (VG), based on the simultaneous use of two orthogonal LEAP motion controllers, is described. The VG is calibrated and static positioning measurements are compared with those collected with an accurate spatial positioning system. The positioning error is lower than 6 mm in a cylindrical region of interest of radius 10 cm and height 21 cm. Real-time hand tracking measurements are also performed, analysed and reported. Hand tracking measurements show that VG operated in real-time (60 fps), reduced occlusions, and managed two LEAP sensors correctly, without any temporal and spatial discontinuity when skipping from one sensor to the other. A video demonstrating the good performance of VG is also collected and presented in the Supplementary Materials. Results are promising but further work must be done to allow the calculation of the forces exerted by each finger when constrained by mechanical tools (e.g., peg-boards) and for reducing occlusions when grasping these tools. Although the VG is proposed for rehabilitation purposes, it could also be used for tele-operation of tools and robots, and for other VR applications

Functional Categories and Syntactic Theory

The distinction between lexical and functional elements plays a major role in current research in syntax and neighboring aspects of the study of language. In this article, we review the motivations of a progressive shift of emphasis from lexical to functional elements in syntactic research: the identification of the functional lexicon as the locus of the triggering of syntactic actions and of syntactic variation, and the description and analysis of the complexity of functional structures in cartographic studies. The latter point leads us to illustrate current cartographic research and to present the maps created in the study of clauses and phrases. The maps of CP, IP, and other phrasal categories all involve a richly articulated functional sequence. We then address issues of the numerosity and typology of the functional lexicon, the constraints on the featural specifications of possible functional heads, and the relations between cartographic research and minimalism

Achieving Isolation in Mixed-Criticality Industrial Edge Systems with Real-Time Containers Appendix

Real-time containers are a promising solution to reduce latencies in time-sensitive cloud systems. Recent efforts are emerging to extend their usage in industrial edge systems with mixed-criticality constraints. In these contexts, isolation becomes a major concern: a disturbance (such as timing faults or unexpected overloads) affecting a container must not impact the behavior of other containers deployed on the same hardware. In this paper, we propose a novel architectural solution to achieve isolation in real-time containers, based on real-time co-kernels, hierarchical scheduling, and time-division networking. The architecture has been implemented on Linux patched with the Xenomai co-kernel, extended with a new hierarchical scheduling policy, named SCHED_DS, and integrating the RTNet stack. Experimental results are promising in terms of overhead and latency compared to other Linux-based solutions. More importantly, the isolation of containers is guaranteed even in presence of severe co-located disturbances, such as faulty tasks (elapsing more time than declared) or high CPU, network, or I/O stress on the same machine

Arf6: a new player in FcγRIIIA lymphocyte-mediated cytotoxicity

AbstractThe activation of phosphoinositide metabolism represents a critical step in the signaling pathways leading to the activation of cytolytic machinery, but its regulation is partially understood. We report here that the stimulation of the low-affinity receptor for immunoglobulin G (IgG) (FcγRIIIA, CD16) on primary human natural killer (NK) cells induces a phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)–dependent activation of the small G protein Arf6. We first demonstrate a functional role for Arf6-dependent signals in the activation of the antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) attributable to the control of secretion of lytic granule content. We also show that Arf6 couples CD16 to the lipid-modifying enzymes phosphatidylinositol4phosphate 5-kinase type I alpha (PI5KIα) and phospholipase D (PLD) that are involved in the control of granule secretion; Arf6, but not Rho family small G proteins RhoA and Rac1, is required for receptor-induced PI5KIα membrane targeting as well as for PI5KIα and PLD activation. Our findings suggest that Arf6 plays a crucial role in the generation of a phosphatidylinositol4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2) plasma membrane pool required for cytolytic granule-mediated target cell killing

A Virtual Glove System for the Hand Rehabilitation based on Two Orthogonal LEAP Motion Controllers

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