Get back! Methods for Exploring Discourses of Nostalgia and Nostalgic Discourses Using Corpora

Nostalgia for something lost (factual or imagined) has shaped nations and continues to shape national self-image and policies. The rhetorical appeal to nostalgia has been blamed for a range of phenomena, from populism to reactionary politics at large, and yet research in psychology has suggested that nostalgising has a beneficial cognitive function. The dissonance between the negative reputation of nostalgia and the science of how it works for us, as a positive and useful emotion, is related to the fact that nostalgia is not a given content, but a situated cultural practice. I here use corpus linguistics methods to pursue the mismatch between the “discourse of nostalgia” and “nostalgic discourses” and to move from expressions that denote nostalgia, to expressions that signal it. This paper reports on the methodological explorations analysing large newspaper corpora and working on the overlaps between the collocational profile of nostalgia and the markers of nostalgic discourse. The aim is to exploit corpus studies’ ability to systematically analyse patterns as a gateway to access nostalgic narratives. Nostalgia is, in fact, intrinsically discursive: it is a story of transformation and it is the story of felt absences in the present compared to an ‘elsewhen’. Understanding the narratives of nostalgia and identifying a typology of nostalgic discursive triggers may offer insights into how this pervasive, powerful and often profitable emotion gains purchase in public discourse

Stochastic Ray Propagation in Stratified Random Lattices – Comparative Assessment of Two Mathematical Approaches

In this report, ray propagation in stratified semi-infinite percolation lattices consisting of a succession of uniform density layers is considered. The final version of this article is available at the url of the journal PIER: http://www.jpier.org/PIER

Churchill, Fulton and the Anglo-American special relationship: setting the agenda?

Churchill is often deemed to have failed at Fulton in delivering ‘the crux’ of what he came to secure, namely a special Anglo-American relationship based in both interest and ‘fraternal association’. As other contributions to this special edition demonstrate, there are good grounds for this verdict. However we ask whether, and if so in what ways, Churchill was actually able in and through the Sinews of Peace speech to set the agenda and frame the terms of discussion for the later emergence of a special relationship. To do this we treat the special relationship as a discursive construct and by combining diplomatic history with corpus-assisted discourse studies map discourse features of the Sinews of Peace speech against media discourse on Anglo-American relations in the early 1950s

A new specific neuronal modulatory effect of nicotine: the functional cross talk between nicotinic and glutamate receptors

We here have addressed the topic of the cross-talk between receptors. We provide evidence supporting the co-localization and the functional interaction between nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and some glutamatergic receptors. The recruitment of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors dynamically and negatively modulates the function of both N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) and ?-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA) receptors throughout their selective internalization. This dynamic control by cholinergic nicotinic system of NMDA and ?-AMPA receptors is operative even at very low concentrations of nicotine. Nicotinic and glutamatergic receptors have been both implicated in important neurological and psychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, and anxiety. Thus, a more extensive and detailed knowledge of this new modulatory role of nicotine may eventually enable us to develop specific therapeutic interventions for these pathologies

Uno studio sull’innovazione nell’industria chimica

In our analysis, we have remembered the general result reached by studies on innovation of late, according to which innovation in manufacturing industry is a complex phenomenon and does not lend itself to be described and explained through simplistic analytical models. We have then taken clue from a variegated description of the firms’ innovative behaviour, based on several indicators of their innovativeness. Our results confirm the idea that remarkable differences exist between the two sub-sectors into which chemical industry is broken down: pharmaceutical and basic chemicals. As for policy implications, the close correlation between patents and basic-research expenditure suggests that the Italian Fund for basic research (FIRB) might be useful in order to promote innovation in chemical industry.Industria chimica; Innovazione; Ricerca

Effects of Ketosis Status Defined by FTIR Spectroscopy on Milk Quality Traits of First-lactation Cows

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of ketosis status on milk yield and quality traits of Holstein Friesian cows. Individual milk samples (n =15,674) of first-lactation cows from 5 to 60 days in milk (DIM) were collected during the official monthly test-day milk recording scheme and analysed for milk quality traits using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. Also, betahydroxybutyrate (BHB) was predicted by FTIR spectroscopy and used to classify records as normal, suspect or ketotic. Data were analysed with a linear mixed model including ketosis status, DIM and their interaction as fixed effects, and cow, herd-test-day and residual as random effects. Overall, ketotic cows exhibited the worst performance in terms of milk yield and quality compared to suspect and normal cows across the first 60 DIM. Results suggest that elevated milk BHB concentrations have a strong negative effect on milk yield and quality traits in early lactation

The INTERSPEECH 2013 computational paralinguistics challenge: social signals, conflict, emotion, autism

The INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge provides for the first time a unified test-bed for Social Signals such as laughter in speech. It further introduces conflict in group discussions as new tasks and picks up on autism and its manifestations in speech. Finally, emotion is revisited as task, albeit with a broader ranger of overall twelve emotional states. In this paper, we describe these four Sub-Challenges, Challenge conditions, baselines, and a new feature set by the openSMILE toolkit, provided to the participants. \em Bj\"orn Schuller$^1$, Stefan Steidl$^2$, Anton Batliner$^1$, Alessandro Vinciarelli$^{3,4}$, Klaus Scherer$^5$}\\ {\em Fabien Ringeval$^6$, Mohamed Chetouani$^7$, Felix Weninger$^1$, Florian Eyben$^1$, Erik Marchi$^1$, }\\ {\em Hugues Salamin$^3$, Anna Polychroniou$^3$, Fabio Valente$^4$, Samuel Kim$^4$

Automated pose estimation captures key aspects of General Movements at eight to 17 weeks from conventional videos

Aim: General movement assessment requires substantial expertise for accurate visual interpretation. Our aim was to evaluate an automated pose estimation method, using conventional video records, to see if it could capture infant movements using objective biomarkers. Methods: We selected archived videos from 21 infants aged eight to 17 weeks who had taken part in studies at the IRCCS Fondazione Stella Maris (Italy), from 2011 to 2017. Of these, 14 presented with typical low-risk movements, while seven presented with atypical movements and were later diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Skeleton videos were produced using a computational pose estimation model adapted for infants and these were blindly assessed to see whether they contained the information needed for classification by human experts. Movements of skeletal key points were analysed using kinematic metrics to provide a biomarker to distinguish between groups. Results: The visual assessments of the skeleton videos were very accurate, with Cohen's K of 0.90 when compared with the classification of conventional videos. Quantitative analysis showed that arm movements were more variable in infants with typical movements. Conclusion: It was possible to extract automated estimation of movement patterns from conventional video records and convert them to skeleton footage. This could allow quantitative analysis of existing footage.Peer reviewe

Uno studio sull’innovazione nell’industria chimica (Italian chemical firms' innovative behaviour)

WP 03/2004; In our analysis, we have remembered the general result reached by studies on innovation of late, according to which innovation in manufacturing industry is a complex phenomenon and does not lend itself to be described and explained through simplistic analytical models. We have then taken clue from a variegated description of the firms’ innovative behaviour, based on several indicators of their innovativeness. Our results confirm the idea that remarkable differences exist between the two sub-sectors into which chemical industry is broken down: pharmaceutical and basic chemicals. As for policy implications, the close correlation between patents and basic-research expenditure suggests that the Italian Fund for basic research (FIRB) might be useful in order to promote innovation in chemical industry