Dissemination activity and impact of maternal and newborn health projects in Ethiopia, India and Nigeria

This study aimed to document the key messages, dissemination activities and impacts of selected projects within the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health strategy portfolio, and consider how these might contribute toward the learning agenda for the strategy

Modularity-based approach for tracking communities in dynamic social networks

Community detection is a crucial task to unravel the intricate dynamics of online social networks. The emergence of these networks has dramatically increased the volume and speed of interactions among users, presenting researchers with unprecedented opportunities to explore and analyze the underlying structure of social communities. Despite a growing interest in tracking the evolution of groups of users in real-world social networks, the predominant focus of community detection efforts has been on communities within static networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for tracking communities over time in a dynamic network, where a series of significant events is identified for each community. Our framework adopts a modularity-based strategy and does not require a predefined threshold, leading to a more accurate and robust tracking of dynamic communities. We validated the efficacy of our framework through extensive experiments on synthetic networks featuring embedded events. The results indicate that our framework can outperform the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we utilized the proposed approach on a Twitter network comprising over 60,000 users and 5 million tweets throughout 2020, showcasing its potential in identifying dynamic communities in real-world scenarios. The proposed framework can be applied to different social networks and provides a valuable tool to gain deeper insights into the evolution of communities in dynamic social networks

UBI MINOR, MAIOR CESSAT: the role of the perception of nature and the compassion for pro-environmental intentions

openLa tesi mira a indagare come i costrutti di percezione della natura e compassione influenzano le intenzioni pro-ambientali dei/delle partecipanti all'esperimento. Essa si sviluppa attraverso un primo focus sul tema del cambiamento climatico, mostrandone sia le implicazioni sul panorama globale, sia gli studi psicologici presenti in letteratura che nel corso degli anni ne hanno indagato le implicazioni sociali. Per realizzare lo studio sono state costruite tre diverse condizioni (due sperimentali e una di controllo) a cui sono stati/e esposti/e i/le partecipanti, così da comprendere quale avrebbe avuto più influenza sulle loro intenzioni pro-ambientali. Le condizioni sperimentali consistevano da un lato nell’umanizzazione degli esseri vegetali e quindi nello stimolare l’idea che esseri vegetali avessero delle caratteristiche umane, mentre dall’altro nell’attivare una categorizzazione universale, ossia l’idea che tutti gli esseri viventi (esseri umani, piante e animali) costituissero un’unica identità universalmente coesa. La terza condizione serviva come controllo. Lo scopo della ricerca era dunque quello di comprendere se l’umanizzazione degli esseri vegetali (come fiori, alberi, ma anche veri e propri paesaggi naturali) e la creazione di un’unica identità universale potessero modificare in senso positivo (quindi aumentare) i comportamenti pro-ambientali che i/le partecipanti erano intenzionati/e a compiere a sostegno della natura. All’interno di questo modello, abbiamo ipotizzato ulteriormente che trovasse spazio anche il costrutto della compassione, fungendo da mediatore nella relazione tra le variabili indipendenti e dipendenti. Dai risultati è emersa una differenza di genere nelle intenzioni pro-ambientali dei/delle partecipanti, mediata in alcuni casi dalla compassione verso gli esseri umani o verso la natura. Tale differenza di genere è stata indagata all'interno dell'ultimo capitolo dell'elaborato, in cui viene inoltre proposto un approccio "eco-femminista" (che vede come perno centrale l'inclusività) come soluzione sociale per affrontare il radicato fenomeno del cambiamento climatico

Development of a multifunctional panel for aerospace use through SLM additive manufacturing

Lattice materials can overcome the need of light and stiff structures in the aerospace industry. The wing leading edge is one of the most critical parts for both on-board subsystem and structure features: it must withstand to the aerodynamic loads and bird-strike, integrating also the anti-ice system functions. Nowadays, this part is made by different components bonded together such as external skin, internal passageways, and feeding tubes. In the present work, a single-piece multifunctional panel made by additive manufacturing will be developed. Optimal design and manufacturing are discussed according to technological constraints, aeronautical performances and sustainability

RTbust: Exploiting Temporal Patterns for Botnet Detection on Twitter

Within OSNs, many of our supposedly online friends may instead be fake accounts called social bots, part of large groups that purposely re-share targeted content. Here, we study retweeting behaviors on Twitter, with the ultimate goal of detecting retweeting social bots. We collect a dataset of 10M retweets. We design a novel visualization that we leverage to highlight benign and malicious patterns of retweeting activity. In this way, we uncover a 'normal' retweeting pattern that is peculiar of human-operated accounts, and 3 suspicious patterns related to bot activities. Then, we propose a bot detection technique that stems from the previous exploration of retweeting behaviors. Our technique, called Retweet-Buster (RTbust), leverages unsupervised feature extraction and clustering. An LSTM autoencoder converts the retweet time series into compact and informative latent feature vectors, which are then clustered with a hierarchical density-based algorithm. Accounts belonging to large clusters characterized by malicious retweeting patterns are labeled as bots. RTbust obtains excellent detection results, with F1 = 0.87, whereas competitors achieve F1 < 0.76. Finally, we apply RTbust to a large dataset of retweets, uncovering 2 previously unknown active botnets with hundreds of accounts

Temperature-driven heterochrony as a main evolutionary response to climate changes in conodonts

Can we predict the evolutionary response of organisms to climate changes? The direction of greatest intraspecific phenotypic variance is thought to correspond to an 'evolutionary line of least resistance', i.e. a taxon's phenotype is expected to evolve along that general direction, if not constrained otherwise. In particular, heterochrony, whereby the timing or rate of developmental processes are modified, has often been invoked to describe evolutionary trajectories and it may be advantageous to organisms when rapid adaptation is critical. Yet, to date, little is known empirically as to which covariation patterns, whether static allometry, as measured in adult forms only, or ontogenetic allometry, the basis for heterochrony, may be prevalent in what circumstances. Here, we quantify the morphology of segminiplanate conodont elements during two distinct time intervals separated by more than 130 Myr: the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary and the Carnian-Norian boundary (Late Triassic). We evidence that the corresponding species share similar patterns of intraspecific static allometry. Yet, during both crises, conodont evolution was decoupled from this common evolutionary line of least resistance. Instead, it followed heterochrony-like trajectories that furthermore appear as driven by ocean temperature. This may have implications for our interpretation of conodonts' and past marine ecosystems' response to environmental perturbations

Surface generation and assessment for peripheral milling

The rotating tool during peripheral milling filters disturbing vibrations between half of the rotation frequency and frequencies assigned to half the time necessary to generate a single cuttermark. This is a relatively large gap in the frequency range being not copied onto the finished surface. Roughness readings returning frequencies in that range are caused by other reasons like secondary fracture effects or the internal structure of the material. Superposition of vibrations at frequencies close to the rotation frequencies may cause interference patterns looking similar to the lines of cuttermarks but without representing the rotating frequency or the frequency of the disturbing vibration. This can also happen for perfectly aligned edges

Cotard’s Syndrome: Clinical Case Presentation and Literature Review

In 1880 French neurologist Jules Cotard described a condition characterized by delusion of negation (nihilistic delusion) in a melancholia context. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in Cotard’s syndrome. The most prominent symptoms of Cotard’s Syndrome are depressive mood, nihilistic delusions concerning one’s own body and one’s own existence, delusions of guilt, immortality and hypochondria. The aim of the present paper is to review literature evidences concerning Cotard’s syndrome and to describe a clinical case keeping in the background the recent trends on its psychopathological implications. In the clinical study, the following sequence of stages emerged: the dissociative side, expressed as a loss of body-mind cohesion; the ‘mixed’ mood disorder, with depressive-manic episodes, and a persecutory background, all coexisting in the anguish of the idea of a body falling apart, the anguish of a descent towards the abyss of melancholia and/or an ascent to unlimited euphoria, characteristic of an “uncommon alarm” for loss of Self cohesion

REDOXI-miRNA of Keap1/Nrf2 axis in lung tumors

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