The Passionate Eye of Angelina Buracci, Pedagogue

This paper examines the contribution of Angelina Buracci, a young feminist and pacifist pedagogue, to the early discourse on film in Italy. Published in 1916, her book Cinematografo educativo [educational cinema] is a brilliant counter to the contemporary representation of women filmgoers in the writings of several Italian male modernist intellectuals. Their construction, between 1908 and 1930, of a new canon of spectatorship centered on the figure of the male cinephile and bears traces of a gendered discourse. In the minds of these intellectuals, the “new spectator” was evoked as an alternative to an earlier, female model of spectatorship. Yet, despite their dismissal of women’s significant presence in the early discursive field, a few women writers had already begun carving out their own space in reflections on cinema. Buracci’s essay is an exemplary document in this respect. Not only does it demonstrate the author’s familiarity with the experience of cinema, but it also reveals an extraordinary independence of thought

A New Fluid Dynamic Model for the CFD Simulations of Fluidized Beds

A new Eulerian-Eulerian multidimensional model is proposed for the study of the dynamics of dense fluidized suspensions. The main distinctive feature of this new formulation of the equations of motion resides in the closure relationships adopted to express the fluid-particle interaction force. The force accounts for three contributions: buoyant force, drag force and elastic force. The buoyant force is related to the weight of the fluid displaced by the particles. The drag force is expressed as the product of the drag exerted on an unhindered particle, subject to the same volumetric flux of fluid, and a “corrective function” dependent on both bed voidage and particle Reynolds number. The elastic force is related to spatial gradients in the bed voidage and is parallel to the drag force; the force can be regarded as the component of the drag which arises when the homogeneity of the suspension is lost at the macroscopic length scale. The model is used to study the fluidization dynamics of liquid-solid homogeneous beds and gas-solid bubbling beds with particles belonging to the Group B of the Geldart’s classification (1). The results of the simulations are compared with experimental data mainly in terms of average bed height, average bed voidage and diameter of the rising bubbles

Building a Persuasive Virtual Dietitian

This paper describes the Multimedia Application for Diet Management (MADiMan), a system that supports users in managing their diets while admitting diet transgressions. MADiMan consists of a numerical reasoner that takes into account users’ dietary constraints and automatically adapts the users’ diet, and of a natural language generation (NLG) system that automatically creates textual messages for explaining the results provided by the reasoner with the aim of persuading users to stick to a healthy diet. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the MADiMan system and, in particular, the basic mechanisms related to reasoning, data interpretation and content selection for a numeric data-to-text NLG system. We also discuss a number of factors influencing the design of the textual messages produced. In particular, we describe in detail the design of the sentence-aggregation procedure, which determines the compactness of the final message by applying two aggregation strategies. In the second part of the paper, we present the app that we developed, CheckYourMeal!, and the results of two human-based quantitative evaluations of the NLG module conducted using CheckYourMeal! in a simulation. The first evaluation, conducted with twenty users, ascertained both the perceived usefulness of graphics/text and the appeal, easiness and persuasiveness of the textual messages. The second evaluation, conducted with thirty-nine users, ascertained their persuasive power. The evaluations were based on the analysis of questionnaires and of logged data of users’ behaviour. Both evaluations showed significant results

Managerial strategies to promote employee brand consistent behavior: the new frontier for brand building strategies

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of managerial strategies in promoting employee brand consistent behavior. Using a recently developed, holistic model of behavioral branding (Mazzei and Ravazzani, 2015), that suggests that a wide array of managerial strategies affect the branding process, this study addresses two specific questions: What communication strategies, in the opinion of managers, sustain employee brand consistent behavior? and What are the most important factors, both contextual and related to their cognitive-emotional states, that employees think affect their brand ambassadorship behavior. Research was conducted, based on a multiple methods strategy, to answer the two questions. The choice of methods was based on the specific characteristics of the two targets, communication managers and employees. An initial study conducted in-depth interviews with 32 communication managers, and this was followed by a case study of a single company. The results show that enablement-oriented strategies are more effective then communication-oriented strategies in sustaining employee brand builder roles. Weak employee commitment, unsatisfactory external communication, and low levels of motivation are strong contextual factors inhibiting employee attitudes to brand ambassadorship, one of the most relevant employee brand consistent behaviors in competitive contexts. The main practical implication is that companies should engage employees as brand ambassadors, not by means of prescriptions of in-role behavior, but enablement strategies leading to authentic and voluntary behaviors; besides, that companies should put a significant effort in “preparing the soil”, i.e. investing in enhancing employee commitment, level of motivation and understanding/alignment with the external communication. The values of the study lies in highlighting the crucial role of enablement-oriented strategies, and the relevance of specific contextual variables affecting the attitudes of employees towards brand consistent behaviors

Reasoning and querying bounds on differences with layered preferences

Artificial intelligence largely relies on bounds on differences (BoDs) to model binary constraints regarding different dimensions, such as time, space, costs, and calories. Recently, some approaches have extended the BoDs framework in a fuzzy, \u201cnoncrisp\u201d direction, considering probabilities or preferences. While previous approaches have mainly aimed at providing an optimal solution to the set of constraints, we propose an innovative class of approaches in which constraint propagation algorithms aim at identifying the \u201cspace of solutions\u201d (i.e., the minimal network) with their preferences, and query answering mechanisms are provided to explore the space of solutions as required, for example, in decision support tasks. Aiming at generality, we propose a class of approaches parametrized over user\u2010defined scales of qualitative preferences (e.g., Low, Medium, High, and Very High), utilizing the resume and extension operations to combine preferences, and considering different formalisms to associate preferences with BoDs. We consider both \u201cgeneral\u201d preferences and a form of layered preferences that we call \u201cpyramid\u201d preferences. The properties of the class of approaches are also analyzed. In particular, we show that, when the resume and extension operations are defined such that they constitute a closed semiring, a more efficient constraint propagation algorithm can be used. Finally, we provide a preliminary implementation of the constraint propagation algorithms