Falquet de Romans, “Ma bella dompna, per vos dei esser gais” (BdT 156.8)

“Ma bella dompna per vos dei esser gais” by Falquet de Romans has been taken for a courtly song for a long time. However, the poem’s metrical form is derived directly from that of the epic, as illustrated by the use of monorhymed ‘décasyllabes’ with non-systematic epic caesura and the presence of a ‘petit vers’ at the end of each stanza. The poem may thus be defined as stanzaic but not lyric because its versification is that of the chanson de geste and its music must be that of an epic chant. Moreover, its content reflects the rhetorical structure of the ‘salut d’amor’, an epistolary genre in which the lover sends a letter to his lady asking her to respond to his love. Thus, “Ma bella dompna” should be considered a formal hybrid between ‘salut d’amor’ and ‘chanson de geste’; in this sense it is to be compared to those few compositions of an epistolary nature that employ epic form, such as Raimbaut de Vaqueiras’ famous letter to the Marquis Boniface of Monferrato, which is probably the prototype of this poetic experiment, along with two pairs of ‘laisses’ exchanged between Gui de Cavaillon and Bertran Folco d’Avignon

Peire Bremon Ricas Novas, “Rics pres, ferms e sobeirans” (BdT 330.15a)

This article provides a new critical edition and a commentary of Peire Bremon Ricas Novas’s “Rics pres, ferms e sobeirans”, a courtly love song composed between 1228 and 1257 and dedicated to Audiart del Baux. Built as a eulogy of the lady, the song focuses on the central theme of the moral and material ‘ricor’ (richness) of the latter. The complexity of the metrical form, which displays a systematic use of the technique of ‘rim derivatiu’, is paralleled by the semantic obscurity of a number of verses and hapaxes, all discussed in the commentary. Stanzas III and IV show echoes of Jaufre Rudel’s “amor de lonh”, since the lover-poet declares that the distance and the ethnical difference between himself and the lady are abolished by the strength of his feelings. The use of ethnonyms in stanza IV is closely examined: the lover-poet reveals that he loves a Castilian lady who looks like a ‘Serrana’ (the name of an Iberian population), admitting that he would like her even if she were Catalan or Syrian. These references to the lady’s ethnical origins are puzzling: they can be read as a calembour with burlesque overtones, as well as a climax aiming to define the real provenance of the lady or as a rhetorical device to underline that courtly love does not know any kind of boundary

Caratterizzazione Neuropsicologica dei Disturbi dell'Umore

Questo studio si propone di confrontare i profili neuropsicologici di gruppi di pazienti affetti dai tre sottotipi principali di disturbo dell'umore in fase di eutimia. Secondo l'orientamento degli studi presenti in letteratura, abbiamo valutato l'impatto sui deficit neurocognitivi di fattori socio-demografici e clinico-anamnestici e dei caratteri multidimensionali lifetime secondo il modello dello spettro dell'umore. Il confronto fra gruppi ha principalmente mostrato un minor deterioramento cognitivo dei pazienti con disturbo bipolare di tipo due rispetto ai pazienti con depressione maggiore ricorrente e disturbo bipolare di tipo uno, stimato con indici che indagano il dominio delle funzioni frontali di attenzione e di funzionamento esecutivo, ed una maggior vulnerabilità dei pazienti bipolari di tipo uno all'”emotional bias”. Sono state rilevate differenze fra i tre gruppi anche riguardo all'effetto sul profilo neurocognitivo del livello d'istruzione e della storia clinica (anamnesi di sintomi psicotici, numero di episodi affettivi critici, durata di malattia e precocità d'esordio), con un andamento in linea con i dati presenti in letteratura. Ulteriori ed interessanti differenze sono emerse dalle correlazioni fra profilo neuropsicologico e spettro dell'umore: in particolare possiamo ipotizzare un'associazione tra alcune dimensioni maniacali ed il deficit di attenzione a stimoli verbali nei pazienti con depressione unipolare ricorrente, a sostegno del modello teorico di Spettro dell'Umore. I nostri dati confermano l'esistenza di significative differenze tra i disturbi dell'umore dal punto di vista cognitivo sia nel confronto tra i gruppi degli indici neuropsicologici che nell'analisi dei potenziali modulatori del deficit neurocognitivo, ed offrono spunti per ulteriori e più approfondite ricerche

Validation of a software dependability tool via fault injection experiments

Presents the validation of the strategies employed in the RECCO tool to analyze a C/C++ software; the RECCO compiler scans C/C++ source code to extract information about the significance of the variables that populate the program and the code structure itself. Experimental results gathered on an Open Source Router are used to compare and correlate two sets of critical variables, one obtained by fault injection experiments, and the other applying the RECCO tool, respectively. Then the two sets are analyzed, compared, and correlated to prove the effectiveness of RECCO's methodology

Software dependability techniques validated via fault injection experiments

The present paper proposes a C/C++ source-to-source compiler able to increase the dependability properties of a given application. The adopted strategy is based on two main techniques: variable duplication/triplication and control flow checking. The validation of these techniques is based on the emulation of fault appearance by software fault injection. The chosen test case is a client-server application in charge of calculating and drawing a Mandelbrot fracta

Data criticality estimation in software applications

In safety-critical applications it is often possible to exploit software techniques to increase system's fault- tolerance. Common approaches are based on data redundancy to prevent data corruption during the software execution. Duplicating most critical variables only can significantly reduce the memory and performance overheads, while still guaranteeing very good results in terms of fault-tolerance improvement. This paper presents a new methodology to compute the criticality of variables in target software applications. Instead of resorting to time consuming fault injection experiments, the proposed solution is based on the run- time analysis of the variables' behavior logged during the execution of the target application under different workloads

Control-flow checking via regular expressions

The present paper explains a new approach to program control flow checking. The check has been inserted at source-code level using a signature methodology based on regular expressions. The signature checking is performed without a dedicated watchdog processor but resorting to inter-process communication (IPC) facilities offered by most of the modern operating systems. The proposed approach allows very low memory overhead and trade-off between fault latency and program execution time overhead

PROMON: a profile monitor of software applications

Software techniques can be efficiently used to increase the dependability of safety-critical applications. Many approaches are based on information redundancy to prevent data and code corruption during the software execution. This paper presents PROMON, a C++ library that exploits a new methodology based on the concept of "Programming by Contract" to detect system malfunctions. Resorting to assertions, pre- and post-conditions, and marginal programmer interventions, PROMON-based applications can reach high level of dependabilit

FAUST: fault-injection script-based tool

The tool described in this paper aims at evaluating the effectiveness of software-implemented fault-tolerant techniques used in safety-critical systems. The target application is stressed with the injection of transient or permanent faults. The user can therefore observe the real behaviour of the application in presence of a fault, and, if necessary, take the appropriate countermeasures. The accent is put on the extreme easiness of the use and the portability on all UNIX platforms