A Special Case of Philosophical Reflection about the Origin of language: Victor, the Wild Child of Aveyron

The paper focuses on the analysis of Jean Itard’s writings documenting the program of linguistic re-education of Victor de l’Aveyron, a wild child found in France at the end of the eighteenth century. When discovered, the boy was seemingly twelve or thirteen years old and suffered from a severe form of deficiency in his intellectual and linguistic development, which made him utterly unable to speak and communicate with others. Itard’s original method of re-education is examined here in relation to both the positive results he achieved from a cognitive point of view (but also the negative ones from the point of view of the ontogenetic birth of language) and the most significant outcomes reached by the eighteenth century philosophy of language through Locke’s and Condillac’s semiotic theories

Functions and characteristics of verbal discourse: from rhetoric to anthropology

The essay describes a common research field between rhetoric and anthropology composed by these elements: (1) the forms and model of verbal language; (2) the analysis of the peculiar properties of orality; (3) the elements of distinction between orality and literacy; (4) the study of factors and conditions that make the spoken word effective, and in the fact that it can exercise persuasive power over the people to whom it is addressed. These topics have been analyzed by prominent authors such as Gorgias, Aristotle, Cicero, Perelman, Goody, Lévi-Strauss

Sound Insulation of Building Elements at Low Frequency: A Modal Approach

In typical laboratory volumes (50-80 m(3)) and at low frequencies (50-100 Hz), the acoustic field is non-diffuse due to the presence of source and receiving room modes. Under such conditions, standard sound insulation measurements and descriptors are not adequate to correctly characterize the insulating property of partitions or flooring systems. The "modal approach" allows to evaluate the airborne sound insulation by the determination of modal transmission loss, or modal sound insulation, of a single mode passing through the partition. Proper normalization terms and an extension method to one-third octave bands are also introduced. The same approach is applied to impact sound insulation measurement. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd

Simulation of a Power Regulation System for Steam Power Plants

Abstract Renewable energy sources, presently constituting about 23% of the total Italian power production, are featured by very discontinuous supply during the day that, to avoid grid malfunctions, must be compensated by fossil fuelled power plants. The latter must hence be able to rapidly control power supply. This paper proposes a power regulation system for coal power plants, consisting in the bypass of the low pressure pre-heaters in order to increase the steam flow-rate in turbine. The main advantage of this system is the limited thermo-mechanical stress induced in the pre-heaters. The solution effectiveness is investigated through a Matlab-Simulink model

A MODAL APPROACH FORREVERBERATION TIME MEASUREMENTS IN NON-DIFFUSE SOUND FIELD

In recent years the extension of reverberation time measurements to frequencies below 100 Hz is becoming more and more important due to the increase of low frequency sources. In ordinary rooms with volumes smaller than 200 m3the low frequency sound field is non-diffuse due to the presence of modes, which are also the main cause of bad quality of listening in terms of clarity and rumble effects. Since standard measurements according to ISO 3382 fail to achieve accurate and precise values in third octave bands due to non-linear decays of room modes, a new ap-proach based on reverberation time measurements of single resonant frequencies (the modal re-verberation time) is introduced. Two measurementmethods based on the relation between mod-al decays and resonant half bandwidths are proposed: the direct method, based on the direct evaluation of modal sound decays with interrupted source signals, and the indirect method based on half bandwidth measurements. Proper measurement procedures, with microphones placed at rectangular room corners and anti-resonant sine waves and sweep source signals for direct and indirect measurement methods respectively, are proposed. Comparison between direct and indi-rect methods shows good and significant agreement. Comparing modal reverberation times with standard ones, the inadequacy of standard procedure to get accurate and precise values at low frequencies with respect to the modal approach becomes evident. In the future, further investi-gations are necessary in more rooms toimprove uncertainty evaluation

Reverberation time measurements in non-diffuse acoustic field by the modal reverberation time

partially_open3mixedPrato, A.; Casassa, F.; Schiavi, A.Prato, A.; Casassa, F.; Schiavi, Alessandr

Leopardi e la lingua italiana tra tradizione e modernità

Leopardi and the Italian language between tradition and modernity. The essay aims to illustrate the Leopardi’s ideas on the crisis of the Italian language and culture of the early nineteenth century, marked by an intellectual provincialism that did not allow it to participate adequately in the development of the sciences and philosophy that characterized Europe 18th century. The lucid and disenchanted criticism of the problems affecting Italy of the Restoration is reconstructed: the gap between spoken and written language, between literature and science and between high culture and popular culture, the lack of civic sense and social cohesion, the scarce development of public opinion, cultural backwardness, lack of modernization of the language. Leopardi’s critical position also has political and social significance and presents elements of evident relevance which are still of great interest to the readers of the 21st century

Estimating Route Choice Models from Stochastically Generated Choice Sets on Large-Scale Networks Correcting for Unequal Sampling Probability:Correcting for Unequal Sampling Probability

Route choice is one of the most complex decision-making contexts to represent mathematically, and the most frequently used approach to model route choice consists of generating alternative routes and modeling the preferences of utility-maximizing travelers. The main drawback of this approach is the dependency of the parameter estimates from the choice set generation technique. Bias introduced in model estimation has been corrected only for the random walk algorithm, which has problematic applicability to large-scale networks. This study proposes a correction term for the sampling probability of routes extracted with stochastic route generation. The term is easily applicable to large-scale networks and various environments, given its dependence only on a random number generator and the Dijkstra shortest path algorithm. The implementation for revealed preferences data, which consist of actual route choices collected in Cagliari, Italy, shows the feasibility of generating routes stochastically in a high-resolution network and calculating the correction factor. The model estimation with and without correction illustrates how the correction not only improves the goodness of fit but also turns illogical signs for parameter estimates to logical signs