S10-01 Is empathy always good?

Empathy is a complex phenomenon. First of all empathy means the capacity to understand someone else's state of mind or to identify with his emotional state. From this point of view, empathy plays a fundamental role in psychotherapy and has been studied as a fundamental therapeutic factor. It is true that an emphatic attitude can help other people and lead to a better understanding of their feelings. But empathy can also be used as a horrible instrument to manipulate and abuse the other. We can see this kind of malign empathy in perverted narcissistic relationships, in sadism or in torture, where the torturer can use empathy in order to figure out the most effective ways to make each of his victims suffer

Poultry farming solutions for a sustainable development of marshlands areas of South Iraq

ArticleThe Department of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Systems of University of Florence carried out cooperation projects in the South Iraq, funded by Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Coop eration, focused on the development of rural areas. All the proposed interventions were designed taking into account some key points, such as the development of sustainable farming systems, the protection of the environment, the empowerment of women role. Among the main activities, a particular importance is given to the simple solutions for poultry breeding that represents an important economic resource for many farmers and a source of food for a large segment of the population. Therefore the main aim of t he project was to define new building solutions to apply in the area of marshlands. A mobile poultry shelter was designed and built to meet the demand for meat and eggs from a typical rural family. This shelter was designed to be used for extensive breedin g, with animals free to graze outside during the day. A suitable self - building methodology was applied to obtain results from farmers without specific skills for wood construction thanks to which they learn the appropriate way to build poultry shelters. As conclusion, poultry breeding can be spread in the area of marshlands using the simple self - building structures presented in the study

Learning to infer structures of network games

Strategic interactions between a group of individuals or organisations can be modelled as games played on networks, where a player’s payoff depends not only on their actions but also on those of their neighbours. Inferring the network structure from observed game outcomes (equilibrium actions) is an important problem with numerous potential applications in economics and social sciences. Existing methods mostly require the knowledge of the utility function associated with the game, which is often unrealistic to obtain in real-world scenarios. We adopt a transformer-like architecture which correctly accounts for the symmetries of the problem and learns a mapping from the equilibrium actions to the network structure of the game without explicit knowledge of the utility function. We test our method on three different types of network games using both synthetic and real-world data, and demonstrate its effectiveness in network structure inference and superior performance over existing methods

Measuring emptiness: Validation of the Italian version of the Subjective Emptiness Scale in clinical and non-clinical populations

Background: Although a feeling of emptiness is listed only as a symptom of the DSM-5 borderline personality disorder, it is commonly encountered in other disorders. The aim of this study was to validate the Italian version of the Subjective Emptiness Scale (SES-I), a 7-item self-report instrument assessing the feeling of emptiness. Methods: Participants in one clinical group (n = 63) and one non-clinical group (n = 48) completed the SES-I along with several other instruments. A principal component analysis was used to analyze the structure of the SES-I and Cronbach's alpha and Rho's Spearman were used to establish aspects of reliability and validity, respectively. Results: The SES-I has a unidimensional structure reflecting the core feature of the feeling of emptiness. It showed an excellent internal consistency (a = 0.92) and convergent validity, as demonstrated by significant correlations with scores on the Beck Depression Inventory – II and conceptually related scales and subscales of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory – III and Personality Inventory for DSM-5. Divergent validity was also demonstrated for the SES-I. SES-I scores in the clinical group were significantly higher than in the non-clinical group. A significant relationship was not found between the feeling of emptiness and self-harming behavior, impulsivity and acting-out. Limitations: A small sample size, several significant differences between the clinical and non-clinical groups and diagnostic heterogeneity in the clinical group limit generalizability of the study. Conclusion: The SES-I is a valid and reliable instrument, which should improve assessment of the feeling of emptiness and help clinicians better understand this complex phenomenon

Chemical behavior and in vitro activity of mixed phosphine gold(I)compounds on melanoma cell lines.

7partially_openCARUSO F; PETTINARI C; PADUANO F; VILLA R; MARCHETTI F; E. MONTI; ROSSI MCaruso, F; Pettinari, C; Paduano, F; Villa, R; Marchetti, F; Monti, ELENA CATERINA; Rossi, M

A nucleotide insertion and frameshift cause albumin Kénitra, an extended and O-glycosylated mutant of human serum albumin with two additional disulfide bridges

Albumin Kenitra is a new type of genetic variant of human serum albumin that has been found in two members of a family of Sephardic Jews from Kenitra (Morocco). The slow-migrating variant and the normal protein were isolated by anion-exchange chromatography and, after treatment with CNBr, the digests were analyzed by two-dimensional electrophoresis in a polyacrylamide gel. The CNBr peptides of the variant were purified by reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography and submitted to sequence analysis. Albumin Kenitra is peculiar because it has an elongated polypeptide chain, 601 residues instead of 585, and its sequence is modified beginning from residue 575. DNA structural studies showed that the variant is caused by a single-base insertion, an adenine at nucleotide position 15 970 in the genomic sequence, which leads to a frameshift with the subsequent translation to the first termination codon of exon 15. Mass spectrometric analyses revealed that the four additional cysteine residues of the variant form two new S-S bridges and showed that albumin Kenitra is partially O-glycosylated by a monosialylated HexHexNAc structure. This oligosaccharide chain has been located to Thr596 by amino-acid sequence analysis of the tryptic fragment 592-59

micrornas and cdh1 regulation in intestinal type gastric cancer

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Risk of hepatitis B virus reactivation in rheumatoid arthritis patients undergoing biologic treatment : extending perspective from old to newer drugs

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) reactivation in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients undergoing biological therapy is not infrequent. This condition can occur in patients with chronic hepatitis B as well as in patients with resolved HBV infection. Current recommendations are mainly focused on prevention and management strategies of viral reactivation under tumor necrosis factor-\u3b1 inhibitors or chimeric monoclonal antibody rituximab. In recent years, growing data concerning HBV reactivation in RA patients treated with newer biological drugs like tocilizumab and abatacept have cumulated. In this review, epidemiology, pathogenesis and natural history of HBV infection have been revised first, mainly focusing on the role that specific therapeutic targets of current biotechnological drugs play in HBV pathobiology; finally we have summarized current evidences from scientific literature, including either observational studies and case reports as well, concerning HBV reactivation under different classes of biological drugs in RA patients. Taking all these evidences into account, some practical guidelines for screening, vaccination, prophylaxis and treatment of HBV reactivation have been proposed

An Exploratory Study of Field Failures

Field failures, that is, failures caused by faults that escape the testing phase leading to failures in the field, are unavoidable. Improving verification and validation activities before deployment can identify and timely remove many but not all faults, and users may still experience a number of annoying problems while using their software systems. This paper investigates the nature of field failures, to understand to what extent further improving in-house verification and validation activities can reduce the number of failures in the field, and frames the need of new approaches that operate in the field. We report the results of the analysis of the bug reports of five applications belonging to three different ecosystems, propose a taxonomy of field failures, and discuss the reasons why failures belonging to the identified classes cannot be detected at design time but shall be addressed at runtime. We observe that many faults (70%) are intrinsically hard to detect at design-time