Parent-child relationships in Italian families: connectedness and autonomy in the transition to adulthood

This contribution focuses on the changes in parent-child relationships during the transition to adulthood, that implies a modification of the balance of connectedness and autonomy. The principal aim was twofold: 1) to verify how relational support and style of decision making - respectively markers of family connectedness and autonomy - change from adolescence to young adulthood; 2) to compare the perceptions of parents and children through a measure of agreement. The sample was composed of 259 Italian families with a child between 17 and 25 years of age. Participants filled out a self report questionnaire including the Parent-Adolescent Support Scale and the Style of Decision Making Scale. Results highlighted that children perceived a significant increase in relational support and in autonomy from late adolescence to young adulthood. Furthermore, agreement between parents and children increased by aging. Therefore, near the transition to adulthood, parents and young adults are closer to each other than during late adolescence

Patients with basal ganglia damage show preserved learning in an economic game.

Both basal ganglia (BG) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) have been widely implicated in social and non-social decision-making. However, unlike OFC damage, BG pathology is not typically associated with disturbances in social functioning. Here we studied the behavior of patients with focal lesions to either BG or OFC in a multi-strategy competitive game known to engage these regions. We find that whereas OFC patients are significantly impaired, BG patients show intact learning in the economic game. By contrast, when information about the strategic context is absent, both cohorts are significantly impaired. Computational modeling further shows a preserved ability in BG patients to learn by anticipating and responding to the behavior of others using the strategic context. These results suggest that apparently divergent findings on BG contribution to social decision-making may instead reflect a model where higher-order learning processes are dissociable from trial-and-error learning, and can be preserved despite BG damage

Multilayer Complex Network Descriptors for Color-Texture Characterization

A new method based on complex networks is proposed for color-texture analysis. The proposal consists on modeling the image as a multilayer complex network where each color channel is a layer, and each pixel (in each color channel) is represented as a network vertex. The network dynamic evolution is accessed using a set of modeling parameters (radii and thresholds), and new characterization techniques are introduced to capt information regarding within and between color channel spatial interaction. An automatic and adaptive approach for threshold selection is also proposed. We conduct classification experiments on 5 well-known datasets: Vistex, Usptex, Outex13, CURet and MBT. Results among various literature methods are compared, including deep convolutional neural networks with pre-trained architectures. The proposed method presented the highest overall performance over the 5 datasets, with 97.7 of mean accuracy against 97.0 achieved by the ResNet convolutional neural network with 50 layers.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures and 4 table

Internationalisation strategies in italian district-based firms:Theoretical modelling and empirical evidence

The internationalisation pattern of district firms in the last decades can be viewed -as envisaged by traditional theory- in terms of exploitation of both firm and territorial advantage to expand into foreign markets. Rapid and intense internationalisation processes represent a means for cluster-based firms to exploit the advantages of being located in a cluster and the resulting positive externalities (skilled and specialized labour, specialized services, access to a sort of "collective international knowledge", easy access to information on the internationalisation strategies of main local competitors) on a larger scale. The contribution of district firms to export flows has increased rapidly throughout the last twenty years in different countries (Putnam, 1993; Ffowcs, Williams, 1997), but it has reached an impressive level in nations like Italy where the density of districts and similar territorial networks is high and dated: in fact, almost two thirds of Italian exports stem from districts (Fortis, 1998). The Italian case also highlights the role of the local system in the "international since the beginning" attitude of firms. In fact, most "born global" Italian firms are located in industrial districts (Zucchella, Maccarini, 1999). Similar empirical evidence is reported by Sopas (2001) in Portugal and Brown & Bell (2001) in New Zealand. The relevance of location-specific factors in the born global firms phenomenon is evident also in the case of high tech districts (Saxenian, 1994; Torrisi, 1998), where it is possible to observe a geographic concentration of businesses involved in advanced technologies and related services. Moreover, information technologies may provide an innovative and powerful tool for establishing and enforcing connections (information, explicit knowledge, etc.) between distant locations, thus permitting the creation of networks among different districts (Ganzaroli, 2002). The above considerations not only provide strong arguments to support the role of local systems in firms' internationalisation, but they also indicate the district in itself as an emerging research subject in the international business agenda. In fact, the district or local cluster may represent not only a "facilitating environment", but also a subject capable of its own collective internationalisation process. In these recent years local systems have shown their ability to transfer their structure to foreign markets, thus generating similar local systems in foreign countries, in a sort of district spin-off or district internationalisation (Majocchi, 2000). These factors outline the relevance of geographic co-location and district formation for the fast and intense internationalisation processes of the players involved. More recently, the capacity of geographic co-location in itself in determining such effects seems to have weakened in favour of more firm- or business -specific factors. In particular, there is empirical evidence about the role of a deep niche orientation on export intensity performance and on early and fast internationalisation processes (Zucchella, Maccarini, 1999; Zucchella, 2001 e 2002). Many firms belonging to districts evidence a global niche orientation, thus it may be appropriate to try to separate the effect of business-specific factors from the effect of location-specific ones, in order to understand -if possible- the effective role of geographic co-location on internationalisation patterns. The purpose of this paper is to verify the relevance of both business-specific factors (niche orientation in particular) and location-specific ones (location in a district) on a set of international performance measures (export intensity, geographic scope, time, adoption of alternative foreign market entry modes). The results are grounded on an empirical survey conducted on a sample of 271 international firms and aim at contributing to a better understanding of the actual main drivers of international performance, with particular emphasis on the comparison between business-specific and location-specific ones.

Editorial: Gastrointestinal Surgery: Emerging techniques, controversies and state of art

Artificial intelligence; Gastrointestinal surgery; Surgical techniquesInteligencia artificial; Cirugía gastrointestinal; Técnicas quirúrgicasIntel·ligència artificial; Cirurgia gastrointestinal; Tècniques quirúrgique

Three new Alpha1-Antitrypsin deficiency variants help to define a C-Terminal region regulating conformational change and polymerization

Alpha1-antitrypsin (AAT) deficiency is a hereditary disorder associated with reduced AAT plasma levels, predisposing adults to pulmonary emphysema. The most common genetic AAT variants found in patients are the mildly deficient S and the severely deficient Z alleles, but several other pathogenic rare alleles have been reported. While the plasma AAT deficiency is a common trait of the disease, only a few AAT variants, including the prototypic Z AAT and some rare variants, form cytotoxic polymers in the endoplasmic reticulum of hepatocytes and predispose to liver disease. Here we report the identification of three new rare AAT variants associated to reduced plasma levels and characterize their molecular behaviour in cellular models. The variants, called Mpisa (Lys259Ile), Etaurisano (Lys368Glu) and Yorzinuovi (Pro391His), showed reduced secretion compared to control M AAT, and accumulated to different extents in the cells as ordered polymeric structures resembling those formed by the Z variant. Structural analysis of the mutations showed that they may facilitate polymerization both by loosening ‘latch’ interactions constraining the AAT reactive loop and through effects on core packing. In conclusion, the new AAT deficiency variants, besides increasing the risk of lung disease, may predispose to liver disease, particularly if associated with the common Z variant. The new mutations cluster structurally, thus defining a region of the AAT molecule critical for regulating its conformational state