Spherical clustering of users navigating 360{\deg} content

In Virtual Reality (VR) applications, understanding how users explore the omnidirectional content is important to optimize content creation, to develop user-centric services, or even to detect disorders in medical applications. Clustering users based on their common navigation patterns is a first direction to understand users behaviour. However, classical clustering techniques fail in identifying these common paths, since they are usually focused on minimizing a simple distance metric. In this paper, we argue that minimizing the distance metric does not necessarily guarantee to identify users that experience similar navigation path in the VR domain. Therefore, we propose a graph-based method to identify clusters of users who are attending the same portion of the spherical content over time. The proposed solution takes into account the spherical geometry of the content and aims at clustering users based on the actual overlap of displayed content among users. Our method is tested on real VR user navigation patterns. Results show that our solution leads to clusters in which at least 85% of the content displayed by one user is shared among the other users belonging to the same cluster.Comment: 5 pages, conference (Published in: ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

High-resolution SAR images for fire susceptibility estimation in urban forestry

We present an adaptive system for the automatic assessment of both physical and anthropic fire impact factors on periurban forestries. The aim is to provide an integrated methodology exploiting a complex data structure built upon a multi resolution grid gathering historical land exploitation and meteorological data, records of human habits together with suitably segmented and interpreted high resolution X-SAR images, and several other information sources. The contribution of the model and its novelty rely mainly on the definition of a learning schema lifting different factors and aspects of fire causes, including physical, social and behavioural ones, to the design of a fire susceptibility map, of a specific urban forestry. The outcome is an integrated geospatial database providing an infrastructure that merges cartography, heterogeneous data and complex analysis, in so establishing a digital environment where users and tools are interactively connected in an efficient and flexible way

Psychosocial Training: A Case of Self-Efficacy Improvement in an Italian School

The changes that the regulatory institutions have imposed on the Italian school system over the last decades may actually result in contradictory effects at the individual and organizational levels: resistance or indifference on the one hand and training or coping strategies on the other. The paper focuses on the impact of such changes on teachers, as professional workers within public schools and individual participants of change. The paper refers to psychosocial training as a coping strategy, analysing how school teachers deal with work-related stress, and what impact a training intervention might have on some individual dimensions. Subsequently, in the longitudinal study presented, we analysed whether the training intervention conducted was effective in terms of learning and change. The case under consideration is a primary school located in the South of Italy, and the participants in the training and research were 92 female teachers. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the designed and applied training programme, we measured how some important psychological dimensions have changed over time: self-efficacy, job satisfaction and interpersonal strain. According to a sociological learning approach, the results suggest the effectiveness of training programmes as enablers of change and solutions to some change paradoxes; when they respond to the identified needs, they are based on practical activities that require a collective participation, they focus on social relationships and processes and the knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. In the school context, the psychosocial training might represent a solution, if not a prevention strategy, for change management

Comprender el malestar a través de las relaciones. La teoría sistémica: entre epistemología, dinámicas familiares y clínica

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo el delinear la evolución de las referencias epistemológicas que subyacen al cambio de los modelos de tipo sistémico-relacional. Tal evolución representa el hilo conductor gracias al cual leer las variaciones de perspectiva que ha experimentado la clínica familiar al observar, significar y tratar el malestar en el ámbito de la teoría y de la escena terapéutica. Son dos los saltos epistemológicos que se revelan como fundamentales. El primero es el paso de un modelo homeostático a un modelo evolutivo, paso que ha conducido a los terapeutas a considerar, además de las tensiones hacia el mantenimiento del equilibrio que caracterizan a los sistemas familiares (sobre todo cuando éstos atraviesan un estado de malestar), también los procesos de desarrollo que se hallan en la base del funcionamiento y de las transformaciones de tales sistemas. El segundo es el paso de la cibernética de primer orden a la de segundo orden, paso que ha permitido concebir la relación terapéutica como un proceso de circularidad constructiva entre el observador y el sistema observado y que ha estimulado una apertura hacia nuevas modalidades de tratamiento terapéutico familiar

Engaging Public Servants: Public Service Motivation, Work Engagement and Work-Related Stress

Considering the ongoing international debate on the role of public administrations in economic systems, public service motivation (PSM) has significantly and increasingly attracted the attention of practitioners and scholars in the past two decades. Following the research streams that have investigated topics of organizational behavior in the public context, this study examines the influence of PSM on the feeling of job satisfaction for public employees. The novelty of the study lies in linking some features of the work context considered to be more prevalent in public organizations with specific job characteristics, seen as determinant antecedents of job satisfaction. Based on two complementary studies conducted in an Italian public administration, this paper shows how PSM influences job satisfaction, job engagement, and life satisfaction. Additionally, the findings display how job engagement affects both job and life satisfaction in these particular contexts. Furthermore, the paper sheds new light on how to deal with such problems and at the same time opens new avenues for investigation

Learning Processes Associated with Panic-Related Symptoms in Families with and Without Panic Disordered Mothers

The present study compared learning processes associated with panic-related symptoms in families with and without panic disordered mothers. Using a multi-informant approach, 86 mothers [of whom 58 had a primary diagnosis of panic disorder (PD)], their partners and teenage children (mean age, 16.67years) reported about parents' behavior (modeling and operant learning) in response to children's and parents' experience of panic-related symptoms. Both, maternal and child reports revealed that mothers with PD were more likely to show panic-maintaining behavior and to involve their children in their own experience of panic-related symptoms than mothers without PD. Mothers with PD reported more often to be punished by others for their experience of panic-related symptoms than mothers without PD. Conversely, parent and child reports did not reveal differences between parents' reactions to their children's experience of panic-related symptoms in families with and without a PD mother. Given that mothers with PD were reported to behave differently in relation to their own experience of panic-related symptoms but not in relation to their children's experience of panic-related symptoms, the present study offers preliminary evidence that modeling, rather than operant learning, might affect children's sensitivity to somatic symptom

The Role of Family Support and Dyadic Adjustment on the Psychological Well-being of Transgender Individuals: An Exploratory Study

Introduction This study aimed to measure dyadic adjustment, social support, and psychological well-being. Methods A research protocol composed of the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, the Outcome Questionnaire 45.2, and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support was administered to a sample of 109 Italian transgender individuals. Results Higher levels of global psychological distress, symptom severity, and interpersonal relationship distress were associated with lower levels of family support and dyadic adjustment. In addition, transgender women and younger transgender individuals reported higher levels of interpersonal relationship distress. Conclusions The results indicate that the support and acceptance of one’s partner and family of origin play a crucial role in promoting well-being. It represents an important protective factor with respect to negative psychological health outcomes. Policy Implications The findings emphasize the need to develop specific clinical and social practices for transgender individuals and their families. Building family and partner-centered policies and programs is particularly important to enable transgender individuals to avoid paying the emotional and psychological costs associated with rejection and non-acceptance

The organisation of sexuality and the sexuality of organisation: A genealogical analysis of sexual ‘inclusive exclusion’ at work

This article problematises sexual inclusion in the workplace by theorising the social and historical processes that underpin heteronormativity in organisations. Drawing on a genealogical analysis of sexuality and inclusion in four Italian social firms that support the work and social integration of disadvantaged individuals, the article provides an in-depth analysis of the historical conditions affecting the management of sexualities in organisations. The analysis exposes the fragility and contradictory character of the notion of inclusion by illustrating how efforts to ‘include’ are often grounded on normative principles. It also shows how heteronormativity works, in practice, to moderate different modalities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer inclusion, recreating hierarchies and binaries within lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals. The article discusses how the power of heteronormativity produces specific meanings of inclusion within which some lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer workers are included and normalised, and others remain excluded because they do not conform to normative conventions and flaunt their ‘diversity’. The necessity of taking a queer perspective on ‘inclusion’ that scrutinises the heteronormative logic is also discussed. The article concludes by shedding light on how, within a heteronormative regime shaped by neoliberal predicaments, ‘inclusive’ organisations might continue to exclude lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals

Retinoic acid-induced differentiation sensitizes myeloid progenitors cells to ER stress

The clonal expansion of hematopoietic myeloid precursors blocked at different stages of differentiation characterizes the acute myeloid leukemia (AML) phenotype. A subtype of AML, acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), characterized by the chimeric protein PML-RARα is considered a paradigm of differentiation therapy. In this leukemia subtype the all-trans-retinoic acid (RA)-based treatments are able to induce PML-RARα degradation and leukemic blast terminal differentiation [1-2]. Granulocytic differentiation of APL cells driven by RA triggers a physiological Unfolded Protein Response (UPR), a series of pathways emanating from the ER in case of ER stress, which ensues when higher protein folding activity is required as during differentiation. We show here that, although mild, the ER stress induced by RA is sufficient to render human APL cell lines and primary blasts very sensitive to low doses of Tunicamycin (Tm), an ER stress inducing drug, at doses that are not toxic in the absence of RA. Importantly only human progenitors cells derived from APL patients resulted sensitive to the combined treatment with RA and Tm whereas those obtained from healthy donors were not affected. We also show that the UPR pathway downstream of PERK plays a major protective role against ER stress in differentiating cells and, by using a specific PERK inhibitor, we potentiated the toxic effect of the combination of RA and Tm. In conclusion, our findings identify the ER stress-related pathways as potential targets in the search for novel therapeutic strategies in AML