Online reverse discourses? Claiming a space for trans voices

In recent years, online media have offered to trans people helpful resources to create new political, cultural and personal representations of their biographies. However, the role of these media in the construction of their social and personal identities has seldom been addressed. Drawing on the theoretical standpoint of positioning theory and diatextual discourse analysis, this paper discusses the results of a research project about weblogs created by Italian trans women. In particular, the aim of this study was to describe the ways online resources are used to express different definitions and interpretation of transgenderism, transsexuality and gender transitioning. We identified four main positioning strategies: \u201cTransgender\u201d, \u201cTranssexual before being a woman\u201d, \u201cA woman who was born male\u201d and \u201cJust a normal woman\u201d. We conclude with the political implications of the pluralization of narratives about gender non-conformity. Specifically, we will highlight how aspects of neoliberal discourses have been appropriated and rearticulated in the construction of gendered subjectivities

Studies in the genus Cortaderia (Poaceae) II. Cortaderia atacamensis, a new synonym of C. speciosa

En esta contribución a la sistemática del género Cortaderia se propone la sinonimización de C. atacamensis y C. speciosa. Hasta ahora el binomio Cortaderia atacamensis ha sido considerado un sinónimo de C. jubata. Sin embargo, el estudio de los ejemplares tipo y de las descripciones originales, complementado con estudios de campo, demostraron que C. atacamensis es un sinónimo de C. speciosa (una especie nativa de las regiones desérticas desde Perú hasta el norte de la Argentina y Chile), distinta de C. jubata (una especie típica de los bosques andinos desde Colombia hasta el norte de la Argentina). Se presentan una caracterización morfológica y una clave para separar ambas especies.In this contribution to the systematics of the genus Cortaderia the synonymization of C. atacamensis and C. speciosa is proposed. Until now the binomial Cortaderia atacamensis has been considered a synonym of C. jubata. Nevertheless, the study of the type specimens and original descriptions, complemented with field studies, demonstrated that C. atacamensis is a synonym of C. speciosa (a species native to the desertic regions from Peru to northern Argentina and Chile), rather than of C. jubata (a species typical of the Andean forests from Colombia to northern Argentina). A morphological characterization and a key to separate the two species are provided.Fil: Testoni, Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Biología, Bioquímica y Farmacia. Laboratorio de Plantas Vasculares; Argentin

Pet Loss and Representations of Death, Attachment, Depression, and Euthanasia

T Studies that have examined pet loss hypothesize that attachment, representations of death, and the belief in an afterlife for animals may influence owners\u2019 bereavement and depressive outcomes. The following instruments were administered to 159 Italian participants recruited through snowball sampling: the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale (LAPS), the Pet Bereavement Questionnaire (PBQ), the Testoni Death Representation Scale (TDRS), and Beck\u2019s Depression Inventory II (BDI-II). Questions concerning pet euthanasia-related issues and the relationship between owners and veterinarians were also submitted to the participants. A path model was conducted, showing that the representation of death and the attachment to a pet had a direct effect on pet grief, which in turn had a direct effect on depression. The results show a positive correlation between the LAPS and PBQ factors, particularly with the PBQ factor Grief. The LAPS factors positively correlated with the TDRS representation of Death as a Passage and negatively correlated with the TDRS representation of Death as Annihilation. The LAPS People Substituting factor positively correlated with the total score and the CognitiveAffective factor of the BDI-II. The PBQ factors positively correlated with the BDI-II, whereas only the TDRS Death as Annihilation factor positively correlated with the BDI-II. Belief in a transcendent dimension was associated with higher scores on the PBQ Guilt factor and the TDRS factors of Death as a Passage and Death as Change, whereas these beliefs were associated with lower scores on the TDRS factor Death as Annihilation. The results indicated that the sensitivity of the veterinarian and a veterinarian who helps owners make conscious and informed decisions for their pet and choose the right time to perform euthanasia are important variables in the management of pet loss. However, these factors are not sufficient and psychological support should be improved to help owners better cope with grief

The undoing project

In his most recent book, entitled The Undoing Project, the American author Michael Lewis unfolds the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the two Israeli psychologists who laid the foundations for behavioural science. But this is not quite the story you might have read elsewhere

The Error of Wanting to Overturn the Hourglass: How the Heidegger-Severino Relationship Arose

The international conference All'alba dell'eternità : I primi 60 anni de "La struttura originaria"  (60SO) [At the dawn of eternity: The first 60 years of "The primal structure"] had just concluded. The event had achieved the desired effect, and the feedback in the media and on the web was extremely positive. Severino did not need to attract attention or create situations that would focus on him, but the opposite was true, i.e. it was those who deeply knew "his discourse" and had studied his texts who needed to discuss what they had understood. Nobody knew that Severino would leave us a year-and-a-half later, but among these same scholars, the desire to not waste any more time was intense

Estudios en el género Cortaderia (Poaceae). III. Cortaderia peruviana, nuevo sinónimo de C. hieronymi

Cortaderia hieronymi y C. peruviana han sido consideradas como dos especies diferentes. Sin embargo, distintos autores difieren en sus límites morfológicos y en su distribución geográfica. Un análisis de componentes principales sobre la base de los caracteres tradicionalmente utilizados para delimitar estas especies no permitió formar grupos discretos para cada taxón. Además, el estudio de los ejemplares tipo y de las descripciones originales, complementado con estudios de campo, permite establecer que C. peruviana es parte de la variabilidad morfológica de C. hieronymi; por lo tanto, se propone su sinonimia. Se amplía la caracterización y distribución geográfica de la especie.Studies in the genus Cortaderia (Poaceae) III. Cortaderia peruviana, a new synonym of C. hieronymi. Cortaderia hieronymi and C. peruviana have been considered as two different species. However, different authors differ in their morphological limits and their geographical distribution. A Principal Components Analysis based on characters traditionally used to delimit these species did not show discrete groupings for each taxon. In addition, the study of type species and their original descriptions, complemented with field studies, allows to establish that C. peruviana is part of the morphological variability of C. hieronymi; therefore, their synonymy is proposed herein. A detailed characterization and geographic distribution of the species is given.Fil: Testoni, Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Biología, Bioquímica y Farmacia. Laboratorio de Plantas Vasculares; Argentin

Death education: The importance of terror management theory and of the active methods

Death education courses (DECs) prepare healthcare students to man- age future relationships with end-of-life (EOL) patients and their relatives. It would be better for DECs to use active methodologies, for example, creative arts therapies and constructivist and narrative techniques. Research should longitudinally monitor students who have complet- ed a DEC to check their levels of willingness to work in palliative care and their levels of work satisfaction versus burn-out in both the EOL and other hospital wards after they become healthcare professionals

Eternity between a novel theology and a new science from giordano bruno to emanuele severino

The article presents the continuity between two Italian thinkers who have undergone a Catholic Inquisition process: The modern Giordano Bruno and the contemporary Emanuele Severino. The aim of this essay is not to make a comparison between the two philosophers but rather to study how the former passed the baton through history to Severino, in a way that was useful in refunding the relationships between Theology and Science. In particular, it describes how Severino completed what Bruno had only sketched. The ideas of eternity are discussed with respect to God, and they are related to the contraposition between Metaphysics and contemporary thought, from which the conflict between Theology and Science was derived in modernity, particularly after the immolation of Bruno. The article aims to address a number of aspects that unify many elements of Italian philosophy and the reasons why the Catholic Inquisition had to fight against it. The overall focus is on the originality of Severino and considers his philosophy as the basis of a possible \u201eparadigm shift\u201f for both Theology and Science. The theoretical treatise shows how Severino\u201fs indication of eternity can solve many aspects of the clash between Theology and Science, substantially refunding both of them

The COVID-19 Pandemic Between Bio-Ethics, Bio-Law and Bio-Politics: A Case Study on The Italian Experience of The DuPre Commission

The aim of this qualitative study was to consider the question of whether the Italian political management of the pandemic respected the European bio-ethical and bio-juridical approaches in light of the principles of autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability. As no specific consolidated literature exists on the subject, the Italian situation was taken into consideration, specifically the work of a spontaneous commission (DuPre) that collected the reflections of academics and researchers interested in discussing political decisions for the management of the emergency, which was the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. The analysis took into account the contributions of scholars during two conferences (without proceedings), which were transcribed and examined. From the texts processed with a thematic analysis, three main themes emerged: ‘pandemic as a state of exception, sovereignty and crisis of democracy’, ‘the value of doubt and refutation’ and ‘elimination of informed consent between persuasion and blackmail’. In this paper, the final bio-political considerations on the European approach and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy are presented

Contributions in image and video coding

Orientador: Max Henrique Machado CostaTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: A comunidade de codificação de imagens e vídeo vem também trabalhando em inovações que vão além das tradicionais técnicas de codificação de imagens e vídeo. Este trabalho é um conjunto de contribuições a vários tópicos que têm recebido crescente interesse de pesquisadores na comunidade, nominalmente, codificação escalável, codificação de baixa complexidade para dispositivos móveis, codificação de vídeo de múltiplas vistas e codificação adaptativa em tempo real. A primeira contribuição estuda o desempenho de três transformadas 3-D rápidas por blocos em um codificador de vídeo de baixa complexidade. O codificador recebeu o nome de Fast Embedded Video Codec (FEVC). Novos métodos de implementação e ordens de varredura são propostos para as transformadas. Os coeficiente 3-D são codificados por planos de bits pelos codificadores de entropia, produzindo um fluxo de bits (bitstream) de saída totalmente embutida. Todas as implementações são feitas usando arquitetura com aritmética inteira de 16 bits. Somente adições e deslocamentos de bits são necessários, o que reduz a complexidade computacional. Mesmo com essas restrições, um bom desempenho em termos de taxa de bits versus distorção pôde ser obtido e os tempos de codificação são significativamente menores (em torno de 160 vezes) quando comparados ao padrão H.264/AVC. A segunda contribuição é a otimização de uma recente abordagem proposta para codificação de vídeo de múltiplas vistas em aplicações de video-conferência e outras aplicações do tipo "unicast" similares. O cenário alvo nessa abordagem é fornecer vídeo com percepção real em 3-D e ponto de vista livre a boas taxas de compressão. Para atingir tal objetivo, pesos são atribuídos a cada vista e mapeados em parâmetros de quantização. Neste trabalho, o mapeamento ad-hoc anteriormente proposto entre pesos e parâmetros de quantização é mostrado ser quase-ótimo para uma fonte Gaussiana e um mapeamento ótimo é derivado para fonte típicas de vídeo. A terceira contribuição explora várias estratégias para varredura adaptativa dos coeficientes da transformada no padrão JPEG XR. A ordem de varredura original, global e adaptativa do JPEG XR é comparada com os métodos de varredura localizados e híbridos propostos neste trabalho. Essas novas ordens não requerem mudanças nem nos outros estágios de codificação e decodificação, nem na definição da bitstream A quarta e última contribuição propõe uma transformada por blocos dependente do sinal. As transformadas hierárquicas usualmente exploram a informação residual entre os níveis no estágio da codificação de entropia, mas não no estágio da transformada. A transformada proposta neste trabalho é uma técnica de compactação de energia que também explora as similaridades estruturais entre os níveis de resolução. A idéia central da técnica é incluir na transformada hierárquica um número de funções de base adaptativas derivadas da resolução menor do sinal. Um codificador de imagens completo foi desenvolvido para medir o desempenho da nova transformada e os resultados obtidos são discutidos neste trabalhoAbstract: The image and video coding community has often been working on new advances that go beyond traditional image and video architectures. This work is a set of contributions to various topics that have received increasing attention from researchers in the community, namely, scalable coding, low-complexity coding for portable devices, multiview video coding and run-time adaptive coding. The first contribution studies the performance of three fast block-based 3-D transforms in a low complexity video codec. The codec has received the name Fast Embedded Video Codec (FEVC). New implementation methods and scanning orders are proposed for the transforms. The 3-D coefficients are encoded bit-plane by bit-plane by entropy coders, producing a fully embedded output bitstream. All implementation is performed using 16-bit integer arithmetic. Only additions and bit shifts are necessary, thus lowering computational complexity. Even with these constraints, reasonable rate versus distortion performance can be achieved and the encoding time is significantly smaller (around 160 times) when compared to the H.264/AVC standard. The second contribution is the optimization of a recent approach proposed for multiview video coding in videoconferencing applications or other similar unicast-like applications. The target scenario in this approach is providing realistic 3-D video with free viewpoint video at good compression rates. To achieve such an objective, weights are computed for each view and mapped into quantization parameters. In this work, the previously proposed ad-hoc mapping between weights and quantization parameters is shown to be quasi-optimum for a Gaussian source and an optimum mapping is derived for a typical video source. The third contribution exploits several strategies for adaptive scanning of transform coefficients in the JPEG XR standard. The original global adaptive scanning order applied in JPEG XR is compared with the localized and hybrid scanning methods proposed in this work. These new orders do not require changes in either the other coding and decoding stages or in the bitstream definition. The fourth and last contribution proposes an hierarchical signal dependent block-based transform. Hierarchical transforms usually exploit the residual cross-level information at the entropy coding step, but not at the transform step. The transform proposed in this work is an energy compaction technique that can also exploit these cross-resolution-level structural similarities. The core idea of the technique is to include in the hierarchical transform a number of adaptive basis functions derived from the lower resolution of the signal. A full image codec is developed in order to measure the performance of the new transform and the obtained results are discussed in this workDoutoradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaDoutor em Engenharia Elétric