La politica energetica dell’India e le sue possibili ripercussioni geopolitiche

L’India, come molti altri paesi, deve oggi districarsi abilmente nell’intreccio sempre più stretto tra politica energetica, politica estera e politica di sicurezza, tematica ormai principe nelle relazioni internazionali. Viviamo in un’epoca caratterizzata da una generalizzata difficoltà nel soddisfare l’incremento della domanda energetica, che provoca il rapido aumento dei prezzi degli idrocarburi, condizionando le scelte dei governi e rendendo sempre più palese il nesso esistente tra la sicurezza energetica e lo sviluppo economico. Il vertiginoso aumento dei consumi di fonti energetiche a livello mondiale ha elevato quest’ultime al rango di drivers delle relazioni internazionali. Allo stesso tempo il petrolio, principale fonte energetica dal secondo dopoguerra ad oggi, è stato al centro di numerose crisi internazionali caratterizzate dall’innalzamento della domanda petrolifera, dovuta sicuramente all’ingresso di nuovi paesi nel mercato energetico, che ha contribuito a sbilanciare un rapporto tra domanda e offerta di energia comunque già in crisi.Nowadays India has to extricate itself between the conflicting requirements of energy policy, foreign affairs and energy safety policy. Energy sources are the global drivers of the foreign affairs and the search for oil and natural gas has been the core of many international crisis. These crises have often been triggered by the rising demand for energy sources on the international market from new countries, whose economies are rapidly growing. The Indian government's power-related policies are influenced by the need to satisfy an increasing domestic energy demand in a context characterized by growing hydrocarbons prices. This situation makes clear the link between energy safety and economic development. India’s power-related policies aim at ensuring safe energy supplies, from both its own internal resources and those of other countries which can be procured without risks and at cheap price

Dediche di armi nei santuari sannitici

Sulla base dellesame della documentazione archeologíca disponíbile proveniente da santuarí e luoghí di culto del Sannio, queato contribulo cerca di analízzare alcuní aspeltí conneasí alluso della dedica di armí nel mondo sannítíco e di evídenzíare la complesaitá di tale fenomeno. Per quanto riguarda 1 princípale bogo di culto sannita (il noto santuario pentro di Píetrabbondante), la notevole presenza di armí e partí dellarmamento fra í materíalí votiví ne rivela chíaramente 1 ruolo centrale nelle forme ideologíche di auto-affermazíone e auto-rappreaentazíone sannítíche. Sembra plausíbíle interpretare le armí e le partí dellarmamento dedícate ala come preda di guerra (slcyla o láphyra apó tón polemion) che come armí proprie del dedicante (ópla nis autós echreito). Per quanto concerne altrí santuarí e luoghí di culto sannitící (Campochíaro, Schíaví d'Abruzzo, Valle dAnsanto, ecc.), pare verosímile rítenere che la presenza di armí e partí dellarmamento dedícate ala ríconducile a offerte indívídualí, connease a dedíche private (ópla oís autós echreito), pratíche inízíatíche, rítí di passaggío, ecc

Perspectives on linguistic documentation from sociolinguistic research on dialects

The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how sociolinguistic research can be applied to endangered language documentation field linguistics. It first provides an overview of the techniques and practices of sociolinguistic fieldwork and the ensuring corpus compilation methods. The discussion is framed with examples from research projects focused on European-heritage English-speaking communities in the UK and Canada that have documented and analyzed English dialects from the far reaches of Scotland to the wilds of Northern Ontario, Canada. The main focus lies on morpho-syntactic and discourse-pragmatic variation; however, the same techniques could be applied to other types of variation. The discussion includes examples from a broad range of research studies in order to illustrate how sociolinguistic analyses are conducted and what they offer for understanding language variation and change.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Effects of Impedance Reduction of a Robot for Wrist Rehabilitation on Human Motor Strategies in Healthy Subjects during Pointing Tasks

Studies on human motor control demonstrated the existence of simplifying strategies (namely `Donders' law') adopted to deal with kinematically redundant motor tasks. In recent research we showed that Donders' law also holds for human wrist during pointing tasks, and that it is heavily perturbed when interacting with a highly back-drivable state-of-the-art rehabilitation robot. We hypothesized that this depends on the excessive mechanical impedance of the Pronation/Supination (PS) joint of the robot and in this work we analyzed the effects of its reduction. To this end we deployed a basic force control scheme, which minimizes human-robot interaction force. This resulted in a 70% reduction of the inertia in PS joint and in decrease of 81% and 78% of the interaction torques during 1-DOF and 3-DOFs tasks. To assess the effects on human motor strategies, pointing tasks were performed by three subjects with a lightweight handheld device, interacting with the robot using its standard PD control (setting impedance to zero) and with the force-controlled robot. We quantified Donders' law as 2-dimensional surfaces in the 3-dimensional configuration space of rotations. Results revealed that the subject-specific features of Donders' surfaces reappeared after the reduction of robot impedance obtained via the force control

Roots of English in the African American diaspora

In this paper we use the world-wide variability in the past tense paradigm of the verb be (e.g. I/you/we/they was/were) to examine the similarities and differences across four geographically separated and ethnically diverse dialects of English spoken in North Preston, Guysborough Enclave and Guysborough Village in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Buckie in northern Scotland. Through comparative linguistic analysis of the distribution of forms across the verbal paradigm, we demonstrate unexpected parallelisms across three of these varieties. We conclude that these are the result of longitudinal continuity of the verb to be. The critical factor in explaining the similarities across dialects is their relative isolation from ongoing linguistic change in the English language

A Really Interesting Story: The Influence of Narrative in Linguistic Change

The intensifier system is well known for its perpetual recycling of fresh innovations; however, neither qualitative nor quantitative analyses have offered a consensus on which social factors are involved in the increased use of one variant at the expense of another, nor do we know much about sites of innovation. In this paper, we delve deep into the intensifier system by considering the distinction between narrative and non-narrative discourse contexts (Labov and Waletsky 1967) and using a “small-within-large” methodology wherein a subset of data from a broad sociolinguistic study is our foundation (Tagliamonte 2008). Our results reveal that narratives have significantly higher intensification rates than non-narratives, which we interpret as a linguistic resource to increase affective meaning when performing the identity work inherent in storytelling (Schiffrin 1996). Further, the statistically significant predictors for intensifier use in narratives are predominantly semantic, involving adjective type and emotional value with no significant social factors. Yet in non-narrative discourse, syntactic factors predominate and both gender and age are statistically significant effects. Partitioning the data by discourse context uncovers additional sociolinguistic bifurcation. Indeed, a more detailed examination of the interaction of speaker age and gender reveals how critical the narrative/non-narrative contrast is in the ebb and flow of changes within this system. While younger speakers of both genders show an increase in really in narratives, in non-narratives younger women exhibit a heightened usage compared to older women (4% vs. 21%). The results for very are equally suggestive: younger women use less very in both registers but there is a sharp decline in non-narratives in particular. This suggests that innovations rise first in narratives for all speakers and then diffuse to non-narratives lead by younger women. Taken together, the findings from this study support earlier observations that greater care should be placed on the discourse embedding linguistic variation and change (see e.g., Cheshire 2005 et seq). We have demonstrated that language change actually begins and ends in stories

Comparative sociolinguistic insights in the evolution of negation

There are three ways of expressing negation on indefinites in English: any-negation (I didn’t have any money), no-negation (I had no money) and negative concord (I didn’t have no money). These variants have been competing diachronically in a change in progress, where the newest variant any-negation is increasing at the expense of the oldest variant no-negation (Tottie 1991a, 1999b, Varela Pérez 2014). This raises the questions: What is the current state of this variability? Is the variation socially evaluated? What does this reveal about linguistic change? Our comparative quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of vernacular speech corpora from Northern England and Ontario, Canada reveals that no-negation is stoutly retained in Britain but is less frequent in Canada. Linguistic constraints on the variation hold cross-dialectally: functional verbs retain no-negation, while lexical verbs favour any. However, the social embedding of the variation is community-specific. Where the change to any-negation is more advanced, i.e., Canada, there are no significant social effects: the variation between any-negation and no-negation appears stable. In England, where no-negation is conserved to a greater extent, there are effects of speaker sex and education, with men and less-educated speakers favouring no-negation. Furthermore, both of the UK communities (North East England and York) display age-grading trends which suggest that the prestige associated with any-negation historically has persisted over time. While the communities share a common variable grammar, the social value in choosing a variant is localised and reflects the status of the change