The Topics-scape of the Pandemic Crisis: The Italian sentiment on political leaders

The aim of the article is to identify themes, actors and mood of the tweets shared by users in the period from March 25 to April 3, 2020 in Italy. It seems an extremely delicate and complex period, because it corresponds to the first phase of the lockdown, introduced following the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a period characterized by emergency and crisis, with nuances related to fear and uncertainty. We assumed that this situation could have influenced and produced effects on the ideologically oriented digital language practice. Taking this background into consideration, we have scraped the messages containing the surnames of the Italian Premier and the one of the opposition leader from Twitter, in order to identify the debate connected to them and to the crisis. To achieve this goal, we performed a computational linguistic technique, Emotinal Text Mining. The first result reconstructs the landscape of the debate. Arising topics-scape drawn by: the leader, the players, the economy, the entertainment, the politic, the skill, and the guilt. Then, representations were identified and sentiments measured

The role of Universal Grammar in first and second language acquisition.

openThe purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the role of Universal Grammar (UG) in first and second language acquisition. The main focus lies on three situations the child faces when acquiring a language: poverty of the stimulus, imitation and absence of explicit negative evidences. These circumstances are initially discussed in the first language acquisition process, in order to analyse later the differences with the second language acquisition. The dissimilarities regard directly the UG: while in the first language acquisition UG is the initial state, when acquiring the second language there also might be the first language involved

Social Impact and Quality of Life of Patients with β-Thalassaemia: A Systematic Review

β-thalassaemia (BT) is a hereditary genetic blood disease caused by a mutation in the gene that encodes the haemoglobin protein. In the most severe forms, BT forces patients to undergo frequent blood transfusions, which has a significant impact on the quality of life. Classified as rare, BT is very common in the Mediterranean area and is also found in the Middle East, Central Asia, India, South America, and North Africa. This disease does not currently have a definitive cure, although technological progress and new gene therapies are achieving promising results. This literature review was conducted with the aim to understand how BT affects patients' lives in various social contexts in which they are involved. The authors also aimed to understand which methods are used for this assessment and the possible social actions that can help in the management of the disease. Electronic databases, including PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, were used to search for the articles. Related article titles were selected and reduced to the abstracts of the relevant articles, after which the selected full articles were reviewed. The reviewed articles showed consistent agreement in observing that the quality of life of patients with BT is considerably lower compared with the healthy population in terms of physical, emotional, social, and functioning at school. The negative results highlight the significance of the introduction of suitable programmes by healthcare providers, counsellors, and education authorities to provide psychosocial support and improve academic performance. In addition, genetic counselling and intervention programmes would positively impact the lives of patients with thalassaemia

Infertility and assisted reproduction: legislative and cultural evolution in Italy. Infertilità e procreazione assistita: evoluzione legislativa e culturale in Italia

The social representation of the infertility coming out from the national newspapers has been explored in relation to the enactment of the Law 40/2004 and the 2005 referendum. All the articles (n=731), published in the last 15 years by the highest circulation Italian newspapers, have been collected in a corpus (token=360345) that underwent a multivariate analysis of textual data. Results show a difficulty in complementing together the mind and the body. The “biologic” is represented as the place of the technical and medical intervention while the “psycho-social” is conceived as the place of the family storytelling of the personal experiences of infertility and the public ethical debate on it. Before the law, newspapers deal with the theme of the family experience probably supporting the law enactment. After the referendum this thematic is dismissed and the theme of infertility as a pathology to treat emerges, bringing back infertility to the medical issu

Self-immolative linkers in polymeric delivery systems

There has been significant interest in the methodologies of controlled release for a diverse range of applications spanning drug delivery, biological and chemical sensors, and diagnostics. The advancement in novel substrate-polymer coupling moieties has led to the discovery of self-immolative linkers. This new class of linker has gained popularity in recent years in polymeric release technology as a result of stable bond formation between protecting and leaving groups, which becomes labile upon activation, leading to the rapid disassembly of the parent polymer. This ability has prompted numerous studies into the design and development of self-immolative linkers and the kinetics surrounding their disassembly. This review details the main concepts that underpin self-immolative linker technologies that feature in polymeric or dendritic conjugate systems and outlines the chemistries of amplified self-immolative elimination

Museo narrante: the Foce Sele Hera sanctuary virtual museum

The communication of one century of archaeological research at the Foce Sele Hera Sanctuary has been the main reason for the creation of a new virtual museum, for which a name that represents a museological approach, “Museo Narrante”, i.e. the Museum that tells stories has been chosen. The museum is conceived as a museum without objects, interactive, multi-sensorial, and multi-medial. Its main issues are: i. minor sites valorization; ii. museums as territorial communication networks; iii. levels of reliability; iv. multiple interpretation. The overall intent is to give viewers evidence and argument instead of a prepackaged explanation. This paper shows how this concept guided the whole exhibition, with the realization of different tools to present to the public the stories of the Foce Sele Hera Sanctuary and the archaeological investigation of the area in a new way

On the Termination of Logic Programs with Function Symbols

Recently there has been an increasing interest in the bottom-up evaluation of the semantics of logic programs with complex terms. The main problem due to the presence of functional symbols in the head of rules is that the corresponding ground program could be infinite and that finiteness of models and termination of the evaluation procedure is not guaranteed. This paper introduces, by deeply analyzing program structure, new decidable criteria, called safety and Gamma-acyclicity, for checking termination of logic programs with function symbols under bottom-up evaluation. These criteria guarantee that stable models are finite and computable, as it is possible to generate a finitely ground program equivalent to the source program. We compare new criteria with other decidable criteria known in the literature and show that the Gamma-acyclicity criterion is the most general one. We also discuss its application in answering bound queries

Thermal analysis of poly(lactic acid) plasticized by cardanol derivatives

This work is aimed to study the suitability of cardanol and its derivatives as plasticizers for poly(lactic acid), PLA. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) was used to assess the plasticizing effectiveness of cardanol (CARD) and its derivatives, cardanol acetate and epoxidated cardanol acetate, comparing the results with those obtained with a commercially available plasticizer, poly (ethylene glycol), PEG, with an average molecular weight of 400 g mol-1. Measurement of the glass transition temperature highlighted that, among the tested cardanol derivatives, neat cardanol is the most effective plasticizer for PLA. In fact, the glass transition temperature of PLA plasticized by CARD is only slightly higher than that of PLA plasticized by PEG. This is attributed to the lower compatibility between PLA and CARD compared to PLA and PEG, as estimated by the interaction radius. Therefore, cardanol could represent a technically valid, economic, and largely available plasticizer for PLA. Moreover, DSC, an X-ray diffraction analysis, showed that, compared to PEG, the addition of CARD involves a limited increase of the rate of crystallization, even in this case, due to its lower compatibility with PLA. Dynamic mechanical analysis showed that, below glass transition, PEG is able to reduce the stiffness of PLA by a higher extent. However, as the temperature increases, retention of the shear modulus of PEGplasticized PLA is much higher than that of CARD-plasticized PLA. As a consequence, above glass transition, the stiffness of CARD-plasticized PLA becomes lower than that of PEG-plasticized PLA. Therefore, despite its lower compatibility with PLA, CARD can impart to plasticized PLA lower modulus compared to PEG, when the plasticizer content is high enough to reduce the glass transition below room temperature

Processing of Super Tough Plasticized PLA by Rotational Molding

This work is aimed at studying the suitability of polylactic acid (PLA) plasticized by two cardanol derivatives, i.e., cardanol and epoxidized cardanol acetate, in rotational molding, for the production of hollow items. For this purpose, plasticized PLA samples were obtained by melt mixing and then processed by a lab-scale rotational molding equipment. For comparison, poly(ethylene glycole), PEG, and plasticized PLA samples were also produced. Despite the very low cooling rates attained in rotational molding, completely amorphous samples were obtained with neat PLA and PLA plasticized by cardanol derivatives. In contrast, PEG plasticized PLA showed a very high degree of crystallinity, as highlighted by DSC and XRD analysis, which made the extraction of the rotomolded box-shaped specimens impossible. The plasticizing effectiveness of cardanol derivatives was proven by tensile testing of rotational molded prototypes, which highlighted the reduced modulus and strength and improved strain to break, compared to neat PLA. Therefore, efficient toughening of PLA can be attained by the use of the two cardanol derived plasticizers, which involves a significant reduction of the polymer glass transition, as well as a reduced increase of the crystallization kinetic. On the other hand, the reduction of the glass transition temperature due to the addition of plasticizer is responsible for significant crystallization effects even during ageing at room temperature, which involves significant embrittlement of the material