The Secret Life of Schoolgirls

Even as a Catholic, I hated Catholic school. I hated our uniforms. They were a horrible yellow and green, with skirts that felt like heavy curtains and shirts made of 2% cotton. On hot days the shirts would stick to your body and slowly creep up to your armpits every time you moved. So forget that Catholic School girl fantasy because there’s a lot of baggage that comes with those knee socks. [excerpt

Experiencing Authenticity of the House Museums in Hybrid Environments

The paper presents an existing scenario related to the advanced integration of digital technologies in the field of house museums, based on the critical literature and applied experimentation. House museums are a particular type of heritage site, in which is highlighted the tension between the evocative capacity of the spaces and the requirements for preservation. In this dimension, the use of a seamless approach amplifies the atmospheric component of the space, superimposing, through hybrid digital technologies, an interactive, context-driven layer in an open dialogue between digital and physical. The methodology moves on the one hand from the literature review, framing the macro themes of research, and on the other from the overview of case studies, selected on the basis of the experiential value of the space. The analysis of the selected cases followed as criteria: the formal dimension of the technology; the narrative plot, as storytelling of socio-cultural atmosphere or identification within the intimate story; and the involvement of visitors as individual immersion or collective rituality. The paper aimed at outlining a developmental panorama in which the integration of hybrid technologies points to a new seamless awareness within application scenarios as continuous and work-in-progress challenges

Overparenting hurts me: how does it affect offspring psychological outcomes?

This review focuses on a peculiar typology of parenting characterized by overprotection, overinvolvement, overcontrol and an excess of entanglement; academic literature refers to this parenting style with the term overparenting or helicopter parenting. An in-depth description of overparenting constitutes the first part of this review. The second part of this review reports empirical evidence regarding the effects of overparenting on offspring psychological outcomes with particular regard to internalizing and externalizing disorders, coping strategies and dysfunctional personality traits. Depression and anxiety symptoms are frequently exhibited in offspring exposed to overparenting, as well as negative affectivity and maladaptive coping. Furthermore, adolescents and adults with overparenting parents seem to have an increased likelihood of exhibiting narcissistic pathological traits

Whose Turn Is It? Problems of Reconciling Family and Work in Dual-Career Couples.

The work-family life conflict affects various aspects of dual-career families. Parenthood and the work-family life balance lead to an overload of responsibility and disparity at the expense of women, on a private as well as on a social level. In our research, we examined WIF (work to family) and FIW (family to work) conflicts in a sample of 483 dual-career couples. The main results underline an increase in familiar duties concerning child birth and childcare, as associated with the traditional work-family life balance strategy. The data seems to reflect differences in traditional roles between public-male- breadwinner and private-female-homemaker

The BIM-based Integrated Design of the SHiP Project Decay Volume

The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) experiment is a new general-purpose fixed target facility proposed at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator to search for longlived exotic particles associated with Hidden Sectors and Dark Matter. This paper reports on the BIM integrated design of SHiP’s decay volume, a conical steel vessel under vacuum that should host several large particle physics detector systems. The use of BIM characterized the design of the decay volume, both in the modeling and structural design phase, and in the process definition phase for the realization and implementation in the facility of the device. This procedure helps to minimize the risks of incorrect design and construction of the device during the whole process. With the automation of the virtual model and the use of interoperable software, in addition to speeding up the exchange of information, it is possible also to export the detailed information of the structural design directly to the numerical control machines for the prefabrication of the various steel modules. Then, the BIM approach to support the integrated design of the SHiP project decay volume from the conceptual planning to the construction phase is shown in this work

Robust Causal Inference of Drug-drug Interactions

There is growing interest in developing causal inference methods for multi-valued treatments with a focus on pairwise average treatment effects. Here we focus on a clinically important, yet less-studied estimand: causal drug-drug interactions (DDIs), which quantifies the degree to which the causal effect of drug A is altered by the presence versus the absence of drug B. Confounding adjustment when studying the effects of DDIs can be accomplished via inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW), a standard approach originally developed for binary treatments and later generalized to multi-valued treatments. However, this approach generally results in biased results when the propensity score model is misspecified. Motivated by the need for more robust techniques, we propose two empirical likelihood-based weighting approaches that allow for specifying a set of propensity score models, with the second method balancing user-specified covariates directly, by incorporating additional, nonparametric constraints. The resulting estimators from both methods are consistent when the postulated set of propensity score models contains a correct one; this property has been termed multiple robustness. We then evaluate their finite sample performance through simulation. The results demonstrate that the proposed estimators outperform the standard IPTW method in terms of both robustness and efficiency. Finally, we apply the proposed methods to evaluate the impact of renin-angiotensin system inhibitors (RAS-I) on the comparative nephrotoxicity of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) and opioids, using data derived from electronic medical records from a large multi-hospital health system.Comment: 33 pages, 9 figures and 2 table

Potential of remote sensing data to support the seismic safety assessment of reinforced concrete buildings affected by slow-moving landslides

Different forms of hazard can affect structures throughout their existence. The occurrence of a seismic event in areas exposed to different risks or already affected by other phenomena is highly likely, especially in countries characterized by high seismicity and equally high hydrogeological risk, as Italy. Nevertheless, the seismic safety assessment of reinforced concrete (RC) structures is commonly carried out considering the seismic action only, generally applied to an analytical model, neglecting the stress–strain state induced by previous ongoing phenomena. The aim of this work is to highlight the importance of the seismic safety assessment in a multi-hazard analysis, cumulating the action coming from two different hazards: landslide and earthquake. An existing RC building, located in an area affected by an intermittent landslide phenomenon with slow kinematics, that may also be subjected to strong earthquakes, is used as case study. The Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) approach is used to monitor the evolution in time of the landslide. DInSAR deformation data are used to detect surface ground movements applied to building foundations. A non-linear static analysis procedure is implemented for the code-based seismic safety assessment, in two different scenarios. The seismic assessment of the case-study building is implemented in a condition of structure deformed only for gravity loads, and, then, in a state of known landslide-induced deformed configuration. A comparison is proposed between the building seismic safety assessment performed in both cases, with or without the consideration of the landslide-induced displacements, showing the importance of a multi-hazard evaluation