La cultura dei servizi di accoglienza migranti in Italia. Una ricerca esplorativa [The culture of migrant reception services in Italy. An exploratory research]

Italy has a long history of immigration, which has become part of the country’s landscape in a complex and varied way, and has led to significant changes in important contexts such as in the school, the work place, and in the provision of welfare services. And yet, immigration policies still consist in emergency measures that do not recognize the phenomenon in its long -standing and structural dimension. In addition, public opinion is concerned as a result of the alarmist distortion of this issue, as shown by the gapbetween data on immigration and perceived immigration. Since in this research we take into consideration collusively shared experiences, these misunderstandings can not be corrected by providing more information on the real data; we posit that the emotional scope must be recognized in order to address this issue. In particular, we asked ourselves how this context -changes brought by immigration, public opinion, and government policies -is repre sented within the migrant Accordingly, we interviewed a group of reception staff from the Roman area on the type of service that they think they are offering. The results show how, in their experience, this complex reality of immigration is not evoked: the experience within the services is isolated from the Italian narrative and context. However, the voice of migrants and their point of view, emerge as a resource within these services, as openness rather than isolation

Development of an optimal array of sensors for the reconstruction of a rigid rough surface based on scattered ultrasound

A novel technique to reconstruct the shape of a two-dimensional rough acoustically rigid surface based on recordings of the scattered acoustic field with an optimised array of sensors is discussed. The method employs inversion techniques which are common in acoustic holography, and is based on a Kirchhoff approximation of the scattered field. The effects of the spatial arrangement of the sensors on the accuracy of the reconstruction are investigated. The optimal layout is identified by means of a genetic algorithm for a representative set of surface statistics. The results will inform the development of a new range of airborne acoustic sensors capable of monitoring the flow conditions of free surface flows remotely, based on the measurement of the spatial scales and dynamics of the water surface

La relazione che organizza il contesto sanitario: domanda dell’utenza e risposta dei servizi sanitari, nel territorio e nell’ospedale - The relationship which organizes the healthcare context: users’ demand and response of healthcare services, in the territory and the hospital

Our intent is to present citizens’ demand of health care services in Italy through a research structured in three studies. We used the Emotional Text Analysis (ETA) to lead the three s tudies: the first study regarded the citizens’expectations of the healthcare services, the second study regarded the point of view of the hospital personnel (medical doctors and nurses), the third regarded the point of view of the General Practitioners onthe health care services. These three studies are briefly presented. Data and outcome of an Assumed Similarity Test applied to all experimental subjects of the three studies in order to make a comparison among them, are also presented. The findings of the Emotional Text Analysis show that citizens, potential users of health services, center their requests on their individual subjectivity, and seek answers both to their suffering and to the feeling of alienation that characterizes the being sick feeling that makes them go to a medical doctor. For their part, general practitioners and hospital doctors immediately transform this subjective feeling in an objective medical diagnosis. Here a first gap emerges between patient’s demand and medical response, leavingthe possibility of an alliance on the diagnosis in order to jointly fight the disease. It has long been in place though a change that has expelled the patient also from sharing the diagnostic process, increasingly taken from self-centered dynamics within the healthcare system. This widens the gap between the request of the citizens and the response of the health services, that contributes to that conflictual growth to which defensive medicine gives a dysfunctional answer. The Assumed Similarity Test contributes to the interpretation of the health care dynamic identified in the Emotional Text Analysis; particularly in regard to the unfolding conflict, given by the hypothesis emerging from the data analysis, that a feeling of closeness for the hospital personnel goes along with an emotional stance of overpowering the othe

The relationship between health care users’ demand and the health care system’s response: a research on change observed in the health care system, in the hospital and in the territory

The present research study aims at exploring the representation of the health service within a group of hospital physicians and nurses. The objective is to identify how the symbolic dynamic of hospital workers shapes their own praxis. The texts of interviews with 25 hospital workers have been subjected to Emotional Text Analysis (ETA). Five clusters emerge from the analysis where the topic of giving life and avoiding death is central and where the hospital assumes a thaumaturgical and basically omnipotent role. This is in conflict with recognizing the limitations of therapy. Only in the background the culture of curing the patients appears, characterized by aggressive reactivity towards the crisis which leads patients to emergency intervention because crises are ascribed to deviances frommedical prescription. Emergency intervention is ultimately the kind of intervention which the hospital believes it is capable to provide. Another problem is the lack of filters provided by bureaucratized general practitioners, whose cooperation would be essential, but who are supposed to have no longer the necessary relationship with their patients

Short-term inhibition of TERT induces telomere length-independent cell cycle arrest and apoptotic response in EBV-immortalized and transformed B cells

open7siBesides its canonical role in stabilizing telomeres, telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) may promote tumorigenesis through extra-telomeric functions. The possible therapeutic effects of BIBR1532 (BIBR), a powerful TERT inhibitor, have been evaluated in different cellular backgrounds, but no data are currently available regarding Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-driven B-cell malignancies. Our aim was to characterize the biological effects of TERT inhibition by BIBR on EBV-immortalized lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) and fully transformed Burkitt's lymphoma (BL) cell lines. We found that BIBR selectively inhibits telomerase activity in TERT-positive 4134/Late and 4134/TERT+ LCLs and EBV-negative BL41 and EBV-positive BL41/B95.8 BL cell lines. TERT inhibition led to decreased cell proliferation, accumulation of cells in the S-phase and ultimately to increased apoptosis, compared with mock-treated control cells. All these effects occurred within 72 h and were not observed in BIBR-treated TERT-negative 4134/TERT- and U2OS cells. The cell cycle arrest and apoptosis, consequent upon short-term TERT inhibition, were associated with and likely dependent on the activation of the DNA damage response (DDR), highlighted by the increased levels of γH2AX and activation of ATM and ATR pathways. Analyses of the mean and range of telomere lengths and telomere dysfunction-induced foci indicated that DDR after short-term TERT inhibition was not related to telomere dysfunction, thus suggesting that TERT, besides stabilizing telomere, may protect DNA via telomere-independent mechanisms. Notably, TERT-positive LCLs treated with BIBR in combination with fludarabine or cyclophosphamide showed a significant increase in the number of apoptotic cells with respect to those treated with chemotherapeutic agents alone. In conclusion, TERT inhibition impairs cell cycle progression and enhances the pro-apoptotic effects of chemotherapeutic agents in TERT-positive cells. These results support new therapeutic applications of TERT inhibitors in EBV-driven B-cell malignancies.openCeleghin, Andrea; Giunco, Silvia; Freguja, Riccardo; Zangrossi, Manuela; Nalio, Silvia; Dolcetti, Riccardo; De Rossi, AnitaCeleghin, Andrea; Giunco, Silvia; Freguja, Riccardo; Zangrossi, Manuela; Nalio, Silvia; Dolcetti, Riccardo; DE ROSSI, Anit

Acoustic imaging in application to reconstruction of rough rigid surface with airborne ultrasound waves

Accurate reconstruction of the surface roughness is of high importance to various areas of science and engineering. One important application of this technology is for remote monitoring of open channel flows through observing its dynamic surface roughness. In this paper a novel airborne acoustic method of roughness reconstruction is proposed and tested with a static rigid rough surface. This method is based on the acoustic holography principle and Kirchhoff approximation which make use of acoustic pressure data collected at multiple receiver points spread along an arch. The Tikhonov regularisation and generalised cross validation (GCV) technique are used to solve the underdetermined system of equations for the acoustic pressures. The experimental data are collected above a roughness created with a 3D printer. For the given surface it is shown that the proposed method works well with the various number of receiver positions. In this paper, the tested ratios between the number of surface points at which the surface elevation can be reconstructed and number of receiver positions are 2.5, 5 and 7.5. It is shown that, in a region comparable with the projected size of the main directivity lobe, the method is able to reconstruct the spatial spectrum density of the actual surface elevation with the accuracy of 20%