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Process Variability Modeling for Complex Organizations
No full textWhen organizations provide similar services and share the same mission they often behave similarly. This, in particular, is true in the context of Public Administration where different offices organize the provisioning of services to citizens in similar ways. This paper presents a novel notation and approach to support variability modeling for those scenarios in which it is difficult to fully foresee in advance how variability can affect the various process perspectives. Notation and approach are inspired on feature modeling where features are used to represents activities of a processes family that can be differently implemented. Applying the proposed approach it is possible to derive a kind of partially predefined process model variant, which is a set of fragments, that in a subsequent step needs to be augmented with additional elements to then fully define process behavior. Notation and approach has been validated on real case studies with encouraging results
Tra adulti nei Centri per bambini e famiglie
No full textAll the studies conducted on the Centers for Children and Families (CCF) highlight that children\u27s experience of social contacts with peers is highly significant as it positively affects children\u27 well-being and favors their socialization. The Center for Children and Families represents a place that provides also children\u27s families with intense emotional and social experiences. In CCF adults appreciate the opportunity of sharing play with their child and child care and education with other families and professionals. This article reports the analysis of observational reports and focus group interviews carried out with CCF staff in 40 Italian Centers for Children and Families. The analysis gives evidence that attendance at the Center provides an important experience also for those adults who take care of children with various roles: parents, grand-parents, baby-sitters.Le ricerche condotte attorno ai Centri per Bambini e Famiglie (CBF) evidenziano che l\u27esperienza di rapporti sociali tra bambini costituisce un valore in s? poich? apporta benefici specifici al benessere del bambino e promuove la socializzazione. Il CBF appare come un luogo carico di emozioni e opportunit? di scambi sociali anche per i familiari che accompagnano i bambini: gli adulti coinvolti non solo apprezzano l\u27opportunit? di condividere con il bambino l\u27esperienza che sta facendo nel servizio, ma percepiscono anche il CBF come luogo di comunit?, luogo di cura condivisa del bambino con altri adulti, altri utenti e gli operatori. Questo contributo riporta quanto emerso dall\u27analisi dei rapporti osservativi e delle interviste di gruppo con gli operatori svolte in 40 CBF italiani. L\u27analisi evidenzia il valore che il CBF pu? assumere anche per gli adulti che accompagnano il bambino al servizio e, a vario titolo, si occupano della sua cura
Youth\u27s Empathy and Complex Thinking
No full textPsychological science has not yet sufficiently examined the association between empathy and complex thinking among young people. Such a thorough examination would contribute not only to enriching the various conceptualizations both of empathy and complex thinking, but also to providing educators with new scientific tools enabling them to perform their educational role with greater competence. It is self-evident that the conceptualizations of empathy include most of the components of the conceptualizations of complex thinking (e.g., multiple perspective-taking, creativity, self-awareness, the acceptance of uncertainty and incompleteness, the ceaseless involvement in a constructive relationship with diversity). The relation between complex thinking and empathy, especially emotional empathy, is here examined within the context of youth\u27s relationship with cultural diversity and through the analysis of some extracts from anonymous open-ended essays written at school by 79 pupils (41 F and 38 M) aged 14-18, where they expressed their attitudes towards multiculturalism in present Italian society. In particular, this study should contribute to helping educators understand the importance of fostering the development of high levels of youth\u27s complex thinking so as to strengthen their capability of building a non-prejudiced, more autonomous, and complex outlook on their relationship with cultural diversity and diversity tout court
The Intentional Stance as Structure Learning: A Computational Perspective on Mindreading
No full textRecent theories of mindreading explain the recognition of action, intention, and belief of other agents in terms of generative architectures that model the causal relations between observables (e.g., observed movements) and their hidden causes (e.g., action goals and beliefs). Two kinds of probabilistic generative schemes have been proposed in cognitive science and robotics that link to a "theory theory" and "simulation theory" of mindreading, respectively. The former compares perceived actions to optimal plans derived from rationality principles and conceptual theories of others\u27 minds. The latter reuses one\u27s own internal (inverse and forward) models for action execution to perform a look-ahead mental simulation of perceived actions. Both theories, however, leave one question unanswered: how are the generative models - including task structure and parameters - learned in the first place? We start from Dennett\u27s "intentional stance" proposal and characterize it within generative theories of action and intention recognition. We propose that humans use an intentional stance as a learning bias that sidesteps the (hard) structure learning problem and bootstraps the acquisition of generative models for others\u27 actions. The intentional stance corresponds to a candidate structure in the generative scheme, which encodes a simplified belief-desire folk psychology and a hierarchical intention-to-action organization of behavior. This simple structure can be used as a proxy for the "true" generative structure of others\u27 actions and intentions and is continuously grown and refined - via state and parameter learning - during interactions. In turn - as our computational simulations show - this can help solve mindreading problems and bootstrap the acquisition of useful causal models of both one\u27s own and others\u27 goal-directed actions
The structure of gravel-bed flow with intermediate submergence: A laboratory study
No full textThe paper reports an experimental study of the flow structure over an immobile gravel bed in open channel at intermediate submergence, with particular focus on the near-bed region. The experiments consisted of velocity measurements using three-component (stereoscopic) Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) in near-bed horizontal plane and two-component PIV in three vertical planes that covered three distinctly different hydraulic scenarios where the ratio of flow depth to roughness height (i.e., relative submergence) changes from 7.5 to 10.8. Detailed velocity measurements were supplemented with fine-scale bed elevation data obtained with a laser scanner. The data revealed longitudinal low-momentum and high-momentum "strips" in the time-averaged velocity field, likely induced by secondary currents. This depth-scale pattern was superimposed with particle-scale patches of flow heterogeneity induced by gravel particle protrusions. A similar picture emerged when considering second-order velocity moments. The interaction between the flow field and gravel-bed protrusions is assessed using cross correlations of velocity components and bed elevations in a horizontal plane just above gravel particle crests. The cross correlations suggest that upward and downward fluid motions are mainly associated with upstream-facing and lee sides of particles, respectively. Results also show that the relative submergence affects the turbulence intensity profiles for vertical velocity over the whole flow depth, while only a weak effect, limited to the near-bed region, is noticed for streamwise velocity component. The approximation of mean velocity profiles with a logarithmic formula reveals that log-profile parameters depend on relative submergence, highlighting inapplicability of a conventional "universal" logarithmic law for gravel-bed flows with intermediate submergence
Il contributo della citizen science allo studio dei laghi nelle Terre Alte
No full textNot availableLa Citizen Science (CS), letteralmente "scienza dei cittadini", pu? essere definita come una tecnica di ricerca che prevede il coinvolgimento del pubblico nella raccolta di dati scientifici, o pi? in generale l\u27impiego di volontari in progetti di ricerca. Negli anni pi? recenti la comunit? scientifica internazionale, efficacemente supportata dalla tecnologia e dagli strumenti di comunicazione, sta vivendo un rafforzamento della collaborazione tra pubblico e ricercatori, tra amatori e specialisti tematici
Prosody and information status in Italian and German L2 intonation
Get PDFThis work addresses the question of how the information status of a discourse entity is prosodically realized by romance learners of a germanic language and by germanic learners of a romance language. We focus on wether differential learning patterns emerge in two groups of speakers, Italians learning L2-German, and Germans learning L2-Italian, by examining how Given, New and Constrative information is intonationally realized in their interlanguage compared to their source language and their target language
Causal Attributions for Poverty in Italy: What Do People Think About Impoverishment
No full textWhat do people think about becoming poor? Should the poor be blamed? Are community or society mainly responsible for their condition? Or Bad Luck? This paper analyses the causal attributions for Poverty in Italy, in order to better understand people\u27s viewpoint. According to literature, we can detect three main attributions, depending on explaining poverty as ascribable to individual, external-tangible or fatalistic factors. The data analyzed come from a study conducted in 2012, in Italy, which involved around 1000 participants. A Principal Component Analysis has allowed to \u27weed-out\u27 the items by identifying three main components. Following analyses have showed significant relations between attributions and factors like sex, age, education level and economic condition
A Cochrane review on brain 18F-FDG PET in dementia: limitations and future perspectives
Get PDF[18F]FDG PET is a well-established method for the evaluation of patients with suspected Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative diseases [1]. This tool has the unique ability to estimate the local cerebral metabolic rate of glucose consumption (CMRgl), thus providing information on the distribution of neuronal death and synapse dysfunction in vivo [2]. Clinically, [18F]FDG PET plays a major role in the early and differential diagnosis of dementia due to AD by showing specific disease patterns of hypometabolism, reflecting neuronal dysfunction in affected brain regions even in the earliest stages of the disease [1]. However, the role of [18F]FDG PET in identifying patients affected by AD but who are still at the stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is less established. Although various studies have indicated a high predictive value in this population, appropriate standardization approaches (i.e. semiquantification methods, observer-independent analyses, identification of cut-off values) and the value of [18F]FDG PET in comparison to amyloidosis biomarkers are still a matter of debate. Recently, a Cochrane review was published with the objective of determining the diagnostic accuracy of [18F]FDG PET for identifying subjects with MCI who will clinically convert toADor other dementias [3]. The authors concluded that there is no evidence supporting routine clinical use of [18F]FDG PET to identify those patients with MCI who will develop AD. For several reasons, we do not agree with the authors of this Cochrane review that existing data on the value of FDG PET in MCI supports such a categorical conclusion. Indeed, clear variability in diagnostic performance of [18F]FDG PET is found in the literature, as correctly reported in the Cochrane review. This variability, however, is not exclusively attributable to the method itself, but rather can be explained by a number of factors concerning study design, definitions of MCI itself and data analysis procedures. We would like to highlight some of these factors in greater detail, because we believe that knowledge on these issues may be necessary to correctly interpret the available literature and to appreciate the diagnostic value of [18F]FDG PET in MCI
Intrinsic motivations driving learning of eye movements: an experiment with human adults
Get PDFIntrinsic motivations drive the acquisition of knowledge and skills on the basis of novel or surprising stimuli or the pleasure to learn new skills. In so doing, they are different from extrinsic motivations that are mainly linked to drives that promote survival and reproduction. Intrinsic motivations have been implicitly exploited in several psychological experiments but, due to the lack of proper paradigms, they are rarely a direct subject of investigation. This article investigates how different intrinsic motivation mechanisms can support the learning of visual skills, such as "foveate a particular object in space", using a gaze contingency paradigm. In the experiment participants could freely foveate objects shown in a computer screen. Foveating each of two "button" pictures caused different effects: one caused the appearance of a simple image (blue rectangle) in unexpected positions, while the other evoked the appearance of an always-novel picture (objects or animals). The experiment studied how two possible intrinsic motivation mechanisms might guide learning to foveate one or the other button picture. One mechanism is based on the sudden, surprising appearance of a familiar image at unpredicted locations, and a second one is based on the content novelty of the images. The results show the comparative effectiveness of the mechanism based on image novelty, whereas they do not support the operation of the mechanism based on the surprising location of the image appearance. Interestingly, these results were also obtained with participants that, according to a post experiment questionnaire, had not understood the functions of the different buttons suggesting that novelty-based intrinsic motivation mechanisms might operate even at an unconscious level