1,721,207 research outputs found
Saint Teresa of Avila: spiritual Greatness and Influence of her female Mastership on Church and Society
No full textThis interdisciplinary paper (economics and philosophy) conceives charism like a spiritual force which can innovate Church, society and even economic systems. Many studies (Zamagni, Bruni, Todeschini, etc.) have already found in the institutions created by some charismatic figures of western catholic monachism (St.Francis of Assisi and St.Benedict of Norcia) the fundamentals of the birth of capitalism. In this same interpretative frame the role of female monachism to the development of Church and society has been investigated in this paper, starting from Saint Teresa of Avila who bravely reformed the monastic Carmelitans’ Order. The New Rule of Carmelo, inspired to poverty and purity, and the correlated foundation of the first monastery of St.Joseph (and of many others too), in addition to her admirable example of female emancipation and freedom very unusual at that time (and still valid for its exemplariness in the present), is the institutional precipitate of Saint Teresa’s charism and of her attitude to “thinking in a great manner”, though women at that time did not have power, were not in the ecclesiastic hierarchy and were banished to non apostolic duties. She can be rightly considered, as this paper shows, a “charismatic” person, perfectly responding to the requisites on which a Charismatic can be identified (Bruni and Smerilli). And, moreover, the innovative context of the monastery created by Saint Teresa of Avila was based on a female symbolic order (centrality of female authority based on trustful relations among women both essential for its foundation and functioning and on a female model of governance of the monastery which was very different from the management of other male monastic institutions).
Other aspects can be further developed from a spiritualistic and philosophical point of view.
Teresa d’Avila began her spiritual journey knowing the common social weakness concerning all women. In spite of this, through her mystical experience that emerged in the writing and through the foundation of the barefoot Carmelite order, she was able to transform the element of weakness into an example of innovative strength for all monasticism (Macola, Muraro, Sartori). Teresa’s intention was to find a rigorous method of perfection that took place in solitude, but shared with other nuns. Teresa D’Avila’s mystic experience did not concentrate upon martyrdom or the mortification of the body, but found its central point in a complete link between the inner life of the individual nun and life experienced together with her co-sisters, expressing the complementary character between Martha and Maria (active and contemplative life). Saint Teresa coined the double metaphor of the interior Castle and the exterior Castle. The interior Castle is the beautiful space within everyone, the dwelling where many rooms need to be lived in to understand, in depth, the stepping away from our personal will and to welcome the Truth that is the will of God (Sartori). In this way the subjectivity of the woman also acquires the possibility of saying an authoritative word, as a linguistic mediation between God’s Truth and the humanity of his existence. But in order to be able to perform perfectly God’s will, word and action need to be united, with a subjective commitment carried out together with other nuns. In this way people can also enter the dimension of the exterior Castle, which is the physical place of personal relations and therefore the convent, where it is possible to develop fully the path to perfection
A Statistical Characterization of the Actual Cooperative Perception Messages and a Generative Model to Reproduce Them
No full textThis paper provides two novel contributions to
vehicular cooperative perception. Firstly, it puts forth an approach to generate the actual perception messages broadcasted
by connected autonomous vehicles. Relying on data gathered
by autonomous vehicles and originally collected for computer
vision purposes, it produces perception messages in accordance
with the standard ETSI rules. The statistical properties of the
messages are determined, showing that their size is remarkably
affected by the driving scenario and the policy adopted to
discern when an object is seen by the vehicle, and to a lesser
extent by the selection of the message generation frequency.
Secondly, the paper proposes a generative model to synthetically
replicate the sequences of perception messages. The ability of
the model to successfully capture the characteristics and the
temporal correlation of the real data is demonstrated in a
reference scenario. The model adoption is promising in largescale numerical simulations, where the perception messages of
many vehicles have to be faithfully reproduced
Human leucocyte antigen diversity: a biological gift to escape infections, no longer a barrier for haploidentical hemopoietic stem cell transplantation
Full text linkSince the beginning of life, every multicellular organism appeared to have a complex innate immune system although the adaptive immune system, centred on lymphocytes bearing antigen receptors generated by somatic recombination, arose in jawed fish approximately 500 million years ago. The major histocompatibility complex MHC, named the Human leucocyte antigen (HLA) system in humans, represents a vital function structure in the organism by presenting pathogen-derived peptides to T cells as the main initial step of the adaptive immune response. The huge level of polymorphism observed in HLA genes definitely reflects selection, favouring heterozygosity at the individual or population level, in a pathogen-rich environment, although many are located in introns or in exons that do not code for the antigen-biding site of the HLA. Over the past three decades, the extent of allelic diversity at HLA loci has been well characterized using high-resolution HLA-DNA typing and the number of new HLA alleles, produced through next-generation sequencing methods, is even more rapidly increasing. The level of the HLA system polymorphism represents an obstacle to the search of potential compatible donors for patients affected by haematological disease proposed for a hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT). Data reported in literature clearly show that antigenic and/or allelic mismatches between related or unrelated donors and patients influences the successful HSCT outcome. However, the recent development of the new transplant strategy based on the choice of haploidentical donors for HSCT is questioning the role of HLA compatibility, since the great HLA disparities present do not worsen the overall clinical outcome. Nowadays, NGS has contributed to define at allelic levels the HLA polymorphism and solve potential ambiguities. However, HLA functions and tissue typing probably need to be further investigated in the next future, to understand the reasons why in haploidentical transplants the presence of a whole mismatch haplotype between donors and recipients, both the survival rate and the incidence of acute GvHD or graft rejection are similar to those reported for unrelated HSCTs
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Identification of the novel allele, HLA-A*02:653, in an Italian patient
No full textHLA-A*02:653 differs from A*02:01:01:01 by a C to T substitution in exon 2
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