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Ricordarsi un futuro. Società locale e partecipazione allo sviluppo in Alta Irpinia
Full text linkREMEMBERING A FUTURE
Local society and participation in development actions in Alta Irpinia
The research focuses on local development strategies, emerging in five little tows of East Irpinia, a peripheral area in Southern Italy. The concept of local development adopted in this work is not only economic: actually, it implies economic growth, but only as a component of a process that must also bring social, cultural and human growth for local societies. Irpinian people come from decades of economic, social and political dependence from distant deci-sion-making arenas. They are living a history of chronic and severe economic crisis and depopulation, at least from 1950s. They have faced several natural disasters, such as the 1980 earthquake, with all the related economic and po-litical consequences: the construction industry doped the local economy for nearly two decades; then came the automotive industry (in neighboring Melfi), which subjected the area to the fluctuations of that specific market, still depending on events and decisions that have been taking place far away. Finally, in the last ten years, the area is becoming a location of intensive ex-traction of natural resources (namely wind power and, possibly, hydrocar-bons). All these processes are not locally controlled.
In opposition to all these difficulties, in the last twenty years another way of thinking local development emerged: a way that aims at promoting the local resources (both touristic and rural), and highlighting their value on the bigger scale of globalized markets: in this vision, winning a remarkable position in the competition game between territories is the main way to take back an au-tonomy capability in local development. Endogenous resources and their promotion can be locally controlled. That is why this promotion is gradually spreading in several initiatives: museums of local cultures, restoration of his-toric places, new productions based on local peculiarities, and so on.
This process has to face considerable challenges. On the one side, the prob-lems of local governance characterizing these: many local development initia-tives that flourished recently have been uncoordinated, therefore unable to build an actual system to properly support the local development strategy. On the other side, the organized civil society looks very fragile, so that it cannot work as an asset to strengthen all these initiatives. For such reasons, an active participation by the local society in these processes becomes vital: the indi-vidual initiatives alone (and their few promoters) will not produce durable outcomes, if the local social environment is not favourable; or, in other words, if a fovourable social capital will not emerge. Signals are unclear: there have been moments of wide participation, regardless the organized level of civil society; but there have been moments of general indifference and apathy, too.
This research focuses on how local society relates itself to the strategies of lo-cal development, and their related actions. How local society elaborates the representations at the core of these strategies? How activism can flourish? How can it endure? To address these questions, it is considered here relevant to understand the way local society organizes, differentiates and manages conflicts; and how it relates with what is perceived as “the outside”. The mak-ing of boundaries influences the opportunities of collective action, and is re-lated to power relations (especially in the frame of statehood rescaling pro-cesses), affecting local development strategies. So, to sum up, the main ques-tion is how the local society imagines itself and its own future path.
This research adopts an interpretative approach. For two years, the author spent on field three intervals of several months, conducting ethnographic re-search by overt participant observation. Main actors of the local development strategies were interviewed as well. A comparative analysis was conducted between the Irpinian case study, and two other similar Italian locations, in-volved in local development actions
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
Aligned fibrous decellularized cell derived matrices for mesenchymal stem cell amplification
No full textBiochemical and biophysical stimuli of stem cell niches finely regulate the self-renewal/differentiation equilibrium. Replicating this in vitro is technically challenging, making the control of stem cell functions difficult. Cell derived matrices capture certain aspect of niches that influence fate decisions. Here aligned fibrous matrices synthesized by MC3T3 cells are produced and the role of matrix orientation and stiffness on the maintenance of stem cell characteristics and adipo- or osteo-genic differentiation of murine mesenchymal stem cells (mMSCs) is investigated. Decellularized matrices promoted mMSC proliferation. Fibrillar alignment and matrix stiffness work in concert in defining cell fate. Soft matrices preserve stemness, whereas stiff ones, in presence of biochemical supplements, promptly induce differentiation. Matrix alignment impacts the homogeneity of the cell population, i.e. soft aligned matrices ameliorate the spontaneous adipogenic differentiation, whereas stiff aligned matrices reduce cross-differentiation. We infer that mechanical signalling is a dominant factor in mMSC fate decision and the matrix alignment contributes to produce a more homogeneous environment, which results in a uniform response of cells to biophysical environment. Matrix thus produced can be obtained in vitro in a facile and consistent manner and can be used for homogeneous stem cell amplification or for mechanotransduction-related studies This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
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
A Novel Smart Sensor Node with Embedded Signal Processing Functionalities Addressing Vibration–Based Monitoring
No full textDispelling 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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