1,340 research outputs found
Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe: De-essentialising Euro-Mediterranean History
No full textInformed by an interpretative framework where the theoretical paradigms of British Cultural studies and Black feminism inextricably interweave, the paper aims at illustrating a complex identity model of the Black British woman as delineated in Anglo-Nigerian writer Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (2001).
Published at the turn of the 21st century, Evaristo’s second novel-in-verse revolves around the life-experience of a young black woman born of Sudanese parents in Roman London, Zuleika, who ends up having an intense relationship with the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. In its highly orchestrated narrative fabric where prose and poetry conflate, this unconventional historical novel, in focusing on Black gendered identities, simultaneously engages with contemporary issues of racialization and national belonging, while, at the same time, transplanting them in Roman Britannia. By virtue of such temporal transposition, The Emperor’s Babe also inevitably allows for an imaginative reshaping of British national history in the context of a wider revision of the European classical past
From ghetto to get-to. Dall'abitare privato all'abitare collettivo in un quartiere informale di Rafaela in Argentina
No full textIn the contemporary context in which globalization, rather than proceeding in line with a universalization phenomenon, nourishes a unbalance development resulting in spatial polarization based on migration, the race to the illusion of possible new activities that provide some form of survival changes sprawl in slums. The city as urban organism no longer exists; its movement between forms of sprawl and high concentration is leading to an increasing expansion of urban emergency which results in environmental emergency due to the excessive use of resources and alteration of environmental equilibrium. It is necessary to find a new point of view which allows to read the city as an organism in which social communities become the instruments of the urban consolidation and make it possible to propose a new living way; in this way should be considered the research project developed in the Specialization Course in “Habitat, Technology and Development” held at Politecnico di Torino in the academic year 2011-12.
The project area is the informal settlement of Barranquitas, in the city of Rafaela in Argentina. The slum is not too large and this has allowed us to design a project that intervenes not only in response to the housing request for the slum dwellers. The design work proposes a new model that doesn’t force people to move thus maintaining neighbourly relations and the feeling of community still present and get better living conditions through programs of professional integration of weak people’s groups.
Public funding, which is required to activate processes of assisted self-building and following self-completion is interpreted not as passive dependency on welfare but as a social investment: two different typologies provide for the will to enter into a mechanism that can operate also in terms of economic return thus ensuring the possibility of a further investment in services by the municipality. “Shop-houses” to allow for the development of the slum informal trade’s network and become an occasion of professional learning are accompanied by “garden-houses” which provide for the allocation of a land’s portion inside the barrio for micro-cultivation. The chance to communicate with the slummers, which led us to verify the validity of the operative proposal, offers potential new food for thought into the theme of living in marginal areas
Critérios essenciais à implantação da Social Accountability (SA) 8000: um estudo de caso
No full textDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produçã
Dividends and Dynamic Solvency Insurance in Two-Dimensional Risk Models
No full textIn this paper we consider two-dimensional risk models where the claim
counting processes of the two classes of business are assumed to be Poisson
processes. We assume that the dividends are paid because of the presence of a
reflecting upper barrier. Furthermore, in order to avoid ruin, we consider
dynamic solvency insurance contracts that depend on two different definitions of time of ruin. We present a rather general model and, under different
assumptions, we obtain the equations fulfilled by the discounted dividend
payments and by the net single premium of dynamic solvency insurance. We
also derive some boundary conditions and provide explicit solutions for some
special cases
Spectroscopic and chemical characterization of atmospheric plasmas produced in hydrocarbon contaminated air by DC and pulsed corona discharges
No full textOptical emission spectroscopy was used to characterize the plasma produced by DC and pulsed corona discharges in air at ambient pressure in a wire-cylinder reactor. The experiments have been performed both in dry and humid air and also in the presence of n-hexane, used in 500 ppm concentration as a model pollutant. The results provide a thorough characterization of different plasma regimes in terms of electron, vibrational and rotational temperature and are discussed with reference to chemical reactivity data
2D motif basis applied to the classification of digital images
No full textThe classification of raw data often involves the problem of selecting the appropriate set of features to represent the input data. Different types of features can be extracted from the input dataset, but only some of them are actually relevant for the classification process. Since relevant features are often unknown in real-world problems, many candidate features are usually introduced. This degrades both the speed and the predictive accuracy of the classifier due to the presence of redundancy in the set of candidate features. Recently, a special class of bidimensional motifs, i.e. 2D motif basis has been introduced in the literature. 2D motif basis showed to be powerful in capturing the relevant information of digital images, also achieving good performances for image compression. Here, we investigate the effectiveness of 2D motif basis, when they are used as features for image classification. We embed such features in a bag-of-words model, and then we apply KNearest Neighbour for the classification step. Results obtained on both benchmark image datasets and video frames datasets show that, despite the pixel-level nature of the considered features, the achieved accuracy is high and comparable with that of other techniques proposed in the literature
Maria Magdalena dan Pemuridan yang Sederajat Suatu Studi Hermeneutik Feminis terhadap Model Pemuridan yang Sederajat dari Kisah Maria Magdalena dalam Yohanes 20:11-18
No full textPerempuan selalu didiskriminasi dengan the second class dalam budaya patriarki Yahudi. Maria Magdalena yang seharusnya menjadi satu di antara murid-murid Yesus tersubordinasi oleh tulisan-tulisan yang memojokkan dirinya. Padahal dalam komunitas Yesus ia telah memasuki sebuah komunitas pemuridan yang sederajat. Memanfaatkan beberapa pendapat dari para teolog feminis, maka teks Yoh 20:11-18 yang bersifat androsentrik dan sarat akan bias patriarkal ditafsir dengan pendekatan hermenutik feminis yang memanfaatkan studi hermeneutik kecurigaan feminis dari Schüssier Fiorenza dan kriteria pengalaman dari Ruether. Hasil studi ini menunjukkan bahwa dalam gerakan Yesus dan gerakan Kristen, perempuan dan laki-laki dipanggil dalam kesederajatan untuk tergabung dalam basileia Allah dan memasuki sebuah komunitas yang inklusif. Kesederajatan inilah yang memungkinkan Maria Magdalena tampil sebagai seorang murid perempuan yang menunjukkan teladan solidaritas dalam kesederajatan, teladan kemuridan sejati, dan saksi kebangkitan (apostle apostolarum). Namun bias patriarkat menyebabkan peredaman terhadap perannya sebab penulis injil Yohanes tidak benar-benar berangkat dari sudut pandang seorang perempuan Yahudi. Peredaman tersebut terlihat dari tiga hal ini: „Siapakah yang engkau cari??, metafor gembala yang baik, dan sikap Yesus: „jangan sentuh aku, perempuan!? Itulah sebabnya sebuah penafsiran feminis hanya dapat dikatakan feminis jika ia benar-benar membebaskan perempuan. Relevansi tulisan ini dapat digunakan dalam kehidupan bergereja di Indonesia dengan memberikan peluang yang sama bagi perempuan dan laki-laki untuk bergandengan tangan memasuki pemuridan yang sederajat dari gerakan Yesus dan memungkinkan setiap orang baik laki-laki maupun perempuan memperoleh gelar apostle apostolarum
An in vitro model of renal inflammation after ischemic oxidative stress injury: nephroprotective effects of a hyaluronan ester with butyric acid on mesangial cells
No full textOlga Baraldi,1 Francesca Bianchi,2,3 Viola Menghi,1 Andrea Angeletti,1 Anna Laura Croci Chiocchini,1 Maria Cappuccilli,1 Valeria Aiello,1 Giorgia Comai,1 Gaetano La Manna1 1Department of Experimental, Diagnostic and Specialty Medicine, Nephrology, Dialysis and Renal Transplant Unit, Sant’Orsola-Malpighi Hospital, University of Bologna, Bologna, 2Stem Wave Institute for Tissue Healing, Gruppo Villa Maria Care & Research – Ettore Sansavini Health Science Foundation, Lugo, Ravenna, 3National Institute of Biostructures and Biosystems at the Department of Experimental, Diagnostic and Specialty Medicine, Sant’Orsola-Malpighi Hospital, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy Background: Acute kidney injury, known as a major trigger for organ fibrosis and independent predictor of chronic kidney disease, is characterized by mesangial cell proliferation, inflammation and unbalance between biosynthesis and degradation of extracellular matrix. Therapeutic approaches targeting the inhibition of mesangial cell proliferation and matrix expansion may represent a promising opportunity for the treatment of kidney injury. An ester of hyaluronic acid and butyric acid (HB) has shown vasculogenic and regenerative properties in renal ischemic-damaged tissues, resulting in enhanced function recovery and minor degree of inflammation in vivo. This study evaluated the effect of HB treatment in mesangial cell cultures exposed to H2O2-induced oxidative stress.Materials and methods: Lactate dehydrogenase release and caspase-3 activation were measured using mesangial cells prepared from rat kidneys to assess necrosis and apoptosis. Akt and p38 phosphorylation was analyzed to identify the possible mechanism underlying cell response to HB treatment. The relative expressions of matrix metallopeptidase 9 (MPP-9) and collagen type 1 alpha genes were also analyzed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. Cell proliferation rate and viability were measured using thiazolyl blue assay and flow cytometry analysis of cell cycle with propidium iodide.Results: HB treatment promoted apoptosis of mesangial cells after H2O2-induced damage, decreased cellular proliferation and activated p38 pathway, increasing expression of its target gene MPP-9.Conclusion: This in vitro model shows that HB treatment seems to redirect mesangial cells toward apoptosis after oxidative damage and to reduce cell proliferation through p38 MAPK pathway activation and upregulation of MPP-9 gene expression involved in mesangial matrix remodeling. Keywords: acute kidney injury, apoptosis, hyaluronan ester of butyric acid, mesangial cell
Efeito de micelas anionicas funcionais e inertes e de pre-agregados micelares sobre as reações de hidrolise do anidrido benzoico e de alcanoatos de 2,4 - dinitrofenila
No full textTese (Doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Ciências Físicas e Matemáticas
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