1,721,095 research outputs found
Fragments of Migration Culture from Bureaucratic Rationality to the Network Paradigm, Suggestions and Food for Thought
Full text linkThrough my contact with migrants at a non-profit organisation in the province of Parma over the last few years I have become familiar with the ways in which they are received and introduced to the realities of their new world. I have been able to interact with many of them and discuss various subjects with some in English or more frequently French (as many come from countries that were at least historically French- speaking), with the help of an interpreter and/or a cultural mediator. The topics addressed range from life in their country of origin to their journey – often lasting years and involving sacrifices and potentially life-threatening dangers –, their attitude towards Italy and the Italians and their plans for the future.
Some of these conversations were transcribed in texts, becoming something akin to life stories (Cipriani, 1989, 1996; Guidicini, 1995; Berteaux, Bichi, 2008; Aa.Vv., 2015). This article will cite extracts from these accounts in order to illustrate the ideas expressed. Due for future publication, the material in question is held at the archives of Svoltare, a non-profit organisation in Parma. More specifically, the interviewees whose stories are cited are: Mohamed Agahatti Toutta, born in 1985 in Danga, a small village in Mali; Omogbai Murana Prince, a 21-year-old from Auchi, the second most important city in Nigeria; Bamba Drissa, also in his early twenties, from the city of Abengourou in the south of Ivory Coast; and Zakhil Abdul Baseer, born in 1994, from the Afghan city of Bazarak, the administrative centre of the province of Panjshir.
The aim of this study is to pave the way for future analysis and reflection about the life stories of immigrants collected at Svoltare over the last two years.
Migration phenomena are often constrained and downsized, reduced to a Procrustean bed by the real or supposed need for rationalisation, which operates at different levels ranging from institutional to political and heuristic. This rationalisation process is mostly functional to or carried out by those in power – the host country in the case of emigration. Rationalisation schematises and standardises the phenomenon of migration, weakening many of its characteristics with significant consequences in the field of everyday life, although it seems to be a necessary prerequisite at times, as we will see, for recognizing the human rights of certain migrant categories.
This article will briefly consider three focal points that highlight the rationalisation of migration: the division of migrants into categories, territoriality and economic analysis.
We will then examine a range of considerations and concrete cases to introduce the option of a ‘more genuine’ culture of emigration. Special focus will be placed on the reasons for emigration and the conceptual corpus of the network paradigm, seen as the most suitable heuristic tool for reflection on the matter
Hydrogen dynamics under extreme conditions: looking for exotic states in water and hydrates
No full textThe main focus of this thesis is the characterization of the self dynamics of simple molecular systems as hydrogen, water, ammonia and methane, and their mixtures, under extreme conditions, employing Quasi-Elastic Neutron Scattering (QENS) as key experimental technique.
We investigated the self-dynamics of water confined in AlPO4 zeolites with 1.2 nm uniaxial nanopores as a function of temperature, observing that the molecule re-orientational dynamics is active down to 100 K, i.e. well below the expected glass transition for bulk water, when the translational dynamics freezes at much higher temperature. Thus we observe that in highly confined water the translational and rotational degrees of freedom decouple. Similarly, we obtained the first direct experimental evi- dence of the predicted plastic Ice VII, an exotic phase where molecules are held in the crystalline ice VII cubic structure but rotate around their equilibrium positions on a picosecond timescale. Similar phases are found also in water-ammonia mixtures, in particular we have investigated the plastic phase ammonia mono-hydrate (AMH), namely AMH-VII.
We also investigated the hydrogen hydrate system, focusing on the structural and vibrational prop- erties of the high pressure filled ice phases. We characterized the quantum dynamics of hydrogen in the high pressure C2 filled ice structure, and observed how the enhanced Van der Waals interactions between the non-polar hydrogen molecules and the water matrix strongly affect the hydrogen’s quan- tum rotations. At higher pressures we identified a new phase, namely C3, with unprecedentedly high hydrogen to water ratio.
Finally, we have focused on water-methane mixtures, in particular their diffusive behaviour at high- pressures and high-temperatures, observing a pressure induced modification of the translational diffu- sion mechanism likely linked to the molecular mixing of methane in water.
The molecular systems studied in this thesis are known to be among the main constituents of the inte- riors of ice bodies in our solar systems, as well as exoplanets. Thus, the knowledge of the high-pressure high-temperature behaviours of these systems and their mixtures, not only enlarges our understanding of inter-molecular interactions, but is also fundamental in order to build reliable models for planetary interiors. In particular their self-dynamics, which has been studied experimentally in this thesis, carries significant implications as the molecular scale dynamics strongly influences both the mechanical and thermal properties of these systems, on which planetary interiors modeling strongly relies
Intravital 2-Photon Microscopy of Dendritic Cell Extension Sampling Pathogen Bacteria Into the Small Bowel Lumen
No full textGoing 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
Gene expression profile of endothelial cells during perturbation of the gut vascular barrier
No full textIt has been widely demonstrated that tolerance against gut microbiota is compartmentalized to mucosal sites where microbes mostly reside. How the commensal bacteria are excluded from the entrance into the blood stream via intestinal capillaries that are located beneath the gut epithelium was not clear. We recently described the existence of a new anatomical structure, the ‘gut vascular barrier’ (GVB), both in murine and human intestines that plays a fundamental role in avoiding indiscriminate trafficking of bacteria from the gut into the blood circulation. The vascular barrier integrity could be altered by Salmonella typhimurium, a pathogen capable of systemic dissemination, through the modulation of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. Here we have analyzed the differences in gut endothelial gene expression profiles during Salmonella infection and have identified some interesting characteristics of endothelial to mesenchymal transition. These findings add new insights in the gut-liver axis
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
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