1,721,224 research outputs found
On the Polarization Properties of Metamaterial Lenses
No full textIn this letter, the polarization properties of composite planar dielectric structures fed by point sources are investigated. With an appropriate choice of substrate heights and dielectric constants, the structure is a leaky wave antenna (LWA), based on a (Fabry-Perot)-like effect, which enhances the directivity of isotropic sources (e.g., dipoles or slots). These antennas have been deeply investigated in the past, especially from the antenna gain point of view. Nevertheless, the aspect concerning with the polarization has not been well explored yet. In our analysis, we show that this high-gain antenna is very well polarized when the excitation is provided by a perfectly polarized feeding source. This concept is important in the design of overlapped apertures in multifeed aperture systems
G. Tessuto (con S. Maci, M. J. Zerbe), Communicating Medical Science in the Digital Age: Culture, Knowledge, Expertise, Practices. Nella collana internazionale Medical Discourse and Communication (Direttore G. Tessuto)
No full textFerrante Fever and her translator’s visibility
No full text‘Ferrante fever’ stands metaphorically for the outbreak of the highly contagious enthusiasm which has been spreading over the past few years, particularly among women, for the books written by an Italian novelist who, as known, publishes under the nom de plume of Elena Ferrante. Though speculations about her identity, often media-averse, are continually being made and debunked, Anita Raja, the Rome-based translator and wife of Neapolitan novelist Domenico Starnone, is among those long rumored to be Ferrante. Figures from Ferrante fever’s ‘medical bulletin’ account for her book sales of about 5.5 million copies worldwide, with publication rights sold in 44 countries, ranging from Estonia to Turkey, and including Cina and Indonesia (The New York Times, December 7, 2016). However, it is thanks to Ann Goldstein’s exquisite English translations that Elena Ferrante has achieved such enormous success, particularly in the Anglophone market, where sales have currently reached almost three million. On the other hand, translating Ferrante has made Ann Goldstein – a long-time editor at the New Yorker magazine – exceptionally famous and given her a celebrity status that translators rarely achieve. The author’s choice to remain anonymous has, paradoxically, given unprecedented visibility to her English translator, who often participates in book tours and interviews left unattended by the author. However, though Goldstein steadfastly affirms that she is ignorant of Ferrante’s identity and communicates with the novelist only by email, she admits (2016), she has «become the face of Elena Ferrante, [...] her representative in the world, at the moment». Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – four novels published serially for reasons of length and duration, between 2011 and 2014, which include My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), and The Story of the Lost Child (2014) – is a sort of feminist bildungsroman whose backbone is the life-long, complicated friendship between Lenù and Lila, where emotional lives and private events continuously intermingle with public matters, so that the personal becomes political, and viceversa. Moving from Lenù and Lila’s childhood in the impoverished outskirts of postwar 1950s Naples, the four books develop alongside the socio-political history of Italy, through the economic boom of the 1960s and the political turmoil of the 1970s, to the two friends’old age in the present day. From the very start of their friendship Lenù and Lila plan to swim against the tide and transcend their boundaries of place and gender, both from a physical and a metaphorical perspective. The tetralogy, where the city of Naples is depicted as a character in its own right, is thus deeply entrenched not just in an Italian socio-geographical context but in a specifically Neapolitan one, where culture-bound elements and socio-historical references and descriptions are deeply intertwined in the plot(s). The earthquake, which took place in the south of Italy in November 1980, turns into a symbol of “smarginatura”, the physical sensation of “dissolving boundaries” which haunts Lila’s whole life. Given these factors, translation poses an especially thorny challenge, one that Ann Goldstein has resoundingly overcome. Today she is considered worldwide one of the preeminent translators of Italian literature, and some critics have even wondered if Goldstein’s translation “might be better than the original” (Merelli 2015, online). Mainly drawing on Berman’s (1984, 1992) and Venuti’s (1992, 1995/2008, 1998, 2004) major theoretical works on translation, our paper aims at highlighting the challenge and trials of Goldstein’s translations through an analysis of some qualitative examples. In Berman’s words, translation is l’épreuve de l’ étranger (trial) “in a double sense [...] first, it establishes a relationship between the Self-Same and the Foreign by aiming to open up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness. [...]. In the second place translation is a trial for the foreign as well, since the foreign work is uprooted from its own language-ground. And this trial, often an exile, can also exhibit the most singular power of the translating act, to reveal the foreign work’s most original kernel, its most deeply buried, most self-same, but equally the most ‘distant’ from itself” (in Venuti 2004: 277). Renderings of the interdependent, complementary relationship present in all types of characters/situations of the tetralogy, moving from Lina’s and Lenu’s inverse stories and personalities (“It was as if [...] the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other,” Lenù recalls in My Brilliant Friend, “and there is no reconciliation to this paradox.”) to the two languages spoken: standard Italian and Neapolitan dialect will also be investigated. This all-pervading dichotomy is also represented in the complex feelings between men and women and echoed in the relationship between translator and translated, which, according to the Italian feminist Luisa Muraro – who has interviewed and influenced Ferrante – would enact a practice of affidamento, of “entrusting” between women that would be the basis for new socio-cultural dynamics meant to dismantle patriarchy (The Guardian, 5 October 2016)
Facts or Followers? Identifying Key Variables in Medical-related Social Networking Sites and Computer-mediated Communication. A Case Study on Covid-19 Tweets
No full textComputer-mediated communication (CMC) in digital and online environments has become a common practice that involves a growing community on a global scale (Herring and Androutsopoulos, 2015), encompassing discourse-related features in a language-oriented perspective (Leppänen 2017; Bouvier 2018; KhosraviNik 2023). In particular, Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have provided an unrivalled opportunity to communicate in a twofold direction: on the one hand, people can get information about a specific topic by retrieving both real-time and archived data; likewise, users are given a personal space to share evidence from often reliable sources, but also to express their own (and unreliable) views. A possible consequence is the rapid spread of fake news that appeal to an alleged sense of truthfulness (D’Ancona 2018), thus overcoming the range of facts spread via institutional sources, the latter being often attacked by users who undermine the concept of affiliation on the basis of mutual interests (Author, in press). The recent Covid-19 pandemic proved to be an infodemic, too (WHO 2021) and is still far from being over, at least in language and discourse-related terms. Both facts and unverified news are still making the news and are still part of SNS interactions, thus shaping the ideological views of people and users. Engagement on such platforms relies massively on the following/follower criterion, thus creating paths of information channelling depending on quantitative metrics and the impact of social “influence” provided by some digital opinion leaders (Locatelli 2020). This paper aims at providing a case study involving a sampling of random Covid-19 interactions on Twitter (now rebranded as X) over a short timespan. Following a resurgence of Covid-19-related interest due to new revelations concerning the origin of the pandemic and in a one-month timespan (March 2023-April 2023), the hypothesis is that some messages appear to be more influential and get more engagement irrespectively of their intrinsic truth but on the basis of the influential user spreading such information. As a result, the popularisation of medical facts may be dramatically hindered by non-objective processes and be preferred to scientific methods. Using a specific retrieval tool (Tweetcatcher, Brooker et al. 2016), tweets are randomly collected, arranged and analysed on the basis of device-specific metrics (e.g. number of following/followers, number of replies) to assess their engagement in relation to their potentially harmful, non-factual meaning
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
Closed form expressions for the modal dispersion equations and for the characteristic impedance of a metamaterial based gap waveguide
No full textIn a recent sequence of papers, a parallel-plate ridge gap waveguide has been introduced, that consists of a metal ridge in a metamaterial magnetic conductor surface, covered by a metallic plate at a small height above it. The gap waveguide is relatively simple to manufacture, especially at millimetre and sub-millimetre wave frequencies when compared with other solutions. The metamaterial surface is designed to provide a frequency band where parallel-plate modes are in cut-off, thereby allowing for a confined gap wave to propagate along the ridge. In a previous work, the authors have presented an approximate analytical solution for the confined quasi-TEM dominant mode of the ridge gap waveguide, when the surrounding metamaterial surface is in the form of a bed of nails. In this study, the authors investigation continues by providing an analytical expression of the modal dispersion equation of the first higher order ridge mode and of the characteristic impedance of the dominant mode. As in the previous paper, the field problem is divided in three regions, the central region above the ridge and the two surrounding side regions above the nails. Transverse mode-matching applied to a few modes representation in each region, results in a closed form expression of the dispersion equation of the first higher order mode. After summarising the formulation for the dominant quasi-TEM mode, the dispersion equation of the first higher order mode is derived, in order to give a criterion to maximise the unimodal bandwidth. Furthermore, three different closed form expressions of the dominant mode characteristic impedance are derived and compared with approximate expressions already used in literature
Tourism Websites: Scrolling and ‘Strolling’ through Capri.net
No full textPromotional tourism communication, which traditionally attempts to persuade, lure and seduce millions of potential clients (Dann 1996), has increasingly been enhanced by online multimodal resources. In particular, textual, linguistic and multimodal features of tourism websites constitute powerful instruments to affect the audience’s reaction to the subject matter they illustrate. Such resources can reach a virtually unlimited audience and offer a wide range of information through invitingly interactive websites which function as hypertexts (Francesconi 2014) with a wide variety of discursive strategies (Fodde, Denti 2008; Maci 2012). For an ideal functioning of advertising communication, verbal texts and images should interact dynamically, since they pragmatically co-determine the meaning of the whole advert (Bateman 2014: 32). A relevant aspect in web advertising is the way in which information is presented, as recent studies in informational architecture (IA), using eye-tracking tools, have shown.
From a broad MCDA perspective (Black 2006, Kress 2010, van Leeuwen, 2013), which includes ecolinguistics, this study focused on one of the most appealing and exhaustive websites dedicated to Capri, www.capri.net/it/ (available in both Italian and English). In capri.net the ‘enshrinement’ (MacCannell 1976), or ‘framing’, of Capri is mainly displayed through a sequence of iconic images aiming at signaling the eco-aesthetic and historical-cultural features of the Blue Island. We investigated its main lines of appeal (Dyer 1988), i.e. landscape and shore excursions, glamour, (habitué) celebrities and nightlife, cuisine, luxury, shopping, wedding locations, ancient historical places, and the cultural memory (Assman 2008) of the illustrious people who brought the island worldwide fame. Throughout this website’s pages, information and promotion/persuasion are deftly blended, through a carefully constructed hierarchy of presentation/foregrounding, though the interaction between the images and verbal texts is not entirely dynamic, as explained in the discussion. Another major finding of our investigation is the flattening of the diachronicity of the different topics illustrated in Capri.net: in the easily scrolled curtains of the website, the history of Tiberius, the lives of the famous writers who made the island attractive for intellectuals, and the presence of contemporary trendy celebrities in well-known bars share an undifferentiated dimension. Through Capri.net’s web pages, the ways of seeing of prospective tourists are thus virtually oriented to an everlasting, a-chronically alluring and ‘unique’ Capri-lifestyle dimension
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