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In this paper we examine the contributions of the Italian geometrical school to the Foundations of Projective Geometry. Starting from De Paolis' work we discuss some papers by Segre, Peano, Veronese, Fano and Pieri. In particular we try to show how a totally abstract and general point of view was clearly adopted by the Italian scholars many years before the publication of Hilbert's Grundlagen.We are particularly interested in the interrelations between the Italian and the German schools (mainly the influence of (...) Staudt's and Klein's works). We try also to understand the reason of the steady decline of the Italian school during the twentieth century. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the conceptual model of an innovative methodology (SAT) to assess the social acceptance of technology, especially focusing on artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology. -/- Design/methodology/approach After a review of the literature, this paper presents the main lines by which SAT stands out from current methods, namely, a four-bubble approach and a mix of qualitative and quantitative techniques that offer assessments that look at technology as a socio-technical system. Each bubble determines the social (...) variability of a cluster of values: User-Experience Acceptance, Social Disruptiveness, Value Impact and Trust. -/- Findings The methodology is still in development, requiring further developments, specifications and validation. Accordingly, the findings of this paper refer to the realm of the research discussion, that is, highlighting the importance of preventively assessing and forecasting the acceptance of technology and building the best design strategies to boost sustainable and ethical technology adoption. -/- Social implications Once SAT method will be validated, it could constitute a useful tool, with societal implications, for helping users, markets and institutions to appraise and determine the co-implications of technology and socio-cultural contexts. -/- Originality/value New AI applications flood today’s users and markets, often without a clear understanding of risks and impacts. In the European context, regulations (EU AI Act) and rules (EU Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy) try to fill this normative gap. The SAT method seeks to integrate the risk-based assessment of AI with an assessment of the perceptive-psychological and socio-behavioural aspects of its social acceptability. (shrink)

The manuscript Chisianus VII 240 (K) is an important witness for A. Donatus’ Commentum on Terence, unfortunately discovered only after the editorial work of P. Wessner. K was demonstrated to follow different sources in different sections of the Commentary, but, for the section containing the commentary on Andria, it derives from the Carnotensis, a codex deperditus with a good Donatian text. In this paper I pay attention to significant errors that join the Chisianus VII 240 with Λ, a group of (...) manuscripts that come from the Maguntinus, in order to demostrate that the most probable way of explaining these Bindefehler is the assumption of a deep process of contamination, probably due to Λ. (shrink)

Emerging evidence supports the role for the intracellular domains of amyloid precursor protein (APP) in the physiology and function of APP. In this short report, I discuss the hypothesis that mutation of Tyr682 on the Y682ENPTY687 C‐terminal motif of APP may be directly or indirectly associated with alterations in APP functioning and activity, leading to neuronal defects and deficits. Mutation of Tyr682 induces an early and progressive age‐dependent cognitive and locomotor decline that is associated with a loss of synaptic connections, (...) a decrease in cholinergic tone, and defects in NGF signaling. These findings support a model in which APP‐C‐terminal domain exerts a pathogenic function in neuronal development and decline, and suggest that Tyr682 potentially could modulate the properties of APP metabolites in humans. (shrink)

The article compares some wellknown features of Western humanism with those of the so-called Muslim humanism (X-XII centuries). The Muslim “golden age” in its various aspects (philosophy, science, literature, politics, etc.) is built on a consistent, though multifarious, religious basis. Even cultural and historical reasons demonstrate, then, that ethics is not sufficient for establishing a common ground for dialogue with Islam, and that Islam has to be approached mainly in its religious meaning. A re-thinking of the Sacred Book on a (...) new basis, proposed by many of contemporary Muslim intellighenzia, who also often emphasize the importance of ancient humanism, should be taken into account also by their Western counterpart. West should not, on the contrary, make the mistake of reading Islam according to its own historical and/or ideological attitudes. KEY WORDS – Muslim humanism. West humanism. Intercultural dialog. Religion. (shrink)

O presente artigo compara algumas características bem conhecidas do humanismo ocidental com aquelas do assim chamado “humanismo muçulmano” dos séculos X-XII. A “idade de ouro” muçulmana, em suas várias facetas, construiu-se sobre uma consistente, apesar de multifacetada, base religiosa. Razões históricas e culturais demonstram sempre que a ética não é suficiente a fim de estabelecer uma base comum para o diálogo com o Islã, e que é preciso aproximar- se dele principalmente pelo viés do pensamento religioso. O re-pensar do Livro (...) Sagrado sobre um novo fundamento, proposto por diversos membros da intelligentzia muçulmana, e que realça, assim, o antigo humanismo, deve, pois, ser levado em consideração pela contraparte ocidental. Já o Ocidente, pelo contrário, não pode cometer o erro de ler o texto do Islã de acordo com suas próprias atitudes históricas e/ou ideológicas. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Humanismo islâmico. Humanismo ocidental. Diálogo de culturas. Religião. (shrink)

This article deals with Averroes’s interpretation of Metaph. Ε 1, where Aristotle discusses the nature and object of metaphysics, as well as its place in the hierarchy of sciences. Among Averroes’s predecessors, al-Kindī seems to see a coincidence between metaphysics and theology, since God can be described as the “first cause of everything”. However, al-Fārābī and Avicenna discovered that “first philosophy” could be conceived as an ontology distinct from theology; moreover, they considered theology to be only a part of metaphysics, (...) not even the most important one. In the Great Commentary on Metaphysics - where the Arabic translation of the work by the Jacobite monk Usṭāth is quoted, Averroes often just paraphrases the original passages. One may infer that theology in the strict sense is merely mentioned by way of example. In the Epitome of Metaphysics, the objects of metaphysics are “general” ones; metaphysics studies the “absolute being” and cannot be identified with theology as “pertaining to God”. (shrink)

The article describes the fourteen passages of the encyclopaedia containing the word dawla. The Ikhwān introduce a cyclical conception of the alternation of ruling dynasties. After the dynasty of the evil reached its apex, the dynasty of the good begins when learned agree “on a unique school and a sole religion”. The Ikhwān introduce this as a wondrous event, close to become reality. This conception is linked to their vision in expectance of the legitimate rulers after the debasement of the (...) Family of the Prophet following Muḥammad’s death. The connection of these passages with the rituals described in Ep. 50 On the Various Kinds of Management (where political vision, astrology and magic are combined) might confirm the Ikhwān’s Ismā ‘īlī commitment. (shrink)

Based on a new and complete collation of manuscripts and ancient editions, this paper will discuss some stemmatic and textual problems concerning the “Excerpta de comoedia” attributed to Aelius Donatus.

This paper wants to demonstrate the not casual similarity between Plautus’Asinaria 205 and Terence’s Andria 545 arguing for the possibility that Plautus’Asinaria 205 was interpolated.

In the first act of Terence'sAndria, we find a dialogue between the old man Simo and Sosia, the freedman, with the former explaining why he has decided to arrange a false wedding for his young son Pamphilus. He has, in fact, learned that his son, despite being betrothed, has had a relationship with another girl and that—quite a serious matter—the fiancée's father, Chremes, has heard about the clandestine affair. In verses 144–9 Simo reports on the not-altogether friendly meeting he has (...) had with Chremes, who is furious about the complete disrespect that has been shown to his daughter; Simo's only defence is to attempt to deny the truth (146:ego illud sedulo negare factum). (shrink)

In human groups performing oscillatory tasks, it has been observed that the frequency of participants' oscillations reduces when compared to that acquired in solo. This experimental observation is not captured by the standard Kuramoto oscillators, often employed to model human synchronization. In this work, we aim at capturing this observed phenomenon by proposing three alternative modifications of the standard Kuramoto model that are based on three different biologically-relevant hypotheses underlying group synchronization. The three models are tuned, validated and compared against (...) experiments on a group synchronization task, which is a multi-agent extension of the so-called mirror game. (shrink)

Heath and Tversky (1991, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 4:5–28) posed that reaction to ambiguity is driven by perceived competence. Competence effects may be inconsistent with ambiguity aversion if betting on own judgement is preferred to betting on a chance event, because judgemental probabilities are more ambiguous than chance events. This laboratory experiment analyses whether ambiguity affects prices and volumes in a double auction market, and contrasts ambiguity aversion to competence effects. In order to test for the presence of competence (...) effects, in the experiment uncertainty is tied to the realisation of events about which the decision maker is more or less knowledgeable. Two experiments are presented: in the first, knowledge is exogenous, whereas in the second the knowledge judgement is endogenous. Market prices provide evidence in favour of the competence hypothesis only when competence is self-assessed. Comparable volumes are observed in both experiments. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the present debate about business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that the Journal of Business Ethics is hosting. Numerous contributions argued theoretical frameworks and taxonomies of CSR practices. The authors want to ground in this knowledge and provide further evidence about how companies adopt CSR practices to address stakeholders’ claims and consolidate their trust. Evidence was provided by a longitudinal case study about an Italian food company that is one of the largest producers (...) of baby food. This company reshaped its corporate strategy along three decades through the adoption of CSR practices in order to win stakeholders’ trust about food safety and supply chain behaviour. The empirical exercise was informed by a literature review of the relevant contributions in terms of CSR business practices and levels of efforts to adopt them. In light of this review, the authors adopted for the research framework the taxonomy of business practices proposed by Spiller (2000, “Ethical Business and Investment: A Model for Business and Society”, Journal of Business Ethics 27, 149-160) and the levels of commitment towards CSR proposed by Stahl and Grigsby (1997, Strategic Management; Total Quality & Global Competition (Blackwell, Oxford)). The main findings are discussed in order to argue theoretical implications and identify further areas of research and debate. (shrink)

Mettant en perspective historique le parallèle entre sciences cognitives et phénoménologie, nous revenons sur « l’architecture ouverte », qui pour Bernstein expliquait la richesse du comportement à la lumière de la physiologie cérébrale. Sa conception de la « dextérité » sera interprétée en rapport à la « dégénérescence » du système nerveux au sens d’Edelman, de façon à mettre au jour les « contraintes dynamiques » entre l’environnement, le corps humain sensori-moteur et le cerveau. Les deux concepts renvoient, en effet, (...) à « l’ouverture » des processus mentaux et comportementaux, dont la plasticité conditionne l’adaptation de l’humain à son environnement. (shrink)

One of the main challenges for computational legal research is drawing up innovative heuristics to derive actionable knowledge from legal documents. While a large part of the research has been so far devoted to the extraction of purely legal information, less attention has been paid to seeking out in the texts the clues of more complex entities: legally relevant facts whose detection requires to link and interpret, as a unified whole, legal information and results of empirical analyses. This paper presents (...) an ongoing research that points in this direction, trying to devise new ways to support public prosecutors in assessing the dangerousness of individuals and groups under investigation, an activity that precisely relies on the cross-sectional evaluation of legal and empirical data. A knowledge mining strategy will be outlined that lines up, into a single metaheuristic model, information extraction, network-based inference, machine learning and visual analytics. We will focus, in particular, on the integration of graph-based inference and machine learning methods used both to support classification tasks and to explore new forms of man-machine cooperation. Experiments made involving public prosecutors from the Italian Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate and using data from real investigations have not only shown the potentialities of our approach but also offered an opportunity to reflect on the role we could assign to AI when thinking about the future of legal science and practice. (shrink)

This article aims at contributing to the discussion about the relationships between ICT, computer science and policy-making by focusing on agent-based social simulation. Enabled, from a technical point of view, by the developments of Distributed Artificial Intelligence in the 1990s and by the features of the object-oriented programming paradigm, agent-based social simulations are a tool for the analysis of social dynamics that can be used also to support the design and the evaluation of public policies. After a brief description of (...) social simulation paradigm and of its impact on social sciences, the paper presents a simple agent-based model devised to analyze, even if in a very abstract way, a phenomenon that can rouse the interest of legal scientists: the interplay between damaging behaviors, punishment and social mechanisms of learning and imitation. Our goal is to show how agent-based simulation can be used not only to illuminate basic mechanisms underlying social phenomena but also to reflect, in an innovative way, on how society can deal with them. (shrink)

In this paper, inspired by methods of Bigard, Keimel, and Wolfenstein , we develop an approach to sheaf representations of MV-algebras which combines two techniques for the representation of MV-algebras devised by Filipoiu and Georgescu and by Dubuc and Poveda . Following Davey approach , we use a subdirect representation of MV-algebras that is based on local MV-algebras. This allowed us to obtain: a representation of any MV-algebras as MV-algebra of all global sections of a sheaf of local MV-algebras on (...) the spectruum of its prime ideals; a representation of MV-algebras, having the space of minimal prime ideals compact, as MV-algebra of all global sections of a Hausdorff sheaf of MV-chains on the space of minimal prime ideals, which is a Stone space; an adjunction between the category of all MV-algebras and the category of MV-algebraic spaces, where an MV-algebraic space is a pair , where X is a compact topological space and F is a sheaf of MV-algebras with stalks that are local. (shrink)

In this paper we prove that the category of abelianl-groups is equivalent to the category of perfect MV-algebras. Furthermore, we give a finite equational axiomatization of the variety generated by perfect MV-algebras.

Humans naturally perceive visual patterns in a global manner and are remarkably capable of extracting object shapes based on properties such as proximity, closure, symmetry, and good continuation. Notwithstanding the role of these properties in perceptual grouping, studies highlighted differences in disembedding performance across individuals, which are summarized by the field dependence dimension. Evidence suggests that age and educational attainment explain part of this variability, whereas the role of sex is still highly debated. Also, which stimulus features primarily influence inter-individual (...) variations in perceptual grouping has still to be fully determined. Building upon these premises, we assessed the role of age, education level, and sex on performance at the Leuven Embedded Figure Test—a proxy of disembedding abilities—in 391 cisgender individuals. We also investigated to what extent shape symmetry, closure, complexity, and continuation relate to task accuracy. Overall, target asymmetry, closure, and good continuation with the embedding context increase task difficulty. Simpler shapes are more difficult to detect than those with more lines, yet context complexity impairs the recognition of complex targets to a greater extent. Concerning demographic data, we confirm that age and educational attainment are significantly associated with disembedding abilities and reveal a perceptual advantage in males. In summary, our study further highlights the role of shape properties in disembedding performance and unveils sex differences not reported so far. (shrink)

IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented strain to healthcare systems worldwide and posed unique challenges to the healthcare professionals and the general public.ObjectivesThe aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health, behavioral, and physical wellbeing of HCPs in the early and mid-term periods of the pandemic in comparison to non-HCPs. Thus, facilitating and guiding optimum planning and delivery of support to HCPs.Methods and AnalysisAn observational cross-sectional survey and cohort study aiming to enroll (...) over 1050 participants. Study questionnaires will be completed at baseline and after 6-weeks and 4-months. Recruitment initiated July 2020. The study was designed in London, United Kingdom, but open to participants worldwide. Baseline: Questionnaires comprising of validated self-administered screening tools for depression, anxiety, sleep-related issues, wellbeing, and burnout. The questionnaires also explore changes in behavior and physical wellbeing of the participants. In addition, associations of these mental health and behavioral factors with work-related factors and support will be explored. Six-weeks and 4-months follow-up: Follow-up questionnaires will assess change in symptoms of anxiety and depression, sleep disorders, use of alcohol and other substances, behavioral or interpersonal relationship changes. Physical wellbeing will be assessed through the presence of suspected or confirmed COVID-19 infection and absence from work. We will also evaluate the impact of variable provision of personal protection equipment, extended working hours, and concern for the wellbeing of family members, anxiety levels, and evidence of burnout.Statistical ConsiderationsThe study has 80% power to detect a 10% difference of combined depression and/or anxiety symptoms between the groups using two-sided type 1 error at 0.05 at baseline. Assuming that only 50% of these HCPs agree to be a part of a cohort survey, we will have 80% power to detect around 12% difference in the two groups in reported physical symptoms, or prevalence of depression and/or anxiety at the end of the study.EthicsThe study was approved by the Cambridge East, Research Ethics Committee.Trial Registration NumberClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04433260. (shrink)

This study sheds new light on why healthcare organisations are having difficulty responding to the growing pressure from stakeholders to proactively address their responsibility to deliver high-quality services without harming the environment. Basing our work on past research on stakeholder pressure and environmental barriers, we conceptualise and empirically test the effect of the interplay between stakeholder pressure and internal barriers on healthcare organisations’ adoption of proactive environmental strategies. To test the proposed hypotheses, a survey was carried out among medical directors (...) of Italian healthcare organisations in 2012. Our results show that the lack of commitment to environmental issues within the organisation represents the main barrier to healthcare organisations’ implementing PESs. Furthermore, the difficulties in evaluating the impacts of advanced environmental practices negatively moderate the influence of stakeholders on developing PESs. Our findings contribute to extending previous knowledge on PESs in two ways: focusing on the healthcare sector, our study investigates the phenomenon in a research context that has been largely overlooked in the sustainability literature; and cross-cutting previous research on stakeholder pressure and internal barriers, the study conceptualises and tests a more complete framework for understanding the adoption of PESs. (shrink)

This paper argues that neuroscience has great potential to increase free will rather than condemn us to determinism. If human freedom depends on such factors as: having the intelligence and rationality to understand the physical, social and moral consequences of one’s actions; being aware of what choices are available and viable; being without emotional illness and compulsion; etc., then brain based treatments can expand human freedom. We present several hypothetical cases in which treatments appear to increase experienced free will. In (...) the fi rst case, a prescription for Epistemidol increases the IQ and information-seeking drive of a woman with initially low normal intelligence. In the second case, a man with Dysthymia is treated with Optimistimine and becomes more outgoing and receptive to others. These and other cases suggest that experiential freedom can be pharmaceutically enhanced by an expanded ability to deliberate and understand the nature of choices and their consequences. (shrink)

We look at a hierarchical arrangement of ideals in an MV -algebra. The principal classes of ideals studied are the maximals, the primes, the local and perfect ideals and the semi-locals. Beyond these special classes of ideals are the general ideals. Herein we study some relationships among these classes and, more specifically, the products of ideals of these classes. Among the results obtained are the square of a prime ideal is a local ideal, the finite product of prime ideals is (...) a semilocal ideal. We also show that the set of local ideals shares many of the properties of the class of prime ideals, as the Lying Over Theorem and the Going Up Theorem. (shrink)

Formulas of n variables of Łukasiewicz sentential calculus can be represented, via McNaughton’s theorem, by piecewise linear functions, with integer coefficients, from hypercube [0,1] n to [0,1], called McNaughton functions. As a consequence of the McNaughton representation of a formula it is obtained a canonical form of a formula. Indeed, up to logical equivalence, any formula can be written as an infimum of finite suprema of formulas associated to McNaughton functions which are truncated functions to $[0,1]$ of the restriction to (...) [0,1] n of single hyperplanes, for short, called simple McNaughton functions. In the present paper we will concern with the problem of presenting formulas of Lukasiewicz sentential calculus in normal form. Here we list the main results we obtained: a) we give an axiomatic description of some classes of formulas having the property to be canonically mapped one-to-one onto the class of simple Mc Naughton functions; b) we provide normal forms for Lukasiewicz sentential calculus, making use of formulas defined in a); c) we prove the polynomial complexity of formulas, in normal form, coming from a certain class described as in a); d) we extend the results described in a), b) and c) to Rational Lukasiewicz logic. (shrink)