Playing fields are “spaces where the communitas suspends its everyday life and structures” and “The internal logic of sporting games is connected to values from the social context”, Playing fields: Power, practice, and passion in sport, 127–144. Reno: University of Nevada Press). But what about the space in between? What kind of semiotics organisation can be detected in the membrane between player and liminal space where spectators are not allowed yet specific characters needed to carry out an event? We can (...) therefore identify a liminality that can be connected either to the controlled or the wild playing field and depending on which of the two is the case can be analysed according to the degree of regulated system of signs which they produce. This implies different pathways and rituals: as matches are played, a variety of bodily activities may be taking place concurrently. Furthermore, it is inevitable that these activities attract the attention of the audience or alternately lead a player to interact with a non-player. In this article, I will first try to identify certain semiotics features, especially connected to Eco’s Peircian concept of Encyclopedia, that characterize the status of liminal space around the playing field. Then I will focus on liminality in soccer, investigating what kinds of interaction exist outside the playing area. (shrink)

ObjectiveMisophonia is an unusually strong aversion to a specific class of sounds – most often human bodily sounds such as chewing, crunching, or breathing. A number of studies have emerged in the last 10 years examining misophonia in adults, but little is known about the impact of the condition in children. Here we set out to investigate the well-being profile of children with misophonia, while also presenting the first validated misophonia questionnaire for children.Materials and MethodsWe screened 142 children using our (...) novel diagnostic [the Sussex Misophonia Scale for Adolescents ]. This allowed us to identify a group of children already manifesting misophonia at that age – the first population-sampled cohort of child misophonics examined to date. Children and their parents also completed measures of well-being and creative self-construct.ResultsData show that children with misophonia have significantly elevated levels of anxiety and obsessive compulsive traits. Additionally children with misophonia have significantly poorer life-satisfaction, and health-related quality of life. As predicted, they show no differences in creative self-construct.ConclusionTogether our data suggest the first evidence in population sampling of poorer life outcomes for children with misophonia, and provide preliminary convergent and discriminant validation for our novel misophonia instrument. Our data suggest a need for greater recognition and therapeutic outlets for adolescents with misophonia. (shrink)

Climate change, rising energy costs, and other dilemmas raise the prospect for major change in energy-ecology-society relations. Two prominent proposals for change include: a nuclear power renaissance; and mega-scale renewable energy development. Both suggest that modern society will receive a rising stream of less CO2-rich kilowatt-hours, so that increased energy consumption and economic growth can continue. The article doubts these CO2 claims and finds both options lead to deepening unsustainability and environmental injustice. A third approach is proposed. A new institutional (...) and community strategy called a Sustainability Energy Utility. The SEU looks to reduce energy use and seeks to support remaining energy needs by community-scale renewables. To accomplish deep energy change, the authors show how an SEU can move society from an energy commodity to energy commons regime. Commonwealth economy and community trusts are key means to significant change: a future commons is offered as the more appropriate strategy. (shrink)

Contemporary international migration is directly related to the construction of the nation-state. The variations in this migration are multiple, depending on the type of mobility, the territories and the characteristics of the people who practice it. One kind of migration that has been particularly important at the end of the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first century is that of minors who migrate without being accompanied by their parents. The legal definitions, bureaucratic practices and rights of these minors-turned-migrants (...) vary across European states and in the international literature. This paper aims to analyse the terminology used colloquially in the media and academically to refer to this group of people. In the early days of the phenomenon, the acronym MENA (unaccompanied migrant minors) has been the most common in Spain. It was intended to be a “neutral” term used in the legal sphere and migration studies. Still, in recent times, MENA has become more than a descriptive category. It has become a way of criminalising a group of young people who are in national territory and come from another country (usually an African country and, especially, a Maghreb country). However, not everything is determined by the circumstances surrounding us or our lives as social beings. Social pressure, with its narrative, cannot mean leaving aside history, legal culture, and learning. We need a new language to talk about this group of people. Currently, the negative connotation hides the most human aspect of this condition; the term “MENA” is a banner to mystify a fundamental fact: we are talking about children and adolescents who, not being able to count on the protection of an adult or family member, are condemned to social exclusion. This article approaches the migrant child as a critical figure who embodies the paradox of humanitarian reasoning, which is also a legal and political paradox, encapsulating the tension between structural rejection and the individual capacity of the human subject. By focusing on the theoretically productive role of minors without parental guardianship as subjects of ethnographic examination, this paper aims to understand better how current anthropological knowledge redefines the concepts of childhood, adulthood, and migration. The first part of this paper focuses on examining the terminologies used at the European and international levels, with their respective social implications. The second part focuses on the Spanish case, with the different impacts the term produces at the local level. The third and final part focuses on the terminology of refugee children and opens the discussion on scapegoating in Spain. (shrink)

A diagrammatic logical calculus for the syllogistic reasoning is introduced and discussed. We prove that a syllogism is valid if and only if it is provable in the calculus.

We present a reading of the traditional syllogistics in a fragment of the propositional intuitionistic multiplicative linear logic and prove that with respect to a diagrammatic logical calculus that we introduced in a previous paper, a syllogism is provable in such a fragment if and only if it is diagrammatically provable. We extend this result to syllogistics with complemented terms à la De Morgan, with respect to a suitable extension of the diagrammatic reasoning system for the traditional case and a (...) corresponding reading of such De Morgan style syllogistics in the previously referred to fragment of linear logic. (shrink)

La nostra via.--L'esempio dei grandi.--Il "verismo" e la musica.-- Influenze straniere.--Mascagni e il suo stile.--Puccini e la sua maniera.--Gli altri.--Sinfonismo e verismo.--Oltre a "realtà.".

This volume examines Diderot's and d'Holbach's views on determinism to illuminate some of the most important debates taking place in eighteenth-century Europe. It problematises their atheism by showing their philosophy to be deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and provides a more nuanced and historicised interpretation of the so-called 'Radical Enlightenment', challenging the notions that this movement can be taken to be a perfectly coherent set of ideas and that it represents a complete break with 'the old'.

Very often reality is identified with our knowledge of it, and in turn our knowledge of reality is identified with the linguistic manner of describing it. It is claimed that the three moments cannot be identified, by pointing out some crucial differences among them obtained through an analysis of the power and limitations of languages and of the manners of acquisition of knowledge.

Doors play a complex role in architecture. The very word, at least in Italian and French, illuminates the marking of the deliberate interruption of the act of foundation during the ceremony of the wall's enceinte tracing. The word porta indicates the action of portare. During the tracing of the furrow into the ground, the blade is lifted out of the ground in order to mark the place of the future entrance to the city. Another significant role is the marking of (...) the “exit” from this world and it is loaded with intense significance in funereal architecture. But if we look at the semantic “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” it will be easy to discover the other, complementary, and necessary role of the porta. The reading of Aristophanes' Lysistrata shows the explicit “hidden” metaphor of the door, which has been very well christened as the “Origin of the World” in the famous Courbet painting. (shrink)

The present study investigates the types of verb and symbolic representational strategies used by 10 deaf signing adults and 13 deaf signing children who described in Italian Sign Language 45 video clips representing nine action types generally communicated by five general verbs in spoken Italian. General verbs, in which the same sign was produced to refer to several different physical action types, were rarely used by either group of participants. Both signing children and adults usually produced specific depicting predicates by (...) incorporating, through a representational strategy, the object and/or the modality of the action into the sign. As for the different types of representational strategies, the adults used the hand-as-object strategy more frequently than the children, who, in turn, preferred to use the hand-as-hand strategy, suggesting that different degrees of cognitive complexity are involved in these two symbolic strategies. Addressing the symbolic iconic strategies underlying sign formation could provide new insight into the perceptual and cognitive processes of linguistic meaning construction. The findings reported here support two main assumptions of cognitive linguistics applied to sign languages: there is a strong continuity between gestures and language; lexical units and depicting constructions derive from the same iconic core mechanism of sign creation. (shrink)

De spatio, ac tempore -- De spatio, et tempore, ut a nobis cognoscuntur -- De motu absoluto, an possit a relativo distingui -- De vi inertiae.

As far as we know, no notion of concrete fibration is available. We provide one such notion in adherence to the foundational attitude that characterizes the adoption of the fibrational perspective in approaching fundamental subjects in category theory and discuss it in connection with the notion of concrete category and the notions of locally small and small fibrations. We also discuss the appropriateness of our notion of concrete fibration for fibrations of small maps, which is relevant to algebraic set theory.

By splitting idempotent morphisms in the total and base categories of fibrations we provide an explicit elementary description of the Cauchy completion of objects in the categories Fib) of fibrations with a fixed base category \ and Fib of fibrations with any base category. Two universal constructions are at issue, corresponding to two fibered reflections involving the fibration of fibrations \.

We review major developmental evidence on the continuity from action to gesture to word and sign in human children, highlighting the important role of caregivers in the development of multimodal communication. In particular, the basic issues considered here and contributing to the current debate on the origins and development of the language-ready brain are: (1) links between early actions, gestures and words and similarities in representational strategies; (2) importance of multimodal communication and the interplay between gestures and spoken words; (3) (...) interconnections between early actions, gestures and signs. The innovation of this report is in connecting these themes together to relevant findings from studies on children between 6 and 36 months of age and highlighting interesting parallels in studies on ape communicative behavior. (shrink)

Although mouse‐tracking has been taken as a real‐time window on different aspects of human decision‐making processes, whether purely semantic information affects response conflict at the level of motor output as measured through mouse movements is still unknown. Here, across two experiments, we investigated the effects of semantic knowledge by predicting participants’ performance in a standard keyboard task and in a mouse‐tracking task through distributional semantics, a usage‐based modeling approach to meaning. In Experiment 1, participants were shown word pairs and were (...) required to perform a two‐alternative forced choice task selecting either the more abstract or the more concrete word, using standard keyboard presses. In Experiment 2, participants performed the same task, yet this time response selection was achieved by moving the computer mouse. Results showed that the involvement of semantic components in the task at hand is observable using both standard reaction times (Experiment 1) as well as using indexes extracted from mouse trajectories (Experiment 2). In particular, mouse trajectories reflected the response conflict and its temporal evolution, with a larger deviation for increasing word semantic relatedness. These findings support the validity of mouse‐tracking as a method to detect deep and implicit decision‐making features. Additionally, by demonstrating that a usage‐based model of meaning can account for the different degrees of cognitive conflict associated with task achievement, these findings testify the impact of the human semantic memory on decision‐making processes. (shrink)

A comprehensive and scholarly study Fr. Rosini has, perhaps for the first time, provided a complete, well-balanced exposition of Scotus on Our Lady, with all the many inter-connections between the mystery of Mary and the whole of theology, ...

Pre-existing mathematical formulations are generally used for the treatment of new scientific problems. In this note we show that the construction of mathematical structures from open physical, chemical, and biological problems leads to new intriguing mathematics of increasing complexity called iso-, geno-, and hyper-mathematics for the treatment of matter in reversible, irreversible, and multi-valued conditions, respectively, plus anti-isomorphic images called isodual mathematics for the treatment of antimatter. These novel mathematics are based on the lifting of the multiplicative unit of ordinary (...) fields (with characteristic zero) from its traditional value +1 into: (1) invertible, Hermitean, and single-valued units for isomathematics; (2) invertible, non-Hermitean, and single-valued units for genomathematics; and (3) invertible, non-Hermitean, and multi-valued units for hypermathematics; with corresponding liftings of the conventional associative product and consequential lifting of all branches of mathematics admitting a (left and right) multiplicative unit. An anti-Hermitean conjugation applied to the totality of quantities and their operation of the preceding mathematics characterizes the isodual mathematics. Intriguingly, the emerging formulations preserve the abstract axioms of conventional mathematics (that based on the unit +1). As such, the new formulations result to be new realizations of existing abstract mathematical axioms. We then show that the above mathematical advances permit corresponding liftings of conventional classical and quantum theories with a resolution of basic open problems in physics, chemistry, and biology, numerous experimental verifications, as well as new industrial applications. (shrink)

In this note we outline the history of q-deformations, indicate their physical shortcomings, suggest their apparent resolution via an invariant Lie-admissible formulation based on a new mathematics of genotopic type, and point out their expected physical significance.

We identify new, rather serious, physical and mathematical inconsistencies of the current formulation of noncanonical or nonunitary string theories due to the lack of invariant units necessary for consistent measurements, lack of preservation in time of Hermiticity-observability, and other shortcomings. We propose three novel reformulations of string theories for matter of progressively increasing complexity via the novel iso-, geno-, and hyper-mathematics of hadronic mechanics, which resolve the current inconsistencies, while offering new intriguing possibilities, such as: an axiomatically consistent and invariant (...) inclusion of gravity, the reduction of macroscopic irreversibility to the most primitive level of vibrations of the universal substratum (ether), or the treatment of multi-valued, irreducible, biological structures. We then identify three corresponding classical formulations of string theories for antimatter via the novel anti-isomorphic isodual mathematics. We finally outline the intriguing features of the emerging new cosmologies (including biological structures, as it should be for all cosmologies), such as: universal invariance (rather than covariance) under a symmetry isomorphic to the Poincaré group and its isodual; equal distributions of matter and antimatter in the universe (as a limit case); continuous creation; no need for the missing mass; significantly reduced dimensions; possibility of experimental identification of antimatter in the universe; identically null total characteristics of time, energy, linear and angular momentum, charge, etc.; and other intriguing features. (shrink)

The most majestic scientific achievement, of this century in mathematical beauty, axiomatic consistency, and experimental verifications has been special relativity with its unitary structure at the operator level, and canonical structure at the classical levels, which has turned out to be exactly valid for point particles moving in the homogenenous and isotropic vacuum (exterior dynamical problems). In recent decades a number of authors have studied nonunitary and noncanonical theories, here generally calleddeformations for the representation of broader conditions, such as extended (...) and deformable particles moving within inhomogeneous and anisotrophic physical media (interior dynamical problems). In this paper we show that nonunitary deformations, including, q-, k-, quatum-, Lie-isotopic, Lie-admissible, and other deformations, even thoughmathematically correct, have a number of problematic aspects ofphysical character when formulated on conventional spaces over conditional fields, such as lack of invariance of the basic space-time units, ambiguous applicability to measurements, loss of Hermiticity-observability in time, lack of invariant numerical predictions, loss of the axions of special relativity, and others. We then show that the classical noncanonical counterparts of the above nonunitary deformations are equally afflicted by corresponding problems of physical consistency. We also show that the contemporary formulation of gravity is afflicted by similar problematic aspects because Riemannian spaces are noncanonical deformations of Minkowskian spaces, thus having noninvariant space-time units. We then point out that new mathematical methods, calledisotopies, genotopies, hyperstructures and their isoduals, offer the possibilities of constructing a nonunitary theory, known asrelativistic hadronic mechanics which: (1) is as axiomatically consistent as relativistic quantum mechanics, (2) preserves the abstract axioms of special relativity, and (3) results in a completion of the conventional mechanics much along the celebrated Einstein-Podolski-Rosen argument. A number of novel applications are indicated, such as a geometric unification of the special and general relativity via the isominkowskian geometry in which the two relativities are differentiated via the invariant basic unit, while preserving conventional Riemannian metrics, Einstein's field equations, and related experimental verifications; a novel operator form of gravity verifying the axioms of relativistic quantum mechanics under the universal isopoincaré symmetry; a new structure model of hadrons with conventional massive particles as physical constituents which is compatile with composite quarks and with established unitary classifications; and other novels applications in nuclear physics, astrophysics, theoretical biology, and other fields. The paper ends with the proposal of a number of new experiments, some of which may imply new practical applications, such as conceivable new forms of recycling nuclear waste. The achievement of axiomatic consistency in the study of the above physical problems has been possible for the first time in this paper thanks to mathematical advances that recently appeared in a special issue of theRendiconti Circolo Matematico Palermo, and in other journals identified in the Acknowledgements. (shrink)