Unitary View Research Articles

Accommodation and Language Contact.

The paper introduces the Special Issue on Language Contact and Speaker Accommodation, which originates from the conference Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) held at the University of Lecce, Italy, in 2019. It discusses the topics of language contact and speaker accommodation, summarizing the contributions included in the Special Issue, and arguing explicitly in favour of a unitary view of how both temporary and stable changes happen in (part of) the linguistic systems. Accommodation is seen as the same gradual and non-homogeneous process at play in different contact settings. In the introductory sections, a discussion is offered on various situations in which linguistic systems are in contact and on the main factors that may be at play; the following sections offer an overview of the papers included in the Special Issue, which focus on accommodation in L2 and heritage speakers as well as on the time dimension of dialect or language societal contact. Finally, accommodation is discussed as the same process that is at work in any interaction, that may modify temporarily or long-term the system of L2 learners and bilinguals (e.g., immigrants), that usually affects in the long-term the heritage speakers' system, and that only in the long term can lead to language changes involving entire communities.

Critical Annotations on Historical Documents: Methodological Possibilities for International Relations Research

This process note explicates the methodological intervention of maintaining fieldnotes on government documents and its significance for historically situated international relations (IR) research. For the most part, IR scholarship treats archival documents as the neutral preserve of the state, representing its coherent national interests. Building on discussions around critical methods within IR, I argue that there is a need to reflexively engage with the writing and curating practices of the state. This process note deploys the ethnographic hallmark of thick description within IR research through critical annotations on archival documents and other government publications on India’s eastern Himalayan borderlands between 1880 and 1965. These annotations encourage a granular reading of government documents and situate them within a larger context of their production, reception, archival memorialisation and subsequent access. I propose that critical annotations help us move beyond post-hoc analyses of foreign policy in terms of success and failure. Instead, in viewing IR theorising as ‘unfinished dictionaries of the international’, I argue that critical annotations challenge a unitary view of the state and facilitate a more nuanced analysis of foreign policymaking emphasising historical contingencies within which policies are articulated and enacted.

Maxwell’s Early Unitary View of Electricity and Fluid Mechanics

In young Maxwell’s eyes, electricity, magnetism and fluid mechanics present analogies that let the first be mathematically grasped in a unitary way similarly to the latter. This entry sketches the first steps of James Clerk Maxwell’s unitary view of electromagnetism and fluid mechanics, with long-lasting effects on understanding the physical world. In his very first paper on the subject, Maxwell interpreted Faraday’s concept of lines of force of both electricity and magnetism as filaments of a flowing fluid. That is, Maxwell suggested to unify the previously distinct fields of electricity and magnetism, considering them as different aspects of the same entity, the ‘electromagnetic field’, which is mathematically described by four partial differential equations. In the literature there are several comprehensive works on Maxwell’s mature exposition of his theory; however, the aim of this entry contribution is rather more limited. Indeed, it is restricted to examining the contributions of Maxwell’s first paper towards developing the idea of electric current as the motion of an incompressible fluid. Thus, this entry highlights the strong connections of Maxwell’s epistemological view with the ‘mechanistic’ approach of the time to every aspect of physical phenomenology. For this purpose, this entry mentions some historical context surrounding the emergence of Maxwell’s innovative concepts.

Emil Kraepelin's taxonomic unitary view of manic-depressive insanity in the 21st century: the never-ending diagnostic conundrum of bipolar depression.

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An Experience Sampling Measure of the Key Features of Rumination.

Research indicates that rumination can be viewed as a dynamic process that fluctuates over time, within hours and days. An increasing number of intensive longitudinal studies on rumination are accordingly being conducted and published using experiencing sampling methodology (ESM), a technique with measurements in everyday life. Yet, this literature suffers from a profound caveat: rumination has so far been conceptualized and measured as a unitary construct in these ESM studies. This is unfortunate, since such a unitary view contrasts with prominent contemporary models that regard rumination as a multifaceted construct, wherein the key features are not interchangeable and should therefore be measured separately. Moreover, no validated ESM measure of the key features of rumination has yet been developed. Therefore, we developed and validated an ESM protocol and the first ESM questionnaire to assess rumination as a multifaceted construct, measuring five features of rumination. We conducted an ESM study in a community sample of 40 French-speaking participants. They answered the five rumination ESM items in French four times a day for fourteen days. At the end of the ESM assessment period, participants completed trait-like questionnaires of rumination, depression, and general anxiety. The ESM rumination items exhibited good psychometric properties, including excellent within-person variability and convergent validity with corresponding trait-like constructs. Although further validation is warranted, this novel ESM assessment protocol of rumination as a multifaceted construct (validated in French and translated into English) will allow future researchers to study how rumination's features fluctuate and interact with other constructs over time.

DOES SIZE MATTER IN ORGANIZING CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (CSR) IN ROMANIAN FIRMS?

The concept and practice of CSR have displayed chameleonic features through time and nowadays the level of involvement, planification, organization and evaluation of CSR incentives differ from region to region and between companies. There is still need to shed light and construct a unitary view on the subject both in theory and practice. Companies’ role in society has expanded with the shifts of power in the globalization process and their social impact can be seen more than ever. Business entities now need to explain how their actions affect the economy, the environment, and society overall due to the release of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Reports and as well as the increase in academic interest in the topic, fact that puts them in the spotlight both regionally and internationally. Although the notion of CSR is still relatively new in Romania and was only introduced at the beginning of the 1990s, it has been a prominent topic in literature and practice during the past few decades. Nevertheless, Romanian CSR practice is not well supported by empirical evidence. Companies can have a significant impact on the progress of a developing country. Therefore, through this research we aim at determining the state-of-art of CSR incentives in Romanian companies, the level of involvement, organization, budgeting, strategies and evaluation in connection with firm size and capital ownership. This empirical study consists of research that is part of a broader quantitative analysis of CSR focusing on the Romanian context. In this study we provide insights regarding the involvement and organization of CSR incentives of companies with the purpose of testing the existence of a relationship in connection with firm size taking into consideration the number of employees, capital ownership and firm age.

Intuition in Mathematics: from Racism to Pluralism

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many mathematicians referred to intuition as the indispensable research tool for obtaining new results. In this essay we will analyse a group of mathematicians (Felix Klein, Henri Poincaré, Ludwig Bieberbach, Arend Heyting) who interacted with Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (the father of the intuitionist foundational school) in order to compare their conceptions of intuition. We will see how to the same word “intuition” (in German Anschauung) very different meanings corresponded: they varied from geometrical vision, to a unitary view of a demonstration, to the perception of time, to the faculty (shared by everybody) of considering concepts that habitually occur in our thinking separately. Furthermore, we will discover that these different meanings had a philosophical, very relevant counterside: they passed from a racial characterization of mathematics to a pluralistic view of it.

Leveraging translanguaging practices in an elementary poetry writing workshop

ABSTRACT While scholars across a range of disciplines challenge the idea that bi/multilinguals have separate linguistic repertoires, monolingual expectations are common in bilingual education. Using elements of case study design and discourse analysis, I explore translanguaging as both a dynamic linguistic practice and a linguistically sustaining pedagogy to develop biliteracy in a fourth-grade bilingual poetry writing workshop. As a linguistic practice, the teacher and her students utilized receptive and productive translanguaging for a variety of purposes, such as to emphasize meaning and establish group membership. It is important to note that the term receptive translanguaging does not necessarily counter the unitary view of bi/multilingualism, rather it focuses on the social duality of language and it acknowledges how bilinguals use their full linguistic repertoire. In terms of pedagogy, I found that the teacher modeled translanguaging in whole class mini lessons and one-on-one conferences, highlighted translingual mentor texts and encouraged students to write translingually for their bi/multilingual families. This work is significant to the field of bilingual education as it highlights how bi/multilinguals language in school settings when there are no linguistic constraints and provides specific examples of translanguaging pedagogy.

Mixed Depression: A Survey on Psychopathological, Diagnostic, and Therapeutic Approaches among a Sample of Italian Psychiatrists

Background: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (5th edition) introduced the specifier “with Mixed Features” to the diagnosis of Major Depressive Episode to designate the presence of (hypo) manic symptoms as part of the clinical presentation. This change has led to renewed attention on the operational definition, diagnosis, and treatment of Mixed Depression. Objective: To investigate the diagnostic and therapeutic approaches towards Mixed Depression among a representative sample of Italian psychiatrists. Methods: Between March and April 2021, 342 psychiatrists working in Italian adult mental health services were invited to participate in an anonymous online survey comprising 32 questions designed to investigate clinical and psychopathological approaches regarding the management of mixed depression in daily psychiatric practice. Results: 83.74% of participants reported having performed a diagnosis of mixed depression in the last five years, with the majority of respondents affirming that they had not used any diagnostic tool. Only 7,5% of the surveyed psychiatrists considered the DSM-5 criteria to be fully adequate in the description of this clinical entity. The most used pharmacological approach was combined therapy, in particular antipsychotics plus mood stabilizers. For monotherapy, the preferred drugs were Valproate and Quetiapine. Regarding the conceptualization of mood disorders, 199 of the participants chose the Kraepelinian unitary spectrum view; meanwhile, 101 expressed their preference for the binary model. Conclusion: Our results suggest a prominent position of mixed depression in the context of mood disorders. Univocal operational criteria and additional research on pharmacological treatment are also needed to ensure the correct recognition and management of mixed depression.

Morele vorming en filosofie opnieuw met elkaar verbinden

Studenten van de Universiteit van Tilburg onderscheiden zich van die van andere universiteiten doordat er in hun opleiding veel aandacht wordt besteed aan karaktervorming. Op welke manier kunnen docenten Studenten helpen om hun karakter te vormen? Kern van mijn betoog is dat morele vorming hierbij een belangrijke rol speelt en dat filosofiedocenten bij uitstek ertoe doen om de morele vorming plaats te laten vinden. Morele vorming en filosofie worden door mij opnieuw met elkaar verbonden, in de zin dat een verbinding via de empirie wordt gemaakt. Ik zal voortbouwend op Martha Nussbaum morele vorming plaatsen in een context van verschillende manieren van ethiek leren; de pedagogische taak van de docent schetsen; voortbouwend op John Dewey en Hannah Arendt empirisch onderzochte kenmerken geven van effectieve filosofielessen; en voortbouwend op Pierre Hadot het goede als oefening die het karakter vormt voorstellen. Zo kunnen we, ondersteund door onderzoek uit faculteiten waar karaktervorming tot de kern behoort, filosofie en theologie, werken aan de morele vorming van studenten. Niet alleen studenten en hun docenten zullen hiervan profiteren, maar ook de gemeenschap rond de studenten (bijvoorbeeld leeftijdgenoten en familie) en hun beroepspraktijken (pastoraat, justitie, defensie, geestelijke verzorging en onderwijs).

Aristotelian and/or Nietzschean narratology

AbstractOver the years, narratologists have established a unitary view of narrative structure based on the principles of Aristotle’sPoetics. I propose in this essay to describe the general features of an alternative epistemological framework based on a renewed interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’sThe Birth of Tragedy. Through this analysis, I wish to show how the adoption of the Aristotelian model as a framework for narratological research could have led to neglecting certain fundamental aspects of narrativity that the adoption of a Nietzschean perspective, conversely, would highlight. In particular, I want to emphasize that the abandonment of the Aristotelian perspective in favor of a Nietzschean approach can be extremely useful in order to highlight the über-natural character of so-called “unnatural narratives”. I will test my hypotheses through the analysis of David Foster Wallace’s short story “Mister Squishy” (2004), which represents an emblematic case of “Nietzschean narrative”.

The fractured frames of Black Mirror

Looking to the increased multiplication of virtual frames or windows in daily life, Anne Friedberg argues that we will increasingly come to ‘see the world in spatially and fractured frames’, as if a puzzle challenging us to fit its pieces together. This perspective is particularly apt for considering the much-praised programme Black Mirror, which repeatedly examines those multiple, and multiply broken, media frames, and does so through a format that is itself composed of separate frames, that is, as an anthology show that troubles the unitary view often ascribed to series television. This article examines Black Mirror’s interrogation of series television by looking at how various episodes - including ‘Fifteen Million Merits’, ‘White Bear’, ‘USS Callister’, and ‘Nosedive’ - evoke the nature of seriality and its impact on audience subjectivity. These episodes, among others, examine the fear that we might find ourselves dominated by the various technologies we have created, and constrained to the paths (including the endless paths of seriality) those technologies seem to lay out for us. These episodes especially show how the series is concerned with reflecting how those technologies play on and with us and project a creeping sense that we are becoming little more than featured players cast in an ongoing, formulaic and serial story from which there is no escape.

Delegating repression?: Pro-government militias and domestic terrorism

ABSTRACT Scholars have increasingly disaggregated domestic terrorism from transnational terrorism and sought to understand the causal factors of the former by focusing on endogenous features of the state and the actions of the government that either provoke or create opportunities for the occurrence of domestic terrorist attacks, especially repressive actions of the government. These arguments are implicitly framed by a unitary view of the state within intra-state conflict. The conflict literature, however, has increasingly looked beyond this unitary view and examined the role and impact of pro-government militias (PGMs) as a tactical means of increasing the state’s ability to wage violence. Using negative binomial analysis of data on domestic terrorism and PGMs, this article demonstrates that PGM activity that serves as a force multiplier for official security forces increases the likelihood of an increase in domestic terrorism, an argument that is robust to various model specifications.

Delineating the Psychic Structure of Substance Use and Addictions, from Neurobiology to Clinical Implications: Ten Years Later

The diagnosis of substance use disorder is currently based on the presence of specifically identified behavioral symptoms. In addition, other psychiatric signs and symptoms accompany addictive behavior, contributing to the full picture of patients’ psychopathologic profile. Historically, such symptoms were confined within the framework of “comorbidity”, as comorbid psychiatric disorders or personality traits. However, an alternative unitary view of the psychopathology of addiction, inclusive of related psychiatric symptoms, has been claimed, with the support of epidemiological, neurobiological, and neuropsychological evidence. In the present article, we highlight the research advancements that strengthen this unified perspective. We then give an account of our group’s definition of a specific SCL-90-based construct of the psychopathology of addiction. Lastly, we discuss the benefits that can be expected to be acquired in the evaluation and treatment of patients with a longitudinal approach including psychological/psychiatric predisposing features, addictive behavior, and psychiatric manifestations.

A study On : Confidentiality Approach to Prevent Features Disclosure in IoT Situations

This paper proposes an approach which safeguards confidentiality to avoid disclosures of features within a multiple IoT situation, that is, a setup of objects in networks that communicate with each other. Two ideas derived from the theory of databases, namely k-anonymity and t-certitude, form our basis. They are used to cluster the objects to provide a unitary view of them and their characteristics. In fact, the use of anonymity and t-closeness robustly ensures privacy for derived groups. Furthermore, description of the object grouping scheme that preserves privacy, which represents the core of our approach was studied. Eventually, we illustrated the corresponding security model and analyzed the associated properties. The study also provided important advantages for the protection of user privacy in all those situations where knowledge of object features may help an attacker to obtain information about user habits and behavior. This study prevents not only the disclosure of information but also the divulgation of features. This is a major strength of our approach as malicious analyzes of the characteristics of objects can interfere with the privacy of people.

E-ASSESS: Creating an EPA Assessment Tool for Structured Simulated Emergency Scenarios.

BackgroundThe entrustable professional activity (EPA) assessment framework allows supervisors to assign entrustment levels to physician trainees for specific activities. Limited opportunity for direct observation of trainees hampers entrustment decisions, in particular for infrequently performed activities. Simulation allows for direct observation, so tools to assess performance of EPAs in simulation could potentially provide additional data to complement clinical assessments.ObjectiveWe developed and collected validity evidence for a simulation-based tool grounded in the EPA framework.MethodsWe developed E-ASSESS (EPA Assessment for Structured Simulated Emergency ScenarioS) to assess performance in 2 EPAs among pediatric residents participating in simulation-based team training in 2017–2018. We collected validity data, applying Messick's unitary view. Three raters used E-ASSESS to assign entrustment levels based on performance in simulation. We compared those ratings to entrustment levels assigned by clinical supervisors (different from the study raters) for the same residents on a separate tool designed for clinical practice. We calculated intraclass correlation (ICC) for each tool and Pearson correlation coefficients to compare ratings between tools.ResultsTwenty-eight residents participated in the study. The ICC between the 3 raters for entrustment ratings on E-ASSESS ranged from 0.65 to 0.77, while ICC among raters of the clinical tool were 0.59 and 0.57. We found no significant correlations between E-ASSESS ratings and clinical practice ratings for either EPA (r = -0.35 and 0.38, P > .05).ConclusionsAssessment following an EPA framework in the simulation context may be useful to provide data points to inform entrustment decisions as part of resident assessment.

L'accounting change nel settore pubblico: primi spunti per una riflessione integrata

The current paper moves from the awareness that the literature on accounting change, especially for the public sector, is still inconclusive and leaves room for more inquiry, because of a compartmentalized approach to the understanding of these phenomena. Thus, the aim of the current paper is to realize a review of the studies on accounting change in public sector, identifying the approaches (i.e. mainstream, critical and interpretive) and focusing on the determinants of such processes, to enucleate in the debate the issues of accountability, power and politics, context and culture, as well as complexity, thus overcoming the existing lack of systematic comprehension. This will allow us to offer a bases for a unitary view of these phenomena, better encompassing the effects of those internal and external forces mounding change. Methodologically, the paper employs a systematic review approach to gather data, then analyzed by means of a linear regression.

Contingency learning as binding? Testing an exemplar view of the colour-word contingency learning effect.

The learning of contingent regularities between events is fundamental for interacting with our world. We are also heavily influenced by recent experiences, as frequently studied in the stimulus-response binding literature. According to one view ("unitary view"), the learning of regularities across many events and the influence of recent events on current performance can coherently be explained with one high-learning rate memory mechanism. That is, contingency learning effects and binding effects are essentially the same thing, only studied at different timescales. On the other hand, there may be more to a contingency effect than just the summation of the influence of past events (e.g., an additional impact of learned regularities). To test these possibilities, the current report reanalyses a number of datasets from the colour-word contingency learning paradigm. It is shown that the weighted sum of binding effects accumulated across many previous trials (with especially strong influence of very recent events) does explain a large chunk of the contingency effect, but not all of it. In particular, the asymptote towards which the contingency effect decreases by accounting for an increasing number of previous-trial binding effects is robustly above zero. On the other hand, we also observe evidence for higher-order interactions between binding effects at differing lags, suggesting that a mere linear accumulation of binding episodes might underestimate their influence on contingency learning. Accordingly, focusing only on episodic stimulus-response binding effects that are due to the last occurrence of a stimulus rendered contingency learning effects non-significant. Implications for memory models are discussed.

The Structural Details of Aspirin Molecules and Crystals.

We revisit, in the key of structural chemistry, one of the most known and important drugs: the aspirin. Although apparently simple, the factors determining the molecular structure and supramolecular association in crystals are not trivial. We addressed the problem from experimental and theoretical sides, considering issues from X-ray measurements and results of first-principle reconstruction of molecule and lattices by ab initio calculations. Some puzzling problems can give headaches to specialists and intrigue the general public. Thus, the reported polymorphism of aspirin is disputed, a so-called form II being alleged as a result of misinterpretation. At the same time, were presented evidences that the structure of common form I can be disrupted by domains where the regular packing is changed to the pattern of form II. The problems appear even at the level of independent molecule: the most stable conformation computed by various techniques of electronic structure differs from those encountered in crystals. Because the energy difference between the related conformational isomers (computed as most stable vs. the experimental structure) is small, about 1 kcal/mol, comprised in the error bars of used methods, the unresting question is whether the modelling is imprecise, or the supramolecular factors are mutating the conformational preferences. By a detective following of the issue, the intermolecular effects were made responsible for the conformation of the molecule in crystal. The presented problems were gathered from literature results, debates, glued with modelling and analysis redone by ourselves, in order to secure the unitary view of the considered prototypic topic.

A privacy-preserving approach to prevent feature disclosure in an IoT scenario

In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving approach to prevent feature disclosure in a multiple IoT scenario, i.e., a scenario where objects can be organized in (partially overlapped) networks interacting with each other. Our approach is based on two notions derived from database theory, namely k-anonymity and t-closeness. They are applied to cluster the involved objects in order to provide a unitary view of them and of their features. Indeed, the use of k-anonymity and t-closeness makes derived groups robust from a privacy perspective. In this way, not only information disclosure, but also feature disclosure, is prevented. This is an important strength of our approach because the malicious analysis of objects’ features can have disruptive effects on the privacy (and, ultimately, on the life) of people.