Publishing and printing in Italy and the single internal market

Despite the anticipated fall of customs barriers in 1992, linguistic differences among European cultures will persist. English-language publishing will increase its presence, particularly in science and technology. Concentration will increase. But the penetration of the Italian market is not one-sided: Italian publishers, too, have entered other markets. The Italian printing industry is healthy, growing, and competitive worldwide. Gianni Merlini is president and CEO of Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese (UTET). His 1952 law degree thesis on “The Publishing manager and managing director before becoming president in 1975. He is active in numerous European associations in the fields of printing and publishing. UTET will celebrate its two-hundredth anniversary in 1991 and has been in Dr. Merlini's family since its founding.     

Understanding Biological Evolution Through Computational Thinking

Science & Education - Computational thinking is a contemporary science and engineering practice that has been introduced to the US science classrooms due to its emphasis in the Next Generation...     

Bioimpedance patterns and bioelectrical impedance vector analysis (BIVA) of road cyclists

Bioelectrical impedance vector-analysis (BIVA) describes cell-mass, cell function and hydration status of an individual or a group. The goal of the present investigation was to provide bioelectrical impedance data for 525 male road cyclists (155 professionals, 79 elite, 59 elite-youth, and 232 amateurs) at the time of their optimal performance level. Data were plotted on the resistance-reactance (R-Xc) graph to characterize cyclists group vectors using BIVA. Compared to the general male population, the mean vector position of the road cyclists indicates a higher body cell mass (BCM) and phase angle (p<0.001). The vector position of the high-performance, compared to the amateur cyclists showed similar patterns with higher BCM and phase angles and higher reactance values for the high-performance athletes (p<0.001). The bio-impedance data were used to calculate the 50%, 75%, and 95% tolerance ellipses of each group of cyclists. The characteristic vector positions of the road cyclists indicate normal hydration and greater muscle mass and function of the high-performance cyclists compared to amateur cyclists and the normal population. The cyclists specific tolerance ellipses, particularly the high-performance cyclists might be used for classifying a cyclist according to the individual vector position and to define target vector regions for lower level cyclists.     

The Official Institutions for the Promotion of Educational Change in Italy

The author describes the formal structures which have been established to support the process of educational change in Italy.

There is a sound legislative base: a series of laws passed since 1973 create both a new model of school and the procedures and organisations designed to facilitate its emergence, including councils at the class and school level. The right and duty of teachers to engage on in‐service education is firmly recognised as an essential component in school development.

The European Centre for Education and the Pedagogical Documentation Library are mentioned, but the author dwells at greater length on the Regional Institutes for Educational Research, Experimentation and In‐Service Training (IRRSAE). He provides a detailed explanation of the duties of the IRRSAE and of their organisation and functioning.

The IRRSAE are widely regarded as key institutions in educational development in Italy.     

Connecting user and item perspectives in popularity debiasing for collaborative recommendation

Recommender systems learn from historical users’ feedback that is often non-uniformly distributed across items. As a consequence, these systems may end up suggesting popular items more than niche items progressively, even when the latter would be of interest for users. This can hamper several core qualities of the recommended lists (e.g., novelty, coverage, diversity), impacting on the future success of the underlying platform itself. In this paper, we formalize two novel metrics that quantify how much a recommender system equally treats items along the popularity tail. The first one encourages equal probability of being recommended across items, while the second one encourages true positive rates for items to be equal. We characterize the recommendations of representative algorithms by means of the proposed metrics, and we show that the item probability of being recommended and the item true positive rate are biased against the item popularity. To promote a more equal treatment of items along the popularity tail, we propose an in-processing approach aimed at minimizing the biased correlation between user-item relevance and item popularity. Extensive experiments show that, with small losses in accuracy, our popularity-mitigation approach leads to important gains in beyond-accuracy recommendation quality.     

Machine learning techniques for XML (co-)clustering by structure-constrained phrases

A new method is proposed for clustering XML documents by structure-constrained phrases. It is implemented by three machine-learning approaches previously unexplored in the XML domain, namely non-negative matrix (tri-)factorization, co-clustering and automatic transactional clustering. A novel class of XML features approximately captures structure-constrained phrases as n-grams contextualized by root-to-leaf paths. Experiments over real-world benchmark XML corpora show that the effectiveness of the three approaches improves with contextualized n-grams of suitable length. This confirms the validity of the devised method from multiple clustering perspectives. Two approaches overcome in effectiveness several state-of-the-art competitors. The scalability of the three approaches is investigated, too.     

Aristotelian Physics in the Context of Teaching Science: A Historical-Philosophical Approach

Nowadays in the community of researchers there is a practically unanimous consensus about the relevance of the history of science to the educational process. In this context, Aristotelian physics was rediscovered and reassessed for didactic purposes. But unfortunately, it is very often presented in a rather fragmentary and oversimplified way that distorts the true meaning of Aristotelian concepts. Facing this problem, the purpose of the present paper is to point out some blunders that originate in the partial reading of Aristotle's work. Particularly, it intends to contribute to the following points: (i) to warn against a hurried identification of pre-scientific notions and Aristotelian physical concepts; (ii) to promote an epistemologically not naïve and historiographically not anachronic interpretation of Aristotle's work on physics, both in the theoretical and in the methodological aspects; (iii) to warn against the interpretative confusion that arises from projecting the conceptual frame of contemporary science on Aristotelian physics, ignoring Aristotle's natural philosophy as a whole; (iv) to show the need of understanding the metaphysical foundations of the Aristotelian system; (v) to promote a return to the reading of the original texts.