Open Access Books

China; Home; House; Life; Place; Rural; Tradition; Transformation

Un “fantasma” sembra aggirarsi nella letteratura francese a partire dagli anni Cinquanta del Novecento e pare destinato a rimanere tale per mezzo secolo, con una latente e, poi, dagli anni Ottanta, con una più riconoscibile capacità di produrre nuove forme o nuovi contesti letterari. Il “fantasma dei sentimenti” da tempo attraversa inquieto le pagine della narrativa, finzionale o autofinzionale, di Francia. Alcuni potrebbero, d’altronde, ipotizzare che questo “spettro” sia stato una presenza attiva, un fermento vitale, seppure dapprima minoritario, sotterraneo e sommesso (ma, forse, neppure troppo clandestino), anche nel periodo più ostile all’espressione in letteratura dei sentimenti. L’inversione di tendenza, nel romanzo francese di questo primo decennio del XXI secolo, appare sempre più netta e riconoscibile e finanche, talvolta, egemonica, se non eccessiva, come spesso succede, quando l’albero è stato troppo piegato, in precedenza, con corde cerebrali e funi ideologiche, nella direzione opposta a quella genetica e costitutiva della scrittura. Quando, come e perché è iniziata questa “riapparizione” dei sentimenti nel romanzo? In quali esperienze significative di scrittura si è espressa e quali sono le varianti narrative che si sono imposte? Quali sono i rischi che il romanzo francese contemporaneo corre quando la ricerca e l’espressione dei sentimenti si fa, come accade oggi, in maniera tumultuosa e incontrollata, con una forte esigenza di originalità che ne temperi i rischi insiti nel sentimentalismo? È possibile una letteratura dell’equilibrio, una letteratura che possa vivere senza l’eccesso, una letteratura senza esasperazione, o per dirla diversamente uno spazio letterario liberato da questa eredità e, dunque, propositivo? Perché il sentimento, anche quello più esacerbato, resta anche un punto di equilibrio tra la leggerezza dell’emozione e la gravità della passione, che porta pure lo stesso nome.

During the past few years, scientists have achieved significant successes in nanoscience and technology. Nanotechnology is a branch of science that deals with fine structures and materials with very small dimensions - less than 100 nm. The composite science and technology have also benefits from nanotechnology. This book collects new developments about diamond and carbon composites and nanocomposites and their use in manufacturing technology.

Bracciolini’s contribution to visual materiality, graphical innovation, and the book trade is the driving force in the development of a new philological turn. This essay explores the textual consciousness that marked the passage to scrupulous criteria of editing and writing, which ultimately indicates and emphasizes the historical dimension of hermeneutical tradition. With a powerful impact on readership and authorship, Bracciolini stands behind this groundbreaking entanglement, as we rethink textual transmission and modern scholarship in this digital age.

In this book, Vladimir Gel’man considers bad governance as a distinctive politico-economic order that is based on a set of formal and informal rules, norms, and practices quite different from those of good governance. Some countries are governed badly intentionally because the political leaders of these countries establish and maintain rules, norms, and practices that serve their own self-interests. Gel’man considers bad governance as a primarily agency-driven rather than structure-induced phenomenon. He addresses the issue of causes and mechanisms of bad governance in Russia and beyond from a different scholarly optics, which is based on a more general rationale of state-building, political regime dynamics, and policy-making. He argues that although these days, bad governance is almost universally perceived as an anomaly, at least in developed countries, in fact human history is largely a history of ineffective and corrupt governments, while the rule of law and decent state regulatory quality are relatively recent matters of modern history, when they emerged as side effects of state-building. Indeed, the picture is quite the opposite: bad governance is the norm, while good governance is an exception. The problem is that most rulers, especially if their time horizons are short and the external constraints on their behavior are not especially binding, tend to govern their domains in a predatory way because of the prevalence of short-term over long-term incentives. Contemporary Russia may be considered as a prime example of this phenomenon. Using an analysis of case studies of political and policy changes in Russia after the Soviet collapse, Gel’man discusses the logic of building and maintenance of politico-economic order of bad governance in Russia and paths of its possible transformation in a theoretical and comparative perspective.

Most measures of interrater agreement are defined for ratings regarding a group of targets, each rated by the same group of raters (e.g., the agreement of raters who assess on a rating scale the language proficiency of a corpus of argumentative written texts). However, there are situations in which agreement between ratings regards a group of targets where each target is evaluated by a different group of raters, like for instance when teachers in a school are evaluated by a questionnaire administered to all the pupils (students) in the classroom. In these situations, a first approach is to evaluate the level of agreement for the whole group of targets by the ANOVA one-way random model. A second approach is to apply subject-specific indices of interrater agreement like rWG, which represents the observed variance in ratings compared to the variance of a theoretical distribution representing no agreement (i.e., the null distribution). Both these approaches are not appropriate for ordinal or nominal scales. In this paper, an index is proposed to evaluate the agreement between raters for each single target (subject or object) on an ordinal scale, and to obtain also a global measure of the interrater agreement for the whole group of cases evaluated. The index is not affected by the possible concentration of ratings on a very small number of levels of the scale, like it happens for the measures based on the ANOVA approach, and it does not depend on the definition of a null distributions like rWG. The main features of the proposal will be illustrated in a study for the assessment of learning teacher behavior in classroom collected in a research conducted in 2018 at Roma Tre University.

O ensaio cumpre o papel de proporcionar aos estudiosos de literatura uma visão pormenorizada das ilustrações e das capas de várias edições do romance Gabriela, cravo e canela, no Brasil e no mundo. O grande desafio é promover incessantemente um canal de experiências e de intercâmbios culturais, incentivando e sistematizando a produção de estudos, teses e ensaios realizados a partir da obra de Jorge Amado.

Nature has always been a source of inspiration and ideas for the robotics community. New solutions and technologies are required and hence this book is coming out to address and deal with the main challenges facing walking and climbing robots, and contributes with innovative solutions, designs, technologies and techniques. This book reports on the state of the art research and development findings and results. The content of the book has been structured into 5 technical research sections with total of 30 chapters written by well recognized researchers worldwide.

Adolescent substance abuse is a problem worldwide. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this issue with a special focus on alcohol abuse. Chapters discuss the biological, social, and environmental risk factors of substance abuse in adolescents, behavioral and pharmacological interventions to prevent or reduce the negative effects of substance abuse, psychological disorders associated with drug abuse, and much more.

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

Comment constituer et comparer des corpus lorsqu’ils sont issus de langues différentes ? Cette question émerge en amont de tous les travaux en analyse du discours qui font se rencontrer, comme dans cet ouvrage, le français avec l’allemand, l’anglais, le japonais, le portugais ou encore le portugais avec le russe. De telles recherches ont donné naissance à l’analyse du discours contrastive. Les contributions posent et/ou explorent ce cadre théorique récent en retravaillant des catégories issues de l’analyse du discours française, pour certain.e.s auteur.e.s, et dans la lignée de Bakhtine, pour d’autres. Ainsi, les analyses ciblant la comparaison des discours entre plusieurs langues invitent à sélectionner un invariant, par exemple, un genre de discours. Elles consacrent aussi une place importante à la culture, inscrite dans l’anthropologie culturelle, suite aux travaux de Humboldt, permettant de présenter aujourd’hui la notion de culture discursive. Cet ouvrage invite enfin à s’interroger sur la comparaison à la fois d’un point de vue théorique et méthodologique, notamment dans le domaine des sciences du langage.

Most English speakers in Australia know a few words of Yagara, the Pama-Nyungan language traditionally spoken in the area that now includes Brisbane and Ipswich. For example, Australian English yakka 'work' comes from the Yagara verb yaga‘to work’. However, no fluent native speakers of Yagara remain. The current volume compares the written records of Yagara to facilitate revitalisation of the spoken language. Part 1: Grammar introduces the Yagara sources, which are then compared to extract a picture of Yagara’s structure – its sounds, its words, and its grammar. Attention is also given to the system of kinship terms, moieties, and totems. Part 2: Dictionary contains the most complete Yagara-English dictionary to date, with over 2,200 entries, the original source spellings for each word, standardised spellings, and anthropological notes. Entries include traditional place names, fun insults, and everyday expressions such as the greeting wi balga ‘Hey, come’. The dictionary is followed by an English word finder list. Part 3: Texts consist of full versions of all known texts in Yagara, including sentences, songs, and three Bible stories. Standardised versions are accompanied by English translations and the original unedited renditions.

Henry W. Shoemaker (1880–1958) was known for his deep love for the wilderness and native cultures of Pennsylvania. The state’s first official folklorist, he wrote more than twenty books detailing Pennsylvania’s modern mythology. Pennsylvania Mountain Stories is perhaps Shoemaker’s definitive collection of folktales. The idea for this book came to Shoemaker during his college years, when he spent his vacations traveling through the mountains of Pennsylvania—on foot, on horseback, or by buggy. He claimed that he heard the stories, “mostly after supper,” from people he met at lumber camps, farmhouses, and backwoods taverns. “As so many of the tales are devoted to subjects of a more or less supernatural order they cannot very well be true,” he writes, but then hastens to add, “neither are they of the author’s invention.” In this ethereal space between fact and fiction, Pennsylvania Mountain Stories reveals the values, the passions, the obsessions of the people who told them. This volume, published under the Metalmark Books imprint, contains a facsimile reproduction of the 1911 edition, originally published by the Reading Times Publishing Company.