Recommendations on Complementary Feeding as a Tool for Prevention of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs)—Paper Co-Drafted by the SIPPS, FIMP, SIDOHaD, and SINUPE Joint Working Group

Adequate and balanced nutrition is essential to promote optimal child growth and a long and healthy life. After breastfeeding, the second step is the introduction of complementary feeding (CF), a process that typically covers the period from 6 to 24 months of age. This process is, however, still highly controversial, as it is heavily influenced by socio-cultural choices, as well as by the availability of specific local foods, by family traditions, and pediatrician beliefs. The Società Italiana di Pediatria Preventiva e Sociale (SIPPS) together with the Federazione Italiana Medici Pediatri (FIMP), the Società Italiana per lo Sviluppo e le Origine della Salute e delle Malattie (SIDOHaD), and the Società Italiana di Nutrizione Pediatrica (SINUPE) have developed evidence-based recommendations for CF, given the importance of nutrition in the first 1000 days of life in influencing even long-term health outcomes. This paper includes 38 recommendations, all of them strictly evidence-based and overall addressed to developed countries. The recommendations in question cover several topics such as the appropriate age for the introduction of CF, the most appropriate quantitative and qualitative modalities to be chosen, and the relationship between CF and the development of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) later in life.

Urban Transformation in Ancient Molise

This book uses all the available evidence to create a site biography of Larinum from 400 bce to 100 ce, with a focus on the urban transformation that occurs there during the Roman conquest. Larinum, a pre-Roman town in the modern region of Molise, undergoes a unique transition from independence to municipal status when it receives Roman citizenship in the 80s bce shortly after the Social War. Its trajectory illuminates complex processes of cultural, social, and political change associated with the Roman conquest throughout the Italian peninsula in the first millennium bce. This work highlights the importance of local isolated variability in studies of the Roman conquest and provides a narrative that supplements larger works on this theme. Through a focus on local-level agency, it demonstrates strong local continuity in Larinum and its surrounding territory. This continuity is the key to Larinum’s transition into the Roman state, which is spearheaded by the local elites. They participate in the broader cultural choices of the Hellenistic koiné and strive to be part of a Mediterranean-wide dialog that, over time, will come to be dominated by Rome. The case is made for advancing the field of Roman conquest studies under a new paradigm of social transformation that focuses on a history of gradual change, continuity, connectivity, and local isolated variability that is contingent on highly specific issues rather than global movements.

Displeasures of Cultural Diversity and Diasporic Hybridity in Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson

The research explores the strands of cultural hybridity and diaspora compromise that Mendelson has introduced in her novel, Almost English (2013). The research has analyzed the diasporic community as victim of cultural diversity and ambivalence. It focuses on the significance of cultural choices to establish one’s identity; we see identity as a process of negotiation and of articulation of cultural differences. It explores the ways in which Mendelson addresses the hybrid world, a world in which no culture and identity is pure or essential. Homi K. Bhabha’s critical approaches serve as the theoretical framework of this research. His concepts of cultural hybridity, ambivalence, third space and mimicry are of prime interest for the study of this novel. This work highlights the appropriation of Bhabha’s concepts and their application in postcolonial context considering Almost English (2013), for which main motifs include: challenging fixity in one culture, awareness about other existing cultures, and a contestation of view which privileges one culture above other, skirmish realities which finally produce multiple meanings, and values and identities. Finally, the research demonstrates that diasporic communities face displeasures of identity and language while living in a hybrid world. A world where third space is not productive enough for diasporic communities because of which they become conscious of their own identities and place in the society.

An exploration of discoursal identity: The rhetoric of narrative writing

The paper aims at disclosing the process of writer identity enactive construal in narrative writing. Three constituent parts of identity discoursal construction in the narrative are social semiotics as a reflection of the social environment, cultural identity theory as the embodiment of cultural choices and preferences, and pragmatics (Charles S. Peirce). The following research questions have been formulated: (1) What is the nature of identity construction? (2) What rhetorical factors influence identity construal in narrative discourse? By providing a step-by-step analysis of thematic structure, the paper conducts a discourse analysis of narrative episodes in terms of Agent, Process, and Medium triad (Halliday, 1973), reflecting the mechanisms of reader’s manipulation with information as a dynamic semiotic process of interpretation, limited by a final interpretant.

Lexical and cultural choices in slovene translations of German and English car slogans

The current paper presents the analysis of translation strategies and linguistic characteristics in Slovene translations of commercial car slogans from English and German. There is no uniform definition of the advertising slogan in the scientific literature; therefore, we attempt to provide the definition of a slogan in the context of marketing communication. One of the main functions of both social and commercial advertising is to provide information to the target audience and make it act in a way desired by the advertisers. In contemporary Translation Studies, translation is defined as a transnational and intercultural communication activity. Therefore, one of the primary tasks of translators is to mediate not only between languages but also between cultures. The objective of the paper has been to identify and describe the language features of car slogans at phonological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels, with due attention drawn to the functionality of these messages in comparison with the messages relayed by slogans in other trades. The study has revealed that, due to the specific market niche, most car slogans tend to use specific language devices and discourse. The theoretical framework is based on German functionalist approaches in Translation Studies – Holz-Mänttäri’s theory of action (Handlungstheorie) and Reiß/Vermeer’s theory of translation’s purpose (Skopostheorie).

Cases of sexual diseases with alpha-emitting nanoparticulates : Parkinson’s, Primary Biliary Cholangitis (prostate and clitoris) – and opening the breast implant debate

These diseases can be called sexual diseases thanks to retro-analysis of the global process of development and degenerescence and combination of the author’s earlier works with research of other authors that demonstrate in new ways the argument. Cultures that encourage sexual repression produce diseases mechanically and exogeneous factors of internal contamination with alpha emitters demultiplicate the effects spilling from these cultural choices. It is possible that researchers investigating Parkinson’s have already years ago understood the link with alpha decay and “flagged” it but because they thought that Parkinson patients indeed due to their full responsivity in depriving their own prostate whereas homosexuality shows how stimulating it creates well-known powerful orgasms, had to suffer, and went not beyond the allegory of alpha emitting nanoparticulates in their articles (which is why this is called “flagging” – “signaling”).

The First Italian Farmers: The Role of Stone Ornaments in Tradition, Innovation, and Cultural Change

When the first farmers landed on the eastern coast of the Italian peninsula (end of seventh millennium cal BC), they brought with them a system of knowledge and technologies that quickly spread along both the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic coasts. The study of the material culture, therefore, assumes an important role in understanding the social and cultural identity of these incoming groups. Analyses of ornament production – involving manufacture technology, raw materials, and stylistic choices – may supply information about the cultural choices and the technical skills of human groups and shed light on the social and symbolic system of these ancient populations. Data obtained from this work show that the ornaments became symbols of a growing cultural identity, which began to be developed within Italian territory. In the ornamental assemblages of the newcomers, the relevance of shaped lithic items is clearly visible, and there was the development of types that will become more and more standardized during the Neolithic period. However, elements in the symbolic culture of these first settlers, such as the use of Columbella rustica and the exclusive production of hard animal matter ornaments in some sites, recall previous traditions. This study intends to extend our knowledge on the ornamental customs of the first Italian Neolithic communities. It will attempt to establish if the chronological and the geographical differences that emerge from our analyses reflect diversities in the cultural and symbolic systems of the incoming farmers and different possible interactions with the native population.

Cinema for children in Poland – a bastard child of popular culture, an element of cultural education

In the mid-1950s, film sealed its place in the world of art with the voice of essentialist theories. At the same time, it did not give up its status as mass entertainment, which it had acquired at the beginning of cinematography’s development. Over the years, it has also developed its position as an educational medium, and its importance and impact on culture created the need for film studies. And although knowledge of film and cinematography is being introduced to school curricula, not only in Poland, the negative view that film is purely for entertainment purposes still prevails. Focusing on the subject outlined, the article refers to the results of research on film knowledge among children and young people, and on the cultural choices (using data on film choices) of parents and caregivers, to analyze the place and role of film in children’s and young people’s development.

The Pogroms of the Civil War and the Soviet-Jewish Alliance

Chapter 1 dissects the genocidal impulses that emerged during the Russian Civil War, in reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution, through a series of case studies in the ethnography of violence. The close-up examination of anti-Jewish violence in one place helps underscore the rationale for the Jewish alliance with Soviet power. This chapter sheds light on the long-term effects of these pogroms—in particular on the legacy of sexual violence against Jewish women and girls, a common feature of this violence. These pogroms triggered the redistribution of the Jewish population away from the former Pale of Settlement. But aside from a geographic resettlement, the pogroms also prompted an emotional resettlement: many responded to the trauma of destruction and rape, searching for anonymity, assimilation, and Sovietization through a symbiotic relationship with the state. A foundational experience for Soviet Jews, the pogroms hastened their process of urbanization, encouraging ideological and cultural choices and erasures.