Modeling opinion polarization on social media: Application to Covid-19 vaccination hesitancy in Italy.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic reminded us how vaccination can be a divisive topic on which the public conversation is permeated by misleading claims, and thoughts tend to polarize, especially on online social networks. In this work, motivated by recent natural language processing techniques to systematically extract and quantify opinions from text messages, we present a differential framework for bivariate opinion formation dynamics that is coupled with a compartmental model for fake news dissemination. Thanks to a mean-field analysis we demonstrate that the resulting Fokker-Planck system permits to reproduce bimodal distributions of opinions as observed in polarization dynamics.

A physician and a man of science: patients, physicians, and diseases in Marcello Malpighi's medical practice.

Marcello Malpighi (1628-94), the celebrated Italian anatomist, was also a very successful physician and, as his correspondence indicates, medical consultant by post. This article focuses on the professional and social network that developed around Malpighi's medical activity. The network played a major role in promoting Malpighi's professional career and in disseminating his scientific ideas.

[Degree thesis in nursing: single center experience].

In literature, about Italy, there are only few studies regarding final thesis and the choices of the nursing student of first level degree. The scope of this study is to analyze the theses of the nursing students of University of Udine to the aim to characterize the fields and and the modalities used from the students in order to write this work. This work analysed 162 theses discussed in three years academics.

Animal electricity at the end of the eighteenth century: the many facets of a great scientific controversy.

In the 1790s, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta were the main protagonists of a lively debate on the role of electricity in animal organisms. Significant developments originated from this debate, leading to the foundation of two new disciplines, electrodynamics and electrophysiology, that were to play a crucial role in the scientific and technological progress of the last two centuries. The Galvani-Volta controversy has been repeatedly reconstructed, sometimes in an attempt to identify the merits and the errors of one or the other of the two protagonists, sometimes with the aim of demonstrating that the theories elaborated by the two Italian scholars were irreconcilable, reflecting completely different ways of looking at phenomena and conceiving of scientific research.