A Study Placing the Earliest Depictions of Lunfardo within the Discourse on Crime and Immigration in Argentina around the Turn of the 20th Century

Lunfardo was first described in Argentina at the end of the 19th century as the jargon of thieves of Buenos Aires, themselves called lunfardos. The current definition of the term, though, focuses on the immigratory milieu of Argentina in which this linguistic repertoire was formed, and considers the connection to criminality as but one of its features. This study analyzes six of the earliest sources depicting Lunfardo as criminal jargon and places them in the socio-historical and intellectual context of Buenos Aires and Argentina between the 1880s and the 1910s. The purpose of this study is to understand the discourse within which that original exclusive connection to criminality was made and came to dominate the understanding of Lunfardo until the 1950s. As those were the years of the consolidation of the national identity of Argentina, this paper aims to provide new insights on an important moment in the process of the Argentine national formation.departmental bulletin pape

On the identity of Mt. Fuji’s deity: A study on the role of Benzai-ten in the development of the Fuji cult

As with many other popular religions, in the history of the cult of Mt. Fuji since the early Edo period many deities were gradually incorporated in a vast and ever-changing pantheon, the subject of multiple scholarly studies. This paper traces how one very popular Japanese female deity, Benzai-ten, may have come to be incorporated into the Fuji cult in the late-Edo period, a fact usually neglected in other studies on this popular cult. 　 The conclusion of this study is that it is important to trace the history of the worship of individual deities within a single cult. At the same time, however, we ought to recognize that searching for a single hierarchy of deities within one cult may not be a significant approach. In fact, different communities of believers within the same cult may find different specific subsets of deities meaningful for their needs, and thus worship them. This paper therefore argues that we should look at any one popular religion as a mosaic of communities of believers devoted to such subsets of deities associated to that religion, rather than as a single system of beliefs.departmental bulletin pape

Pregnancy and infanticide in early-modern Japan: the role of the midwife as a medium

In early-modern Japan, pregnancy was understood, at the commoners’ level, as a phenomenon within the discourse of pollution (kegare). Pregnancy and particularly the moment of childbirth were strongly associated with three kinds of pollution: those of birth, of death, and of blood. This paper presents this popular understanding of pregnancy as a heavily polluted state, and thus aims to reevaluate the practices of abortion and infanticide, common in early-modern Japan, as special cases within the general discourse on pollution intrinsic in the view of pregnancy at the time. In this paper, the role of the midwife in this context of pollution is interpreted as that of a medium figure, both in her capacity of physically delivering the newborn, and as the person primarily in charge of dealing with the pollution of pregnancy and childbirth. As the discourse of pregnancy shifted from the religious one of pollution in the early-modern period to the medical one of hygiene by the beginning of the Meiji period, the role of the midwife too had to undergo profound changes. I argue that this paradigmatic shift from religion to science was the result of the modernization and centralization process which was central to the Meiji regime’s policies in the construction of a new nation.departmental bulletin pape

First- and second-generation valorisation of wastes and residues occurring in the food supply chain

Despite the high potential to increase sustainability of food systems, wastes and by-products occurring in the food supply chain are currently only partially valorised at different value-added levels. First-generation valorisation strategies that aim at utilisation of complete material streams for production of animal feed, energy, compost and/or specific consumer applications are already widely implemented and experience further dissemination and/or development (e.g. biohydrogen/biohythane production) – either in the form of single processes or as part of cascade utilisations. Second-generation valorisation strategies comprise various forms of fractionised utilisation of material streams. They rely on integration of adapted recovery and conversion procedures for specific components in order to obtain sequentially different classes of products, e.g. fine chemicals, commodity products and biofuels. Such advanced strategies are particularly suitable for wastes and by-products occurring during industrial food processing. Valorisation of food by-products for functional food is an emerging trend

New hardware and software technologies for real-time control in nuclear fusion experiments

The current machines for the study of nuclear fusion does not produce energy, and their output is substantially a large amount of data. The accuracy of the data collected, and their density within narrow temporal samples, can determine the effectiveness of the real time control systems to install in future reactors. We set ourselves the objective to design and test a high-speed and high-density data acquisition system based on the latest generation FPGA technologies. in the thesis is used the latest products released by Xilinx to design a acquire stream system of signals from generic probes (specifically magnetic probes). The Zynq 7000 family is nowadays state of the art of sistemy SoC that integrating a powerful and extensive FPGA section with an ARM mullticore. Of fundamental importance will be the drastic reduction of signal cables between the sensory apparatus and acquisition systems with the dual objective of eliminating the noise induced and drastically lower installation costs. Magnetic field configuration in RFX is characterised by fast variations of all the three field components during the pulse, with relevant non axis-symmetry in toroidal direction. Typical spectra exhibit modes up to n=15 in toroidal direction and mainly m=0 and m=1 in poloidal direction. As a consequence, probe signals have a large dynamic (more than 60 dB), and extended frequency spectrum (several tens of kHz). Therefore, a large number of probes are required to correctly identify the complex spatial structure of the plasma column. To reduce shielding effects, probes must be installed inside the stabilising shell. The three components of field outside the vacuum vessel can be very different in amplitude. At the same time, one can reach 0.8 T and another can be typically lower than some mT. Furthermore, they vary very quickly. The probes to be installed have to guarantee an uncertainty less than 1 mT to correctly reconstruct the plasma behaviour. These two specifications are particularly stringent and require an accurate calibration and a careful probe alignment to minimise the spurious effect of unwanted components. A further design specification for the sensors is due to the maximum operation temperature of the vacuum vessel (200 °C). The analogic acquires systems must exhibit high isolation, high speed and resolution, but above all a low noise level. The noise must be below minimum margins throughout the frequency spectrum contained in the signals provided by magnetic probes. The main topic of the thesis is to verify the suitability of the ATCA MIMO ISOL modules in the upper and lower part of the signal spectrum of bi-axis magnetic probes in order to be able to be integrated into the new FPGA acquisition and realtime control in RFX systems

A Study in the Development of the Program for Incoming International Students in the Department of English Language Education, Tamagawa University

Since 2008, the Department of Comparative Cultures has hosted up to ten students from Evergreen State College, Washington for three weeks a year. With an increasing number of Evergreen students wanting to join the program and the Department of Comparative Cultures being replaced by the Department of English Language Education in 2015, new challenges have arisen. This report describes how our research project sought to find ways of meeting such challenges, chiefly by clarifying the needs and interests of the Evergreen students, but also taking into account changes in the curriculum with the introduction of the new department. Based on these findings, we make recommendations for developing a more viable program.departmental bulletin pape

Parasitic castration by Xenos vesparum depends on host gender

Host castration represents a mechanism used by parasites to exploit energy resources from their hosts by interfering with their reproductive development or to extend host lifespan by removing risks associated with reproductive activity. One of the most intriguing groups of parasitic castrators is represented by the insects belonging to the order Strepsiptera. The macroparasite Xenos vesparum can produce dramatic phenotypic alterations in its host, the paper wasp Polistes dominula. Parasitized female wasps have undeveloped ovaries and desert the colony without performing any social task. However, very little attention has been given to the parasitic impact of X. vesparum on the male phenotype. Here, we investigated the effects of this parasite on the sexual behaviour and the morpho-physiology of P. dominula males. We found that, differently from female wasps, parasitized males are not heavily affected by Xenos: they maintain their sexual behaviour and ability to discriminate between female castes. Furthermore, the structure of their reproductive apparatus is not compromised by the parasite. We think that our results, demonstrating that the definition of X. vesparum as a parasitoid does not apply to infected males of P. dominula, provide a new perspective to discuss and maybe reconsider the traditional view of strepsipteran parasites

Effect of the temperature in a mixed culture pilot scale aerobic process for food waste and sewage sludge conversion into polyhydroxyalkanoates

The utilisation of urban organic waste as feedstock for polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) production is growing since it allows to solve the main concerns about their disposal and simultaneously to recover added-value products. A pilot scale platform has been designed for this purpose. The VFA-rich fermentation liquid coming from the anaerobic treatment of both source-sorted organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW) and waste activated sludge (WAS) has been used as substrate for the aerobic process steps: a first sequencing batch reactor (SBR, 100 L) for the selection of a PHA-producing biomass, and a second fed-batch reactor (70 L) for PHA accumulation inside the cells. The SBR was operated at 2.0-4.4 kg COD/(m3 d) as OLR, under dynamic feeding regime (feast-famine) and short hydraulic retention time (HRT; 1 day). The selected biomass was able to accumulate up to 48% g PHA/g VSS. Both steps were performed without temperature (T) control, avoiding additional consumption of energy. In this regard, the applied OLR was tuned based on environmental T and, as a consequence, on biomass kinetic, in order to have a constant selective pressure. The latter was mainly quantified by the PHA storage yield (YP/Sfeast 0.34-0.45 CODP/CODS), which has been recognized as the main parameters affecting the global PHA productivity [1.02-1.82 g PHA/(L d)] of the process