Il tesoriere e i poveri. La fondazione quattrocentesca dell'ospedale di Santa Maria di Monserrato a Messina

Prima della riforma quattrocentesca che avrebbe visto l'accorpamento in un unico ente assistenziale, a Messina tanti piccoli ospedali avevano garantito a una vasta gamma di disagiati cure e assistenza. Tra questi, l'ospedale di Santa Maria di Monserrato, la cui fondazione è legata alle volontà testamentarie dell'intraprendente Nicolò Castagna, personaggio tra i più interessanti della dinamica società messinese, che da mercator riusciva a scalare i vertici e diventare viceré. L'articolo ricostruisce il contesto in cui avvenne la fondazione e ne segue le vicende, condizionate dalla reazione degli eredi di Nicolò, intenzionati a rivendicare beni e proprietà dell'avo: Castagna peraltro in vita non si era direttamente impegnato in opere di carità e solo al momento della morte pensò alla propria salvezza, destinando una parte del patrimonio alla creazione di una nuova struttura assistenziale dedicata alla Vergine di Monserrat.Before the fifteenth reform that would see the unification into a single charity, many small hospitals in Messina had guaranteed in a wide range of disadvantaged treatment and care. Among them, the hospital of Santa Maria of Montserrat, whose foundation is linked to the will and testament of Nicholas Castagna, character of the dynamic Messina companies, which could mercator rises to the top and become viceroy. The article reconstructs the context in which it happened the foundation and follows the stories, influenced by the reaction of Nicholas heirs, determined to reclaim assets and property ancestor: Castagna also in life was not directly involved in charity work and only at the time of death he thought of his own safety, by allocating some of the assets in the creation of a new private health care dedicated to the Virgin of Montserrat

Covariance and Controvariance: a fresh look at an old issue (a primer in advanced type systems for learning functional programmers)

Twenty years ago, in an article titled "Covariance and contravariance: conflict without a cause", I argued that covariant and contravariant specialization of method parameters in object-oriented programming had different purposes and deduced that, not only they could, but actually they should both coexist in the same language. In this work I reexamine the result of that article in the light of recent advances in (sub-)typing theory and programming languages, taking a fresh look at this old issue. Actually, the revamping of this problem is just an excuse for writing an essay that aims at explaining sophisticated type-theoretic concepts, in simple terms and by examples, to undergraduate computer science students and/or willing functional programmers. Finally, I took advantage of this opportunity to describe some undocumented advanced techniques of type-systems implementation that are known only to few insiders that dug in the code of some compilers: therefore, even expert language designers and implementers may find this work worth of reading

Fibrotic and Vascular Remodelling of Colonic Wall in Patients with Active Ulcerative Colitis

open16noIntestinal fibrosis is a complication of inflammatory bowel disease [IBD]. Although fibrostenosis is a rare event in ulcerative colitis [UC], there is evidence that a fibrotic rearrangement of the colon occurs in the later stages. This is a retrospective study aimed at examining the histopathological features of the colonic wall in both short-lasting [SL] and long-lasting [LL] UC. Surgical samples of left colon from non-stenotic SL [a parts per thousand currency sign 3 years, n = 9] and LL [a parts per thousand yen 10 years, n = 10] UC patients with active disease were compared with control colonic tissues from cancer patients without UC [n = 12] to assess: collagen and elastic fibres by histochemistry; vascular networks [CD31/CD105/nestin] by immunofluorescence; parameters of fibrosis [types I and III collagen, fibronectin, RhoA, alpha-smooth muscle actin [alpha-SMA], desmin, vimentin], and proliferation [proliferating nuclear antigen [PCNA]] by western blot and/or immunolabelling. Colonic tissue from both SL-UC and LL-UC showed tunica muscularis thickening and transmural activated neovessels [displaying both proliferating CD105-positive endothelial cells and activated nestin-positive pericytes], as compared with controls. In LL-UC, the increased collagen deposition was associated with an up-regulation of tissue fibrotic markers [collagen I and III, fibronectin, vimentin, RhoA], an enhancement of proliferation [PCNA] and, along with a loss of elastic fibres, a rearrangement of the tunica muscularis towards a fibrotic phenotype. A significant transmural fibrotic thickening occurs in colonic tissue from LL-UC, together with a cellular fibrotic switch in the tunica muscularis. A full-thickness angiogenesis is also evident in both SL- and LL-UC with active disease, as compared with controls.openIppolito, Chiara; Colucci, Rocchina; Segnani, Cristina; Errede, Mariella; Girolamo, Francesco; Virgintino, Daniela; Dolfi, Amelio; Tirotta, Erika; Buccianti, Piero; Di Candio, Giulio; Campani, Daniela; Castagna, Maura; Bassotti, Gabrio; Villanacci, Vincenzo; Blandizzi, Corrado; Bernardini, NunziaIppolito, Chiara; Colucci, ROCCHINA LUCIA; Segnani, Cristina; Errede, Mariella; Girolamo, Francesco; Virgintino, Daniela; Dolfi, Amelio; Tirotta, Erika; Buccianti, Piero; Di Candio, Giulio; Campani, Daniela; Castagna, Maura; Bassotti, Gabrio; Villanacci, Vincenzo; Blandizzi, Corrado; Bernardini, Nunzi

On Global Types and Multi-Party Session

Global types are formal specifications that describe communication protocols in terms of their global interactions. We present a new, streamlined language of global types equipped with a trace-based semantics and whose features and restrictions are semantically justified. The multi-party sessions obtained projecting our global types enjoy a liveness property in addition to the traditional progress and are shown to be sound and complete with respect to the set of traces of the originating global type. Our notion of completeness is less demanding than the classical ones, allowing a multi-party session to leave out redundant traces from an underspecified global type. In addition to the technical content, we discuss some limitations of our language of global types and provide an extensive comparison with related specification languages adopted in different communities

JoXSZ: Joint X-SZ fitting code for galaxy clusters

The thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect and the X-ray emission offer separate and highly complementary probes of the thermodynamics of the intracluster medium. We present JoXSZ, the first publicly available code designed to jointly fit SZ and X-ray data coming from various instruments to derive the thermodynamic profiles of galaxy clusters. JoXSZ follows a fully Bayesian forward-modelling approach, accounts for the SZ calibration uncertainty and X-ray background level systematic. It improves upon most state-of-the-art, and not publicly available, analyses because it adopts the correct Poisson-Gauss expression for the joint likelihood, makes full use of the information contained in the observations, even in the case of missing values within the datasets, has a more inclusive error budget, and adopts a consistent temperature across the various parts of the code, allowing for differences between X-ray and SZ gas mass weighted temperatures when required by the user. JoXSZ accounts for beam smearing and data analysis transfer function, accounts for the temperature and metallicity dependencies of the SZ and X-ray conversion factors, adopts flexible parametrization for the thermodynamic profiles, and on user request allows either adopting or relaxing the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium (HE). When HE holds, JoXSZ uses a physical (positive) prior on the radial derivative of the enclosed mass and derives the mass profile and overdensity radii $r_\Delta$. For these reasons, JoXSZ goes beyond simple SZ and electron density fits. We illustrate the use of JoXSZ by combining Chandra and NIKA data on the high-redshift cluster CL J1226.9+3332. The code is written in Python, it is fully documented and the users are free to customize their analysis in accordance with their needs and requirements. JoXSZ is publicly available on GitHub.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Code available on GitHub at https://github.com/fcastagna/JoXSZ. v2 updated with language editin

Set-Theoretic Types for Polymorphic Variants

Polymorphic variants are a useful feature of the OCaml language whose current definition and implementation rely on kinding constraints to simulate a subtyping relation via unification. This yields an awkward formalization and results in a type system whose behaviour is in some cases unintuitive and/or unduly restrictive. In this work, we present an alternative formalization of poly-morphic variants, based on set-theoretic types and subtyping, that yields a cleaner and more streamlined system. Our formalization is more expressive than the current one (it types more programs while preserving type safety), it can internalize some meta-theoretic properties, and it removes some pathological cases of the current implementation resulting in a more intuitive and, thus, predictable type system. More generally, this work shows how to add full-fledged union types to functional languages of the ML family that usually rely on the Hindley-Milner type system. As an aside, our system also improves the theory of semantic subtyping, notably by proving completeness for the type reconstruction algorithm.Comment: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, Sep 2016, Nara, Japan. ICFP 16, 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, 201

A Theory of Explicit Substitutions with Safe and Full Composition

Many different systems with explicit substitutions have been proposed to implement a large class of higher-order languages. Motivations and challenges that guided the development of such calculi in functional frameworks are surveyed in the first part of this paper. Then, very simple technology in named variable-style notation is used to establish a theory of explicit substitutions for the lambda-calculus which enjoys a whole set of useful properties such as full composition, simulation of one-step beta-reduction, preservation of beta-strong normalisation, strong normalisation of typed terms and confluence on metaterms. Normalisation of related calculi is also discussed.Comment: 29 pages Special Issue: Selected Papers of the Conference "International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming 2008" edited by Giuseppe Castagna and Igor Walukiewic