Promoting nutrition sensitive and climate smart agriculture through increased use of traditional underutilised species in the Pacific

Poster presented at Tropentag 2014. International Conference on Research on Food Security, Natural Resource Management and Rural Development. "Bridging the Gap between Increasing Knowledge and Decreasing Resources" Prague (Czech Republic) Sep 17-19 2014

(Un)doing home: exploring home-making and identity – an example of a project in a London higher education classroom

In this article we discuss the lived, embodied experience of home-making in relation to identity and belonging through the example of a service-learning project conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic in a higher education setting in London, UK. We also explore the notion of belonging-not-belonging as a cultural, material and embodied construct, inspired by critical pedagogy. We draw on posthumanism, new materialism, intercultural studies, (auto-)ethnography and creative practice research as possible lines of flight in deconstructing the dichotomy between home and a ‘foreign’ territory-other-than-home that sits at the core of intercultural discourses. We present this project as a possible alternative discourse to (un)do more traditional considerations of home-making as a much more complex construct; in the encounter with new territories, humans and other-than-human artefacts, objects, machines and landscapes, we argue that home-making is a continuous, never-finished process that moves the learner and their teachers continuously. We aim to bring to the forefront new emerging considerations of intercultural studies at the intersection with interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional discourses, breaking away from a more traditional and neoliberal view about what belonging means within the context of higher education

The psycholinguistic and affective structure of words conveying pain

Despite the flourishing research on the relationships between affect and language, the characteristics of pain-related words, a specific type of negative words, have never been systematically investigated from a psycholinguistic and emotional perspective, despite their psychological relevance. This study offers psycholinguistic, affective, and pain-related norms for words expressing physical and social pain. This may provide a useful tool for the selection of stimulus materials in future studies on negative emotions and/or pain. We explored the relationships between psycholinguistic, affective, and pain-related properties of 512 Italian words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) conveying physical and social pain by asking 1020 Italian participants to provide ratings of Familiarity, Age of Acquisition, Imageability, Concreteness, Context Availability, Valence, Arousal, Pain-Relatedness, Intensity, and Unpleasantness. We also collected data concerning Length, Written Frequency (Subtlex-IT), N-Size, Orthographic Levenshtein Distance 20, Neighbor Mean Frequency, and Neighbor Maximum Frequency of each word. Interestingly, the words expressing social pain were rated as more negative, arousing, pain-related, and conveying more intense and unpleasant experiences than the words conveying physical pain

Decrumpling membranes by quantum effects

The phase diagram of an incompressible fluid membrane subject to quantum and thermal fluctuations is calculated exactly in a large number of dimensions of configuration space. At zero temperature, a crumpling transition is found at a critical bending rigidity $1/\alpha_{\rm c}$. For membranes of fixed lateral size, a crumpling transition occurs at nonzero temperatures in an auxiliary mean field approximation. As the lateral size L of the membrane becomes large, the flat regime shrinks with $1/\ln L$.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Unlocking the potential of wild edibles

Many wild edible species are disappearing due to environmental pressures or to neglect as populations worldwide move away from traditional food systems towards more simplified and energy-rich diets and become averse to consuming traditional dishes that are perceived as “food for the poor”, only to be drawn upon in times of food scarcity

Ozone in Lombardy: Years 1998-1999

Photochemical pollutants, especially ozone, have reached very high levels in Lombardy in recent years, with peaks of up to 150 ppb in late spring and summer. Lombardy, lying on the Po Plain, supports a large number of cities and industries and these, along with heavy traffic, produce copious amounts of primary pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and numerous volatile organic compounds. Furthermore, the peculiar orography of this region fosters the stagnation of air masses on a basin-scale and the presence of diurnal breezes towards northern areas, along with the evolution of the Mixing Layer, spread the polluted air masses over a large territory. Numerous stations in Lombardy give the concentrations of ozone and of nitrogen oxides. In this paper, ozone measurements carried out at the plain area around Milan and at pre-alpine sites in the spring and summer 1998 and 1999 will be shown and discussed, focusing on the months of May and July. The study of temporal and spatial behaviour of ozone goes hand in hand with the analysis of the Boundary Layer’s evolution. A number of radon stations were operating in Milan and in other sites in Lombardy. Measurements of atmospheric concentrations of radon yield an index of atmospheric stability, of the formation of thermal inversion, of convective turbulence, and of the movement of air masses, and hence they are very relevant to the understanding of the conditions of atmospheric pollutants