Volcanic eruptions from ghost magma chambers

Recent studies have proposed that magma reservoirs crystallized to a virtually rigid crystal-mush can be partially remelted by diffusion of hot fluids. We show that for a crystal mush with the composition of a K-trachyte from the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) Eruption, remelting can occur without a significant increase of the magma temperature, but simply by diffusion of H2O by the magmatic gases feeding the system. The CI origin is not the issue here, but rather the chemical and physical behavior of an almost solidified magma mass left over in a reservoir after a major eruption. To test our hypothesis, we run high pressure/high temperature laboratory experiments to study the kinetics of water diffusion, together with thermodynamics and fluid diffusion modelling. For small diffusivities, or large diffusion time, the remelting mechanism proposed above needs to be replaced by other processes as gas percolation or intrusion of a magmatic mass

Exploring the impacts of public childcare on mothers and children in Italy: does rationing play a role?

This paper investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending second grade of primary school in 2008-09 in conjunction with data on public childcare availability. Public childcare coverage in Italy is scarce (12.7 percent versus the OECD average of 30 percent) and the service is "rationed": each municipality allocates the available slots according to eligibility criteria. We contribute to the existing literature taking into account rationing in public childcare access and the functioning of childcare market. Our estimates indicate that childcare availability has positive and significant effects on both mothers' working status and children's language test scores. The effects are stronger when the degree of rationing is high and for low educated mothers and children living in lower income areas of the country.childcare; female employment; child cognitive outcomes

L'arte di dire l'esilio

International audienceThe article develops an argument about the exile of Dante in order to identify some critical issues posed by this "historical fact" as well as this "textual data". First, the author considers the problem of a proper historical evaluation of Dante's exile in keeping with recent propositions coming from studies of medieval history and historical sociology of intellectual groups. Then, focusing on Dante's answers to the problem of the say-ability (dicibilità) of his own political experience, the author highlights the refusal be Dante of the "erotic-political" discourse - which was instead typical of the Sicilian and Tuscan poetry as well as of ovidian Tristia and Epistulae ex-Pontus. By this way, the author points out the gradual shift in Dante's authorship and self-representation from a Boethian model to the reinvention of the apostolic-prophetic model. The conclusions highlight the paradoxes of authorship launched by Dante and by him delivered to the Italian literary tradition.Quest'articolo investiga l'esilio di Dante in modo da fare emergere alcuni problemi posti da questo "fatto storico" non meno che da questo" dato testuale. In primo luogo, l'autore considera il problema di una corretta valutazione storica dell'esilio di Dante sulla scorta di alcuni recenti proposte formulate nell'ambito degli studi di medievistica e di sociologia storica dei gruppi intellettuali. Quindi, focalizzandosi sulle risposte date da Dante al problema della dicibilità della sua esperienza politica, l'autore sottolinea il rifiuto da parte di Dante del regime discorsivo "erotico-politico" - proprio invece della tradizione poetica Siciliana e Toscana, così come degli ovidiani Trista e Epistulae ex Ponto. In tal modo, l'autore sottolinea il progressivo slittamento nella costruzione autoriale di Dante da un modello boeziano alla riformulaizone dei modello apostolico-profetico. Le conclusioni sottolineano i paradossi dell'autorialità varata da Dante e da lui consegnata alla tradizione letteraria italiana

Exploring the Impacts of Public Childcare on Mothers and Children in Italy: Does Rationing Play a Role?

This paper investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending second grade of primary school in 2008-09 in conjunction with data on public childcare availability. Public childcare coverage in Italy is scarce (12.7 percent versus the OECD average of 30 percent) and the service is “rationed”: each municipality allocates the available slots according to eligibility criteria. We contribute to the existing literature taking into account rationing in public childcare access and the functioning of the childcare market. Our estimates indicate that childcare availability has positive and significant effects on both mothers' working status and children's language test scores. The effects are stronger when the degree of rationing is high and for low educated mothers and children living in lower income areas of the country.childcare, female employment, child cognitive outcomes

Exploring the impacts of public childcare on mothers and children in Italy: Does rationing play a role?

This paper investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending second grade of primary school in 2008-09 in conjunction with data on public childcare availability. Public childcare coverage in Italy is scarce (12.7 percent versus the OECD average of 30 percent) and the service is rationed each municipality allocates the available slots according to eligibility criteria. We contribute to the existing literature taking into account rationing in public childcare access and the functioning of the childcare market. Our estimates indicate that childcare availability has positive and significant effects on both mothers' working status and children's language test scores. The effects are stronger when the degree of rationing is high and for low educated mothers and children living in lower income areas of the country

Repurposing Digital Methods for Human-Centered Design:Distilling Data-Driven Personas from Twitter Discussions: The case of Urban Nature in Paris

From logs and information left in online spaces to data points self-generated by connected devices, digital traces have become more diffused over the past years, prompting an expansion of Human-Centered Design methods. Along with some bigdata approaches, Digital Methods of research – treating the actual content of digital users’ manifestation on-line (i.e. tweets, Instagram pictures, comments) – offer the opportunity to better understand users through their online activities. This paper investigates how Digital Methods can be repurposed as a full-fledged approach for Human-Centered Design. Grafting on the NATURPRADI project – a research aimed at describing the debate raised by the re-vegetation of the city of Paris by analysing Twitter posts – in the paper we will explain how we have identified and described a set of personas characterized by different approaches towards the evolution of the urban nature issue. The final objective of the paper is to provide a first methodological tool created at the intersection of Digital Methods and Human-Centered Design discussing its opportunities and criticalities: Data-driven Personas

Digital Methods for Service Design:Experimenting with data-driven frameworks

From logs and information left in online spaces to data points self-generated by connected devices, digital traces have become more and more diffused over the past years. Along with some big-data approaches, Digital Methods of research - treating the actual content of users’ manifestation online (i.e. tweets, Instagram pictures, comments) - offer the opportunity to better understand people and behaviors through their online activities. This paper investigates how Digital Methods can be repurposed as a full-fledged approach for the Service Design practice, by offering a method to outline service design frameworks from a corpus of web data. This quantitative methods, in combination with the traditional qualitative approaches, leverage the continuous exchange of information that is happening in the digital space and suggest the possibility to automate parts of the data collection and analysis processes in support of service design activities. Grafting on several case studies - we will explain how Digital Methods could be used to identify and describe a set of personas by extracting and interpreting data from their online activities, and we will inquire into the application of the same methodological approach to map other frameworks - such as experience journeys or system maps - that are critical to Service Design

Short and long-term genome stability analysis of prokaryotic genomes.

BACKGROUND: Gene organization dynamics is actively studied because it provides useful evolutionary information, makes functional annotation easier and often enables to characterize pathogens. There is therefore a strong interest in understanding the variability of this trait and the possible correlations with life-style. Two kinds of events affect genome organization: on one hand translocations and recombinations change the relative position of genes shared by two genomes (i.e. the backbone gene order); on the other, insertions and deletions leave the backbone gene order unchanged but they alter the gene neighborhoods by breaking the syntenic regions. A complete picture about genome organization evolution therefore requires to account for both kinds of events. RESULTS: We developed an approach where we model chromosomes as graphs on which we compute different stability estimators; we consider genome rearrangements as well as the effect of gene insertions and deletions. In a first part of the paper, we fit a measure of backbone gene order conservation (hereinafter called backbone stability) against phylogenetic distance for over 3000 genome comparisons, improving existing models for the divergence in time of backbone stability. Intra- and inter-specific comparisons were treated separately to focus on different time-scales. The use of multiple genomes of a same species allowed to identify genomes with diverging gene order with respect to their conspecific. The inter-species analysis indicates that pathogens are more often unstable with respect to non-pathogens. In a second part of the text, we show that in pathogens, gene content dynamics (insertions and deletions) have a much more dramatic effect on genome organization stability than backbone rearrangements. CONCLUSION: In this work, we studied genome organization divergence taking into account the contribution of both genome order rearrangements and genome content dynamics. By studying species with multiple sequenced genomes available, we were able to explore genome organization stability at different time-scales and to find significant differences for pathogen and non-pathogen species. The output of our framework also allows to identify the conserved gene clusters and/or partial occurrences thereof, making possible to explore how gene clusters assembled during evolution.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Grotta Romanelli (Southern Italy, Apulia). Legacies and issues in excavating a key site for the Pleistocene of the Mediterranean

Grotta Romanelli, located on the Adriatic coast of southern Apulia (Italy), is considered a key site for the Mediterranean Pleistocene for its archaeological and palaeontological contents. The site, discovered in 1874, was re-evaluated only in 1900, when P. E. Stasi realised that it contained the first evidence of the Palaeolithic in Italy. Starting in 1914, G. A. Blanc led a pioneering excavation campaign, for the first-time using scientific methods applied to systematic palaeontological and stratigraphical studies. Blanc proposed a stratigraphic framework for the cave. Different dating methods (C-14 and U/Th) were used to temporally constrain the deposits. The extensive studies of the cave and its contents were mostly published in journals with limited distribution and access, until the end of the 1970s, when the site became forgotten. In 2015, with the permission of the authorities, a new excavation campaign began, led by a team from Sapienza University of Rome in collaboration with IGAG CNR and other research institutions. The research team had to deal with the consequences of more than 40 years of inactivity in the field and the combined effect of erosion and legal, as well as illegal, excavations. In this paper, we provide a database of all the information published during the first 70 years of excavations and highlight the outstanding problems and contradictions between the chronological and geomorphological evidence, the features of the faunal assemblages and the limestone artefacts

Relations between Effects and Structure of Small Bicyclic Molecules on the Complex Model System Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The development of compounds able to modify biological functions largely took advantage of parallel synthesis to generate a broad chemical variance of compounds to be tested for the desired effect(s). The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a model for pharmacological studies since a long time as it represents a relatively simple system to explore the relations among chemical variance and bioactivity. To identify relations between the chemical features of the molecules and their activity, we delved into the effects of a library of small compounds on the viability of a set of S. cerevisiae strains. Thanks to the high degree of chemical diversity of the tested compounds and to the measured effect on the yeast growth rate, we were able to scale-down the chemical library and to gain information on the most effective structures at the substituent level. Our results represent a valuable source for the selection, rational design, and optimization of bioactive compounds