A Corpus Study of Italian Proverbs: Implications for Lexicography

In this paper we look at the way in which proverbs were found to behave in a corpus of contemporary written Italian. We comment especially on the types of formal variation they were found to undergo, whether in terms of alternative citation forms or context related changes. We also comment on the more significant relationships between variation and textual function. Our findings would suggest that proverbs are far from being invariable units, and that lexicographical description of proverbs could be more complete than it usually is, especially as regards formal variation and syntactic flexibility. We acknowledge the need to compare our findings with data regarding proverb usage in the spoken language, and also the size limitations of the corpus used in the present study

A corpus-based study of Italian idiomatic phrases: from citation forms to 'real-life' occurrences

In the current paper we present a typological description of the alternative forms and variations which Italian idiomatic phrases were found to take in a corpus of contemporary written Italian. We were concerned above all with lexical variation, both regularly occurring and occasional, not with the syntactic flexibility of idioms. Flexible search parameters were used in order to locate as many variations as possible, including alternative lexical components, shortened forms of idioms, adaptation of underlying metaphors, and alternative syntactic realizations. We relate our findings to lexicographical description

Many hands make light work: Collaborative CLIL Activities for university courses in Medieval funerary Archaeology

This paper describes the activities performed by the students of the course of funerary archaeology held at the Division of Palaeopathology of Pisa University in collaboration with the Institute for Computational Linguistics (ILC) of the National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa in the period April-June 2014. The lessons, which used a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, were aimed at studying the funerary beliefs and burial practices in Italy and England in the Middle Ages. The 2014 course followed on from the courses of the year 2012 (focused on the more general issue of taphonomy; primary and secondary burials; single, double, or multiple burials), and 2013 (which examined the world of the ancient Romans and their burial customs of cremation and inhumation). The lessons were conducted by using extracts from self-contained specialized texts that were simple to read and that offered the basic concepts of medieval funerary archaeology. The students were supported by a reference text for funerary archaeology, which established the correct nomenclature to use when describing bodies, grave goods and tombs. Powerpoint slide presentations helped students break up the monotony of the text work and made the material more interesting and engaging. The slides were used to illustrate different types of burials in filled or empty spaces; the position of burials in both rural and urban environments; the disposition of the limbs in the burial; the rise of the Monasteries in the early Middle Ages and of the religious Orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the late Middle Ages. Each student was responsible for researching and reporting on a particular topic, and was supported by the use of information and communication techniques. Particular attention was devoted to the Books of Hours, important illuminated medieval manuscripts (containing psalms, short prayers and biblical quotations) that marked the different parts of the day and that were specifically composed for wealthy people. Classroom activities ranged from the simpler multi-matching and gap-filling exercises to the more complex tasks of providing definitions for given words, creating mind-maps, enriching a bilingual English-Italian glossary and providing contextualized examples for an English grammar book. Educational videos from the BBC or other channels and pertaining to the topics treated during the lessons were projected each time and were followed by direct questioning and more general conversation, to help students gain proficiency in oral communication. In the last three years, the Italian students from Pisa University have been working in collaboration with those of Ohio University on an excavation project carried out at the Field School in Medieval Archaeology and Bioarchaeology at Badia Pozzeveri (Lucca, Italy), to which the prestigious International journal SCIENCE dedicated a special issue and cover in December 2013. Finally, multidisciplinary elements were also included in the courses, by exploiting the information extracted from videos related to disciplines other than funerary archaeology, for example a BBC Channel 4 video describing the British meals of the day, the origins of which date back to medieval times

Lighting up stars in chemical evolution models : the CMD of Sculptor

This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. ©: 2016 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present a novel approach to draw the synthetic colour–magnitude diagram (CMD) of galaxies, which can provide – in principle – a deeper insight in the interpretation and understanding of current observations. In particular, we ‘light up’ the stars of chemical evolution models, according to their initial mass, metallicity and age, to eventually understand how the assumed underlying galaxy formation and evolution scenario affects the final configuration of the synthetic CMD. In this way, we obtain a new set of observational constraints for chemical evolution models beyond the usual photospheric chemical abundances. The strength of our method resides in the very fine grid of metallicities and ages of the assumed data base of stellar isochrones. In this work, we apply our photochemical model to reproduce the observed CMD of the Sculptor dSph and find that we can reproduce the main features of the observed CMD. The main discrepancies are found at fainter magnitudes in the main sequence turn-off and sub-giant branch, where the observed CMD extends towards bluer colours than the synthetic one; we suggest that this is a signature of metal-poor stellar populations in the data, which cannot be captured by our assumed one-zone chemical evolution model.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

State of the Art on Stylized Fabrication

© 2018 The Authors Computer Graphics Forum © 2018 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Digital fabrication devices are powerful tools for creating tangible reproductions of 3D digital models. Most available printing technologies aim at producing an accurate copy of a tridimensional shape. However, fabrication technologies can also be used to create a stylistic representation of a digital shape. We refer to this class of methods as ‘stylized fabrication methods’. These methods abstract geometric and physical features of a given shape to create an unconventional representation, to produce an optical illusion or to devise a particular interaction with the fabricated model. In this state-of-the-art report, we classify and overview this broad and emerging class of approaches and also propose possible directions for future research

CLIL Funerary Archaeology courses for first-cycle and second-cycle degree students

This paper reports on the differences between two specialized funerary archaeology courses conducted by a native language teacher from the Institute for Computational Linguistics of the National Research Council in Pisa and a subject specialist in paleopathology and funerary archaeology from the Division of Palaeopathology, Department of Translational Research on New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery of Pisa University. Lessons addressed to first cycle three-year Bachelor's degree undergraduates who were studying archaeology, art history, natural and environmental sciences took place in the second semester of the year 2012-2013. Classes in the same discipline and addressed to students from the same faculties had been held a year earlier for a second cycle twoyear Master's degree course. The classes were delivered in English using CLIL (exploitation of a vehicular foreign language to teach a special subject) associated with blended learning methodology (combination of face-to-face instructor-led training with web-based technology). Appropriate teaching materials selected by the two teachers covered a wide range of topics, from the study of death to ancient burials, rites, and dynamics of human settlements, as well as evidence of past human societies recovered by excavations. In particular, ancient Roman funerary customs (inhumation, cremation) and Medieval mortuary practices and burials were studied, alongside artifacts such as weapons, jewellery, and pottery vessels recovered from archaeological sites both in Italy and in Britain. Collaboration between language teacher and subject specialist was crucial for the selection of the reading and listening materials, for the correction of the oral and written work assigned to the students, and for the intervention on the part of the subject teacher to clarify points that had been raised, to assist the students during the individual presentations, pairwork or group discussions, and to encourage their work. Two researchers collaborating with the subject specialist also contributed to the lessons by presenting studies they had performed in their area of expertise and by assisting the students during the discussions. These student-centred tasks were aimed at accomplishing important educational goals such as student motivation, improved cognitive and academic performance, enhanced access to online learning resources, peer learning and collaboration. The 2012-2013 course proved to be much more interactive and challenging than the previous one, owing to the major emphasis given to the more practical aspects, in preparation for the fieldwork in archaeology and bioarchaeology, which was carried out in the summer of 2013, working with their peers from Ohio State University and other Universities in the USA, Canada and Australia. Particular attention was devoted to the language of funerary archaeology, and the trainees extracted definitions from the texts they were using to enrich an ongoing English-Italian glossary of funerary archaeology terms. The most important items and sentence structures of the English language were studied and revised, and an English grammar containing contextualized examples drawn from specialized works in that domain was enriched with new material. Student exchanges under different European and international programmes have emphasized on the need for specialist knowledge in specific thematic areas, alongside an oral and written command of a foreign language

Automated generation of flat tileable patterns and 3D reduced model simulation

The computational fabrication community is developing an increasing interest in the use of patterned surfaces, which can be designed to show ornamental and unconventional aesthetics or to perform as a proper structural material with a wide range of features. Geometrically designing and controlling the deformation capabilities of these patterns in response to external stimuli is a complex task due to the large number of variables involved. This paper introduces a method for generating sets of tileable and exchangeable flat patterns as well as a model-reduction strategy that enables their mechanical simulation at interactive rates. This method is included in a design pipeline that aims to turn any general flat surface into a pattern tessellation, which is able to deform under a given loading scenario. To validate our approach, we apply it to different contexts, including real-scale 3D printed specimens, for which we compare our results with the ones provided by a ground-truth solver

Resolved stellar population of distant galaxies in the ELT era

The expected imaging capabilities of future Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) will offer the unique possibility to investigate the stellar population of distant galaxies from the photometry of the stars in very crowded fields. Using simulated images and photometric analysis we explore here two representative science cases aimed at recovering the characteristics of the stellar populations in the inner regions of distant galaxies. Specifically: case A) at the center of the disk of a giant spiral in the Centaurus Group, (mu B~21, distance of 4.6 Mpc); and, case B) at half of the effective radius of a giant elliptical in the Virgo Cluster (mu~19.5, distance of 18 Mpc). We generate synthetic frames by distributing model stellar populations and adopting a representative instrumental set up, i.e. a 42 m Telescope operating close to the diffraction limit. The effect of crowding is discussed in detail showing how stars are measured preferentially brighter than they are as the confusion limit is approached. We find that (i) accurate photometry (sigma~0.1, completeness >90%) can be obtained for case B) down to I~28.5, J~27.5 allowing us to recover the stellar metallicity distribution in the inner regions of ellipticals in Virgo to within ~0.1 dex; (ii) the same photometric accuracy holds for the science case A) down to J~28.0, K~27.0, enabling to reconstruct of the star formation history up to the Hubble time via simple star counts in diagnostic boxes. For this latter case we discuss the possibility of deriving more detailed information on the star formation history from the analysis of their Horizontal Branch stars. We show that the combined features of high sensitivity and angular resolution of ELTs may open a new era for our knowledge of the stellar content of galaxies of different morphological type up to the distance of the Virgo cluster.Comment: 21 pages, 17 figures, PASP accepted in pubblicatio

Variable stars and stellar populations in Andromeda XXI: II. Another merged galaxy satellite of M31?

B and V time-series photometry of the M31 dwarf spheroidal satellite Andromeda XXI (And XXI) was obtained with the Large Binocular Cameras at the Large Binocular Telescope. We have identified 50 variables in And XXI, of which 41 are RR Lyrae stars (37 fundamental-mode RRab, and 4 first-overtone RRc, pulsators) and 9 are Anomalous Cepheids (ACs). The average period of the RRab stars ( = 0.64 days) and the period-amplitude diagram place And~XXI in the class of Oosterhoff II - Oosterhoff-Intermediate objects. From the average luminosity of the RR Lyrae stars we derived the galaxy distance modulus of (m-M)$_0$=$24.40\pm0.17$ mag, which is smaller than previous literature estimates, although still consistent with them within 1 $\sigma$. The galaxy color-magnitude diagram shows evidence for the presence of three different stellar generations in And~XXI: 1) an old ($\sim$ 12 Gyr) and metal poor ([Fe/H]=$-$1.7 dex) component traced by the RR Lyrae stars; 2) a slightly younger (10-6 Gyr) and more metal rich ([Fe/H]=$-$1.5 dex) component populating the red horizontal branch, and 3) a young age ($\sim$ 1 Gyr) component with same metallicity, that produced the ACs. Finally, we provide hints that And~XXI could be the result of a minor merging event between two dwarf galaxies.Comment: accepted for publications in Ap

A different perspective for nonphotochemical quenching in plant antenna complexes

Light-harvesting complexes of plants exert a dual function of light-harvesting (LH) and photoprotection through processes collectively called nonphotochemical quenching (NPQ). While LH processes are relatively well characterized, those involved in NPQ are less understood. Here, we characterize the quenching mechanisms of CP29, a minor LHC of plants, through the integration of two complementary enhanced-sampling techniques, dimensionality reduction schemes, electronic calculations and the analysis of cryo-EM data in the light of the predicted conformational ensemble. Our study reveals that the switch between LH and quenching state is more complex than previously thought. Several conformations of the lumenal side of the protein occur and differently affect the pigments’ relative geometries and interactions. Moreover, we show that a quenching mechanism localized on a single chlorophyll-carotenoid pair is not sufficient but many chlorophylls are simultaneously involved. In such a diffuse mechanism, short-range interactions between each carotenoid and different chlorophylls combined with a protein-mediated tuning of the carotenoid excitation energies have to be considered in addition to the commonly suggested Coulomb interactions