Data on face-to-face contacts in an office building suggests a low-cost vaccination strategy based on community linkers

Empirical data on contacts between individuals in social contexts play an important role in providing information for models describing human behavior and how epidemics spread in populations. Here, we analyze data on face-to-face contacts collected in an office building. The statistical properties of contacts are similar to other social situations, but important differences are observed in the contact network structure. In particular, the contact network is strongly shaped by the organization of the offices in departments, which has consequences in the design of accurate agent-based models of epidemic spread. We consider the contact network as a potential substrate for infectious disease spread and show that its sparsity tends to prevent outbreaks of rapidly spreading epidemics. Moreover, we define three typical behaviors according to the fraction $f$ of links each individual shares outside its own department: residents, wanderers and linkers. Linkers ($f\sim 50\%$) act as bridges in the network and have large betweenness centralities. Thus, a vaccination strategy targeting linkers efficiently prevents large outbreaks. As such a behavior may be spotted a priori in the offices' organization or from surveys, without the full knowledge of the time-resolved contact network, this result may help the design of efficient, low-cost vaccination or social-distancing strategies

ALMA observations of polarized emission toward the CW Tau and DG Tau protoplanetary disks: constraints on dust grain growth and settling

We present polarimetric data of CW Tau and DG Tau, two well-known Class II disk/jet systems, obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array at 870 $\mu$m and 0."2 average resolution. In CW Tau, the total and polarized emission are both smooth and symmetric, with polarization angles almost parallel to the minor axis of the projected disk. In contrast, DG Tau displays a structured polarized emission, with an elongated brighter region in the disk's near side and a belt-like feature beyond about 0."3 from the source. At the same time the total intensity is spatially smooth, with no features. The polarization pattern, almost parallel to the minor axis in the inner region, becomes azimuthal in the outer belt, possibly because of a drop in optical depth. The polarization fraction has average values of 1.2% in CW Tau and 0.4% in DG Tau. Our results are consistent with polarization from self-scattering of the dust thermal emission. Under this hypothesis, the maximum size of the grains contributing to polarization is in the range 100 - 150 $\mu$m for CW Tau and 50 - 70 $\mu$m for DG Tau. The polarization maps combined with dust opacity estimates indicate that these grains are distributed in a geometrically thin layer in CW Tau, representing a settling in the disk midplane. Meanwhile, such settling is not yet apparent for DG Tau. These results advocate polarization studies as a fundamental complement to total emission observations, in investigations of the structure and the evolution of protoplanetary disks.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

What is the Philology Author?

Este artículo pretende definir la filología de autor y, para ello, atenderá a su génesis, donde cobran especial importancia las figuras de Contini e Isella, a sus premisas básicas, que la diferencian de la crítica genética francesa y al radical cambio al que está sometida hoy nuestra disciplina. La filología de autor, que implica además una interpretación personal por parte del crítico, refleja dicha interpretación no solo en la lección escogida del texto, sino en la propia construcción del aparato crítico, que podrá ser genético o evolutivo. Todas estas cuestiones básicas se explican a partir de los Idilli de Leopardi o Fermo e Lucia de Manzoni, entre otros ejemplos.The aim of the article is to define author’s philology, and in order to do so, it will look at its beginnings, where we find the relevance of the figures of Contini an Isella, at its basic premises, which make it differ from French genetic criticism, and at the radical transformation to which our discipline is exposed today. Author’s philology, which also entails a personal interpretation on the critic’s part, projects this interpretation not only in the lesson chosen from the text, but also in the construction itself of the critical apparatus, which may be genetic or evolutive. All these basic issues are dealt with taking the Idilli, by Leopardi, or Fermo e Lucia, by Manzoni, as basis, among others

What is Authorial Philology?

"A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial philology in its cultural and conceptual architecture. The originality and distinction of this work lies in its clear systematization of a discipline whose autonomous status has only recently been recognised (at least in Italy), though its roots may extend back as far as Giorgio Pasquali. This pioneering volume offers both a methodical set of instructions on how to read critical editions, and a wide range of practical examples, expanding upon the conceptual and methodological apparatus laid out in the first two chapters. By presenting a thorough account of the historical and theoretical framework through which authorial philology developed, Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni successfully reconceptualize the authorial text as an ever-changing organism, subject to alteration and modification. What is Authorial Philology? will be of great didactic value to students and researchers alike, providing readers with a fuller understanding of the rationale behind different editing practices, and addressing both traditional and newer methods such as the use of the digital medium and its implications. Spanning the whole Italian tradition from Petrarch to Carlo Emilio Gadda, this ground-breaking volume provokes us to consider important questions concerning a text’s dynamism, the extent to which an author is ‘agentive’, and, most crucially, about the very nature of what we read.

Epidemic Threshold in Continuous-Time Evolving Networks

Current understanding of the critical outbreak condition on temporal networks relies on approximations (time scale separation, discretization) that may bias the results. We propose a theoretical framework to compute the epidemic threshold in continuous time through the infection propagator approach. We introduce the {\em weak commutation} condition allowing the interpretation of annealed networks, activity-driven networks, and time scale separation into one formalism. Our work provides a coherent connection between discrete and continuous time representations applicable to realistic scenarios.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Mulcom: a multiple comparison statistical test for microarray data in Bioconductor

Many microarray experiments compare a common control group with several ”test ” groups, like in the case, for example of a time-course experiments where time zero serves as a common reference point. The MulCom package described here implements the Dunnett’s t-test, which has been specifically developed to handle multiple comparisons against a common reference, in a version tailored for genomic data analysis that we named MulCom (Multiple Comparisons) test. The implementation includes two test parameters, namely the t value and an optional minimal fold-change value, m, with automated, permutation-based estimation of False Discovery Rate (FDR) for parameter combinations of choice. The package permits automated optimization of the test parameters to obtain the maximum number of significant genes at a given FDR value. In this vignette we present the rationale, implementation and usage of the MulCom package, plus a practical application on a time-course microarra

Editoria e filologia. Nuove prospettive per le opere di Gadda

The essay intends to investigate which ecdotic perspectives open today for Gadda’s work, whose editorial life continued after the author's death, due to the wide gap between what he kept unpublished and what instead it was given to the press, during his difficult and painful lifetime. The recent studies on La meditazione milanese (edited by Gian Carlo Roscioni) and on Racconto italiano di ignoto del novecento, on Un fulmine sul 220 and on La meccanica (edited by Dante Isella) brought out the author’s commitment on philosophy and on the novel, and it revolutionized our knowledge, radically changing our critic approach to his texts. The two major challenges that await future publishers are the vastness of the submerged production and the constant circulation and reworking of the published texts. Gadda's work will therefore continue to offer an ideal field for the combination of philology and criticism, for its indisputable importance, for the vastness and quality of the surviving documentation, as well as for the experimental tension that animates it: the one that makes Gadda a writer with an "accentuated heuristic position".Il saggio intende indagare quali prospettive ecdotiche si aprano oggi per l'opera gaddiana, la cui vita editoriale non poteva che proseguire dopo la morte dell'autore, a causa dell'ampio scarto fra quanto egli tenne inedito nei suoi «leggendari bauli» e quanto invece fu dato alle stampe, in una vita sofferta e spesso disperata. Il recupero della Meditazione milanese (da parte di Gian Carlo Roscioni), del Racconto italiano di ignoto del Novecento, di Un fulmine sul 220 e della Meccanica (da parte di Dante Isella ) ha fatto affiorare l’audace impegno sul fronte della filosofia e del romanzo e rivoluzionato le nostre conoscenze, modificando radicalmente l’approccio critico. Le due maggiori sfide che aspettano i futuri editori sono la vertiginosa vastità della produzione sommersa e la circolazione e incessante rielaborazione dei testi editi. L'officina di Gadda continuerà dunque ad offrire al connubio di filologia e critica un terreno ideale, per il suo indiscutibile rilievo, per la vastità e qualità della documentazione sopravvissuta, nonché per l’accesa tensione sperimentale che lo anima: quella che fa di lui uno scrittore dalla «posizione accentuatamente euristica»