Cultural Communication and Cultural Transmission: The Case of Popular Tradition in Corsica

Culture is produced, shaped and transmitted through intergroup relations provoked by communication. In this paper it is examined the cultural communication alternations in a popular culture. More particularly, taking the case of dance practice in Corsica, it is described the actual dance situation. The purpose of this paper is to propose communication modules to avoid a possible cultural loss. This qualitative study is based on field research, in-depth interviews and observation. The researcher had the opportunity to observe the dance condition in Corsica, during the five (5) years that she lived on this island (2003 – 2007), exchanging and communicating with dance associations and other cultural organisations. Dance activity in Corsica today is considered a limited practice, as dance associations are the only places where it is experienced. This study identified an intergroup relation difficulty among the different dance associations. Some of the actions proposed in this study in order to improve communication and consequently improve the actual situation of insufficient dance transmission and practice is to follow common rules, propose a specific agenda with dance events, invite younger people to dance, achieve members’ identification by creating intercultural groups, mixing the teams with regard to nationality and promote cultural education and research

Tsunami hazards in the Eastern Mediterranean: strong earthquakes and tsunamis in the East Hellenic Arc and Trench system

International audienceData on tsunami phenomena occurring in the East Hellenic Arc and Trench system (HA-T) from antiquity up to the present have been updated, critically evaluated and compiled in the standard GITEC format developed in the last decade for the New European Tsunami Catalogue. New field observations are presented for the tsunamis of 9 February 1948 and 24 March 2002. From the 18 tsunamis reported eight are rather well-documented while another nine remain doubtful. The mean recurrence of strong tsunamis is likely equal to about 142 years. Most of the tsunamis documented are caused by strong earthquakes occurring in the area offshore Rhodes to the east or northeast of the island. However, there are large earthquakes near Rhodes that do not cause tsunamis, like the 1926 and 1957 ones, which is of particular importance for the tsunami hazard assessment

Well-promising outcomes with vacuum-assisted closure in an infected wound following laparotomy: A case report

Introducation: Negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) represents an alternative method to optimize conditions for wound healing. Delayed wound closure is a significant health problem, which is directly associated with pain and suffering from patient's aspect, as well with social and financial burden. Presentation of case: We report a case of vacuum-assisted wound therapy with hypertonic solution distillation and continuous negative pressure application, in an infected wound after laparotomy for incisional hernia reconstruction with mesh placement. Negative pressure was initiated at the wound margins after failure of conventional treatment with great outcomes, achieving a total closure of the incision within two weeks. Discussion: Each wound has particular characteristics which must be managed. Vacuum assisted closure (VAC) with continuous negative pressure and simultaneous wound instillation and cleanse can provide optimum results, reducing the cavity volume, by newly produced granulated tissue. Conclusion: The simultaneous use of instillation and constant pressure seemed to be superior in comparison with NPWT alone. Compared to conventional methods, the use of VAC ends to better outcomes, in cases of infected wounds following laparotomy

Path and rate of development in child heritage speakers: Evidence from Greek subject/object form and placement

Aims: We investigated: (1) whether differences in accuracy between heritage speakers (HS) and monolingual speakers (MS) signal differences in the path or merely in the rate of language development, and (2) whether, independently of these differences, HS become more accurate as they grow older. Methods: Using an elicitation task, we collected data from three groups of speakers of Greek: HS in the United States and Canada (78–226 months), MS of the same age (77–177 months), and younger MS (42–69 months). In terms of structures, we focused on two phenomena that are encoded differently in Greek and English: subject/object form in reference maintenance contexts and subject placement in embedded wh-dependencies. Data and Analysis: Data were analyzed with mixed-effects logistic regression models. Findings: We found that the heritage group had a lower accuracy and produced different error patterns than both monolingual groups. Specifically, only the heritage group produced non-felicitous lexical subjects/objects in reference maintenance contexts and ungrammatical preverbal subjects in embedded wh-structures. Accuracy, though, increased with age. Furthermore, current amount of heritage language (HL) input and generation, which were included as covariates, emerged as significant predictors in some or all of the conditions. Originality: The inclusion of a younger monolingual group helped us determine whether the different patterns observed in the language of HS are also attested in the language of MS at earlier developmental stages. The inclusion of a wide age range helped us determine whether, independently of differences in the path/rate of development, HS become more accurate as they grow older and accumulate the necessary amount of HL input. Implications: HS may go through developmental stages not attested in L1 acquisition. However, differences in developmental stages do not necessarily entail differences in the outcome of language acquisition. HS’ accuracy may continue to increase, provided that they continue using their HL

Fano resonances in THz metamaterials composed of continuous metallic wires and split ring resonators

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that Fano resonances can be obtained in terahertz metamaterials that are composed of periodic continuous metallic wires dressed with periodic split ring resonators. An asymmetric Fano lineshape has been found in a narrow frequency range of the transmission curve. By using a transmission line combined with lumped element model, we are able to not only fit the transmission spectra of Fano resonance which is attributed to the coupling and interference between the transmission continuum of continuous metallic wires and the bright resonant mode of split ring resonators, but also reveal the capacitance change of the split ring resonators induced frequency shift of the Fano resonance. Therefore, the proposed theoretical model shows more capabilities than conventional coupled oscillator model in the design of Fano structures. The effective parameters of group refractive index of the Fano structure are retrieved, and a large group index more than 800 is obtained at the Fano resonance, which could be used for slow light devices. (C) 2014 Optical Society of Americ

Prediction-Coherent LSTM-based Recurrent Neural Network for Safer Glucose Predictions in Diabetic People

In the context of time-series forecasting, we propose a LSTM-based recurrent neural network architecture and loss function that enhance the stability of the predictions. In particular, the loss function penalizes the model, not only on the prediction error (mean-squared error), but also on the predicted variation error. We apply this idea to the prediction of future glucose values in diabetes, which is a delicate task as unstable predictions can leave the patient in doubt and make him/her take the wrong action, threatening his/her life. The study is conducted on type 1 and type 2 diabetic people, with a focus on predictions made 30-minutes ahead of time. First, we confirm the superiority, in the context of glucose prediction, of the LSTM model by comparing it to other state-of-the-art models (Extreme Learning Machine, Gaussian Process regressor, Support Vector Regressor). Then, we show the importance of making stable predictions by smoothing the predictions made by the models, resulting in an overall improvement of the clinical acceptability of the models at the cost in a slight loss in prediction accuracy. Finally, we show that the proposed approach, outperforms all baseline results. More precisely, it trades a loss of 4.3\% in the prediction accuracy for an improvement of the clinical acceptability of 27.1\%. When compared to the moving average post-processing method, we show that the trade-off is more efficient with our approach

Slab segmentation controls the interplate slip motion in the SW Hellenic subduction: New insight from the 2008Mw 6.8 Methoni interplate earthquake

We present an integrated approach of the seismic structure and activity along the offshore SW Hellenic subduction from combined observations of marine and land seismic stations. Our imaging of the slab top topography from teleseismic receiver function analysis at ocean bottom seismometers supports a trenchward continuation of the along-dip slab faults beneath the Peloponnesus. We further show that their morphostructural control accounts for the backstepping of the thrust contact of the Mediterranean Ridge accretionary wedge over the upper plate. Local seismic activity offshore SW Peloponnesus constrained by ocean bottom seismometer observations reveals a correlation with specific features of the forearc: the Matapan Troughs. We study the Mw6.8 14.02.2008 interplate earthquake offshore SW Peloponnesus and show that its nucleation, rupture zone, and aftershocks sequence are confined to one slab panel between two adjacent along-dip faults and are thus controlled by not only the offshore slab top segmentation but also the upper plate sea-bottom morphology