Témoignages du culte domestique en Suisse romaine

A survey of domestic shrines in Switzerland in the Roman period reveals ritual practices conducted for deities and ancestors honored in the family circle. In a town or in a vicus, lararia in a known context appear near the entrance of the house, located either by the remains of a cabinet or a wooden container, or found dispersed in a shop or specific room behind the shop or an entrance hallway. The bronze statuettes are part of shrines and are often accompanied by other objects in connection with the cult such as the serpent pots found in Augst/Augusta Raurica. The choice of the deities that are represented suggests that the officiant is either Gallic, Helvetian or Roman and that the worship of the gods is in the Gallic and Roman versions. In the first century AD in Avenches, ram heads carved in stone served as andirons for hearths in the center of the household, continuing a Celtic tradition of domestic worship. Two inscriptions from Aventicum are dedicated to deified women by their freed husbands, one with Gallic names, another with Roman names. A bust of an elderly helvetian lady attests to the persistence of Gallic and Roman ancestor worship during Tiberius period. In the Roman settlement of Vallon near Avenches, statuettes and various objects of a lararium have been preserved in situ or scattered in a central hall opening towards a portico and decorated with a mosaic, book-cabinets and an absidial bench. A bronze chalice offered by a local Paterna to protective goddesses, the Suleviae, was probably linked to a happy birth, a mark of women's participation to the memorial place that constitutes the domestic chapel

Quantum Key Distribution with Classical Bob

Secure key distribution among two remote parties is impossible when both are classical, unless some unproven (and arguably unrealistic) computation-complexity assumptions are made, such as the difficulty of factorizing large numbers. On the other hand, a secure key distribution is possible when both parties are quantum. What is possible when only one party (Alice) is quantum, yet the other (Bob) has only classical capabilities? We present a protocol with this constraint, and prove its robustness against attacks: we prove that any attempt of an adversary to obtain information (and even a tiny amount of information) necessarily induces some errors that the legitimate users could notice.Comment: 4 and a bit pages, 1 figure, RevTe

Regards sur la peinture antique

« Le corpus pictural d’époque romaine est vaste et ne cesse de s’accroître, dans toutes les provinces de l’Empire » : voilà comment Jean-Michel Croisille conclut son ouvrage intitulé sobrement La peinture romaine (Croisille, 2005, p. 342). Ce n’est pas seulement à la peinture romaine que ce constat doit s’étendre, mais à la peinture antique en général, celle du bassin méditerranéen, du monde grec à celui des Gaulois, en passant par les Étrusques. Les efforts de l’Association internationale po..

Ecouter, voir : architectures du spectacle antique

Au début était le culte de Dionysos, pour qui va s’élaborer le théâtre, le jeu lui-même comme le lieu où il se déroule. Si les Grecs portent le drame, l’action dans un lieu fixe, les Romains vont marquer de leur empreinte l’évolution et la diffusion du bâtiment du théâtre et plus généralement des édifices de spectacle. Ceux-ci se sont perfectionnés, les aménagements techniques se sont affinés, adaptés dès la fin de la République et sous l’Empire, au point que l’on compte aujourd’hui près d’un..

Writing clinical practice guidelines in controlled natural language

Clinicians could benefit from decision support systems incorporating the knowledge contained in clinical practice guidelines. However, the unstructured form of these guidelines makes them unsuitable for formal representation. To address this challenge we translated a complete set of pediatric guideline recommendations into Attempto Controlled English (ACE). One experienced pediatrician, one physician and a knowledge engineer assessed that a suitably extended version of ACE can accurately and naturally represent the clinical concepts and the proposed actions of the guidelines. Currently, we are developing a systematic and replicable approach to authoring guideline recommendations in ACE

Mismatch negativity is not correlated with neuroendocrine indicators of catecholaminergic activity in healthy subjects.

The identification of the brain structures and neurotransmitters responsible for the generation and/or modulation of the mismatch negativity (MMN) may contribute to a clearer understanding of its functional significance, and may have clinical implications. In this context, some findings suggest that the scalp-recorded MMN reflects activity from multiple neuronal ensembles within or in the immediate vicinity of the primary auditory cortex and with possible contribution from the frontal cortex. However, few data are available concerning the influence of neurotransmitter systems on the MMN. In this study, the relationship between both noradrenergic and dopaminergic systems and the MMN were investigated in 34 healthy volunteers. Noradrenergic and dopaminergic activities were assessed with the apomorphine and clonidine challenge tests. The results showed no significant relationship between either growth hormone (GH) responses to apomorphine or clonidine and the MMN amplitude or latency. Therefore, this study does not demonstrate the implication of dopaminergic and noradrenergic activities as assessed by GH response to apomorphine and clonidine for the generation and/or the modulation of the MMN. However, given the complexity of the central neurotransmitter systems, these results cannot be considered as definitive evidence against a relationship between dopaminergic and noradrenergic activity and the MMN