Un’ampolla in vetro blu nell’antica Bergomum

This paper presents an unusual blue bunch of grapes-shaped ampulla from ancient Bergomum. The aim is the analysis of the types of glasses of bunch grapesshaped. According to the spread of these glasses and the find of a sample in Bergamo, this paper offers a possible case study of trade channels between the Levant, first area of production of these samples, and northern Italy

Measurement of adsorption of a single component from the liquid phase : modelling investigation and sensitivity analysis

In this work, we consider an alternative approach for the measurement of adsorption from the liquid phase. Consider a mixture consisting of a non-adsorbed component (B) and an adsorbed component (A) present at some low concentration. Initially, a feed of component B only flows through a column packed with an adsorbent. Then, the feed is switched to the mixture of A and B. As soon as the mixture enters the column, there will be a reduction in the outlet flow rate as component A leaves the liquid phase and passes into the adsorbed phase. There are three stages to this work. The first is to develop overall and component balances to show how the amount adsorbed of component A can be determined from the variation in the column outlet flow rate. The second is to determine the actual variation in the column outlet flow rate for both plug flow and axial-dispersed plug flow. The final stage is to consider the suitability of a gravity-fed system to deliver the feed to the column. An analysis of the results shows that the experimental arrangement should be able to accurately monitor adsorption from the liquid phase where the mass fraction of the solute is of the order of 1%: the limiting experimental factor is how constant the volumetric flow rate of the liquid feed can be maintained

The Buffer Function of Wealth in Socioemotional Responses to Covid‐19 in Italy

The social stratification of material consequences of individual‐level disruptive events is a widely researched topic. Less is known about the stratification of psychological outcomes in response to contextual‐level disruptive events. We aim to fill this gap by investigating the aftermath of the Covid‐19 pandemic on individuals’ dispositional optimism and the stratification based on unequal wealth resources. The study focuses on Italy, the first European country to be strongly hit by Covid‐19, and one characterised by high levels of private savings and homeownership. Theoretically, we draw on the conventional social inequalities framework informed by insights from the literature on natural disasters, positing that wealth‐related resource disparities may have stratified the socioemotional response to the pandemic. Empirically, we leverage a combination of individual‐level longitudinal survey data (Bank of Italy’s Special Survey of Italian Households) and municipality‐level official statistics on excess mortality (Italian National Institute of Statistics), covering the first 17 months of the Covid‐19 pandemic in Italy. Results indicate overall negative consequences of severe exposure to risks associated with the pandemic on optimism. However, we found evidence in line with a post‐traumatic growth scenario, as optimism slightly increased over the course of the pandemic. The insurance function of wealth emerges in the higher optimism of individuals with more resources. Nevertheless, resource disparities are not translated into stark differences in susceptibility to risk exposure or post‐traumatic growth. Overall, our findings support a limited insurance function of wealth in the socioemotional sphere

Traumatic journeys; understanding the rhetoric of patients' complaints

Background Research on patients’ complaints about healthcare has tended to focus on the typology of complaints and complainants to homogenise complaints and better understand safety implications. Nonetheless, complaints speak to a broader spectrum of harm and suffering that go beyond formal adverse events. Complaints about care episodes can take considerable time and effort, generate negative energy and may leave a dogged ‘minority’ embittered. Methods This study provides an overview of the process and rhetoric of how patients formulate written complaints. We collated a data corpus comprising 60 letters of complaints and their responses over a period of one month. This paper focuses on the complaint letters only. National Health Service (NHS) Complaint Department staff in a healthcare area in the United Kingdom (UK) anonymized the letters. We took a broad qualitative approach to analysing the data drawing upon Discourse Analysis focusing on the rhetorical and persuasive strategies employed by the complainants. Results What patients complained about related to how they complained, with complainants expending considerable effort in persuasive rhetoric that sought to legitimise the complaint drawing upon different sources of epistemic authority. The complainants struggle to be an ‘objective’ witness as the complaint evolves from an implicit neglect narrative to increasing ‘noise’ with other features such as Direct Reported Speech used to animate and authenticate the narrative. Many of the complex complaints appeared to evidence some psychological distress. This was associated with the complainants’ reports of experiencing cumulative poor health care and their repeated failure to resolve the complaint. The subsequent delicate and potentially stigmatized formal act of complaining was a source of additional distress. Conclusions Complaints are involved narratives often predicated on the expectation they will not be given due credence. Health care staff may benefit from understanding how complaints are formulated to be able to more appropriately address the focus and extent of patients’ grievances from the outset and therefore, reduce the considerable associated harm

The first COVID-19 lockdown did nothing but confirm the gendered division of domestic chores

Anna Zamberlan, Filippo Gioachin, and Davide Gritti show that both men and women who lost paid hours during the first lockdown increased the time they spent on domestic chores. They explain why this has nevertheless not led to a significant rebalancing of housework obligations

CoSMed: a confidentiality-verified social media platform

This paper describes progress with our agenda of formal verification of information-flow security for realistic systems. We present CoSMed, a social media platform with verified document confidentiality. The system’s kernel is implemented and verified in the proof assistant Isabelle/HOL. For verification, we employ the framework of Bounded-Deducibility (BD) Security, previously introduced for the conference system CoCon. CoSMed is a second major case study in this framework. For CoSMed, the static topology of declassification bounds and triggers that characterized previous instances of BD security has to give way to a dynamic integration of the triggers as part of the bound

Rethinking embryology in vitro: A synergy between engineering, data science and theory

Pluripotent stem cells, in the recent years, have been demonstrated to mimic different aspects of metazoan embryonic development in vitro. This has led to the establishment of synthetic embryology: a field that makes use of in vitro stem cell models to investigate developmental processes that would be otherwise inaccessible in vivo. Currently, a plethora of engineering-inspired techniques, including microfluidic devices and bioreactors, exist to generate and culture organoids at high throughput. Similarly, data analysis and deep learning-based techniques, that were established in in vivo models, are now being used to extract quantitative information from synthetic systems. Finally, theory and data-driven in silico modeling are starting to provide a system-level understanding of organoids and make predictions to be tested with further experiments. Here, we discuss our vision of how engineering, data science and theoretical modeling will synergize to offer an unprecedented view of embryonic development. For every one of these three scientific domains, we discuss examples from in vivo and in vitro systems that we think will pave the way to future developments of synthetic embryology.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

CoSMed: a confidentiality-verified social media platform

This paper describes progress with our agenda of formal verification of information flow security for realistic systems. We present CoSMed, a social media platform with verified document confidentiality. The system’s kernel is implemented and verified in the proof assistant Isabelle/HOL. For verification, we employ the framework of Bounded-De- ducibility (BD) Security, previously introduced for the conference system CoCon. CoSMed is a second major case study in this framework. For CoSMed, the static topology of declas- sification bounds and triggers that characterized previous instances of BD Security has to give way to a dynamic integration of the triggers as part of the bounds. We also show that, from a theoretical viewpoint, the removal of triggers from the notion of BD Security does not restrict its expressiveness

CoSMeDis: a distributed social media platform with formally verified confidentiality guarantees

We present the design, implementation and information flow verification of CoSMeDis, a distributed social media platform. The system consists of an arbitrary number of communicating nodes, deployable at different locations over the Internet. Its registered users can post content and establish intra-node and inter-node friendships, used to regulate access control over the posts. The system’s kernel has been verified in the proof assistant Isabelle/HOL and automatically extracted as Scala code. We formalized a framework for composing a class of information flow security guarantees in a distributed system, applicable to input/output automata. We instantiated this framework to confidentiality properties for CoSMeDis’s sources of information: posts, friendship requests, and friendship status