Farmers of the Bronze Age – Exploring land use dynamics and agricultural practices using legacy data and land-use modelling

The site of Kastanas, a small tell located at the Axios river near the shore of the ancient thermaic gulf, is used as a case study to assess land use dynamics and agricultural practice through analysis of botanical legacy data and land-use modelling. With a stratigraphy spanning from the Early Bronze to the Iron Age and hundreds of botanical samples from different contexts (first published in 1983), it offers a unique possibility to reconstruct a sequence of probable agricultural practices. This allows insights into the subsistence economy of this specific microregion in the Bronze and Iron Ages, as the tell is one of a group of similar sites located closely to each other. This case study is part of a supra-regional analysis to diachronically evaluate past land-use activities and to connect them to environmental dynamics. The results will contribute to understand the resilience and vulnerabilities of the respective agrarian societies of the Bronze Age in Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans

Educators’ Perspectives on Transitions to Professional Care

International audienceThe purpose of this study was to provide an in-depth understanding of how childcare educators experience infants’ transitions to childcare and how relationships are built between parents and educators and between educators and children during the settling-in process and beyond it. This investigation is approached relationally using attachment theory as an investigative lens within a qualitative case study design over a 16-month period. Data were collected by participating in theory/practice inquiry meetings, observation at the centre and individual educator interviews. Results reveal that educators experience social expectations that are culturally based and influence their actions, decisions and feelings, either acknowledged or unconsciously. Educators demonstrated great effort in defining their professional roles as early childhood educators, something that influenced not only their professional understanding, but also their interpretation of the policies and structures of the childcare society, and their personal relationships with both parents and children. Surprisingly, the educators’ opinions about attachment to the children in their care as well as their professional roles and relationships varied a great deal from conventional understandings of attachment theory and relational approaches to teaching

Luminosity Scans for Beam Diagnostics

A new type of fast luminosity separation scans ("Emittance Scans") was introduced at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015. The scans were performed systematically in every fill with full-intensity beams in physics production conditions at the Interaction Point (IP) of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. They provide both emittance and closed orbit measurements at a bunch-by-bunch level. The precise measurement of beam-beam closed orbit differences allowed a direct, quantitative observation of long-range beam-beam PACMAN effects, which agrees well with numerical simulations from an improved version of the TRAIN code

No long urban, can\u27t be rural, definitely not suburban : the experience of Detroit

Detroit is a city of makers, dreamers and doers. When pushed to the brink the city does not step down, but instead continues to fight through grassroots movements, community advocates and neighborhood innovators. In this way Detroit has regained notoriety, not through corporate industry, banking or sports, but through those residents who have put their own difficulties aside for the betterment of their communities. However, the current economic and social developments in the city are centered around the downtown core of posterity, ignoring the work done by those individuals within the greater community context. In these neighborhoods, where autoworkers once lived in dense residential blocks, the current context cannot be more different; Detroit has created its own urban typology, that of transparency. Remembering the past and looking towards the future, performance and agriculture industries collaborate to form a new town center, void of street walls and automotive centric transportation, unified under a single roof as means of redefining the economic geography of Detroit. These industries have always had a place in the city, even in the heyday of industry and manufacturing, and now they return to energize the community. Sweeping across Gratiot Avenue, this large horizontal roof collects these industries within it, as did the old auto-plants of the city, centering both economic and social empowerment for the residents of Detroit. There is a constant and active play between market and performance, it is a place for both business and leisure, of learning and making, and of growth and connectivity. The structure brings into play the Detroit vernacular of low, expansive industrial scale with the newly developed direction of transparency, where programs blend into a blur of activity, where performance is both market and Motown, activating and giving space for the rise and expansion of these individual movements. Located in the neighborhood of Poletown East, the project relies heavily on restructuring the job market and transportation systems. Gratiot Avenue becomes the location of a new BRT line for the city, transporting both people and fresh food, and thus the heart of the structure. Where train tracks once lay connecting these hubs of industry, recreation appears, adding a human focused corridor to a historically automotive focused city. An array of performance spaces, recording booths, and practice rooms mix and interact with the encompassing market, and gathering and breakout spaces are loosely defined as one program or the other. Education acts as a programmatic sponge in the blending of market and performance, while surrounding industrial buildings are reutilized for the means of food and artistic production, all crossing paths under this single lid. Here, roof is both architecture and urbanism, creating a new typology of the town center

Observations from LHC proton-proton operation

This paper describes two distinct effects observed during the operation of the LHC in 2012: first, the impacts on beam parameter evolution of the end-of-squeeze instabilities encountered in the second half of the 2012 run; and, second, the very reproducible loss pattern of Beam 1 observed (while a similar pattern was negligible, if present at all, for Beam 2). Statistics for 2012 are provided and the impact on luminosity production is highlighted.Comment: Presented at the ICFA Mini-Workshop on Beam-Beam in Hadron Colliders, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-22 March 201

End of life in prison: Talking across disciplines and across countries

What a good end of life means is a particularly relevant question in the context of confinement and prison. Most of the questions and issues raised by end of life for those living in liberty also apply to the correctional setting. However, the institutional particularities and logics of the prison create unique barriers and make it difficult in practice to reconcile concerns in regard to end of life—like care and comfort—with the mandate of corrections—confinement and punishment. At present, the literature on end of life in prison is dominated by U.S. contributions. We have therefore invited researchers from various disciplines in various countries to analyze the topic from their disciplinary perspectives and within the respective institutional frames of their national contexts. Keywords: end of life, ethics, practice, palliative care, priso

Clinical and genetic studies on the causes and prognosis of intracranial haemorrhage

Introduction: Intracranial haemorrhage occurs within the compartments of the intracranial vault (skull). Spontaneous (non-traumatic) intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH) and aneurysmal subarachnoid haemorrhage (aSAH) have a high mortality and morbidity rate, while convexity subarachnoid haemorrhage (cSAH) in older people is associated with a high risk of future intracranial bleeding. In this thesis I present several studies investigating factors associated with the development and prognosis of ICH, aSAH cSAH. Methods: I evaluated patients recruited to the Genetics and Observational Subarachnoid Haemorrhage (GOSH) study with aSAH or unruptured intracranial aneurysm as well as patients with ICH recruited to the Clinical Relevance Of Cerebral Microbleeds In Stroke (CROMIS-2) study, both multicentre observational studies recruiting patients from the UK. Individual patient data was also collected for meta-analysis of published studies. Main findings: 1) We found a different risk factor profile in patients with aSAH compared to patients with unruptured intracranial aneurysms and continued our research by validating a prediction model for the prediction of long-term functional outcome after aSAH; 2) in our cohort of patients with convexity SAH we found that it is associated with a higher rate of symptomatic ICH in patients with probable cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA); 3) our genetic association analysis showed that Haptoglobin might be associated with mortality after ICH. Additionally, Apolipoprotein E is associated with novel neuroimaging markers of CAA. In our genome-wide association analysis we found new loci (rs4675692) associated with ICH status in a genome-wide association study (but did not find a repeat expansion for C9orf72) and finally found previously reported and novel genetic variants in familial aSAH. Conclusion: These findings, in diverse cohorts, confirm the importance of clinical, radiological and genetic factors for disease expression and prognosis in different forms of intracranial haemorrhage