Studiare Svetonio a Padova alla fine del Quattrocento

pp. 53-64Giovanni Calfurnio, docente di retorica dal 1486 al 1503 presso lo Studio padovano, annotava in modo parco ma penetrante due incunaboli padovani delle Vitae di Svetonio, esemplari delle edizioni del 1490 e del 1493. La notizia di maggior interesse giunge però da un terzo incunabolo, l’attuale London, British Library, IB 21405 (anche qui un esemplare dell’edizione ’90 col commento del Sabellico), fittamente postillato da Willibald Pirckhaymer: la comunicazione presenta una edizione delle postille.Giovanni Calfurnio, professor of rhetoric from 1486 to 1503 at the Studium of Padua, wrote in a park but penetrating way two paduan incunabula of the Suetonius’ Vitae, copies of the editions of 1490 and 1493. The news of most interest, however, comes from a third incunabulum, the current London, British Library, IB 21405 (also a copy of the edition of 1490 with Sabellico’s commentary), densely annotated by Willibald Pirckhaymer: this communication presents an edition of the postils

Local field enhancement: comparing self-similar and dimer nanoantennas

We study the local field enhancement properties of self-similar nanolenses and compare the obtained results with the performance of standard dimer nanoantennas. We report that, despite the additional structural complexity, self-similar nanolenses are unable to provide significant improvements over the field enhancement performance of standard plasmonic dimers

Chiral Surface Waves for Enhanced Circular Dichroism

We present a novel chiral sensing platform that combines a one-dimensional photonic crystal design with a birefringent surface defect. The platform sustains simultaneous transverse electric and transverse magnetic surface modes, which are exploited to generate chiral surface waves. The present design provides homogeneous and superchiral fields of both handednesses over arbitrarily large areas in a wide spectral range, resulting in the enhancement of the circular dichroism signal by two orders of magnitude, thus paving the road toward the successful combination of surface-enhanced spectroscopies and electromagnetic superchirality.Comment: Added references. Corrected typos. Included new design for broadband chiral surface wave

Effect of blueberry supplementation in overweight and obese pregnant women

Childhood obesity is a serious problem growing worldwide that needs to be early considered and treated. Maternal overweight and obesity lead to foetal complications and to an increased risk of child obesity. Blueberry bio-active compounds have antioxidant properties and improve insulin sensitivity in obese individuals. We proposed a daily integration of a freeze-dried blueberry extract in the last trimester of a population of overweight and obese pregnant women. Mother cytokine milieu, birth weight and at age one, were compared with a matched control group. Results: birth weight was significantly lower in those whose mothers assumed the blueberry extract (male: 3636 gr ± 56,7 in control group and 3302 gr ± 60,9 in the blueberry, P=.001; female: 3446 gr ± 53 in control group and 3094 gr ± 65,5 in the blueberry, P <.0001) and this result remained comparable at age one (male control group: 9597 gr ± 134,4; blueberry: 8656 gr ± 271,9; P=.0021; female control group: 8812 ± 167,5; blueberry: 8083 ± 266,3; P=.0211); pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α and leptin) were significantly reduced in the blueberry group (control 29,89 pg/mL ± 0,283 vs blueberry 8,124 ng/mL ± 0,1085 and 17,28 ± 0,4742 vs 6,977 ± 0,1187, respectively); anti-inflammatory cytokines (TGF-β and IL-4) were significantly increased in the blueberry group (control 4,196 pg/ml ± 0,9752 vs blueberry 14,87 pg/ml ± 0,8844 and 14,87 pg/ml ± 0,8844 vs 55,22 ± 1,47, respectively), CRP levels were significantly lower in the blueberry group (control 5,917 mg/L ± 0,698 vs blueberry 3,741 mg/L ± 0,6279). Conclusion: a daily dietary supplementation with bioactive from whole blueberries in overweight and/or obese pregnant women is an effective intervention to reduce the risk of foetal macrosomia and early childhood obesity

LINEAR INFRASTRUCTURES THAT CHARACTERIZE A PAST LAND MANAGEMENT: THE MONTAGNOLA SENESE DRY STONE WALLS. A METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH OF ANALYSIS

The aim of this paper is to highlight the development of a methodology for studying linear infrastructures such as dry stone walls, characteristic of an earlier land management in the Siena countryside. The study area on which this methodology was tested is located in the Site of Community Importance (SCI) “Montagnola Senese”. It was chosen as an example of a historical form of agricultural and forest land management, partly related to the key presence of the above mentioned artifacts. This methodology was based on the analysis of a historical cadastre and the concurrent construction and updating of a L.I.S. (Land Information System) processed in a GIS environment. In order to compare 1825 data about land use, land ownership and parcel boundaries of the current walls were surveyed during fieldwork through GPS handheld equipment. The results show quite a good correspondence between wall lines and cadastral parcel boundary lines, mostly in the woodland. The analysis of the study area brings out that the walls were designed to carry out different functions such as property boundary, to enclose fields and defend them from the entrance of livestock grazing in the woodland, and subdivide a same land property in different management portions both as cultivated fields and as woodland

Tra Marche e Abruzzi. Un sonetto ritornellato di metà Trecento

edizione critica e commento linguistico di un sonetto ritornellato mediotrecentesco di area marchigiano-abruzzes

Per il testo delle Notizie istoriche della Città di Belluno, 1780 (Emissioni, stati, cartigli)

Le giunte autografe di Lucio Doglioni nei margini di un esemplare delle Notizie istoriche della Città di Belluno, 1780 conservato alla Biblbioteca Civica di Belluno consentono di assegnargli defiitivamente la paternità dell'opera. L'edizione della Storia di Belluno del 1816 curata dal nipote del Doglioni si servì di questo esemplare pubblicandone scrupolosamente le aggiunte

Vision from the right stem

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A Scalable Algorithm for Metric High-Quality Clustering in Information Retrieval Tasks

We consider the problem of finding efficiently a high quality k-clustering of n points in a (possibly discrete) metric space. Many methods are known when the point are vectors in a real vector space, and the distance function is a standard geometric distance such as L1, L2 (Euclidean) or L2 2 (squared Euclidean distance). In such cases efficiency is often sought via sophisticated multidimensional search structures for speeding up nearest neighbor queries (e.g. variants of kd-trees). Such techniques usually work well in spaces of moderately high dimension say up to 6 or 8). Our target is a scenario in which either the metric space cannot be mapped into a vector space, or, if this mapping is possible, the dimension of such a space is so high as to rule out the use of the above mentioned techniques. This setting is rather typical in Information Retrieval applications. We augment the well known furthest-point-first algorithm for kcenter clustering in metric spaces with a filtering step based on the triangular inequality and we compare this algorithm with some recent fast variants of the classical k-means iterative algorithm augmented with an analogous filtering schemes. We extensively tested the two solutions on synthetic geometric data and real data from Information Retrieval applications. The main conclusion we draw is that our modified furthest-point-first method attains solutions of better or comparable quality within a fraction of the time used by the fast k-means algorithm. Thus our algorithm is valuable when either real time constraints or the large amount of data highlight the poor scalability of traditional clustering methods