LANDSLIDE EVOLUTION PATTERN REVEALED BY MULTI-TEMPORAL DSMS OBTAINED FROM HISTORICAL AERIAL IMAGES

Abstract. Landslides are a widespread natural hazard that cause damages to people and to the built up environment. Accurate knowledge of landslide distribution is crucial to develop planning strategies, prevention and resilient communities worldwide. One of the most diffuse way of reporting landslides distribution in a territory is by preparing landslide inventory maps. Such a task is mostly accomplished by expert photo-interpretation of historical aerial photographs, which are an invaluable source of information because they portray the landscape when the anthropic pressure was lower than the present day, providing an observation of the landscape closer to the natural conditions. Despite such a common use of aerial photographs, they are poorly exploited to obtain quantitative measures to support landslide mapping activities. In this paper we present a comparison of two photogrammetric approaches to measure elevation changes in a 50-years period for an area densely affected by landslides in Southern Italy. The obtained results allowed to revisit the original expert mapping proving that such a method is a useful tool to support geomorphological mapping and to improve the overall accuracy of landslide inventories

Search for π0→νμνˉμ\pi^0 \to \nu_{\mu}\bar\nu_{\mu} Decay in LSND

We observe a net beam-excess of $8.7 \pm 6.3$ (stat) $\pm 2.4$ (syst) events, above 160 MeV, resulting from the charged-current reaction of $\nu_{\mu}$ and/or $\bar\nu_{\mu}$ on C and H in the LSND detector. No beam related muon background is expected in this energy regime. Within an analysis framework of $\pi^0 \to \nu_{\mu}\bar\nu_{\mu}$, we set a direct upper limit for this branching ratio of $\Gamma(\pi^0 \to \nu_\mu \bar\nu_\mu) / \Gamma(\pi^0 \to all) < 1.6 \times 10^{-6}$ at 90% confidence level.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Rethinking “democratic backsliding” in Central and Eastern Europe – looking beyond Hungary and Poland

This essay introduces contributions to a special issue of East European Politics on “Rethinking democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe”, which seeks to expand the study of democratic regression in CEE beyond the paradigmatic cases of Hungary and Poland. Reviewing these contributions, we identify several directions for research: 1) the need to critique “democratic backsliding”, not simply as a label, but also as an assumed regional trend; 2) a need to better integrate the role of illiberal socio-economic structures such as oligarchical structures or corrupt networks; and 3) a need to (re-)examine the trade-offs between democratic stability and democratic quality. We also note how insights developed researching post-communist regions such as Western Balkans or the post-Soviet space could usefully inform work on CEE backsliding. We conclude by calling for the study of CEE democracy to become more genuinely interdisciplinary, moving beyond some narrowly institutionalist comparative political science assumptions

Clostridium difficile in Retail Meat Products, USA, 2007

To determine the presence of Clostridium difficile, we sampled cooked and uncooked meat products sold in Tucson, Arizona. Forty-two percent contained toxigenic C. difficile strains (either ribotype 078/toxinotype V [73%] or 027/toxinotype III [NAP1 or NAP1-related; 27%]). These findings indicate that food products may play a role in interspecies C. difficile transmission

MaCoCu: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages

We present the most relevant results of the project MaCoCu: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages in its second year. Parallel and monolingual corpora have been produced for eleven low-resourced European languages by crawling large amounts of textual data from selected top-level domains of the Internet; both human and automatic evaluation show its usefulness. In addition, several large language models pretrained on MaCoCu data have been published, as well as the code used to collect and curate the data.This action has received funding from the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility 2014-2020 - CEF Telecom, under Grant Agreement No. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2020/2278341

MaCoCu:Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages

We introduce the project MaCoCu: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages, funded by the Connecting Europe Facility, which is aimed at building monolingual and parallel corpora for under-resourced European languages. The approach followed consists of crawling large amounts of textual data from selected top-level domains of the Internet, and then applying a curation and enrichment pipeline. In addition to corpora, the project will release the free/open-source web crawling and curation software used.</p