Bronze Age textile and wool economy. The case of the Terramare site of Montale, Italy

At the onset of the 2nd millennium bc, a wool economy emerged across continental Europe. Archaeological, iconographical, and written sources from the Near East and the Aegean show that a Bronze Age wool economy involved considerable specialised labour and large scale animal husbandry. Resting only on archaeological evidence, detailed knowledge of wool economies in Bronze Age Europe has been limited, but recent investigations at the Terramare site of Montale, in northern Italy, document a high density of spindle whorls that strongly supports the existence of village-level specialised manufacture of yarn. Production does not appear to have been attached to an emerging elite nor was it fully independent of social constraints. We propose that, although probably managed by local elites, wool production was a community-based endeavour oriented towards exports aimed at obtaining locally unavailable raw materials and goods

Symbiotic, opportunistic, and probiotic microbes: new advances in understanding their interaction with immune system

In this thesis we analysed the impact of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Lactobacillus reuteri on human immune system. S. cerevisiae is a yeast harboring the human gastrointestinal tract, and the interaction with human blood dendritic cells (DCs) was never been investigated. We found that conventional DC (cDCs) and plasmacytoid DCs (pDCs) sense S. cerevisiae and that cDCs induce IL-6 and IL-17 production, while pDCs IFN-α and IL-10 with pro- and anti-inflammatory properties, respectively. These results could have relevant implication in health and diseases associated to microbiota dysbiosis. A. baumannii is a nosocomial bacteria promoting pathology in immunocompromised hosts. We analysed for the first time the response of human innate immune cells to A. baumannii ATCC19606T (low virulence) and ACICU (high virulence). We found that macrophages promote killing of both bacterial strains, monocytes kill preferentially ATCC19606T, DCs and monocytes produce cytokines. Importantly, ACICU induces lower expression of two cytokines that have been associated to protection against A. baumannii: IL-10, IFN-α. Thus, we identified mechanisms potentially related to the high virulence of the multidrug-resistant strain. L. reuteri is a probiotic with beneficial properties. We studied the effect of L. reuteri in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), characterized by social problems and gastrointestinal dysbiosis. Since we previously demonstrated a pro-social effect of L. reuteri supplementation, we analysed the effects of probiotic on immune system and microbiota. We observed an increase of fecal F.prausnitzii and E. rectale, with anti-inflammatory properties, and a decrease of plasmatic soluble CD40L, with pro-inflammatory properties, in probiotic-treated ASD children. These results indicate an anti-inflammatory role of probiotic L. reuteri in ASD children. Overall, we uncovered new mechanisms involved in the regulation of host/microbe interaction, with potential implication in the response to pathogenic infections, prevention of excessive inflammation, and exploitation of beneficial effect of microbiota and probiotic

Broadband Internet and Social Capital

We study how the diffusion of broadband Internet affects social capital using two data sets from the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that broadband access has long depended on customers' position in the voice telecommunication infrastructure that was designed in the 1930s. The actual speed of an Internet connection, in fact, rapidly decays with the distance of the dwelling from the specific node of the network serving its area. Merging unique information about the topology of the voice network with geocoded longitudinal data about individual social capital, we show that access to broadband Internet caused a significant decline in forms of offline interaction and civic engagement. Overall, our results suggest that broadband penetration substantially crowded out several aspects of social capital.Comment: Internet & Society; Economic

AiiDA: Automated Interactive Infrastructure and Database for Computational Science

Computational science has seen in the last decades a spectacular rise in the scope, breadth, and depth of its efforts. Notwithstanding this prevalence and impact, it is often still performed using the renaissance model of individual artisans gathered in a workshop, under the guidance of an established practitioner. Great benefits could follow instead from adopting concepts and tools coming from computer science to manage, preserve, and share these computational efforts. We illustrate here our paradigm sustaining such vision, based around the four pillars of Automation, Data, Environment, and Sharing. We then discuss its implementation in the open-source AiiDA platform (http://www.aiida.net), that has been tuned first to the demands of computational materials science. AiiDA's design is based on directed acyclic graphs to track the provenance of data and calculations, and ensure preservation and searchability. Remote computational resources are managed transparently, and automation is coupled with data storage to ensure reproducibility. Last, complex sequences of calculations can be encoded into scientific workflows. We believe that AiiDA's design and its sharing capabilities will encourage the creation of social ecosystems to disseminate codes, data, and scientific workflows.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure

Accelerometry-Based Classification of Human Activities Using Markov Modeling

Accelerometers are a popular choice as body-motion sensors: the reason is partly in their capability of extracting information that is useful for automatically inferring the physical activity in which the human subject is involved, beside their role in feeding biomechanical parameters estimators. Automatic classification of human physical activities is highly attractive for pervasive computing systems, whereas contextual awareness may ease the human-machine interaction, and in biomedicine, whereas wearable sensor systems are proposed for long-term monitoring. This paper is concerned with the machine learning algorithms needed to perform the classification task. Hidden Markov Model (HMM) classifiers are studied by contrasting them with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classifiers. HMMs incorporate the statistical information available on movement dynamics into the classification process, without discarding the time history of previous outcomes as GMMs do. An example of the benefits of the obtained statistical leverage is illustrated and discussed by analyzing two datasets of accelerometer time series

Beta-diversity of Central European forests decreases along an elevational gradient due to the variation in local community assembly processes

Beta-diversity has been repeatedly shown to decline with increasing elevation, but the causes of this pattern remain unclear, partly because they are confounded by coincident variation in alpha- and gamma-diversity. We used 8,795 forest vegetation-plot records from the Czech National Phytosociological Database to compare the observed patterns of beta diversity to null-model expectations (beta-deviation) controlling for the effects of alpha- and gamma-diversity. We tested whether \b{eta}-diversity patterns along a 1,200 m elevation gradient exclusively depend on the effect of varying species pool size, or also on the variation of the magnitude of community assembly mechanisms determining the distribution of species across communities (e.g., environmental filtering, dispersal limitation). The null model we used is a novel extension of an existing null-model designed for presence/absence data and was specifically designed to disrupt the effect of community assembly mechanisms, while retaining some key features of observed communities such as average species richness and species abundance distribution. Analyses were replicated in ten subregions with comparable elevation ranges. Beta-diversity declined along the elevation gradient due to a decrease in gamma-diversity, which was steeper than the decrease in alpha-diversity. This pattern persisted after controlling for alpha- and gamma-diversity variation, and the results were robust when different resampling schemes and diversity metrics were used. We conclude that in temperate forests the pattern of decreasing beta-diversity with elevation does not exclusively depend on variation in species pool size, as has been hypothesized, but also on variation in community assembly mechanisms. The results were consistent across resampling schemes and diversity measures, thus supporting the use of vegetation plot databases for understanding...Comment: Accepted version 25 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Limitations of web-based rubric resources: Addressing the challenges

As a wider variety of meaningful assessment strategies come into more prominent classroom use, teachers are called upon to craft scoring rubrics which validly and reliably assess students\u27 knowledge and abilities. The creation of instructionally sound rubrics can be time consuming, and many teachers feeling the pinch of time pressures are turning to rubric resources from the World Wide Web for assistance. The purposes of this paper are to review the issues surrounding the creation of instructionally sound rubrics, to examine how those issues apply to online rubric banks and rubric generators, and to offer guidelines for how educators can use online resources to best support the creation of meaningful and effective rubrics. Accessed 19,599 times on https://pareonline.net from March 07, 2006 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right

A subexponential bound on the cardinality of abelian quotients in finite transitive groups

We show that, for every transitive group $G$ of degree $n\ge 2$, the largest abelian quotient of $G$ has cardinality at most $4^{n/\sqrt{\log_2 n}}$. This gives a positive answer to a 1989 outstanding question of L\'aszl\'o Kov\'acs and Cheryl Praeger.Comment: 4 pages, Revised argument in section 3 (results unchanged

Bimanual Passive Movement: Functional Activation and Inter-Regional Coupling

The aim of this study was to investigate intra-regional activation and inter-regional connectivity during passive movement. During fMRI, a mechanic device was used to move the subject's index and middle fingers. We assessed four movement conditions (unimanual left/right, bimanual symmetric/asymmetric), plus Rest. A conventional intra-regional analysis identified the passive stimulation network, including motor cortex, primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, plus the cerebellum. The posterior (sensory) part of the sensory–motor activation around the central sulcus showed a significant modulation according to the symmetry of the bimanual movement, with greater activation for asymmetric compared to symmetric movements. A second set of fMRI analyses assessed condition-dependent changes of coupling between sensory–motor regions around the superior central sulcus and the rest of the brain. These analyses showed a high inter-regional covariation within the entire network activated by passive movement. However, the specific experimental conditions modulated these patterns of connectivity. Highest coupling was observed during the Rest condition, and the coupling between homologous sensory–motor regions around the left and right central sulcus was higher in bimanual than unimanual conditions. These findings demonstrate that passive movement can affect the connectivity within the sensory–motor network. We conclude that implicit detection of asymmetry during bimanual movement relies on associative somatosensory region in post-central areas, and that passive stimulation reduces the functional connectivity within the passive movement network. Our findings open the possibility to combine passive movement and inter-regional connectivity as a tool to investigate the functionality of the sensory–motor system in patients with very poor mobility