Continuity and change in subsistence at Tell Barri, NE Syria

The history of the Fertile Crescent is well documented through archaeology and epigraphy. However, contrary to adjacent regions in the Mediterranean and Middle East, the reconstruction of diet and food ways through isotope analysis is limited for Mesopotamia and, consequently, matters of subsistence change are not well understood. To address this, collagen carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios of human (N=84) and animal (N=8) samples from Tell Barri, Syria, predominantly ranging from the Early Bronze Age to Roman/Parthian times, were analysed to ascertain diachronic dietary patterns as well as gender- and age-related differences

K0∗(800)K_{0}^{\ast}(800) as a companion pole of K0∗(1430)K_{0}^{\ast}(1430)

We study the light scalar sector up to $1.8$ GeV by using a quantum field theoretical approach which includes a single kaonic state in a Lagrangian with both derivative and non-derivative interactions. By performing a fit to $\pi K$ phase shift data in the $I=1/2,$ $J=0$ channel, we show that $K_{0}^{\ast}(800)$ (or $\kappa$) emerges as a dynamically generated companion pole of $K_{0}^{\ast }(1430)$. This is a result of investigating quantum fluctuations with one kaon and one pion circulating in the loops dressing $K_{0}^{\ast}(1430)$. We determine the position of the poles on the complex plane in the context of our approach: for $K_{0}^{\ast}(1430)$ we get $(1.413\pm0.002)-i{0.02cm}(0.127\pm0.003)$ (in GeV), while for $\kappa$ we get $(0.746\pm0.019)-i{0.02cm}(0.262\pm0.014)$ (in GeV). The model-dependence of these results and related uncertainties are discussed in the paper. A large-$N_{c}$ study confirms that $K_{0}^{\ast}(1430)$ is predominantly a quarkonium and that $K_{0}^{\ast}(800)$ is a molecular-like dynamically generated state.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Social Media\u27s Impact on College Student Activism: Senior Student Affairs Professional\u27s Perspectives

Activism has been an ever present on college campuses throughout history. The student activist has been a part of some of the biggest movements in American history, such as, the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Kent State Massacre, and the #MeToo movement. This study seeks to understand student activism on college campuses and how activism has changed in our new digital era. The internet’s social media platforms have created new meeting places and areas for idea sharing for college activists. These social media platforms mean that students can remotely plan, organize, and execute their protests, demonstrations, or movements quicker than ever before. This has led to a relatively new idea of activism called slacktivism. This study interviewed student affair professionals about college student activists on their campuses and how they perceive students organizing and executing their movements

HandyBroker - An intelligent product-brokering agent for M-commerce applications with user preference tracking

One of the potential applications for agent-based systems is m-commerce. A lot of research has been done on making such systems intelligent to personalize their services for users. In most systems, user-supplied keywords are generally used to help generate profiles for users. In this paper, an evolutionary ontology-based product-brokering agent has been designed for m-commerce applications. It uses an evaluation function to represent a user’s preference instead of the usual keyword-based profile. By using genetic algorithms, the agent tracks the user’s preferences for a particular product by tuning some parameters inside its evaluation function. A prototype called “Handy Broker” has been implemented in Java and the results obtained from our experiments looks promising for m-commerce use

Social Media\u27s Impact on College Student Activism: Senior Student Affairs Professional\u27s Perspectives

Activism has been an ever present on college campuses throughout history. The student activist has been a part of some of the biggest movements in American history, such as, the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Kent State Massacre, and the #MeToo movement. This study seeks to understand student activism on college campuses and how activism has changed in our new digital era. The internet’s social media platforms have created new meeting places and areas for idea sharing for college activists. These social media platforms mean that students can remotely plan, organize, and execute their protests, demonstrations, or movements quicker than ever before. This has led to a relatively new idea of activism called slacktivism. This study interviewed student affair professionals about college student activists on their campuses and how they perceive students organizing and executing their movements

Understanding the decline of interpersonal violence in the ancient middle east

How did human societies succeed in reducing interpersonal violence, a precondition to achieve security and prosperity? Given that homicide records are only available for the more recent period, much of human history remains virtually outside our purview. To fill this gap, a literature intersecting economics, archaeology, and anthropology has devised reliable methods for studying traumas deliberately inflicted in human skeletal remains. In this paper we reconstruct the early history of conflict by exploiting a novel dataset on weapon-related wounds from skeletons excavated across the Middle East, spanning the whole pre-Classical period (ca. 8,000-400 BCE). By documenting when and how ancient Middle Eastern populations managed to reduce intersocietal violence and achieve remarkable levels of development, we broaden historical perspectives on the structural factors driving human conflict

Eradication of an outbreak of vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE): the cost of a failure in the systematic screening

BACKGROUND: Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) are still a concern in hospital units tending to seriously ill patients. However, the cost-effectiveness of active surveillance program to identify asymptomatically VRE colonized patient remains debatable. This work aims at evaluating the cost of a failure in the active surveillance of VRE that had resulted in an outbreak in a French University Hospital. FINDINGS: A VRE outbreak was triggered by a failure in the systematic VRE screening in a medico-surgical ward specialised in liver transplantation as a patient was not tested for VRE. This failure was likely caused by the reduction of healthcare resource. The outbreak involved 13 patients. Colonized patients were grouped in a dedicated part of the infectious diseases unit and tended by a dedicated staff. Transmission was halted within two months after discovery of the index case. The direct cost of the outbreak was assessed as the cost of staffing, disposable materials, hygiene procedures, and surveillance cultures. The loss of income from spare isolation beds was computed by difference with the same period in the preceding year. Payments were drawn from the hospital database. The direct cost of the outbreak (2008 Euros) was €60 524 and the loss of income reached €110 915. CONCLUSIONS: Despite this failure, the rapid eradication of the VRE outbreak was a consequence of the rapid isolation of colonized patient. Yet, eradicating even a limited outbreak requires substantial efforts and resources. This underlines that special attention has to be paid to strictly adhere to active surveillance program