Preliminary Report on the 2014 Field Season of the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP)

This article provides a preliminary report on the 2014 excavations carried out by the American Excavations at Morgantina (Sicily): Contrada Agnese Project (CAP). The 2014 season was the second year of this multiyear research and excavation project aimed at investigating both the urban planning of the city and the lives of its residents, with a specific focus on the periods of occupation and cultural transformation from the third to first century BCE. During the second season, three trenches were excavated in the area corresponding to Lot One of the urban insula W13/14S. This preliminary report presents the significant stratigraphic units and material finds encountered in each trench, along with a provisional outline of the phases of activity, setting the developments observed in each trench within the broader historical and archaeological context of the urban center at Morgantina. The discovery of several rooms with similar architectural features suggests that they belong to a single building, the so-called Southeast Building, the function and dimensions of which will be investigated in future CAP excavations

Research in Sicily: Publication Preparations and Laying the Groundwork for Student Participation

https://scholarworks.seattleu.edu/fss-2019/1007/thumbnail.jp

Galactic cold dark matter as a Bose-Einstein condensate of WISPs

We propose here the dark matter content of galaxies as a cold bosonic fluid composed of Weakly Interacting Slim Particles (WISPs), represented by spin-0 axion-like particles and spin-1 hidden bosons, thermalized in the Bose-Einstein condensation state and bounded by their self-gravitational potential. We analyze two zero-momentum configurations: the polar phases in which spin alignment of two neighbouring particles is anti-parallel and the ferromagnetic phases in which every particle spin is aligned in the same direction. Using the mean field approximation we derive the Gross-Pitaevskii equations for both cases, and, supposing the dark matter to be a polytropic fluid, we describe the particles density profile as Thomas-Fermi distributions characterized by the halo radii and in terms of the scattering lengths and mass of each particle. By comparing this model with data obtained from 42 spiral galaxies and 19 Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies, we constrain the dark matter particle mass to the range $10^{-6}-10^{-4} eV$ and we find the lower bound for the scattering length to be of the order $10^{-14} fm$.Comment: 13 pages; 6 figures; references added; v.3: typo corrected in the abstract, published in JCA

Preliminary Report on the 2015 Field Season of the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP)

In its third season, the Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) continued archaeological investigations in the remains of a building, located near the western margins of the ancient urban center of Morgantina. In 2015, excavations opened a larger portion of the so-called Southeast Building, extending from the trenches opened during the 2014 season. These investigations yielded evidence from construction trenches and sub-floor fills that now allow a preliminary dating of the building’s phases. The building appears to have had a short life, having been built and abandoned within fewer than 75 years, beginning around the middle of the third century BCE. New architectural features were revealed by the 2015 excavations, including columns composed of terracotta drums and a small oven set in the corner of a central room, indications of monumental decoration and food production, respectively. This combination of monumentality and small-scale production leads excavators to identify the building as a modest house, but further excavations will be needed to fully characterize its form and function

From Offshore Operation to Onshore Simulator: Using Visualized Ethnographic Outcomes to Work with Systems Developers

This paper focuses on the process of translating insights from a Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)-based study, conducted on a vessel at sea, into a model that can assist systems developers working with simulators, which are used by vessel operators for training purposes on land. That is, the empirical study at sea brought about rich insights into cooperation, which is important for systems developers to know about and consider in their designs. In the paper, we establish a model that primarily consists of a ‘computational artifact’. The model is designed to support researchers working with systems developers. Drawing on marine examples, we focus on the translation process and investigate how the model serves to visualize work activities; how it addresses relations between technical and computational artifacts, as well as between functions in technical systems and functionalities in cooperative systems. In turn, we link design back to fieldwork studies

Preliminary Report on the 2016 Field Season of the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP)

In its fourth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) continued archaeological investigations inside a modest house of Hellenistic date located near the western edge of the ancient urban center at Morgantina. Previous CAP excavations, conducted between 2013 and 2015, had verified the presence of an adaptive urban grid in this portion of the ancient city and, moreover, revealed much of the northern part of the building that occupied Lot 1 of insula W13/14S. Following the 2015 excavations, we came to identify this building as a modestly-appointed house that had been occupied for roughly 50 to 75 years, beginning in the second quarter of the third century BCE. The 2016 CAP season represented a significant expansion of the excavation, as four large trenches were set across the entirety of the lot, with the twin goals of resolving stratigraphic questions that remained from previous seasons and exploring the lesser-known southern area of the building. In this report we describe newly excavated evidence for the construction and use of the building as a whole, proceeding phase by phase and trench by trenc

Preliminary Report on the 2018 Field Season of the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP)

In its sixth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) continued archaeological investigations inside the House of the Two Mills, a modestly-appointed house of Hellenistic date located near the western edge of the ancient city of Morgantina. This report gives a phase-by-phase summary of the significant discoveries from the 2018 excavation season, highlighting the architectural development of the building as well as evidence for the various activities that took place there over the course of its occupation

Effectiveness of home pharmaceutical interventions in metabolic syndrome: a randomized controlled trial

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a group of different risk factors that raises the chances of develop several health problems such, as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. There are few cases in literature of studies that specifically address the use of pharmaceutical care in MetS. The aim of study was to evaluate the effectiveness of home pharmaceutical interventions in patients with this syndrome. The randomized clinical trial was conducted in subjects with diagnosis of MetS treated in a basic unit of health from Cuité, Paraíba. The patients were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to two groups: intervention (IG) and control (CG). The IG received monthly individual pharmaceutical interventions, while the CG did not. The effectiveness of the intervention protocol was measured after six months, comparing the hemodynamic values, anthropometric, biochemistry, cardiovascular risk, medication adherence, drug related problems (DRP) and quality of life. The sample consisted of 63 individuals (33 IG and 30 CG) and older than 60 years. The majority of pharmaceutical interventions were educational and/or behavioral. In the intervention group, significant differences were observed in the parameters systolic and diastolic blood pressure, triglycerides, medication adherence and DRP. The pharmaceutical interventions at home were effective in improving medication adherence, decreasing DRPs and helping to control components of the metabolic syndrome

Preliminary Report on the 2017 Season of the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP)

In its fifth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) continued archaeological investigations inside the Southeast Building, a modestly-appointed house of Hellenistic date located near the western edge of the city. The 2016 CAP season had revealed the full extent of the property’s boundary walls and allowed us to propose a cohesive phasing scheme for the building’s construction, occupation, and abandonment. We suggested that the house was occupied for approximately 60-75 years, beginning in the second quarter of the third century BCE. The 2017 CAP excavations resolved a number of remaining questions, particularly those concerning the phasing of the boundary walls, the layout of interior spaces in the southern and eastern parts of the building, and the nature of domestic activities at different stages of the house’s occupation. This report describes the results of these excavations and pro-poses a new account of the building’s early development. The discovery of two large rotary millstones within the building raises the possibility that the occupants of the house may have specialized in the milling of grains and prompts us to re-name the building, “the House of the Two Mills”

On domain walls in a Ginzburg-Landau non-linear S^2-sigma model

The domain wall solutions of a Ginzburg-Landau non-linear $S^2$-sigma hybrid model are unveiled. There are three types of basic topological walls and two types of degenerate families of composite - one topological, the other non-topological- walls. The domain wall solutions are identified as the finite action trajectories (in infinite time) of a related mechanical system that is Hamilton-Jacobi separable in sphero-conical coordinates. The physical and mathematical features of these domain walls are thoroughly discussed.Comment: 26 pages, 18 figure