The Swiss City Canton: A POlitical Invention

All major Swiss cities are located north of the Alps. Their development can be understood best as part of the development of the North European cities—those of Germany, Flanders and France—and as part of the communal movement as it developed in those areas. Yet the cities that eventually became Swiss are those that accepted more of the characteristic institutions of Italian city-states than did the rest, and it is this acceptance of certain Italian practices—particularly the creation of a rural territory and thus eventually of a territorial city-state—that made those cities into city Cantons, able to take part in the formation of Switzerlan

Longevity of immediate rehabilitation with direct metal-wire reinforced composite fixed partial dentures.

OBJECTIVES This study aimed to analyze the longevity of direct metal-wire reinforced composite fixed partial dentures (MRC-FPD) and factors influencing their survival and success. METHODS Within one private practice 513 MRC-FPD were directly applied. The preparation of a proximal cavity in abutment teeth was not limited. MRC-FPD were reinforced by one to three metal-wires. At the last follow-up MRC-FPD were considered successful, if they were still in function without any need of therapy. MRC-FPD were considered as survived, if they were repaired or replaced. Multi-level Cox proportional hazard models were used to evaluate the association between clinical factors and time. RESULTS Mean follow-up period (range) was 59(2-249) months. Seventy-three bridges did not survive (cumulative survival rate(CSR):86%) and further 129 bridges had received a restorative follow-up treatment (CSR:61%). AFR was 2.2% for survival and 8.6% for success. In multivariate analysis MRC-FPD with> 1 wire showed a up to 2.3x higher failure rate than MRC-FPD with one wire(p ≤ 0.023). Dentist's experience in designing MRC-FDP (p ≤ 0.017), patient's caries risk (p ≤ 0.040) and bruxism (p = 0.033) significantly influenced the failure rate: the more experience, the lower caries risk and bruxism, the lower the failure rate. SIGNIFICANCE For directly prepared metal-wire reinforced composite bridges high survival and moderate success rates were observed. MRC-FPD might, thus, be an immediate, short- and medium-term solution for replacing missing teeth. However, several factors on the levels of practice (dentist's experience in designing MRC-FDP), patient (bruxism, caries risk) and restoration (number of wires) were identified as significant predictors for the failure rate. The study was registered in the German Clinical Trials Register (DRKS-ID: DRKS00021576)

Smooth Entropy in Axiomatic Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics can be formulated in either of two approaches, the phenomenological approach, which refers to the macroscopic properties of systems, and the statistical approach, which describes systems in terms of their microscopic constituents. We establish a connection between these two approaches by means of a new axiomatic framework that can take errors and imprecisions into account. This link extends to systems of arbitrary sizes including very small systems, for which the treatment of imprecisions is pertinent to any realistic situation. Based on this, we identify the quantities that characterise whether certain thermodynamic processes are possible with entropy measures from information theory. In the error-tolerant case, these entropies are so-called smooth min and max entropies. Our considerations further show that in an appropriate macroscopic limit there is a single entropy measure that characterises which state transformations are possible. In the case of many independent copies of a system (the so-called i.i.d. regime), the relevant quantity is the von Neumann entropy. Transformations among microcanonical states are characterised by the Boltzmann entropy

Locative Media and Sociability:Using Location-Based Social Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life

Foursquare was a mobile social networking application that enabled people to share location with friends in the form of “check-ins.” The visualization of surrounding known social connections as well as unknown others has the potential to impact how people coordinate social encounters and forge new social ties. While many studies have explored mobile phones and sociability, there is a lack of empirical research examining location-based social network’s (LSBNs) from a sociability perspective. Drawing on a dataset of original qualitative research with a range of Foursquare users, the paper examines the application in the context of social coordination and sociability in three ways. First, the paper explores if Foursquare is used to organize certain social encounters, and if so, why. Second, the paper examines the visualization of surrounding social connections and whether this leads to “serendipitous encounters.” Lastly, the paper examines whether the use of Foursquare can produce new social relationships

Quantum majorization and a complete set of entropic conditions for quantum thermodynamics

What does it mean for one quantum process to be more disordered than another? Interestingly, this apparently abstract question arises naturally in a wide range of areas such as information theory, thermodynamics, quantum reference frames, and the resource theory of asymmetry. Here we use a quantum-mechanical generalization of majorization to develop a framework for answering this question, in terms of single-shot entropies, or equivalently, in terms of semi-definite programs. We also investigate some of the applications of this framework, and remarkably find that, in the context of quantum thermodynamics it provides the first complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions for arbitrary quantum state transformations under thermodynamic processes, which rigorously accounts for quantum-mechanical properties, such as coherence. Our framework of generalized thermal processes extends thermal operations, and is based on natural physical principles, namely, energy conservation, the existence of equilibrium states, and the requirement that quantum coherence be accounted for thermodynamically