Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods

In this issue of Engramma: Giulia Zanon’s "Zooming Mnemosyne" deals with the use of details in Warburg’s Bilderatlas, Monica Centanni’s "Collateral effects of the “visibile parlare” (Dante, Pg. X, v. 95)" reconstructs the hypothesis of a visual model for the legend of Trajan’s Justice, according to Warburg intuition about it; this contribution is connected of the paper by Filippo Perfetti’s "Dante, Botticelli, and Trajan. An Open Note" where the author investigates how Botticelli could have come to know that the bas-relief of the Arch of Constantine liberatori urbis was related to an episode in Trajan's life”. The focus of this issue is then extended to Warburg's cultural environment. Matilde Sergio’s "Aby Warburg, Walter Benjaming, and the Memory of Images" investigates the influence of Warburg's essay about Luther, on Benjamin's thought, while Dorothee Gelhard’s "Gertrud Bing’s Scientific Beginnings" reconstructs the intellectual history of Bing's doctoral thesis and its influences on Warburgian work. The theme of Warburg’s Denkraum is the focal point of Salvatore Settis’ "Anselm Kiefer's Logic of Inversion": a fundamental overview of Kiefer's Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce (Andrea Emo) on display at Sala dello Scrutinio in Palazzo Ducale, Venezia from March to October 2022. The third section of the issue is dedicated to new publications and exhibitions. Echoing Settis’ reflection on Denkraum, we present Clio Nicastro’s "La Dialettica del Denkraum in Aby Warburg", published this year for Palermo University Press; an introduction to "Cultural Memories": a series published by Peter Lang and edited by Katia Pizzi. Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino with "Mary Hertz Warburg: Free and Unconventional" reviews the exhibition of the artist Mary Hertz Warburg. The issue closes with the important "Choral Reading of "Il metodo di Aby Warburg" by Kurt W. Forster. L’antico dei gesti. Il futuro della memoria", where Barbara Baert, Victoria Cirlot, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michael Diers, Andrea Pinotti and Ianick Takaes offer us their personal reading of Warburg’s life and thought as they are presented by Forster’s newly translated book, edited by Ronzani editore

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in pediatric rheumatology: an European perspective

To analyse the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in children with rheumatic diseases, treated at a paediatric rheumatology centre in Italy

A new FSA approach for in situ γ\gamma-ray spectroscopy

An increasing demand of environmental radioactivity monitoring comes both from the scientific community and from the society. This requires accurate, reliable and fast response preferably from portable radiation detectors. Thanks to recent improvements in the technology, $\gamma$-spectroscopy with sodium iodide scintillators has been proved to be an excellent tool for in-situ measurements for the identification and quantitative determination of $\gamma$-ray emitting radioisotopes, reducing time and costs. Both for geological and civil purposes not only $^{40}$K, $^{238}$U, and $^{232}$Th have to be measured, but there is also a growing interest to determine the abundances of anthropic elements, like $^{137}$Cs and $^{131}$I, which are used to monitor the effect of nuclear accidents or other human activities. The Full Spectrum Analysis (FSA) approach has been chosen to analyze the $\gamma$-spectra. The Non Negative Least Square (NNLS) and the energy calibration adjustment have been implemented in this method for the first time in order to correct the intrinsic problem related with the $\chi ^2$ minimization which could lead to artifacts and non physical results in the analysis. A new calibration procedure has been developed for the FSA method by using in situ $\gamma$-spectra instead of calibration pad spectra. Finally, the new method has been validated by acquiring $\gamma$-spectra with a 10.16 cm x 10.16 cm sodium iodide detector in 80 different sites in the Ombrone basin, in Tuscany. The results from the FSA method have been compared with the laboratory measurements by using HPGe detectors on soil samples collected in the different sites, showing a satisfactory agreement between them. In particular, the $^{137}$Cs isotopes has been implemented in the analysis since it has been found not negligible during the in-situ measurements.Comment: accepted by Science of Total Environment: 8 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Genetic similarities among Modenese, Romagnola and three Veneto chicken breeds

A recent Italian poultry study (Zanon et al., 2001) showed, in the last decades, the presence of 90 poultry breeds (53 of them are chicken's), they represent a historical and cultural patrimony, and a genetic source of biodiversity

A Very Low Resource Language Speech Corpus for Computational Language Documentation Experiments

Most speech and language technologies are trained with massive amounts of speech and text information. However, most of the world languages do not have such resources or stable orthography. Systems constructed under these almost zero resource conditions are not only promising for speech technology but also for computational language documentation. The goal of computational language documentation is to help field linguists to (semi-)automatically analyze and annotate audio recordings of endangered and unwritten languages. Example tasks are automatic phoneme discovery or lexicon discovery from the speech signal. This paper presents a speech corpus collected during a realistic language documentation process. It is made up of 5k speech utterances in Mboshi (Bantu C25) aligned to French text translations. Speech transcriptions are also made available: they correspond to a non-standard graphemic form close to the language phonology. We present how the data was collected, cleaned and processed and we illustrate its use through a zero-resource task: spoken term discovery. The dataset is made available to the community for reproducible computational language documentation experiments and their evaluation.Comment: accepted to LREC 201