Chapter The Old Serbian Version of the Antiochene Recension of Samuel-Kings: Some Preliminary Issues in Textual Criticism

The article discusses several textual features of the second Church Slavonic version of 1–4 Kingdoms, which has come down to us in two manuscripts, written in Serbian Resavian orthography. The earliest copy dates from 1418 (National Research Library of Odessa, no. 6 [1/106]), while the second is from 1523–1543 (Moscow, Russian State Library, f. 87 N° 1 [1684]). The paper presents this tradition to scholars as new material for the study of the Antiochene or Lucianic recension of 1–4 Kingdoms, a text-type found in five Greek manuscripts. The analysis shows that it represents a new witness, not only to the Antiochene recension of 1–4 Kingdoms as a whole, but also to its proto-Lucianic textual stratum

Indications of a late-time interaction in the dark sector

We show that a general late-time interaction between cold dark matter and vacuum energy is favoured by current cosmological datasets. We characterize the strength of the coupling by a dimensionless parameter $q_V$ that is free to take different values in four redshift bins from the primordial epoch up to today. This interacting scenario is in agreement with measurements of cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies from the Planck satellite, supernovae Ia from Union 2.1 and redshift space distortions from a number of surveys, as well as with combinations of these different datasets. We show that a non-zero interaction is very likely at late times. We then focus on the case $q_V\not=0$ in a single low-redshift bin, obtaining a nested one parameter extension of the standard $\Lambda$CDM model. We study the Bayesian evidence, with respect to $\Lambda$CDM, of this late-time interaction model, finding moderate evidence for an interaction starting at $z=0.9$, dependent upon the prior range chosen for the interaction strength parameter $q_V$. For this case the null interaction ($q_V=0$, i.e.$\Lambda$CDM) is excluded at 99% c.l..Comment: version to appear in PRL, 6 pages, 6 figure

Privately Connecting Mobility to Infectious Diseases via Applied Cryptography

Human mobility is undisputedly one of the critical factors in infectious disease dynamics. Until a few years ago, researchers had to rely on static data to model human mobility, which was then combined with a transmission model of a particular disease resulting in an epidemiological model. Recent works have consistently been showing that substituting the static mobility data with mobile phone data leads to significantly more accurate models. While prior studies have exclusively relied on a mobile network operator's subscribers' aggregated data, it may be preferable to contemplate aggregated mobility data of infected individuals only. Clearly, naively linking mobile phone data with infected individuals would massively intrude privacy. This research aims to develop a solution that reports the aggregated mobile phone location data of infected individuals while still maintaining compliance with privacy expectations. To achieve privacy, we use homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proof techniques, and differential privacy. Our protocol's open-source implementation can process eight million subscribers in one and a half hours. Additionally, we provide a legal analysis of our solution with regards to the EU General Data Protection Regulation.Comment: Added differentlial privacy experiments and new benchmark

Differential neural dynamics underling pragmatic and semantic affordance processing in macaque ventral premotor cortex

Premotor neurons play a fundamental role in transforming physical properties of observed objects, such as size and shape, into motor plans for grasping them, hence contributing to "pragmatic" affordance processing. Premotor neurons can also contribute to "semantic" affordance processing, as they can discharge differently even to pragmatically identical objects depending on their behavioural relevance for the observer (i.e. edible or inedible objects). Here, we compared the response of monkey ventral premotor area F5 neurons tested during pragmatic (PT) or semantic (ST) visuomotor tasks. Object presentation responses in ST showed shorter latency and lower object selectivity than in PT. Furthermore, we found a difference between a transient representation of semantic affordances and a sustained representation of pragmatic affordances at both the single neuron and population level. Indeed, responses in ST returned to baseline within 0.5 s whereas in PT they showed the typical sustained visual-to-motor activity during Go trials. In contrast, during No-go trials, the time course of pragmatic and semantic information processing was similar. These findings suggest that premotor cortex generates different dynamics depending on pragmatic and semantic information provided by the context in which the to-be-grasped object is presented

Exploring the potential of deep targets in the South Adriatic Sea: insight from 2D basin modeling of Croatian offshore

The Croatian offshore hydrocarbon province is highly under-explored. From a total number of 128 exploration wells, 96 were drilled in the North Adriatic Sea, 27 in the Central Adriatic Sea and only 5 in the South Adriatic Sea. Most of exploration wells were drilled to test the Pliocene shallow sandstone biogenic gas play, which has been in production since the end of the twentieth century. However, the deep Mesozoic oil plays are still heavily under-explored. By interpreting regional studies, offshore well datasets and 2D seismic lines acquired by Spectrum in 2013, this study identified two new interesting explorative plays: Structural Karst play (Triassic/Jurassic);Slope Calciturbidites play (Cretaceous/Eocene). 2D petroleum system modeling was performed along a representative interpreted seismic section to define the potential and the exploration risk of  the two plays. The results show that all critical elements for a working petroleum system are present for both plays. Several fluid-saturated traps are present in the Cretaceous and Jurassic reservoirs with an indicative total depth between 3500 and 5500 m and in water depth from 500 to 1200 m. For the Structural Karst play the main uncertainties are related to the quality and efficiency of the reservoir, while for the Slope Calciturbidites play the main uncertainty is related to the sealing efficiency. </p

In-group bias in preferences for redistribution: a survey experiment in Italy

Using a new survey and experimental data, we investigate how information on inequality and immigration affect preferences for redistribution in Italy. Our randomized treatments show that preferences for redistribution are often inelastic to information. However, we find that provision of information on poverty statistics related to the native-immigrant composition of poverty reduces economic in-group bias by affecting exclusionary redistributive preferences: respondents are less likely to support policies which exclude immigrants from access to the welfare state once they learn that immigrants are less represented among the poor and natives are not as poor as they used to believe. Finally, we find some evidence of in-group bias by investigating the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects across groups