The Sumerian verb kušur, “to repair”

The article discusses a Sumerian verb, kušur, which can be interpreted as an Akkadian loanword and be related to the root *kšr attested in the verb kašāru/kuššuru, meaning “to repair (ruined or damaged walls, building, ...)”

Two Old Babylonian model contracts

This article presents the edition of a cuneiform tablet recording two Old Babylonian model contracts

A handbook from the Eduba'a: an Old Babylonian collection of model contracts

The Old Babylonian prism here published is a compendium of model contracts (and one legal provision) written in Sumerian and it is a direct expression of the scholastic legal tradition in Southern Mesopotamia

Another Old Babylonian barley loan from Gula’s temple

The article is the edition of a new Old Babylonian loan of barley from the Gula temple in Larsa

Two isomorphism criteria for directed colimits

Using the general notions of finitely presentable and finitely generated object introduced by Gabriel and Ulmer in 1971, we prove that, in any (locally small) category, two sequences of finitely presentable objects and morphisms (or two sequences of finitely generated objects and monomorphisms) have isomorphic colimits (=direct limits) if, and only if, they are confluent. The latter means that the two given sequences can be connected by a back-and-forth chain of morphisms that is cofinal on each side, and commutes with the sequences at each finite stage. In several concrete situations, analogous isomorphism criteria are typically obtained by ad hoc arguments. The abstract results given here can play the useful r\^ole of discerning the general from the specific in situations of actual interest. We illustrate by applying them to varieties of algebras, on the one hand, and to dimension groups---the ordered $K_0$ of approximately finite-dimensional C*-algebras---on the other. The first application encompasses such classical examples as Kurosh's isomorphism criterion for countable torsion-free Abelian groups of finite rank. The second application yields the Bratteli-Elliott Isomorphism Criterion for dimension groups. Finally, we discuss Bratteli's original isomorphism criterion for approximately finite-dimensional C*-algebras, and show that his result does not follow from ours.Comment: 10 page

Becker and Lomnitz rheological models: a comparison

The viscoelastic material functions for the Becker and the Lomnitz rheological models, sometimes employed to describe the transient flow of rocks, are studied and compared. Their creep functions, which are known in a closed form, share a similar time dependence and asymptotic behavior. This is also found for the relaxation functions, obtained by solving numerically a Volterra equation of the second kind. We show that the two rheologies constitute a clear example of broadly similar creep and relaxation patterns associated with neatly distinct retardation spectra, for which analytical expressions are available.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

The Old Babylonian loan contract "Aegyptus 10.1" (= Boson 1936 n° 300)

The short article offers an updated transliteration, along with a commentary and a photograph, of an Old Babylonian tablet (known as "Aegyptus 10.1") belonging to the cuneiform collection of the library of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan

The effect of round-off error on long memory processes

We study how the round-off (or discretization) error changes the statistical properties of a Gaussian long memory process. We show that the autocovariance and the spectral density of the discretized process are asymptotically rescaled by a factor smaller than one, and we compute exactly this scaling factor. Consequently, we find that the discretized process is also long memory with the same Hurst exponent as the original process. We consider the properties of two estimators of the Hurst exponent, namely the local Whittle (LW) estimator and the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). By using analytical considerations and numerical simulations we show that, in presence of round-off error, both estimators are severely negatively biased in finite samples. Under regularity conditions we prove that the LW estimator applied to discretized processes is consistent and asymptotically normal. Moreover, we compute the asymptotic properties of the DFA for a generic (i.e. non Gaussian) long memory process and we apply the result to discretized processes.Comment: 44 pages, 4 figures, 4 table

The metacognitions about smoking questionnaire : development and psychometric properties

The Metacognitions about Smoking Questionnaire was shown to possess good psychometric properties, as well as predictive and divergent validity within the populations that were tested. The metacognition factors explained incremental variance in smoking behaviour above smoking outcome expectancies