The early medieval origin of Perth, Scotland

The radiocarbon results (and Bayesian modeling) of 15 samples of carbonized food residues removed from the external surface of rim sherds of cooking pots indicate that shellyware pottery first appeared in Perth, Scotland, around cal AD 9101020 (95% probability) and that it had disappeared by cal AD 10201140 (95% probability). Previously, it had been suggested that this pottery could not date to before AD 1150. These data, together with 14C analyses carried out on leather artifacts and a sample of wattle from a ditch lining, also demonstrate that there was occupation in Perth about 100 yr or more prior to the granting of royal burgh status to Perth in the 1120s

Spirituality and attitudes towards nature in the Pacific Islands: insights for enabling climate - change adaptation

A sample of 1226 students at the University of the South Pacific, the premier tertiary institution in the Pacific Islands, answered a range of questions intended to understand future island decision-makers’ attitudes towards Nature and concern about climate change. Questions asking about church attendance show that the vast majority of participants have spiritual values that explain their feelings of connectedness to Nature which in turn may account for high levels of pessimism about the current state of the global/Pacific environment. Concern about climate change as a future livelihood stressor in the Pacific region is ubiquitous at both societal and personal levels. While participants exhibited a degree of understanding matching objective rankings about the vulnerability of their home islands/countries, a spatial optimism bias was evident in which ‘other places’ were invariably regarded as ‘worse’. Through their views on climate change concern, respondents also favoured a psychological distancing of environmental risk in which ‘other places’ were perceived as more exposed than familiar ones. Influence from spirituality is implicated in both findings. Most interventions intended to reduce exposure to environmental risk and to enable effective and sustainable adaptation to climate change in the Pacific Islands region have failed to acknowledge influences on decision making of spirituality and connectedness to Nature. Messages that stress environmental conservation and stewardship, particularly if communicated within familiar and respected religious contexts, are likely to be more successful than secular ones

Probing magnetic order in EELS of chromite spinels using both multiple scattering (FEFF8.2) and DFT (WIEN2k)

The electron energy loss near edge structure on the O K-edge from chromite spinels contains fine structure from the hybridisation of the O p-orbitals and the Cr d-orbitals. Unlike the aluminates, a non-spin polarised calculation of this fine structure differs significantly from experimental observations. This is due to the large magnetic moment on the Cr. Calculations using simplified collinear ordering of the spins and the local spin density approximation give much improved agreement. A real space multiple scattering formalism and a reciprocal space density functional formalism give results in substantial agreement. In general, the actual spin arrangement of these chromites is not known since they are typically frustrated magnetic systems with ordering temperatures in the 10–20 K range. The calculations are based on the hypothesis that dynamic short range order persists to room temperature over the time scale of the interaction with the fast electron. However, it is possible that the observed effects are due to the strong paramagnetism present at room temperatures but which it is not possible to simulate accurately at present

Melanocytoma on. a Normand bull

Les auteurs rapportent un cas de mélanocytome (mélanome bénin) chez un taurillon normand de 7 mois. Située en arrière de l'épaule, la tumeur, de la taille d’une pomme 2 mois auparavant, atteignait celle d'un ballon de football au moment de l'exérèse. Une revue de la littérature est effectuée à cette occasion.The authors describe a case of melanocytoma (benign melanoma) on a seventh mouth old Normand bull. Localized behind the shoulder, the tumour, which had the size of an apple two months earlier, reached the size of a football ball at the time of the ablation. A review of the literature on the subject is made at this occasion

The Five Factor Model of personality and evaluation of drug consumption risk

The problem of evaluating an individual's risk of drug consumption and misuse is highly important. An online survey methodology was employed to collect data including Big Five personality traits (NEO-FFI-R), impulsivity (BIS-11), sensation seeking (ImpSS), and demographic information. The data set contained information on the consumption of 18 central nervous system psychoactive drugs. Correlation analysis demonstrated the existence of groups of drugs with strongly correlated consumption patterns. Three correlation pleiades were identified, named by the central drug in the pleiade: ecstasy, heroin, and benzodiazepines pleiades. An exhaustive search was performed to select the most effective subset of input features and data mining methods to classify users and non-users for each drug and pleiad. A number of classification methods were employed (decision tree, random forest, $k$-nearest neighbors, linear discriminant analysis, Gaussian mixture, probability density function estimation, logistic regression and na{\"i}ve Bayes) and the most effective classifier was selected for each drug. The quality of classification was surprisingly high with sensitivity and specificity (evaluated by leave-one-out cross-validation) being greater than 70\% for almost all classification tasks. The best results with sensitivity and specificity being greater than 75\% were achieved for cannabis, crack, ecstasy, legal highs, LSD, and volatile substance abuse (VSA).Comment: Significantly extended report with 67 pages, 27 tables, 21 figure

Read-It: A Multi-modal Tangible Interface for Children Who Learn to Read

Multi-modal tabletop applications offer excellent opportunities for enriching the education of young children. Read-It is an example of an interactive game with a multi-modal tangible interface that was designed to combine the advantages of current physical games and computer exercises. It is a novel approach for supporting children who learn to read. The first experimental evaluation has demonstrated that the Read-It approach is indeed promising and meets a priori expectations

Self-trapping transition for nonlinear impurities embedded in a Cayley tree

The self-trapping transition due to a single and a dimer nonlinear impurity embedded in a Cayley tree is studied. In particular, the effect of a perfectly nonlinear Cayley tree is considered. A sharp self-trapping transition is observed in each case. It is also observed that the transition is much sharper compared to the case of one-dimensional lattices. For each system, the critical values of $\chi$ for the self-trapping transitions are found to obey a power-law behavior as a function of the connectivity $K$ of the Cayley tree.Comment: 6 pages, 7 fig

Utility of TERT Promoter Mutations for Cutaneous Primary Melanoma Diagnosis

Telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) promoter mutations are commonly found in malignant melanomas but rare in melanocytic nevi. To assess its potential diagnostic utility for the distinction of melanoma from nevus, we determined the TERT promoter mutation status of 86 primary melanomas, 72 melanocytic nevi, and 40 diagnostically problematic melanocytic proliferations. Of the 86 melanomas, 67 (77.9%) were TERT-positive, defined as harboring a hotspot TERT promoter mutation at positions -124C>T, -124_125CC>TT, -138_139CC>TT, or -146C>T. Of the 72 nevi, only 1 (1.4%) was TERT-positive. Of the 40 diagnostically uncertain melanocytic proliferations, 2 (5.0%) were TERT-positive. TERT positivity as a test for melanoma versus nevus had an accuracy of 87.3% [95% confidence interval (CI), 81.1-92.1], a sensitivity of 77.9% (95% CI, 68.9-85.4), a specificity of 98.6% (95% CI, 95.8-100), a positive predictive value of 98.5% (95% CI, 95.6-100), and a negative predictive value of 78.9% (95% CI, 72.6-85.4). Our results indicate that hotspot TERT promoter mutation status may be a useful ancillary parameter for the diagnosis of melanoma. In particular, the high specificity of these mutations for melanoma indicates the presence of a TERT promoter mutation in a melanocytic neoplasm associated with diagnostic controversy, or uncertainty should increase concern for a melanoma

Reionization by active sources and its effects on the cosmic microwave background

We investigate the possible effects of reionization by active sources on the cosmic microwave background. We concentrate on the sources themselves as the origin of reionization, rather than early object formation, introducing an extra period of heating motivated by the active character of the perturbations. Using reasonable parameters, this leads to four possibilities depending on the time and duration of the energy input: delayed last scattering, double last scattering, shifted last scattering and total reionization. We show that these possibilities are only very weakly constrained by the limits on spectral distortions from the COBE FIRAS measurements. We illustrate the effects of these reionization possibilities on the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies and polarization for simple passive isocurvature models and simple coherent sources, observing the difference between passive and active models. Finally, we comment on the implications of this work for more realistic active sources, such as causal white noise and topological defect models. We show for these models that non-standard ionization histories can shift the peak in the CMB power to larger angular scales.Comment: 21 pages LaTeX with 11 eps figures; replaced with final version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.