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History-writing has a central place in the rich, extensive literature of medieval Ireland and in depicting their past, learned authors employed their own vernacular creatively and confidently. The biblical and classical frameworks within which they constructed Ireland's story, as well as their modes of expression reflect those of their European contemporaries, yet this corpus of texts is rarely considered when the writing of history in the early and central Middle Ages is explored. Focussing on narratives in their manuscript context, this article will situate medieval Irish historical writing within the broader Latinate literary culture of which it formed an integral part. In so doing, the intellectual heritage of scholars such as Marianus Scotus whose formative education was in Ireland will be illuminated, and the debt to the Irish strand in their cultural makeup assessed. Moreover, the relative linguistic harmony in Irish learned circles in which Latin and vernacular written media were interwoven in a mutually beneficial embrace can help better inform our understanding of cross-cultural European elite interaction at the time., Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, No 4 (2017): Open Issue

In this study we present new absolute dates for the Early Eneolithic in Serbia. Four of them confirm the recently obtained dates from that period (Bubanj-Hum I culture) but two samples (from Mokranjske stene and Bubanj) provide somewhat later dates for this period, although their stratigraphic context makes their interpretation difficult. Pottery from those sites, besides the typical examples, also shows particular stylistic and typological characteristics that resemble Galatin or Sălcuţa IV cultures, so one can presume that the Bubanj-Hum I culture in Serbia may have lasted longer than what is generally assumed. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 177020: Cultural Identity, Integrating Factors, Technological Processes and the Role of the Central Balkans in the Development of European Prehistory and Grant no: 47025: Ethnogenesis of the Serbs during the Middle Ages (until c. 1250): a comparative analysis of the historic-cultural heritage, genetic material and artefacts of material culture from the aspect of analytical chemistry]

Usually we do not think of Warburg as an archaeologist. He rather appears, carefully dressed, as the scholar in his studio, surrounded by the images he cut out for his collages. But his favourite metaphor to describe his life���s work was that of the excavator: to retrace, as he put it in one version, the vagaries of Nachleben as the unearthing of villages and towns of which only isolated road blocks and fading road numbers survived. In another version of the archaeological metaphor he described his study of the survival of pathos formulas as ���preliminary excavation reports about the first stages of the migration routes along which ancient gesture travelled from Athens to Rome, Florence and Nuremberg���. These metaphors suggest something that until now has remained somewhat neglected in both reception and Nachleben studies: that not only images survive, but objects as well, and that they survive not just as the carriers of images, but as material objects as well. And whereas reception studies of images is by now a well-established and flourishing discipline, especially in the UK, the material reception of Antiquity is still an emerging field. Biographies of objects over long periods are now occasionally written, but the biographical model is a bit of a mixed blessing: it helps structure the narrative, but tends to favour a conception of an object as a unique individual, rather than a member of a class or type. Also, the metaphor of the life of an object gives the narrative a certain shape and drive that obscures all sorts of methodological issues.

A seven-year-old neutered male Labrador retriever was presented with behavioral changes and reduced vision. Neurological examination revealed blindness of the left eye with a positive pupillary light reflex and a decreased mental status. Blood and cerebrospinal fluid analyses showed no abnormalities. MRI revealed a deviant area located in the thalamic, hypothalamic and caudate nuclear regions. Invasion of the left optic nerve was also observed. The dog was euthanized after 38 days of palliative treatment. Necropsy showed a non-encapsulated extruding white lardaceous mass, with a diameter of 2 cm, in the white matter, located in the ventral thalamic region near the chiasma opticum, which extended along the left optic nerve. Histologically, neoplastic cells had a “fried egg” appearance. Immunolabelling for glial fibrillary acidic protein demonstrated the presence of numerous reactive astrocytes. The tumor was diagnosed as a low grade (II) intracranial oligodendroglioma with infiltration of the optic nerve.

Character animation tools are based on a keyframing metaphor where artists pose characters at selected keyframes and the software automatically interpolates the frames inbetween. Although the quality of the interpolation is critical for achieving a fluid and engaging animation, the tools available to adjust the result of the automatic inbetweening are rudimentary and typically require manual editing of spline parameters. As a result, artists spend a tremendous amount of time posing and setting more keyframes. In this pose-centric workflow, animators use combinations of forward and inverse kinematics. While forward kinematics leads to intuitive interpolations, it does not naturally support positional constraints such as fixed contact points. Inverse kinematics can be used to fix certain points in space at keyframes, but can lead to inferior interpolations, is slow to compute, and does not allow for positional contraints at non-keyframe frames. In this paper, we address these problems by formulating the control of interpolations with positional constraints over time as a space-time optimization problem in the tangent space of the animation curves driving the controls. Our method has the key properties that it (1) allows the manipulation of positions and orientations over time, extending inverse kinematics, (2) does not add new keyframes that might conflict with an artist's preferred keyframe style, and (3) works in the space of artist editable animation curves and hence integrates seamlessly with current pipelines. We demonstrate the utility of the technique in practice via various examples and use cases.

Riassunto Nel contributo si esamina l’autorappresentazione di un convertito, vissuto nel XVI secolo, il quale per diverse volte pass. dalla religione cattolica a quella musulmana e viceversa. Nei suoi scritti Giorgio del Giglio Pannilini affrontava le sue diverse appartenenze in maniera innovativa. Dopo un’analisi approfondita della sua autobiografia e del modo in cui raccont. la battaglia di Lepanto, si studiano le lettere che sped. a Firenze, Genova, in Savoia e nell’Impero ottomano. Dall’insieme di queste fonti straordinarie - e in parte sconosciute - emerge che Giorgio nella narrazione della sua vita si indirizzava a due categorie di pubblico. Rivolgendosi sia a musulmani che a cattolici, Giorgio ricorreva sempre in modo consapevole a un linguaggio ornamentale e a simboli estetici di natura interculturale per autocollocarsi strategicamente all’interno di uno spazio mediterraneo plurireligioso. Pertanto l’assoggettamento di Giorgio non fu solo una vicenda di costrizione e soggiogamento, ma apr. al contempo vie nuove e creative di autorappresentazione. In questa maniera Giorgio reclamava per sè il dominio interpretativo sulla sua vita, tracciando al contempo le forme in cui ci si poteva comportare da ex musulmano nella Roma cattolica.

Die Untersuchung missionarischen Schreibens über nicht-europäische Zeitvorstellungen in der Frühen Neuzeit soll für hierarchisierende Logiken sensibilisieren, die auch im historiografischen Schreiben über frühneuzeitliche Zeitvorstellungen im 20. Jahrhundert anzutreffen sind. Statt Zeit zu essentialisieren, werden Kontexte des Schreibens über Zeit(en) daraufhin untersucht, wie sie der Beanspruchung kultureller Überlegenheit dien(t)en, um spezifische Selbstbeschreibungen zu artikulieren. Im Schreiben über andere Zeiten «zeiteten» sich Missionare selbst, indem sie Fremdheit als objektivierende und hierarchisierende Kategorie innerhalb des Heilsplans konstruierten. Wenn sie Uhren verschenkten, war Beschleunigung heils- und nicht fortschrittstheoretisch normiert. Fortschritt war dann nicht das Ziel einer Geschichte, für deren Entwicklungsgrad Technik als Indikator fungierte, sondern Technologie stellte vielmehr ein Mittel zur Beschleunigung des Heilsplans dar. Diese Uhren können daher nicht als Export von Zeitpräzision gelesen werden. Statt historiografisch etablierte Zeit-Narrative über historische Zeitwahrnehmungen vorauszusetzen, sind die pluralen Zeitwahrnehmungen der Akteure selbst zu untersuchen., This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Chronos-Verlag.

Although the role of complete gene inactivation by two loss-of-function mutations inherited in trans is well-established in recessive Mendelian diseases, we have not yet explored how such gene knockouts (KOs) could influence complex human phenotypes. Here, we developed a statistical framework to test the association between gene KOs and quantitative human traits. Our method is flexible, publicly available, and compatible with common genotype format files (e.g. PLINK and vcf). We characterized gene KOs in 4498 participants from the NHLBI Exome Sequence Project (ESP) sequenced at high coverage (>100×), 1976 French Canadians from the Montreal Heart Institute Biobank sequenced at low coverage (5.7×), and >100 000 participants from the Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits (GIANT) Consortium genotyped on an exome array. We tested associations between gene KOs and three anthropometric traits: body mass index (BMI), height and BMI-adjusted waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). Despite our large sample size and multiple datasets available, we could not detect robust associations between specific gene KOs and quantitative anthropometric traits. Our results highlight several limitations and challenges for future gene KO studies in humans, in particular when there is no prior knowledge on the phenotypes that might be affected by the tested gene KOs. They also suggest that gene KOs identified with current DNA sequencing methodologies probably do not strongly influence normal variation in BMI, height, and WHR in the general human population.

Background: Past research has shown links between both children’s aggressive behaviour and a lack of prosocial behaviour to later maladaptation. Both types of behaviours have also been identified as crucial in children’s social and emotional development and later (mal)adaptation. However, little is known about the way they predict each other over time. Methods: We utilised a large, ethnically diverse, longitudinal population sample of girls and boys (N = 1,334) to examine the bidirectional cross-lagged links between aggressive and prosocial domains of behaviour from age seven to eleven. Teacher, parent and child self-reports were utilised to assess aggressive behaviour and prosocial behaviour. Results: The results revealed that aggressive behaviour measured one year predicted decreases in prosocial behaviour in the following year. Conversely, prosocial behaviour did not predict changes in aggressive behaviour in the subsequent year. Furthermore, peer difficulties were examined and found to be an important mediator of the link between aggressive and prosocial behaviour. Specifically, peer difficulties mediated the links between aggressive behaviour and prosocial behaviour one year later, particularly during the first three years of school attendance. Conclusions: Implications of the findings for the design of intervention strategies to reduce children’s aggressive behaviour are discussed., BMC Psychology, 3, ISSN:2050-7283