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Agricultural economies of the Hellenistic era (323–30 bce) are poorly understood from primary plant and animal remains despite the extent of sites and rich historical records dating to this period. Here we present archaeobotanical remains from Hellenistic Ashkelon, an urban centre on the Mediterranean coast of the southern Levant, in comparison with a survey of the extant literature on Hellenistic archaeobotany across the eastern Mediterranean. Agricultural systems at Ashkelon focused on the cultivation of cereals, pulses, grapes, and figs, as did those of many other Hellenistic sites. We identify Triticum dicoccum (emmer) as a core component of agriculture at Ashkelon, a new finding for the period. Re-examination of other published Hellenistic assemblages from the southern Levant additionally suggests that T. dicoccum cultivation has been underappreciated to date and may have been regionally widespread, a legacy of Ptolemaic Egyptian control of the region in the early Hellenistic. A spatial and diachronic analysis of archaeobotanical remains in conjunction with the archaeological evidence at Ashkelon indicates a shift in practices of domestic food preparation towards increasing commercialization of food preparation. Further detailed archaeobotanical study of other Hellenistic cities is needed to establish whether this trend extends beyond Ashkelon during the period.

Phonosymbolic elements such as ideophones and interjections test the translator’s ability in various ways. These forms would, in theory, require a complete change of form and substance of the source text but this has not always been possible because of graphical, cultural and linguistic reasons, and this led, in certain cases, to a foreignized target-text environment. Recent research has started to consider the relationship between verbal and visual modes as beneficial and not just as a mere constraint for the translator. This research aims to align itself with this approach in order to analyze how verbal and visual modes in Disney comic books have come together to welcome sound symbolic forms and how translators have dealt with them in Italian Disney comics, in particular. In order to clarify the behavior, function, translation and use of expressive sound symbolic devices in Italian Disney comics, this article will offer a diachronic analysis of these strategies as found in a diachronic bidirectional corpus compiled through extensive archival research.

In recent years, there have been frequent chaos in professional lending, and professional lenders are in a stage of strict regulation. At present, most provinces lack specific determination standards for the professional lenders in judicial practice, and the data research on the phenomenon of professional lenders lacks global and diachronic analysis. Based on more than 5 million judgment texts, the number of litigation involved by the same party is used as the identification standard, and the number of litigation involved 5 or more is included as the index to establish a case database of suspected professional lenders. Based on the case database of suspected professional lenders, we conduct an exploratory analysis of the dimensions of region, gender, age and the number of litigation involved. The results show that the regional distribution of suspected professional lenders is mainly concentrated in the eastern region, and the proportion of males is higher than that of females, and the majority are the middle-aged and middle-aged elderly. However, the number of litigation involved does not subject to power-law distribution.

In order to assess the dynamics of forests and the effectiveness of their management strategies, it is necessary to develop monitoring systems based on qualitative and quantitative tools for their conservation, valorization and restoration. This approach is particularly important for areas that have undergone intense anthropogenic transformations in the last century. In order to do this, it is first necessary to apply a chronological methodology based on historical GIS that allows the integration of different types of geodata. As a result of constantly evolving spatial analysis tools, the monitoring of landscape forest evolution is increasingly more effective and complete. Using as a case study a region representative of common processes of other Mediterranean areas (Southern Italy–Basilicata region), a diachronic analysis of 156 years was applied to evaluate the forest landscape dynamics. Starting from historical cartographies to remotely sensed data available online, a GIS-based approach was implemented to evaluate the spatial and statistical variations of the forest landscape. In this way, it was possible to assess how much, where and how the forest landscape has changed in order to provide a methodology to support more detailed and sectoral studies.

This article presents a new theory on the origins of the common Finnic tetrameter as a poetic form (also called the Kalevala-meter, regilaul meter, etc.). It argues that this verse form emerged as a creolization of the North Germanic alliterative verse form during a period of intensive language contacts, and that the Finnic ethnopoetic ecology made it isosyllabic. Previous theories have focused on the trochaic, tetrametric structure and viewed other features of poetic form as secondary or incidental. This is the first theory to offer a metrically driven explanation for the distinctive features of the poetic form: the systematic placement of lexically stressed short syllables in metrically unstressed positions and systematic yet unmetricalized use of verse-internal alliteration. The emergence of the poetic form may be viewed simply in terms of hybridization, but its formation as a central mode for epic and ritual poetry demands consideration of social factors. Creolization is considered a social process of hybridization at the level of sign systems that is characterized by a salient asymmetrical relation of power, authority or other value in the cultural sign systems being reconfigured from the perspective of the society or groups involved. An argument is presented that North Germanic contacts also produced systematic verse-internal alliteration in Finnic languages. Discussion then turns to the distinction between the origin and spread of the poetic form. The poetic form’s uniformity across Finnic language areas in spite of its ‘foreign’ metrical features along with the range of genres with which it was used are considered indicators of the poetic form’s spread with language, forming an argument that the tetrameter emerged within an environment that also produced Late Proto-Finnic, and then spread with Late Proto-Finnic language and culture through areas where other Finnic language forms were spoken.

The disastrous circumstances in the aftermath of a massive event like Fukushima nuclear accident is not unique to Japan. The more exertion to prevent the next Fukushima nuclear accident is required not to reiterate the similar failure. The countries where nuclear power is potentially introduced in future need to study the lessons learnt from the Fukushima nuclear accident, which would help to highlight the critical point for the future nuclear operation. However, the scholarly application of the lessons from the Fukushima nuclear accident to such countries, in particular ASEAN Member States (AMS), has yet to be fully discussed. As such, this study first conducts the diachronic analysis of various energy and nuclear policies in Japan before and after the Fukushima nuclear accident and then identifies the three major lessons and challenges, that is; nuclear regulatory institutional reform, development of stringent regulation and public engagement in policy making. Finally, the current nuclear situation in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippine and Thailand in ASEAN is analyzed to extract the critical aspect of nuclear installation in AMS and to provide strategic implications on the basis of the identified lessons learnt from the Fukushima nuclear accident.

This reflective essay presents the journal as a transnational networking instrument for TESOL teacher education at the in-service level and beyond. The introspective and retrospective dimensions associated with journaling can be beneficial on many different levels for in-service teachers. The diachronic analysis and re-examination of daily in-class professional experience serves as a basis for reassurance and evidence of progress. Not only is the journal a safe haven to express frustrations, but it also provides insights into the need for concrete strategies to avoid certain pitfalls in the teaching and learning process. It also discloses new methods, issues or factors which need to be considered for further research. Finally, in terms of TESOL teacher education research, the reflective journal serves as a knowledge base for the formation of a centralized corpus, providing an overview of the profession from a large picture perspective, if it is shared as a transnational networking instrument.

The Meskat system, which is an ancestral anti-erosion practice, has faced abandonment in the last decades. The present study is intended to monitor the spatial and temporal evolution of the Meskat system in the region of Sousse (Tunisian Sahel). Satellite images from the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) 5 sensor were used for four years of 1987, 2003, 2007 and 2011. The detection of land use changes was applied with the Geomatica Focus software, based on a supervised classification. Analysis of land use validation and classification highlighted nine land use classes, with an average global success and Kappa indexes of, 86 and 84%, respectively. Results of the space-time evolution of the Meskat system showed that it is mainly divided among three watersheds: Sabkha Halek El Menjel, Wadi Laya El Hammam and Wadi Hamdoun. The diachronic analysis of these three watersheds classification between 1987 and 2011 revealed an expansion of urban areas at the expense of the Meskat system. Indeed, urban areas recorded an increase of 1, 8, and 4%, while areas occupied by Meskat system were decreased by 6, 8, and 13% for the Sabkha Halek El Menjel, Laya El Hammam Wadi and Hamdoun Wadi watersheds, respectively.

Статья посвящена изучению употребления пословиц в огузском эпосе и в азербайджанской письменной литературе. Цель настоящей статьи – выявление функционально-семантических особенностей пословиц. Ставятся следующие задачи: проанализировать материалы азербайджанской художественной литературы «Книга моего Деда Коркута» и тексты «Огузнаме», в т. ч. творчества М. П. Вагифа, С. Вургуна, Б. Вагабзаде и др., выявить пословичные единицы и дать их функционально-семантическое описание по диахроническому направлению. Новизна работы заключается в том, что впервые рассматриваются функционально-семантические особенности пословиц в комплексном подходе в эпической и литературной традиции. Материалом для исследования являются огузский эпос «Книга моего Деда Коркута» и цикл эпических текстов по общему называнию «Огузнаме», материалы азербайджанской художественной литературы. При анализе применены описательный, историко-сравнительный и структурно-семантический методы. Проведен историко-сравнительный и функционально-семантический анализ пословиц, выявленных в фольклорно-эпической и литературной традициях. Анализ подтверждает, что пословицы носят в себе народные традиции и стереотипные поведенческие формулы народной мудрости. Они самостоятельно существуют в фольклорной традиции народа и как духовные ресурсы обогащают как эпическую традицию, так и художественную литературу. Пословицы наблюдаются в диахроническом плане в двух формах. В эпосе они сохраняются в оригинале или в малых изменениях. Поскольку нам известны богатые образцы пословичных изречений, зафиксированных в разные времена, эти списки пословиц нам позволят сравнить их и определить изменения в структурно-семантическом освещении. Исходя из этого диахронического анализа можно определить семантический инвариант пословиц и его разные релевантности в среде художественного текста. Сравнительный анализ пословиц такого рода также помогает для систематизации и описания изменений в функционально-семантической структуре. Перспективы изучения пословиц в фольклорной и литературной традиции видится в том, что это позволит проследить функционально-семантические изменения в развитии художественного облика изречений в двух традициях одного народа., Вестник Северо-Восточного федерального университета имени М.К. Аммосова. Vestnik of North-Eastern Federal University. Серия "Эпосоведение. Epic studies", Выпуск 1 2021, Pages 114-120

Corporate volunteering (CV) is a new phenomenon in the activities of Russian companies. Based on the use of diachronic analysis, a comparative study of the transformation of the essence and content of corporate volunteering in the works of foreign and domestic scientists and specialists has been carried out. There has been revealed a shift in emphasis from CV as an element of corporate social responsibility, to CV as an independent business process. Due to the novelty of this phenomenon, as well as the complex of characteristics determined on the basis of the use of synchronous analysis, it has been proved that CV can be defined as one of the forms of social innovation.

espanolIntroduccion. Se investigan las mujeres en el cine comercial espanol: directoras y personajes. Metodologia. Se estudian fuentes primarias y secundarias; se analizan, de forma cuantitativa y diacronica, las peliculas espanolas mas taquilleras, entre 2001 y 2016; se examinan, de manera cualitativa y descriptiva, protagonistas, tramas y estereotipos, de un corpus de 26 peliculas. Resultados. El genero dominante es la comedia. Hay 36 protagonistas masculinos y 23 femeninos. El grupo gira en torno a los deseos de varones. Discusion. Ellos mueven la accion y son antiheroes, con sentimentalidad infrarrepresentada. Las mujeres son acompanantes, con acciones de cuidados y mediacion familiar. Conclusiones. En Espana, ninguna mujer ha dirigido pelicula que haya recaudado mas de 10 millones de euros. La realidad no cambiara mientras no cambie la representacion. El cine comercial puede construir ciudadanos civicos, respetuosos, humanos; y no meros consumidores, que respondan a intereses mercantiles de la industria cinematografica. EnglishIntroduction. This article analyses the representation of women in Spanish commercial cinema: as film directors and as characters. Methods. The study is based on the analysis of primary and secondary sources; the quantitative and diachronic analysis of the highest-grossing Spanish films from 2001 to 2016; the qualitative and descriptive examination of the protagonists, plots and stereotypes of a sample of 26 films. Results. Comedy is the dominant genre. There are 36 male protagonists and 23 female protagonists. The selected films revolve around the wishes of men. Discussion. Men lead the action, are antiheroes, and their sentimentality is underrepresented. Women are companions of men and are in charge of family caretaking and mediation. Conclusions. In Spain, no woman has directed a film that has grossed more than 10 million euros. This situation will not change until representation changes. Commercial cinema can build civic, respectful and human citizens; and not mere consumers, who respond to the commercial interests of the film industry.

Experiencing climate changes and increased human pressure, Mediterranean regions are considered representative hotspots of desertification. However, relatively few studies have been devoted to quantify the individual impact of different factors shaping land sensitivity to desertification in these contexts. Our study contributes to this deserving (positive and normative) issue with a diachronic analysis of the impact of multiple drivers of desertification risk on six indicators of land sensitivity based on the Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) approach. Indicators (average and maximum ESA score, coefficient of variation and normalized range in the ESA scores, share of ‘fragile’ and ‘critical’ areas in total landscape) were calculated in 777 rural districts of Italy at three time points (early-1960s, early-1990s, and early-2010s). Multivariate models were used to determine the impact of 12 predictors (climate, soil, vegetation, and land management quality) on each indicator of land sensitivity. Results of the analysis identified two non-redundant dimensions respectively associated with the average level of land sensitivity and its intrinsic variability across space. Impacts of climate and vegetation qualities on the level of land sensitivity were high, decreasing over time, and more intense respectively in Northern and Southern Italy. Impacts of soil and land management qualities were moderate, increasing over time, and involving almost all the country's area. Our study emphasizes the role of context-based measures promoting sustainable land management. The ‘local’ dimension proved to be crucial in any strategy of risk mitigation undertaken at disaggregated spatial scales.

Even if the non-unitary nature of parties has come back into the party politics agenda, many of its features are still largely understudied. Specifically, an encompassing explanation of individual faction membership and of the role of party fusions in fostering faction membership is still missing. By performing a diachronic analysis, this article proposes a new approach to study the determinants of faction membership, highlighting the fundamental role of ideological, policy- and career-related factors. Moreover, the article uses as an explanatory factor a key element that has hitherto never been taken into account in intra-party analyses: psychological social identity, a variable that strongly conditions party members’ behaviour in situations where parties are merging. The analysis also shows the crucial role of party fusion in shaping individual faction membership determinants, highlighting that the effect of these determinants varies considerably the more time has elapsed since the party’s merger.

For better or for worse, the “corporations rule the world” assertion is nowadays more actual and accurate than ever before, as multinational companies represent the undisputable engine of the globalization process, and the latter continuously (re)creates the background against which global multinationals are flourishing, while reinforcing their “domination”. Since 1995, the Fortune Global 500 ranking (FG 500) annually provides a comprehensive and eloquent image of the world of global multinationals; the merits of the FG 500 ranking go beyond the synchronic approach of the characteristics of global multinationals (in terms of revenues, profits, assets and employees - by sector, industry and country), as it also favors diachronic analysis and comparisons - which are essential for strategists in identifying evolving trends and substantiating corporate strategies able to lead to sustainable competitiveness. The paper aims to determine the contribution of sectors to FG 500 ranking in 2016, on one hand, and to emphasize on some industry-based dynamics in FG 500 - by comparatively analyzing the 2016 and 1996 rankings, on the other hand.

This paper draws attention to the unexploited potential of cartographic material related to Ploiesti city, Romania, from the oldest reports to the modern. The cartographic document may bring valuable, more often than not original, information in order to improve understandings of behavioural patterns and the evolution of prehistoric communities. The study of the distribution and dynamics of burial mounds (tumuli) associated with the Bronze Age, within the perimeter of Ploiesti city and its metropolitan area, is one of the first applications of this kind of analysis made in Romania, and succeeds in showing the importance of using direct or indirect data from this category of cartographic documents for archaeological studies. Moreover, it demonstrates that, because geosystems and social systems are not static in space and time, a diachronic cartographic study provides the opportunity for a phenomenological focus on the evolutional issues of tumuli – spatiality, boundaries, distances and density.

In the last few years, the increasing availability of large corpora spanning several time periods has opened new opportunities for the diachronic analysis of language. This type of analysis can bring to the light not only linguistic phenomena related to the shift of word meanings over time, but it can also be used to study the impact that societal and cultural trends have on this language change. This paper introduces a new resource for performing the diachronic analysis of named entities built upon Wikipedia page revisions. This resource enables the analysis over time of changes in the relations between entities (concepts), surface forms (words), and the contexts surrounding entities and surface forms, by analysing the whole history of Wikipedia internal links. We provide some useful use cases that prove the impact of this resource on diachronic studies and delineate some possible future usage. Source code and more details are available here: https://github.com/pippokill/dae

Las características rexistásicas de los sistemas eco-geomorfológicos en entornos mediterráneos predisponen a la existencia de riesgos ciertos de inundabilidad y erosión de suelos. Se trata de geo-sistemas de respuesta rápida frente al cambio en cualquiera de sus componentes y muy sensibles a los cambios en los usos del suelo. Este trabajo usa una región extensa y significativa como es la provincia de Málaga para evaluar el modo en que el aprovechamiento del territorio ha actuado positiva o negativamente sobre dichos riesgos. Para ello se realiza un análisis diacrónico de ambos procesos y se evalúan las variaciones de su intensidad. Se han utilizado como indicadores el umbral de escorrentía y la erosión potencial de suelos, y se ha trabajado a dos escalas, la provincial, para obtener una visión comparativa de la distribución de los procesos, y una de más detalle para identificar de forma concreta cuáles son los cambios territoriales que explican los principales incrementos y decrementos en la erosión y la inundabilidad. Los resultados muestran el reparto geográfico de ambos riesgos en los dos periodos seleccionados, y permite concluir las variaciones espaciales a las que la evolución del territorio ha dado lugar, y la influencia que procesos como la litoralización, el turismo, la periurbanización, los incendios forestales o las reforestaciones.

The paper presents a research on a masonry building typology, formed by pebbles stones with brick courses, well known and spread in a wide area in Northern Italy, but never studied in depth. The sample of buildings selected for this work is located in Vimercate area, near Milan, where it has been possible to lay out a diachronic scheme of the geometrical features characterizing the listed masonry: dimensions of component materials, distance between the courses, etc. The studied sample included different buildings typologies, like churches, civil houses, palaces and villas, realized with brick stripes and pebble stones. Crossing historical information coming from different authors with the surveyed textures, a relationship between this technique and its mechanical characteristics was investigated. Therefore, it has been possible to observe the trends of the technique, referring to an optimal ratio between the thickness of the wall and the distance among brick stripes, as well some archaeometric data on the production and supply of bricks in the area through time.

Changes in agricultural practices represent one of the main causes of shift in species composition of arable plant communities. In particular, the intensification of agriculture going on worldwide since several decades led to heavy transformations of arable plant diversity. Basing on a study conducted in 1964 in Latium (central Italy), we re-surveyed the arable plant communities of 21 maize fields in order to assess the shifts that occurred over 50 years. The results showed a relevant decrease in the number of species (both in the total number and in the mean number per relevé), accompanied by a major species turnover. An increase in neophyte, wide-distribution, geophyte, C4 photosynthetic pathway, and monocot species was observed, while the incidence of insect-pollinated taxa decreased. The calculation of the mean Ellenberg indicator values per relevé showed an increase, in particular, of nutrients and moisture levels.

Archaeobotanical analysis at Kaymakci, a second-millennium BCE site in western Turkey, gives the first evidence for Bronze Age agricultural practices in central western Anatolia, and represents one of a very few contemporary datasets for western Anatolia as a whole. Inhabitants of the site adopted a diversified agricultural system, with major crops including barley, free-threshing wheat, bitter vetch, chickpea, and grape. Spatial analysis of crop taxa suggests differential distribution of wheat and chickpea across the site, while initial results of diachronic analysis indicate a narrowing of wheat agriculture over time. The archaeobotanical assemblage of Kaymakci is compared to those of contemporary sites throughout the Aegean and Anatolia, where it represents an intermediate position, an apparent hybrid of Aegean and Anatolian agricultural practices. This study provides a valuable new perspective on agriculture of the Late Bronze Age in a particularly understudied region of the eastern Mediterranean.

The aim of the publication is the discussion of the most burning issues of reforming of the sphere of science and education and, first of all, consequences of the law «About the Russian Academy of Sciences, Reorganization of the State Academies of Sciences and Modification of Separate Legal Acts of the Russian Federation» (No. 253-FZ) adopted September 27, 2013. Results and scientific novelty. Firstly, the specified law was decently declared to be a narrow direction of «reorganization of the state academies of Sciences» and «separate changes»; the law has deeply affected all levels of the Russian science, mostly in a negative way. The attention is drawn to discrepancy of estimates of the undertaken reform, a vagueness of its aims and pseudo-reformatory installations of the separate entered legal acts, and also the fact that the expected results of transformations aren’t even hypothetically formulated. All listed factors as a whole and deprivation of an academic community of activities autonomy pose a threat for full, real functioning and development of the scientific sphere that directly affects also a condition of all educational system in general. The origin suppositions of the state academies of sciences in Russia, history of their development and reforming, an origin of numerous public academies in education in the 90th years of the last century are considered on the basis of the retrospective, synchronous and diachronic analysis. Strategic miscalculations resulted the «nationalization» of science, replacement of the scientific self-government which isn’t controlled by the state with a reliable departmental collar are disclosed on the example of the Russian Academy of Education. Practical significance. Based on the current situation, the author models functions of the Academy of Education; the functions are real and acceptable in its new status. Those functions come down to providing a qualified expert evaluation of drafts of regulations, state programs, pedagogical technologies and innovations, and also to implementation of publishing and printing activities – to publication and wide circulation of results of scientific researches.

Online library catalog records of Chinese texts written during the late imperial period contain a wealth of traditional bibliographic information. Nearly 35,000 records on texts written from 1550 to 1799, available through WorldCat, describe these works in minute detail: the size of a page's text frame, the number of characters per page, print quality, genre, and so on. Aggregating this bibliographic information allows for a rapid and statistically rigorous approach to quantitative print history. Diachronic analysis of the size of the text frame of the late imperial texts represented by these records reveals a rapid increase in the production of very small format texts during the latter part of the eighteenth century. When integrated with information on genre, this analysis confirms Robert Hegel's hypothesis that novels were printed in ever smaller formats during the Qing dynasty and traces the origin of this trend to the 1750s. 摘要：: 各種網上圖書館目錄包含關於明清時期古籍善本的目錄學資料。 WorldCat 保 存了三萬五千條從 1550 至 1799 年間所刊書籍的記錄。這些記錄包括版框面積、風格 等詳細的信息。歷時性分析表明版框很小的書籍的數量在十八世紀末急劇增加，也 確證何谷理關於清朝的小說印本縮小的假說。

в данной статье рассмотрены исторический, бытовой, нумерологический, религиозный и географический аспекты образований лакуны. С помощью диахронического анализа выявлены особенности национального сознания России и Китая. Установлено, что лучше всего народные традиции и менталитет прослеживаются в произведениях литературы и в фольклоре. Классические образы мифологического характера также играют одну из ведущих ролей в формировании сознания читателей, узнаются разными народами, и потому могут использоваться как связующее средство межъязыковой коммуникации.this article details with the historical, daily, numerological, religious and geographical aspects of lacunae formation. With the help of diachronic analysis, the characteristics of Russia and China’s national consciousness have been revealed. It is established that national traditions and mentality are best traced in literature works and oral folklore. Classical mythological characters, which are recognized by different peoples, also serve as one of the leading roles in the formation of reader’s consciousness. Therefore, these mythological characters can be used as a connecting means of interlingual communication.

The text is concerned with structural changes occurring in complex organizations, an exceptional contingecy in the life of organizations, and thus normally passed over as a study subject. Emphasis is placed on a diachronic analysis perspective of the phenomenon of strutural changes, by recourse to the image of the life cycle of structures. A model is proposed for the interpretation of the phenomenon that seeks to integrate into a single comprehensive pattern both the actions of authorities that patronize change and the mutation dynamics of people affected by reforms.

The temporal dynamics of landscapes in pays Agonlin zone of south Benin (West Africa) were studied through a diachronic analysis of three Landsat images (TM 1986, ETM 2000 et OLI TIR, 2015), supported by field visits. The results indicate that the forest cover was reduced from 35.46 % in 1986 to 9.97 % in 2016. This decrease of forest area went together with a loss of savannah area. On the other hand, agricultural areas increased up to 23.21% over the same period. Landscape pattern analysis by means of configuration metrics revealed a fragmentation of natural and seminatural vegetation by agricultural activities, leading to an aggregation of agricultural patches. As general trend, human activities and demographic growth have caused significant changes to the landscapes of the study region.

In the field of contemporary Brazilian geography, it is urgent to continue studies on the city and the urban. This article is an approach by the investigation of the material in question, since the beginning, a classic bibliography, facilitated by the existence of tools based on the information technology. In addition to the indication of the work, it deals with the volume of quotations relating to it. The use of studies based on the H index will allow the updating of the studies with the presentation of the persons responsible for the production of important works on the urban geography in Brazil, thus making it possible to spatialize the production in the country (volume of citations

Microblogs serve hundreds of millions of active users, but have also attracted large numbers of spammers. While traditional spam often seeks to endorse specific products or services, nowadays there are increasingly also paid posters intent on promoting particular views on hot topics and influencing public opinion. In this work, we fill an important research gap by studying how to detect such opinion spammers and their micro-manipulation of public opinion. Our model is unsupervised and adopts a Bayesian framework to distinguish spammers from other classes of users. Experiments on a Sina Weibo hot topic dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. A further diachronic analysis of the collected data demonstrates that public opinion spammers have developed sophisticated techniques and have seen success in subtly manipulating the public sentiment.

The ‘harsh’ decision in Ezra 10:1–44 and Nehemiah 13:23–31 to terminate marriages with ‘foreign’ women falls strange on modern ears. This article reads these sections against the background of identity formation in Ezra-Nehemiah. It is proposed that these two passages should be studied on more than just one level. It states that synchronic, literary-redactional and socio-historical methods are to be combined in an effort to better understand why marriages were dissolved in Ezra and Nehemiah.

Since it is imperative to share the values with the spectators to convince the public of the era, the main characters of a story that underwent numerous adaptation through time would change gradually. This paper examined changes of the main characters in various versions of Cinderella. Until the mid-20th century, Cinderella would be portrayed as a meek, passive and obedient girl as in the original fairy tale version of Perrault. As moving to 70s, a heroine who acts with her own feelings and thoughts began to appear. In the 90s, spectators could meet a protagonist who fought fiercely to be the owner of her own fate, and in the recent Disney movie, Cinderella stood up for herself while accepting herself as she was. The prince character also underwent similar transition. In the early versions of Cinderella, the prince would be a vague figure with a title who was desired by all maids in the country. It is in the 70s that the prince began to be portrayed as a person who has his own problems. In the recent years, the spectators could see the process that the prince transformed from a naive aristocrat to a man with responsibilities. In modern society, women have more social opportunities compared to the past, and women`s social statuses do not need to be secured by relationship with men any longer. Thus Cinderella story is not as popular nowadays, moreover somebody whose dream is becoming Cinderella would subject to social reproach. However, beside the gender, the story could be the only hope for people who feel a sense of helplessness that there is no chance in their lives. As result variations of Cinderella story will go on as long as people of social deprivation exist.

This chapter explores the political strategies that are mobilized in the name of “intercultural cities”. While there are significant common threads between cities, the author highlights the plurality of intercultural strategies in order to take account of historical, institutional and organizational specificities. This chapter proposes a new model of comparison that makes it possible to carry out both synchronic and diachronic analysis. Preliminary analyses make it possible to observe the presence of four components common to many intercultural strategies: the recognition of diversity, the fight against discrimination, the importance of rapprochement between communities and the promotion of a civic sense of belonging.

Greetings and farewells mark the boundaries of conversations; they are often formulaic and are generally claimed to be devoid of propositional content. However, they are often embedded in longer exchanges, and within such exchanges individual expressions may or may not have propositional content. This contribution discusses some of the inherent problems of retrieving speech acts, such as greetings and farewells, from a corpus. This is illustrated with a diachronic analysis of greetings and farewells in two hundred years of American English as documented in the 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). In the nineteenth century, the most frequent greetings were “good morning” and “how are you?” and the most frequent leave-taking expression was farewell while in Present-day American English the expressions hi and hello dominate as greetings and goodbye and “bye bye” as leave-taking expressions. The two phrases “how do you do?” and “how are you?” serve as examples that show how formulaic and literal uses have coexisted over the entire period covered by COHA, with a shift from a predominance of literal uses to a predominance of formulaic uses, particularly in the case of “how do you do?”. However, both phrases remain ambiguous in their uses. The interactants discursively assign a more literal or more formulaic force to them.

Nowadays, ancient coins are under-estimated. In fact, their iconography can provide students and researchers more information than they expect. Existing web solutions allow to retrieve data and to display ancient mints on digital maps, but they do not consider a powerful iconographic approach. The “Digital Iconographic Atlas of Numismatics in Antiquity” (DIANA) fulfill this gap providing a tool for the in-deep analysis of ancient mints specifically considering coin iconography, chronology, and geographical location. In this article, we present the new Cloud-based DIANA architecture that was recently re-engineered extending the Drupal platform. In particular, we focus on a new innovative Graphical User Interface (GUI) and system back-end that allows researchers a smarter diachronic study of the ancient culture according to the mints and coin iconography. The innovative features are highlighted through four case studies regarding personage, animal/mythical creature, flora, and object iconographies.

Investigating spatio-temporal trends in soil vulnerability to degradation based on the diachronic analysis of selected biophysical and socioeconomic drivers is a key issue for the identification of prone areas. The working hypothesis of the present study is that a given territorial system may undergo different (and sometimes contrasting) patterns of soil vulnerability (improvement, worsening or stability) in the long term, thus creating (or amplifying) spatial heterogeneity in land resource distribution. Areas classified as “critical” are regarded as soil vulnerability hotspots that require dedicated mitigation policies. The correct identification of “critical” areas to soil degradation is particularly important for the natural areas and, more generally, for the agro-forest systems preserved under various land protection regimes. Based on these premises, the objectives of this study are (i) to assess the spatial distribution of soil vulnerability in Italy over a long enough time interval (1990–201...

By using large corpora of chronologically ordered language, it is possible to explore diachronic phenomena, identifying previously unknown correlations between language usage and time periods, or epochs. We focused on a statistical approach to epoch delimitation and introduced the task of epoch characterization. We investigated the significant changes in the distribution of terms in the Google N-gram corpus and their relationships with emotion words.

This corpus-based keyword analysis investigates the letters to the shareholders from two commercial banks, Bank of America and Citigroup, over a 3-year period from 2008, 2009, and 2010. The letters were compiled to facilitate a diachronic analysis, an assessment of language change over a specific period, of profit/loss reporting from two prominent financial institutions over a time period in which the recession commenced, peaked, and concluded. To conduct the analysis on the node texts, two sets of reference corpora were compiled. One reference corpus set consists of the letters to shareholders from eight consistently high-performing corporations not within the commercial banking industry for each of the 3 years; the other reference corpus set consists of the letters from the 10 banking institutions that also appeared in the Fortune 500 listings for the 3-year period. The corpus-based analysis revealed that in years of low performance companies create messages that assert a vision and forward a strategy for ensuring future success while also establishing distance between management and past failures. In contrast, when companies perform well, the keyword lists display a clear tendency of the company/author to accept praise and attribute success to actions of management.

A comprehensive diachronic analysis (1951–2010) of precipitation and temperature regimes has been carried out at the national and regional scale in Italy to investigate the impact of climate aridity on the agricultural system. Trends in climate aridity have been also analysed using UNEP aridity index which is the ratio between rainfall and potential evapotranspiration on a yearly basis. During the examined time period, and particularly in the most recent years, a gradual reduction in rainfall and growing temperatures have been observed which have further widened the gap between precipitation amounts and water demand in agriculture.

The assistive conservation approach includes strategies for conserving community-based lands basedon a complex combination of traditional and modern scientific knowledge. It enjoys broad legitimacyand seems promising for conserving territories with autochthonous populations. However, as a novel strategy, it has been applied mostly to societies and environments that are fragile in conservationist terms. This paper critically analyses the evolution of environmental discourses on nature conservation, assesses their related strategies and methodologies, and shows how emerging discourses have been assimilated to produce a qualitative shift from ‘top-down’ to ‘bottom-up’ models of environmental management, but without eliminating considerable dependence. It reviews earlier critiques of the protected areas approach associated with this emerging concept. Finally, it revisits the evolution of an important early case of assistive conservation, La Ventanilla (Oaxaca, Mexico), to assess processes of dependence and this emergent strategy’s potential to face challenges of environmental degradation. It concludes that, over time, this concept makes local ecologies more vulnerable to social and environmental degradation, especially as traditional management institutions once responsible for ecological integrity become obsolete.

We applied a diachronic analysis to explore the presence of stickiness factors at difference stages in the transfer of HRM practices from four Taiwanese multinational corporations (MNCs) to their British subsidiaries over a five-year period. Based on a total of 201 interviews with managers and employees from headquarters and the subsidiaries, the findings provide evidence of the manifestation of different stickiness factors at three different stages of the transfer process. More specifically, the results suggest that the main factors that continue to affect the degree of transfer stickiness over time are, first, the quality of social interactions between expatriate managers and other key actors in the subsidiary and headquarters; second, the expatriates' ability – as knowledge senders – to teach and explain parent HRM practices to host-country nationals; and third, certain attitudinal barriers among host-country nationals that were related to attempts to transfer HRM practices from ‘East to West’.

The aim of this work is the diachronic analysis, over the past 60 years, of the vegetation changes in dune environments of a stretch of Tuscan coast. Aerial photos of the years 1954 and 2010 were compared using photointerpretation and GIS software, and phytosociological surveys in the field were carried out. In addition to the spatial dynamics of the identified phytocoenoses, we have analyzed the different degrees of anthropogenic alteration of the examined area by the development of a synthetic index already used in neighboring contexts. The results showed with respect to the past, a deep morphological transformation of the dune system, and a consequent high spatial contraction and fragmentation of psammophilous plant communities. Today, indexed values of anthropogenic alteration, although particularly high especially when compared historically, are mitigated by the marginal and punctiform permanence, in few of those dune areas spared from urban infrastructure, of the main psammophilous plant associations typical of Tyrrhenian coasts.

This paper presents a diachronic analysis centered on the exploration of differences between the writing styles of journalistic texts in Romanian language. This analysis is focused on the time evolution of this language across two adjacent regions, Bessarabia and Romania in two major periods that were marked by important historical differences. Our aim is to examine these language differences based on corpora of historical and contemporary texts. To this end, we employ the ReaderBench framework to calculate a number of textual complexity indices that can be reliably used to characterize writing style. These analyses are conducted on two independent corpora for each of the two language styles, covering the following time periods: 1941-1991, when Bessarabia was separated from Romania and became a state in the Soviet Union (and there were few connections and language influences with Romania), and after July 1991, when Bessarabia became an independent state, Republic of Moldavia (and many language interactions with Romania occurred). The results of our analyses highlight the lexical and cohesive textual complexity indices that best reflect the differences in writing style, ranging from sentence and paragraph structure to word entropy and cohesion, measured in terms of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).

In the first decade of the 20th century, French illustrated news journals — and especially 'L’Illustration' — published articles on the skyscrapers of New York. Through the diachronic analysis of word-image relations at work in these journals, this article reveals how the publishing of this new building type — within an equally new cityscape — moved within a single decade towards new forms that were the product of inverted hierarchies between the written and the graphic. The spectacular double-page photographs taken with an unusual viewing axis gave the clearest expression of it. These photographs, preceding those famously taken by Alvin Coburn, were a means developed by the journal editors to convey strong sensations to its readership. With this evolution towards architecture as sensational news in which the reader became the protagonist, the general-interest journals offered a completely different approach visually compared to the conventional way architecture journals published the same skyscrapers. This episode in publishing New York buildings represented the beginning of an important rift between the general public’s and the architectural expert’s ways of perceiving and experiencing architecture and the city.

Compelling topical, conceptual, and linguistic analogies between Saul's first military campaign against the Philistines at Michmash (1 Sam 13:1–14:46) and Gideon's war against the Midianites (Judg 6–8) indicate direct dependence by the Michmash narrative on the Gideon story. These building blocks from the Gideon narrative serve as a foil for the actors in the Michmash narrative. These findings illuminate the early stages in the formation of the Gideon cycle as well as the growth of the Michmash narrative.

In Egypt, an agro-industrial company, in association with a non-governmental organization, began setting up milk collection centres within producers' organizations in 2011. The project was very active in the Beni Suef Governorate. This article analyses the milkshed evolution over the past 50 years and the project impact. Using interviews and historical data, a diachronic analysis was performed. The evolution can be divided into four phases: before 1980, dairy products were primarily sold on the local market; from 1980 to 2000, a " milkshed centred" development drove the dairy sector; from 2000 to 2011, the sector was driven by the demand in Greater Cairo; and since 2011, the arrival of the agro-industry has introduced new dynamics in local milk collection. Locally, the development of collection centres led to a rise in milk prices and improvements to milk hygienic quality. Demographic and dietary changes have stimulated demand for dairy products. Liquid milk collection has developed since the liberalization of public policies and improved infrastructure. The agro-industry is struggling to penetrate the highly competitive local milk collection sector and the model's future is uncertain.