Childhood trauma: methods for the identification of physeal fractures in non-adult skeletal remains

Objectives Today, fractures at the growth plate (or physis) are common injuries in children, but provide challenges of identification in skeletonized remains. Clinical studies provide detailed information on the mechanisms, locations, age of occurrence, and complications associated with physeal fractures, enabling the development of new criteria for identifying this injury in non-adults. To test these criteria, skeletal remains from five rural and urban medieval cemeteries were examined. Methods The sample consisted of 961 skeletons (0-17 years) with open epiphyses. Macroscopic observation looked for any irregularities of the metaphysis or epiphysis which was consistent with the clinical appearance of physeal fractures or resulting complications. Radiographic examination was applied to identify fracture lines or early growth arrest. Results This study revealed 12 cases of physeal trauma (1.2%). Physeal fractures occurred predominantly at the distal end (75%), and while they were identified in all age categories, they were most frequent in those aged 12-17 years (0.2% TPR). The humerus was the most commonly affected location (3/12 or 25%). Conclusions This study highlights the potential for recognizing physeal fractures in children of all ages, enhancing our understanding of non-adult trauma, and enabling us to assign a more precise age of the injury to build up a picture of their activities in the past.

Dying young: a palaeopathological analysis of child health in Roman Britain

Children represent the most vulnerable members of society, and as such provide valuable insight into past lifeways. Adverse environmental conditions translate more readily into the osteological record of children, making them primary evidence for the investigation of ill-health in the past. To date, most information on growing up in Roman Britain has been based on the Classical literature, or discussed in palaeopathological studies with a regional focus, e.g. Dorset or Durnovaria. Thus, the lifestyles and everyday realities of children throughout Britannia remained largely unknown. This study sets out to fill this gap by providing the first large scale analysis of Romano-British children from town and country. The palaeopathological analysis of 1643 non-adult (0-17 years) skeletons, compiled from the literature (N=690) and primary osteological analysis (N=953), from 27 urban and rural settlements has highlighted diverse patterns in non-adult mortality and morbidity. The distribution of ages-at-death suggest that older children and adolescents migrated from country to town, possibly for commencing their working lives. True prevalence rates suggest that caries (1.8%) and enamel hypoplasia (11.4%) were more common in children from major urban towns, whereas children in the countryside displayed higher frequencies of scurvy (6.9%), cribra orbitalia (27.7%), porotic hyperostosis (6.2%) and endocranial lesions (10.9%). Social inequality in late Roman Britain may have been the driving force behind these urban-rural dichotomies. The results may point to exploitation of the peasantry on the one hand, and higher status of the urban population as a more ‘Romanised’ group on the other. Comparison with Iron Age and post-medieval non-adults also demonstrated a decline in health in the Roman period, with some levels of ill-health, particularly in the rural children, similar to those from post-medieval London. This research provides the most comprehensive study of non-adult morbidity and mortality in Roman Britain to date. It has provided new insights into Romano-British lifeways and presents suggestions for further work.

A lost insular version of the romance of Octavian

This article is the first full examination of the Irish translation of the popular and influential medieval romance "Octavian". I argue that the source for this Irish translation was an insular version of the romance, probably in Middle English. I show how the Irish translator incorporated material from another romance, "Fierabras", in order to introduce the characters of Charlemagne and his vassals into the story. This is the only version of "Octavian" that gives the text a Carolingian setting. I also demonstrate that the version of the romance from which the Irish translation was produced differed in significant ways from any of the surviving versions in other languages. I suggest that the Irish translation provides our only witness to a lost variant version of "Octavian" and, as such, extends our knowledge of the corpus of insular romance in the Middle Ages.

Música dos espaços: paisagem sonora do Nordeste no movimento armorial

This work exams the presence of music in the imaginary constitution of spaces, taking as study s object part of the musical production of the Armorial Movement, officially casted in 1970 in the city of Recife, Pernambuco. From that so called, by the Armorial s discourse, the essence of the brazilian northeastern popular art , the armorialists has intended to make an art that express an idea of northeasternity and brazility . Tries to demonstrate how the music has exerted a basic function of condensation and spreading of the armorial aesthetics, auditorily delimiting the territory of Brazilian Northeastern and, at the same time, trying to impose a sonority to it. This work still analyses the elaboration of what would be a proper soundscape of the Northeastern and how this elaboration passes trough the desire of crystallization of an idealized space, perpetual, escape line of the characteristic modernizing and postmodernizing experience of the twentieth century, product, in turn, of the anxiety of conservation of the Northeastern as a shelter to the traditions that has been evidenced by the construction of an visibility and, also, an audibility to the so called northeastern universe. It analyses, too, the way as works the confrontation between the idea of a so called northeastern soundscape - sonorous events set taken as typical from the rural space - and a sonorous archives series produced since 1920 with the regionalist discourse, showing how was elaborated an armorial music that has intended to represent the brazilian Northeastern. It evidences how, to the elaboration of armorial music, it was managed elements from the European musical culture so called scholar. It argues that the utilization of, to the manufacture of the armorial thinking and aesthetics, of a European mimical capital, so called that way by Stephen Greenblat, was consequence of the intellectual leadership of the Movement, centered in the writer Ariano Suassuna. It argues that Suassuna, followed by the musicians and the artists of the Movement, has searched to evidence a genetic linking between what he has considered the Brazilian true popular art and the medieval Iberian culture. For in such a way, the music was taken as a formation element of the social imaginary and directed to verify a relationship between the Northeastern idealized by the Armorial and the music produced by the Movement. This work has searched, therefore, through the analysis of the armorial music, to study the possible confluences between music and the space that has produced it to, by this analysis, to think the complicity between music and history

Desenvolvimento de chatterbots educacionais: um estudo de caso voltado ao ensino de algoritmos

In development of Synthetic Agents for Education, the doubt still resides about what would be a behavior that could be considered, in fact, plausible for this agent's type, which can be considered as effective on the transmission of the knowledge by the agent and the function of emotions this process. The purpose of this labor has an investigative nature in an attempt to discover what aspects are important for this behavior consistent and practical development of a chatterbot with the function of virtual tutor, within the context of learning algorithms. In this study, we explained the agents' basics, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, bots, chatterbots and how these systems need to provide credibility to report on their behavior. Models of emotions, personality and humor to computational agents are also covered, as well as previous studies by other researchers at the area. After that, the prototype is detailed, the research conducted, a summary of results achieved, the architectural model of the system, vision of computing and macro view of the features implemented.

O amor cortês e os Lais de Maria de França: um olhar historiográfico

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Estudo do acento lexical no português arcaico por meio das Cantigas de Santa Maria

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

O narrador e a presença da sátira menipéia em The adventures of Tom Sawyer

Pós-graduação em Letras - FCLAS

Habilidades matemáticas e memória operacional em crianças de 7 a 12 anos infectadas pelo HIV por transmissão vertical, em estado assintomático

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Da Camelot arturiana à Terra-média: representações da mulher em Le morte Darthur e the Lord of the rings

Pós-graduação em Letras - IBILCE

Provocações brasileiras: a imprensa contracultural made in Brazil : coluna Underground (1969-1971), Flor do mal (1971) & a Rolling Stone brasileira (1972-1973)

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Mark Twain: um patriota antiimperialista e seu relato de viagem em The innocents abroad or the new pilgrim's progress

Pós-graduação em Letras - FCLAS

Polifonia, carnavalização e paródia na Teoria do Medalhão, de Machado de Assis: confronto com Le Père Goriot, de Balzac

In the short story “Teoria do Medalhão”, written by Machado de Assis in 1881, a zealous father decides to give good advices to his son who just turned 21 years old. Using a speech that represents the official ideology of the eighteenth century, created by the dominant hegemony, including the France of Balzac’s time, the father suggests that the son abandons his ideals, using masks and annulling his thoughts and tastes to become a true Medalhão. The dialogue that is established between both of them is surrounded by irony and humor, because the father makes an apparently wise speech, which is, actually, empty and fool, leading to think about the concepts of parody and carnavalization by Bakhtin. Besides that, when he built a story in dialogue form, Machado de Assis transfers the word to the characters, in a crossing of voices that makes us think about “embryos” of polyphony. This work aims to make a bakhtiniana reading of the machadiano short story, “Teoria do Medalhão” in opposition to the novel Le Père Goriot by Balzac.

A Poética do amor em O Romance da Rosa

We aim with this article to analyze the poetics of love in The Romance of the Rose. We think that Guillaume de Lorris’s conception of love is associated with the flourishing of the French courtly society of the XIII Century, and that Jean de Meun’s conception of love is a result of the decline of this same society. Behind the virtues offered by Guillaume to the medieval lover we find the notion of courtesy, of the art of living in society, the understanding of the poetry as a form of ethics, and the medieval poetic of desire – intimately associated with the religious mysticism appeared from the XI Century and with the troubadours’ poetry. Jean is more influenced by the Ovidian tradition of thinking about the causes and effects of love. In the first part of the poem, Guillaume idealizes the conquest of the Rose; in the second, Jean describes the cueillette of the Rose, which could be read as a rape, in an allegorical way. It is this tension between different conceptions of love in a same poem that makes possible a better comprehension of the ways people used to think and feel in the Middle Ages.

Lamb Bright Saviors [Excerpt: Noon Song & Mady]

Lamb Bright Saviors begins as an apocalyptically inclined itinerant preacher staggers across the Nebraska prairie. With his young assistant, Mady, in tow hauling a wagon stacked with bibles, it’s not long before the preacher finds he’s come to the final fulfillment of his self-proclaimed life’s work: to die in front of a group of strangers. Odd as his own end-of-days might be, the lives and struggles of the strangers attending this deathbed scene are even odder. As the dying preacher unleashes a barrage of hallucinatory ramblings and rantings in the hope of imparting wisdom, each ragtag member of this unlikely congregation must reckon with his or her own dark past. And, through it all, the irrepressible Mady lends the preacher’s strange performance a surprising and unforgettable dignity and humor.