Adriaan Rademaker, Sophrosyne and the Rhetoric of Self-Restraint. Polysemy and Persuasive Use an Ancient Greek Value Term

Fil: Saravia de Grossi, María Inés. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina.

16th Annual Seminar Course on Ancient Greek Literature and Culture Delfos, Grecia, 19 a 29 de julio de 2010

Fil: Cairo, María Emilia. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina.

Harris, E. M; Leão, D. F. and Rhodes, P. J. , Law and Drama in Ancient Greece, Duckworth, London, 2010, vii + 200 pp.

Fil: Fernández Deagustini, María del Pilar. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (UNLP-CONICET); Argentina.

Reseña de Toner, J. (2012) Sesenta Millones de Romanos. La cultura del pueblo en la Antigua Roma. Barcelona: Crítica. Traducción de Luis Noriega, Título original, Popular Culture in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009, pp. 363

En este trabajo comento el contenido y el enfoque del libro de Jerry Toner, director de estudios clásicos en el Hughes Hall College de la Universidad de Cambridge, quien en "Sesenta millones de romanos..." estudia y caracteriza la cultura popular como un conjunto de estrategias empleadas por el pueblo romano para enfrentar los desafíos de la vida cotidiana

Harris, E. M; Leão, D. F. and Rhodes, P. J. , Law and Drama in Ancient Greece, Duckworth, London, 2010, vii + 200 pp.

Fil: Fernández Deagustini, María del Pilar. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (UNLP-CONICET); Argentina.

Scientific drilling projects in ancient lakes: Integrating geological and biological histories

Sedimentary sequences in ancient or long-lived lakes can reach several thousands of meters in thickness and often provide an unrivalled perspective of the lake's regional climatic, environmental, and biological history. Over the last few years, deep-drilling projects in ancient lakes became increasingly multi- and interdisciplinary, as, among others, seismological, sedimentological, biogeochemical, climatic, environmental, paleontological, and evolutionary information can be obtained from sediment cores. However, these multi- and interdisciplinary projects pose several challenges. The scientists involved typically approach problems from different scientific perspectives and backgrounds, and setting up the program requires clear communication and the alignment of interests. One of the most challenging tasks, besides the actual drilling operation, is to link diverse datasets with varying resolution, data quality, and age uncertainties to answer interdisciplinary questions synthetically and coherently. These problems are especially relevant when secondary data, i.e., datasets obtained independently of the drilling operation, are incorporated in analyses. Nonetheless, the inclusion of secondary information, such as isotopic data from fossils found in outcrops or genetic data from extant species, may help to achieve synthetic answers. Recent technological and methodological advances in paleolimnology are likely to increase the possibilities of integrating secondary information. Some of the new approaches have started to revolutionize scientific drilling in ancient lakes, but at the same time, they also add a new layer of complexity to the generation and analysis of sediment-core data. The enhanced opportunities presented by new scientific approaches to study the paleolimnological history of these lakes, therefore, come at the expense of higher logistic, communication, and analytical efforts. Here we review types of data that can be obtained in ancient lake drilling projects and the analytical approaches that can be applied to empirically and statistically link diverse datasets to create an integrative perspective on geological and biological data. In doing so, we highlight strengths and potential weaknesses of new methods and analyses, and provide recommendations for future interdisciplinary deep-drilling projects.

Researching in ancient engineering physical and chemical analysis in hidraulic roman mortars

Around ten years ago investigation of technical and material construction in Ancient Roma has advanced in favour to obtain positive results. This process has been directed to obtaining some dates based in chemical composition, also action and reaction of materials against meteorological assaults or post depositional displacements. Plenty of these dates should be interpreted as a result of deterioration and damage in concrete material made in one landscape with some kind of meteorological characteristics. Concrete mixture like calcium and gypsum mortars should be analysed in laboratory test programs, and not only with descriptions based in reference books of Strabo, Pliny the Elder or Vitruvius. Roman manufacture was determined by weather condition, landscape, natural resources and of course, economic situation of the owner. In any case we must research the work in every facts of construction. On the one hand, thanks to chemical techniques like X-ray diffraction and Optical microscopy, we could know the granular disposition of mixture. On the other hand if we develop physical and mechanical techniques like compressive strength, capillary absorption on contact or water behaviour, we could know the reactions in binder and aggregates against weather effects. However we must be capable of interpret these results. Last year many analyses developed in archaeological sites in Spain has contributed to obtain different point of view, so has provide new dates to manage one method to continue the investigation of roman mortars. If we developed chemical and physical analysis in roman mortars at the same time, and we are capable to interpret the construction and the resources used, we achieve to understand the process of construction, the date and also the way of restoration in future.

Mechanical properties of adobe bricks in ancient constructions

A study of the mechanical properties of adobe bricks collected from houses and land dividing walls in Aveiro district, Portugal, representative of existing traditional constructions, was conducted. Cylindrical adobe specimens were subjected to simple compression and splitting tests. From these tests it was possible to evaluate the strength capacity, stiffness and deformation evolution for increasing loading. Correlations between the evaluated properties were determined, and the results obtained for houses and land dividing walls were compared. This study contributes for the characterization of adobes traditionally used in Aveiro district, and provides reference values that can be considered in rehabilitation processes

Adobe's Mechanical Characterization in Ancient Constructions: The Case of Aveiro's Region

Adobe is commonly found in Aveiro's ancient constructions. Preservation and rehabilitation of those constructions, some of them with architectural and historical interest, has been forgotten for many years. As a result, in Aveiro region, the majority of existing constructions in adobe is structurally weak, and, in several cases, they are in the threshold of ruin. Rehabilitation and/or strengthening urge. Despite some efforts has been made, a great difficulty for technicians working on the rehabilitation of these constructions relies on the lack of knowledge on adobe's mechanical behaviour. In fact, in order to properly describe the structural behaviour of those constructions, there is a need to investigate the mechanical behaviour of adobe. Hence, this paper is based on a study intended to characterise the behaviour of adobe brick units. Specimens were prepared from selected representative constructions of the Aveiro region. The prepared specimens were tested in order to evaluate their mechanical behaviour in compression and tension

Outreach Testing of Ancient Astronomy

This work is an outreach approach to an ubiquitous recent problem in secondary-school education: how to face back the decreasing interest in natural sciences shown by students under ‘pressure’ of convenient resources in digital devices/applications. The approach rests on two features. First, empowering of teen-age students to understand regular natural events around, as very few educated people they meet could do. Secondly, an understanding that rests on personal capability to test and verify experimental results from the oldest science, astronomy, with simple instruments as used from antiquity down to the Renaissance (a capability restricted to just solar and lunar motions). Because lengths in astronomy and daily life are so disparate, astronomy basically involved observing and registering values of angles (along with times), measurements being of two types, of angles on the ground and of angles in space, from the ground. First, the gnomon, a simple vertical stick introduced in Babylonia and Egypt, and then in Greece, is used to understand solar motion. The gnomon shadow turns around during any given day, varying in length and thus angle between solar ray and vertical as it turns, going through a minimum (noon time, at a meridian direction) while sweeping some angular range from sunrise to sunset. Further, the shadow minimum length varies through the year, with times when shortest and sun closest to vertical, at summer solstice, and times when longest, at winter solstice six months later. The extreme directions at sunset and sunrise correspond to the solstices, swept angular range greatest at summer, over 180 degrees, and the opposite at winter, with less daytime hours; in between, spring and fall equinoxes occur, marked by collinear shadow directions at sunrise and sunset. The gnomon allows students to determine, in addition to latitude (about 40.4° North at Madrid, say), the inclination of earth equator to plane of its orbit around the sun (ecliptic), this fundamental quantity being given by half the difference between solar distances to vertical at winter and summer solstices, with value about 23.5°. Day and year periods greatly differing by about 2 ½ orders of magnitude, 1 day against 365 days, helps students to correctly visualize and interpret the experimental measurements. Since the gnomon serves to observe at night the moon shadow too, students can also determine the inclination of the lunar orbital plane, as about 5 degrees away from the ecliptic, thus explaining why eclipses are infrequent. Independently, earth taking longer between spring and fall equinoxes than from fall to spring (the solar anomaly), as again verified by the students, was explained in ancient Greek science, which posited orbits universally as circles or their combination, by introducing the eccentric circle, with earth placed some distance away from the orbital centre when considering the relative motion of the sun, which would be closer to the earth in winter. In a sense, this can be seen as hint and approximation of the elliptic orbit proposed by Kepler many centuries later.

Intron positions correlate with module boundaries in ancient proteins

We analyze the three-dimensional structure of proteins by a computer program that finds regions of sequence that contain module boundaries, defining a module as a segment of polypeptide chain bounded in space by a specific given distance. The program defines a set of “linker regions” that have the property that if an intron were to be placed into each linker region, the protein would be dissected into a set of modules all less than the specified diameter. We test a set of 32 proteins, all of ancient origin, and a corresponding set of 570 intron positions, to ask if there is a statistically significant excess of intron positions within the linker regions. For 28-Å modules, a standard size used historically, we find such an excess, with P < 0.003. This correlation is neither due to a compositional or sequence bias in the linker regions nor to a surface bias in intron positions. Furthermore, a subset of 20 introns, which can be putatively identified as old, lies even more explicitly within the linker regions, with P < 0.0003. Thus, there is a strong correlation between intron positions and three-dimensional structural elements of ancient proteins as expected by the introns-early approach. We then study a range of module diameters and show that, as the diameter varies, significant peaks of correlation appear for module diameters centered at 21.7, 27.6, and 32.9 Å. These preferred module diameters roughly correspond to predicted exon sizes of 15, 22, and 30 residues. Thus, there are significant correlations between introns, modules, and a quantized pattern of the lengths of polypeptide chains, which is the prediction of the “Exon Theory of Genes.”