The transformation of an agricultural economy : forms of rural settlement in Epirus from the second century BCE to the fourth century CE

This thesis investigates the transformation of the agricultural economy of Epirus in Roman times, approximately from its conquest in 168/7 BCE and its annexation in the province of Macedonia in 146 BCE, until the 4th century CE. It does so through study of diverse forms of rural settlement in the Epirote countryside, using untapped rescue archaeology to distinguish between different farms, to refine their chronologies, and to assess their agricultural productions. In so doing, the nature of the villa and its temporal spread in this area of Greece is also thoroughly examined and clarified. The development of Epirus has in the past often been closely linked to narratives painted by Roman authors of its allegedly devastating destruction and subsequent agricultural exploitation by members of the Roman aristocracy, who called themselves "Synepirotae". Many rural sites have been interpreted in this light and called "villas", leading scholars to postulate that the villa spread widely in Epirus during the early Roman period. In contrast to this theory, it is argued that, while a few exceptional villas were constructed early on, they did not become popular until the middle and later Imperial periods; instead, in early Roman times dispersed villages and fortified farms, many of which had been inhabited before the Roman period, were more numerous. Consequently, the villa was not always the typical way to manage agricultural resources of substantial scale in this part of the Roman world. The thesis also combines rural rescue archaeology with material culture from cities and with written evidence, to reconstruct a new view of societal and economic change in Epirus during the Roman period. It is shown how gradual changes in the agricultural economy reflected changes in local societies, which were also measured in pace, and it is highlighted that the individuals making up those societies played a more active role in the ways that Epirus became incorporated into the Roman Empire than has previously been thought

On P-H_v-Structures in a Two-Dimensional Real Vector Space

In this paper we study P-Hv-structures in connection with Hv-structures, arising from a specific P-hope in a two-dimensional real vector space. The visualization of these P-Hv-structures is our priority, since visual thinking could be an alternative and powerful resource for people doing mathematics. Using position vectors into the plane, abstract algebraic properties of these P-Hv-structures are gradually transformed into geometrical shapes, which operate, not only as a translation of the algebraic concept, but also, as a teaching process. 

CLASSIFICATION FOR SYMPTOMS OF DEPRESSION, ANXIETY AND STRESS IN STUDENTS DURING THE FIRST COVID-19 LOCKDOWN

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of the classification of depression, anxiety, and stress levels among students during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Greece using machine learning methods. Leveraging a dataset derived from 1016 responses to the Dass21 questionnaire, this research evaluates the efficacy of five classifiers, IBk (KNN=3), Random Forest, MLP, FURIA, and SMO—in categorizing individuals' mental health status. The findings underscore the potential of machine learning in psychiatric evaluation and the importance of early detection and tailored interventions in mental health care.  Article visualizations

Frailty and cardiac rehabilitation : A call to action from the EAPC Cardiac Rehabilitation Section

Frailty is a geriatric syndrome characterised by a vulnerability status associated with declining function of multiple physiological systems and loss of physiological reserves. Two main models of frailty have been advanced: the phenotypic model (primary frailty) or deficits accumulation model (secondary frailty), and different instruments have been proposed and validated to measure frailty. However measured, frailty correlates to medical outcomes in the elderly, and has been shown to have prognostic value for patients in different clinical settings, such as in patients with coronary artery disease, after cardiac surgery or transvalvular aortic valve replacement, in patients with chronic heart failure or after left ventricular assist device implantation.The prevalence, clinical and prognostic relevance of frailty in a cardiac rehabilitation setting has not yet been well characterised, despite the increasing frequency of elderly patients in cardiac rehabilitation, where frailty is likely to influence the onset, type and intensity of the exercise training programme and the design of tailored rehabilitative interventions for these patients.Therefore, we need to start looking for frailty in elderly patients entering cardiac rehabilitation programmes and become more familiar with some of the tools to recognise and evaluate the severity of this condition. Furthermore, we need to better understand whether exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation may change the course and the prognosis of frailty in cardiovascular patients

Speaker-independent emotion recognition exploiting a psychologically-inspired binary cascade classification schema

In this paper, a psychologically-inspired binary cascade classification schema is proposed for speech emotion recognition. Performance is enhanced because commonly confused pairs of emotions are distinguishable from one another. Extracted features are related to statistics of pitch, formants, and energy contours, as well as spectrum, cepstrum, perceptual and temporal features, autocorrelation, MPEG-7 descriptors, Fujisakis model parameters, voice quality, jitter, and shimmer. Selected features are fed as input to K nearest neighborhood classifier and to support vector machines. Two kernels are tested for the latter: Linear and Gaussian radial basis function. The recently proposed speaker-independent experimental protocol is tested on the Berlin emotional speech database for each gender separately. The best emotion recognition accuracy, achieved by support vector machines with linear kernel, equals 87.7%, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches. Statistical analysis is first carried out with respect to the classifiers error rates and then to evaluate the information expressed by the classifiers confusion matrices. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Monitoring functional capacity in heart failure.

This document reflects the key points of a consensus meeting of the Heart Failure Association of European Society of Cardiology (ESC) held to provide an overview the role of physiological monitoring in the complex multimorbid heart failure (HF) patient. This article reviews assessments of the functional ability of patients with HF. The gold standard measurement of cardiovascular functional capacity is peak oxygen consumption obtained from a cardiopulmonary exercise test. The 6-min walk test provides an indirect measure of cardiovascular functional capacity. Muscular functional capacity is assessed using either a 1-repetition maximum test of the upper and lower body or other methods, such as handgrip measurement. The short physical performance battery may provide a helpful, indirect indication of muscular functional capacity

DETECTION OF POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD) SYMPTOMS ASSOCIATED WITH CORONAVIRUS DISEASE 2019 (COVID-19) IN THE STUDENT POPULATION

The pandemic has killed at least 670,000 people since it hit China's Wuhan, and 17 million cases have been diagnosed. The United States, Brazil, Mexico and Britain have been hit hard by COVID-19 in recent weeks (7/2020) as their governments try to find an effective response. A pandemic is a health crisis that occurs once in a hundred years, the effects of which will be felt for decades (WHO). In the dramatic changes brought about by a crisis, unfortunately many people experience a time of stress and sadness like no other in their lives and then the most common diagnosis is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Anxiety Disorder (World Health Organization [WHO]), 2001). In this study we detect and categorize symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) associated with coronavirus disease 2019 in a student population.  Article visualizations

Estimation of electron density in the nighttime ionosphere based on remote sensing of the 135.6 nm far ultraviolet emission

This thesis develops a method to accurately estimate the electron density altitude profiles of the nighttime ionosphere, as well as important parameters such as the peak height and density, using nighttime far ultraviolet (FUV) measurements of the 135.6 nm nighttime emissions. Specifically, we will describe a method to accurately obtain the electron density content of the ionosphere by using brightness measurements of the nighttime 135.6 nm emission. The method is applied and tested using simulated measurements to relate to those to be obtained by the limb-viewing FUV instrument on board the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) satellite scheduled to be launched in 2017. The OI 135.6 nm emission can be used as a proxy of the ionosphere's electron density and is related through an integral equation of the volume emission rate to the brightness measured by the FUV instrument. The instrument's observation geometry allows for the discretization of the problem, thus connecting the ionosphere's electron density with the measured brightness through a matrix equation. Regularization methods are used in order to enforce constraints of smoothness and continuity on the estimation of the volume emission rate, to compensate for the noise amplification in the inversion process. Tikhonov regularization, generalized cross-validation, total variation and Bayesian methods that assume prior knowledge of the ionosphere's electron density distribution are investigated. Comprehensive simulations are used to explore the different brightness intensities for all longitudes, and for latitudes from -40 to 40 degrees, in order to allow the characterization of the effect of different SNR values on the electron density reconstruction accuracy. FUV measurements are simulated using the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) and Mass Spectrometer and Incoherent Radar (MSIS) models to create a forward model which can be inverted in order to validate the altitude profile reconstruction as well as the peak height and density accuracy. This allows us to investigate the expected performance of the FUV instrument

Farmacocinética pre-clínica del nuatigenósido y otras biomoléculas radiomarcadas obtenidas del extracto semipurificado de raíces de Solanum sisymbriifolium Lam

El objetivo general del trabajo es la determinación de la farmacocinética pre-clínica del nuatigenósido y otras biomoléculas radiomarcadas obtenidas del extracto semipurificado de raíces de Solanum sisymbriifolium Lam.CONACYT – Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y TecnologíaPROCIENCI

Epigenetic alterations involved in cancer stem cell reprogramming

Current hypotheses suggest that tumors originate from cells that carry out a process of 'malignant reprogramming' driven by genetic and epigenetic alterations. Multiples studies reported the existence of stem-cell-like cells that acquire the ability to self-renew and are able to generate the bulk of more differentiated cells that form the tumor. This population of cancer cells, called cancer stem cells (CSC), is responsible for sustaining the tumor growth and, under determined conditions, can disseminate and migrate to give rise to secondary tumors or metastases to distant organs. Furthermore, CSCs have shown to be more resistant to anti-tumor treatments than the non-stem cancer cells, suggesting that surviving CSCs could be responsible for tumor relapse after therapy. These important properties have raised the interest in understanding the mechanisms that govern the generation and maintenance of this special population of cells, considered to lie behind the on/off switches of gene expression patterns. In this review, we summarize the most relevant epigenetic alterations, from DNA methylation and histone modifications to the recently discovered miRNAs that contribute to the regulation of cancer stem cell features in tumor progression, metastasis and response to chemotherapy