• Publicationsclose
• 2014-2023close
• Part of book or chapter of book close
• CH close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage close

Abstract Wood has been used by mankind since prehistory; therefore the presence of wood in cultural heritage is huge. The dendrochronological dating is considered one of the principal techniques for the study of wood of historical and architectural interest. When the traces left by the history make a correct reading of the context impossible, the results given by dendrochronology are often the only certain data useful as a reference. Wood species identification and tree-ring analysis allow far more than just dating: often it is possible to identify the provenance of the woods, closely studying some technical aspects, detecting major or minor interventions of restoration, substitution, and reuse, and, in some fields of study, verifying the attribution of the artifact to a certain artist or school. The power of dendrochronology is based on the rigorous scientific approach and the complete independence from other stylistic or historical considerations.

This paper focuses on the normative notion of ‘good death’, its practical relevance as a frame of reference for ‘death work’ procedures in institutional elder care in Switzerland and the ways in which it may be challenged within migrant ‘dying trajectories’. In contemporary palliative care, the concept of ‘good death’ focuses on the ideal of an autonomous dying person, cared for under a specialised biomedical authority. Transferred to the nursing home context, characterised by long-term basic care for the very old under conditions of scarce resources, the notion of ‘good death’ is broken down into ready-to-use, pragmatic elements of daily routines. At the same time, nursing homes are increasingly confronted with socially and culturally diversified populations. Based on ethnographic findings, we give insight into current practices of institutional ‘death work’ and tensions arising between contradicting notions of a ‘good death’, by referring to decision-making, life-prolonging measures, notions on food/feeding and the administration of sedative painkillers.

The actor Claud Sykes (1883–1963), who had come to Zurich in 1915, met Joyce in 1917. Together they founded the English Players, an English language theatre company that was active in Zurich between April 1918 and late 1919. Sykes moved back to England after the war. He continued to produce plays at first, but later worked as an author and translator of books about World War I aviation. From the mid-1930s onwards he worked for MI5.

Although published in close temporal proximity to one another, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist provide markedly different outlooks on the impact of the 11 September 2001 attacks. As these two novels illustrate, 9/11 fiction actively partakes in contemporary public discourse, employing the mode of fiction to both reiterate and interrogate prevailing narratives about 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror. Whereas American Ground Zero novels tend to support the master narrative of 9/11 as a cultural trauma, postcolonial War on Terror novels assume a counter-discursive position by offering different narrative contextualizations of the event. Thus, the Anglophone “novel after 9/11” can be shown to make diverse, sometimes conflicting contributions to the meaning-making processes surrounding 9/11 and the War on Terror.

The inherent complexity and structure on long timescales make the automated composition of music a challenging problem. Here we present the Deep Artificial Composer (DAC), a recurrent neural network model of note transitions for the automated composition of melodies. Our model can be trained to produce melodies with compositional structures extracted from large datasets of diverse styles of music, which we exemplify here on a corpus of Irish folk and Klezmer melodies. We assess the creativity of DAC-generated melodies by a new measure, the novelty of musical sequences, showing that melodies imagined by the DAC are as novel as melodies produced by human composers. We further use the novelty measure to show that the DAC creates melodies musically consistent with either of the musical styles it was trained on. This makes the DAC a promising candidate for the automated composition of convincing musical pieces of any provided style.

The aims of this chapter are to outline the key experimental methods used by neuroscientists to evaluate the impact of game-based training strategies on attention and working memory function in humans. The chapter is organized into sections that detail methods that probe the major facets of attention followed by methods that probe working memory. Attention methods are subdivided into sections on (1) spatial attention, (2) temporal attention, (3) combined spatial and temporal attention, (4) feature-/object-based attention, (5) sustained attention, (6) interaction between top-down and bottom-up attention, and (7) attention resource allocation. Methods that assess working memory function are then presented in two major sections, (9) visual and visuospatial working memory and (10) verbal working memory. We conclude with a discussion of prospects for further research and applications.

Early ideas about the origin of the cosmos and of life on Earth can be found in the myths of different nations and in religions. A number of these reflections are reviewed. The myths are based on imagination and form impressive pieces of literature.

In October 1881, the “Gunfight at the O.K. (‘Old Kindersley’) Corral,” a combat between lawmen and members of a group of outlaws, the so-called “Cowboys”, took place in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. Tombstone was a booming mining town near the Mexican border. The gunfight is widely regarded as the most famous shootout in the history of the Wild West. It was the result of a feud between five of the Cowboys and four representatives of the town’s authorities, in particular Special Policeman Wyatt Earp and Temporary Policeman Doc Holliday, a gambler, gunfighter and dentist.

Astrophysics deals with important questions characterizing human nature. Most of our knowledge was obtained in the last century. The data resulting from these explorations, collected in space or on ground, are of great value, encoding our knowledge of the Universe, of our past and of our future. With the emergence of clouds and deep learning, high level interfaces to these data could evolve towards providing direct access to knowledge. The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs can play a role towards a consensus in establishing a code of conduct on data handling and promoting the data and knowledge on the Universe as an intangible world cultural heritage.