Combining chemical data with GIS and PCA to investigate Phoenician–Punic Cu-metallurgy

This study focusses on the development and application of an innovative protocol which combines chemical data, GIS (geographical information system) and PCA, involving numeric (chemical composition) and categorical (typology of object, archaeological context, chronology and geographical areas) variables, as a simple tool to help in the visualisation and interpretation of large multidisciplinary datasets on Cu-based alloy archaeological artefacts influenced by Phoenician–Punic contacts. The protocol is a useful tool for highlighting existing connections between specific alloy chemical compositions, the location of the original settlement where the artefact had been produced and the proximity to mining resources, waterways, and allochthonous presence such as, in the specific case of this study, the Phoenician and Punic influence in the Iberian bronze production during the Late Bronze Age–Iron Age. The protocol was tested successfully in a case study concerning the precise dating and provenance of bronze statuettes of unknown age and provenance from the Evora Museum collection in Southern Portugal where it confirmed and further refined earlier hypotheses based solely on archaeological and/or chemical studies. The results were interpreted with a unique perspective, to validate the GIS system in combination with experimental chemical-physical data to yield the identification of metallurgical sites of bronze production.     

Fine Boundary Behavior and Invariant Subspaces of Harmonically Weighted Dirichlet Spaces

We study the boundary behavior of functions in spaces of Dirichlet-type by using non-linear capacities generalizing the logarithmic capacity. We use these capacities to obtain information about the invariant subspaces of the shift operator. As an application, we prove an analogue of a conjecture of Brown and Shields when the space is weighted by the Poisson integral of a finite sum of atoms.     

Tweeting nano: how public discourses about nanotechnology develop in social media environments

Journal of Nanoparticle Research - This study reports the development of a fast and facile route for the synthesis of novel CeO2–TiO2 core–shell nanocomposite particles using microwave...     

Thomas Bayes’ walk on manifolds

Convergence of the Bayes posterior measure is considered in canonical statistical settings where observations sit on a geometrical object such as a compact manifold, or more generally on a compact metric space verifying some conditions. A natural geometric prior based on randomly rescaled solutions of the heat equation is considered. Upper and lower bound posterior contraction rates are derived.     

30 ps pulses source based on a fiber-coupled passively Q-switched microchip laser

We report the design of low-cost and compact short-pulse source based on a fiber-coupled Q-switched microchip laser. The combination of stimulated Raman scattering and nonlinear polarization rotation effects in the fiber associated with appropriate filtering makes it possible to tune pulse duration down to 32 ps with peak power above 3 kW. Pulse to pulse peak power fluctuation is below 4%.