Cultural Heritage and Digitalization in City Branding

In today's competitive global environment, cities are striving to stand out and be attractive to investors, visitors, and residents. City branding is an important tool to differentiate the city from its competitors and to be preferred by visitors. Every city has its own characteristics resulting from its historical development, the influence of its geography, and its social, cultural, and economic past. Therefore, the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of cities is vital for their promotion and branding. This study aims to show the importance of their cultural heritage, which is the most fundamental feature to differentiate themselves from their competitors in city branding. It is emphasized that the cultural events organized in cities or the assets specific to cities, most of which are on the UNESCO World Heritage List, have a significant impact on city branding. In addition, the chapter explains the impact of digitalization, which is one of the most important developments of our time, on city branding and cultural heritage.

Menus for the Soul Changing Food Landscapes in Contemporary Japan

As Nancy K. Stalker (2018) points out, in recent years food in Japan has established itself as a fundamental feature of national and local identity and became one of Japan's most influential cultural brands. An intriguing example is the B-kyū gurume boom, the celebration of creative versions of typical comfort food, intertwined with the obsession for local traditions. Such processes are reflected in representations of food in media and arts: contemporary culture plays a fundamental role in shaping but also in connoting food culture with new meanings. The aim of this paper is to analyze the construction and narration of contemporary Japanese food culture in one of the most recent and successful franchises, Shin’ya Shokudō, the popular manga by Abe Yarō, which inspired the Netflix series that enjoyed unexpected international success in 2017.

The Vernaculars of No One, Really. The (Un?)Translatable Fictional Languages

The present paper aims to show the two possible directions, effects, manifestations of the fictional languages in general. Thus, according to the purposes of their creation, fictional languages have, throughout history, been created in order to achieve certain political, aesthetic or playful purposes, but the most fundamental feature that divides them into two categories is one strongly linked to the purpose of their creation: whether or not they can be learned and used in day-to-day life. Thus, whether they originated in the Sci-Fi, Fantasy or in the literary Avant-Garde universes, the issue of their purpose (to hide or to reveal meaning) also raises the issue of their translatability and, most of all, the issue of their “educability”, issues that may or may not harm their aesthetic dimensions.

Deciphering Solar Magnetic Activity: 140 Years of the ‘Extended Solar Cycle’ – Mapping the Hale Cycle

We investigate the occurrence of the “extended solar cycle” (ESC) as it occurs in a host of observational data spanning 140 years. Investigating coronal, chromospheric, photospheric, and interior diagnostics, we develop a consistent picture of solar activity migration linked to the 22-year Hale (magnetic) cycle using superposed epoch analysis (SEA) and previously identified Hale cycle termination events as the key time for the SEA. Our analysis shows that the ESC and Hale cycle, as highlighted by the terminator-keyed SEA, is strongly recurrent throughout the entire observational record studied, some 140 years. Applying the same SEA method to the sunspot record confirms that Maunder’s butterfly pattern is a subset of the underlying Hale cycle, strongly suggesting that the production of sunspots is not the fundamental feature of the Hale cycle, but the ESC is. The ESC (and Hale cycle) pattern highlights the importance of $55^{\circ }$ 55 ∘ latitude in the evolution, and possible production, of solar magnetism.

The identity phenomenon in the media culture of the 60s of the XX century

The seventh decade of the XX century of the communist regime is significant in many ways. First of all, it is through the brief “liberalization” of the political, social and cultural life of the former Soviet country, which followed the Stalinist frost of sadness. Nonetheless, the ideological constraints in the field of culture and the media have not completely disappeared. A fundamental feature of the research paradigm of British cultural studies explains that no cultural-artistic practice or cultural product can be understood out of context that is why the study of identity dimensions of media culture in the given period requires a complex grid of analysis. The factual state of culture in general, but also of media communication in particular, can be fully understood only if we proceed to a deconstruction of the mechanisms of propagandistic transfiguration of “socialist reality” and of the cultural or media discourse in the society of those times.

Deciphering Solar Magnetic Activity: 140 Years Of The ‘Extended Solar Cycle’ – Mapping the Hale Cycle

We investigate the occurrence of the ``extended solar cycle'' (ESC) as it occurs in a host observational data spanning 140 years. Investigating coronal, chromospheric, photospheric and interior diagnostics we develop a consistent picture of solar activity migration linked to the 22-year Hale (magnetic) cycle using superposed epoch analysis (SEA) using previously identified Hale cycle termination events as the key time for the SEA. Our analysis shows that the ESC and Hale cycle, as highlighted by the terminator-keyed SEA, is strongly recurrent throughout the entire observational record studied, some 140 years. Applying the same SEA method to the sunspot record confirms that Maunder's butterfly pattern is a subset of the underlying Hale cycle, strongly suggesting that the production of sunspots is not the fundamental feature of the Hale cycle, but the ESC is. The ESC (and Hale cycle) pattern highlights the importance of 55\degree\ latitude in the evolution, and possible production, of solar magnetism.

Dilated Filters for Edge-Detection Algorithms

Edges are a basic and fundamental feature in image processing that is used directly or indirectly in huge number of applications. Inspired by the expansion of image resolution and processing power, dilated-convolution techniques appeared. Dilated convolutions have impressive results in machine learning, so naturally we discuss the idea of dilating the standard filters from several edge-detection algorithms. In this work, we investigated the research hypothesis that use dilated filters, rather than the extended or classical ones, and obtained better edge map results. To demonstrate this hypothesis, we compared the results of the edge-detection algorithms using the proposed dilation filters with original filters or custom variants. Experimental results confirm our statement that the dilation of filters have a positive impact for edge-detection algorithms from simple to rather complex algorithms.

Biomaterials and Their Biomedical Applications: From Replacement to Regeneration

The history of biomaterials dates back to the mists of time: human beings had always used exogenous materials to facilitate wound healing and try to restore damaged tissues and organs. Nowadays, a wide variety of materials are commercially available and many others are under investigation to both maintain and restore bodily functions. Emerging clinical needs forced the development of new biomaterials, and lately discovered biomaterials allowed for the performing of new clinical applications. The definition of biomaterials as materials specifically conceived for biomedical uses was raised when it was acknowledged that they have to possess a fundamental feature: biocompatibility. At first, biocompatibility was mainly associated with biologically inert substances; around the 1970s, bioactivity was first discovered and the definition of biomaterials was consequently extended. At present, it also includes biologically derived materials and biological tissues. The present work aims at walking across the history of biomaterials, looking towards the scientific literature published on this matter. Finally, some current applications of biomaterials are briefly depicted and their future exploitation is hypothesized.

Strange strangers, epidemics and cosmological contagion: A reprise of the outside in three acts

In this essay I attempt to draw some crucial theoretical parallelisms between ancient Greek cosmology and the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Marcel Detienne and Timothy Morton’s work, I deploy the figure of Dionysos as a conceptual persona which can help us think of strangeness as a non-human mode of relationality Anthropocene societies must urgently engage with. Events such as the ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, through which non-humans are brought to the forefront of politics and social relations, traditionally result to attempts of sublating strangeness through human modes of knowledge. As I argue, epidemics instead demand the creation of practices, collectives and techniques through which strangeness is not eliminated or ‘understood’, but rather elevated to a fundamental feature of social relations. In such sense, the ancient world presents a critical vector of intervention to the current state of the Anthropocene, since it showcases a cosmos in which human life and society is constantly embedded and negotiated amid non-human strangeness.