In Italy, malaria was an endemic disease that was eradicated by the mid-20th century. This paper evaluates the prophylactic and therapeutic remedies used by folk medicine to cure malaria in Calabria (southern Italy).The data has been collected by analysing works of physicians, ethnographers, folklorists and specialists of the study of Calabrian history between the end of the 19th century and th...

Evidences of delivery are essential for resolving (and avoiding) disputes on delivery of messages, in classical as well as electronic commerce. We present the first rigorous specifications and provably-secure implementation, for a communication layer providing time-stamped evidences for the message delivery process. This improves on existing standards for evidences (‘non-repudiation’) services,...

Since Jeff Paris introduced them in the late seventies [Par78], densities turned out to be useful for studying independence results. Motivated by their simplicity and surprising strength we investigate the combinatorial complexity of two such densities which are strongly related to the pigeonhole principle. The aim is to miniaturise Ramsey’s Theorem for 1-tuples. The first principle uses an unl...

I study necessary and sufficient conditions for a choice function to be rationalised in the following sense: there exists a complete asymmetric relation T (a tournament) such that for each feasible (finite) choice situation, the choice coincides with the uncovered set of T . This notion of rationality explains not only cyclical and contextdependent choices observed in practice, but also provide...