............................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. 4 Table of

This presentation reviews the latest progress in the identification of the proteinaceous materials and organic dyes presented in art and in historical building materials using mass spectrometry as a dominant method. The method of the peptide mass mapping for identification of proteinaceous binders in the colour layers of easel paintings and in the historical mortars was developed in our laborat...

Good estimates for the tails of loss severity distributions are essential for pricing or positioning high-excess loss layers in reinsurance. We describe parametric curvetting methods for modelling extreme historical losses. These methods revolve around the generalized Pareto distribution and are supported by extreme value theory. We summarize relevant theoretical results and provide an extensiv...

A chemical investigation of the organic paint binders of the Giant Buddhas of Bāmiyān was performed using an analytical approach based on mass spectrometry, combining traditional gas chromatography/mass spectrometry protocols with advanced proteomics methodologies. The research was carried out on a selection of rescued fragments. The data revealed the use of egg proteins as the paint binders of...

The historical record tells us stories of migrations, population expansions and colonization events in the last few thousand years, but what was their demographic impact? Genetics can throw light on this issue, and has mostly done so through the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the male-specific Y chromosome. However, there are a number of problems, including marker ascertainm...

The Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools Prototype Project, or LANDFIRE Prototype Project, originated from a recent mapping project that developed a set of coarse-scale spatial data layers for wildland fire management describing fire hazard and ecological status for the conterminous United States (Hardy and others 2001; Schmidt and others 2002; www. fs.fed.us/fire/fuelman). Sch...

The GeoMemories project aims at publishing on the Web and digitally preserving historical aerial photographs that are currently stored in physical form within the archives of the Aerofototeca Nazionale in Rome. We describe a system, available at http://www.geomemories.org, that lets users visualize the evolution of the Italian landscape throughout the last century. The Web portal allows compari...