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In this study we report the underlying reasons to why bacteria are present on banknotes and coins. Despite the use of credit cards, mobile phone apps, near-field-communication systems, and cryptocurrencies such as bitcoins which are replacing the use of hard currencies, cash exchanges still make up a significant means of exchange for a wide range of purchases. The literature is awash with data that highlights that both coins and banknotes are frequently identified as fomites for a wide range of microorganisms. However, most of these publications fail to provide any insight into the extent to which bacteria adhere and persist on money. We treated the various currencies used in this study as microcosms, and the bacterial loading from human hands as the corresponding microbiome. We show that the substrate from which banknotes are produced have a significant influence on both the survival and adherence of bacteria to banknotes. Smooth, polymer surfaces provide a poor means of adherence and survival, while coarser and more fibrous surfaces provide strong bacterial adherence and an environment to survive on. Coins were found to be strongly inhibitory to bacteria with a relatively rapid decline in survival on almost all coin surfaces tested. The inhibitory influence of coins was demonstrated through the use of antimicrobial disks made from coins. Despite the toxic effects of coins on many bacteria, bacteria do have the ability to adapt to the presence of coins in their environment which goes some way to explain the persistent presence of low levels of bacteria on coins in circulation.

This article analyses opportunities, limitations and impact of communal sport policies in the second quarter of the 20th century by the example of Zurich, the largest city of Switzerland. The period of ‘Red Zurich’ from 1928 to 1949, when a Social Democratic majority committed to the strategy of ‘communal socialism’ dominated the city's executive council, was at the same time the take-off period of both mass and commercialised elite sport. Yet, unlike in ‘Red Vienna’, a specifically socialist approach of ‘Red Zurich’ towards sport is hardly identifiable, with the city administration not privileging worker sports organisations ideologically close to them nor applying any theories of class specific physical education. Rather their policies were in line with contemporary mainstream discourses on health, hygiene and problems posed by modern urbanity. The same can be said regarding the development of sport infrastructure, which despite economic crisis and wartime austerity witnessed a rapid expansion and was c...

This report presents the findings of a survey on undeclared economic practices undertaken by Croatian companies. In order to obtain the rigorous evidence on undeclared work in Croatia, we previously investigated citizens’ experiences with undeclared work and the practice of envelope wages. With this representative survey of 521 companies, we focus on frequency of company engagement in the undeclared economy. Four out of ten survey respondents estimate that 20% to 50% of trade in their sector is undeclared, while more than one quarter (21.8%) believe that this percentage is higher than 50%. Only one sixth of survey respondents state that the percentage of trade in their sector conducted through the undeclared economy is less than 10%. 40% of respondents believe that 20% to 50% of employees in their sector are working without a contract, while 11.8% estimate that this percentage is greater than 50%. One quarter of the company representatives (26.12%) think that less than 10% of employees in their sector do not have contracts. More than half of the survey respondents (59.3%) believe that the extent of envelope wages in their sector is between 20% and 50%, while 17% deem that underreporting of salaries is higher than 50%. A little less than one quarter (23.8%) of respondents evaluated that envelope wage practices are not widespread in their industry and that they represent less than 20% of salaries. Administrative and support service and accommodation and food service activities are at the top of the list of sectors that always apply the practice of envelope wages. On the other side, such a practice is never applied in a significant number of companies in arts, entertainment and recreation and in education. Regarding the characteristic years in business, mentioned behaviour is less prevalent in companies with business activity from one to three years and from four to ten years. Almost a half (47.28%) of survey respondents believe that the proportion of the total wage payments that are paid unofficially is in the 20-50% range of the total wage payments, while around 16% state that this percentage is greater than 50% and another 16% stated that the range is between 10% and 20%. A little over one fifth (21.2%) of respondents evaluate that such undeclared payments represent less than 10% of total wage payments. According to views of the surveyed firm representatives, the most important reason for companies in Croatia underreporting salaries of their employees is the intention to keep labour costs down, followed by longer working hours. All different types of misbehaviour among the competitors, except illicit exporting/importing of goods, false documentation or no documentation, happens in 50% to 60% of the cases. In addition, 42.64% of the interviewed representatives think that illicit exporting or importing never happens, while 17.16% assessed that this behaviour happens in almost all cases. Regarding the VAT fraud, almost half of the interviewed representatives (49.39%) stated that it happens sometimes, while 28.61% never observed such behaviour. This similar structure of responses was found for hiding, not paying taxes, duties and/or excises - more than a half of the interviewed representatives stated that this happens sometimes, while 23.4% believed that it never happens. Overall, the survey respondents widely agreed with the majority of measures for tackling undeclared economic activities undertaken by companies, therefore supporting a combination of various policies and measures. The majority of the interviewed representatives (53.73%) supported the notion that companies, which employ undeclared workers, under-report salaries or have outstanding social security payments should be banned from participation in public tenders and should not receive subsidies. Furthermore, 44.05% of companies believe that by simplifying the processes for hiring workers on small or occasional jobs would reduce undeclared work. In contrast, less than 20% of the surveyed participants think that public exposure of undeclared work and/or awareness campaigns about the negative consequences of operating unregistered would result in significant reduction in the undeclared economy.

Automatic ancient Roman coin analysis only recently emerged as a topic of computer science research. Nevertheless, owing to its ever-increasing popularity, the field is already reaching a certain degree of maturity, as witnessed by a substantial publication output in the last decade. At the same time, it is becoming evident that research progress is being limited by a somewhat veering direction of effort and the lack of a coherent framework which facilitates the acquisition and dissemination of robust, repeatable, and rigorous evidence. Thus, in the present article, we seek to address several associated challenges. To start with, (i) we provide a first overview and discussion of different challenges in the field, some of which have been scarcely investigated to date, and others which have hitherto been unrecognized and unaddressed. Secondly, (ii) we introduce the first data set, carefully curated and collected for the purpose of facilitating methodological evaluation of algorithms and, specifically, the effects of coin preservation grades on the performance of automatic methods. Indeed, until now, only one published work at all recognized the need for this kind of analysis, which, to any numismatist, would be a trivially obvious fact. We also discuss a wide range of considerations which had to be taken into account in collecting this corpus, explain our decisions, and describe its content in detail. Briefly, the data set comprises 100 different coin issues, all with multiple examples in Fine, Very Fine, and Extremely Fine conditions, giving a total of over 650 different specimens. These correspond to 44 issuing authorities and span the time period of approximately 300 years (from 27 BC until 244 AD). In summary, the present article should be an invaluable resource to researchers in the field, and we encourage the community to adopt the collected corpus, freely available for research purposes, as a standard evaluation benchmark.

There has been a concerted effort to identify problems computable with quantum technology which are intractable with classical technology or require far fewer resources to compute. Recently, randomness processing in a Bernoulli factory has been identified as one such task. Here, we report two quantum photonic implementations of a Bernoulli factory, one utilising quantum coherence and single-qubit measurements and the other which uses quantum coherence and entangling measurements of two qubits. We show that the former consumes three orders of magnitude fewer resources than the best known classical method, while entanglement offers a further five-fold reduction. These concepts may provide a means for quantum enhanced-performance in the simulation of stochastic processes and sampling tasks. Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, and 4 pages of supplementary material

The case of Félida X and her ‘doubled personality’ served in the last quarter of the 19th century as a proving ground for a distinctively French form of psychology that bore the stamp of physiology, including the comparative term normal state. Debates around Félida’s case provided the occasion for reflection about how that term and its opposites could take their places in the emerging discursive field of psychopathology. This article centres its analysis on Eugène Azam’s 1876–77 study of Félida, and the ways his framing of the case was adopted or critiqued by subsequent researchers. Azam initially deployed the label normal state in a routine manner, in contrast to his use of condition seconde to designate Félida’s other state; this pairing served, I argue, to anchor the scientific legitimacy of Félida’s extraordinary psychological manifestations. Unpacking the conceptual associations of Azam’s use of normal state, we find it marked as qualitatively distinct, temporally fixed, and most of all individualized; this without becoming normative. It was only through responses to and criticism of Azam’s study that there emerged a more generalized sense of normality against which pathological (hysteric) subjects’ comportment could be contrasted. Félida’s case itself constitutes a highly individualized reconfiguration of the concept of a normal state, while the subsequent framing of doubled mental states provides a valuable vantage point from which to consider the articulations between the language of emerging French psychology and its evolving subjects of enquiry.

[EN]This paper addresses the formation processes at an unparalleled Bronze Age settlement in the Iberian Meseta. The site of El Cerro (Burgos, Spain) presents a series of challenging features: the simultaneous inhumation of three subadults alongside a dwelling quarter and adjacent pits, some of them filled with apparent formality, including such anachronistic elements as Neolithic and Beaker items and several placed deposits, such as a leg of a cow. A critical evaluation of the contextual dataset, a re-fitting operation, and an assessment of the abrasion and size of a ceramic sample were carried out. The archaeological peculiarities of the site are explained as a contextually specific cultural response to a grievous and traumatic episode: the death of three young siblings, which entailed the abandonment of the settlement through prescribed practices. Some depositions are a product of recognizable intentionality, while others are regarded as unintended cumulative outcomes.