Rise From Want explores the ways in which a family of poor peasants from the Karst plateau above Trieste, Italy, lived through the great changes brought about by industrialization and modernization.
Population ageing requires society to adjust by ensuring additional types of services and assistance for elderly people. These may be provided by either organized services and sources of informal ...social support. The latter are especially important since a lack of social support is associated with a lower level of psychological and physical well-being. During the Covid-19 pandemic, social support for the elderly has proven to be even more crucial, also due to physical distancing. Therefore, this study aims to identify and describe the various types of personal social support networks available to the elderly population during the pandemic. To this end, a survey of Slovenians older than 64 years was conducted from April 25 to May 4, 2020 on a probability web-panel-based sample (n = 605). The ego networks were clustered by a hierarchical clustering approach for symbolic data. Clustering was performed for different types of social support (socializing, instrumental support, emotional support) and different characteristics of the social support networks (i.e., type of relationship, number of contacts, geographical distance). The results show that most of the elderly population in Slovenia has a satisfactory social support network, while the share of those without any (accessible) source of social support is significant. The results are particularly valuable for sustainable care policy planning, crisis intervention planning as well as any future waves of the coronavirus.
People’s ambiguous, ambivalent, non-rational and nonsensical relation towards death is a constant feature throughout the human past. The obvious way of dealing with such a stressful moment in ...personal and community life is guided by tradition – the well-established system of ways and manners of making spiritual meaning that implicitly answers how to go through this difficult period. From the long-term perspective, burying the deceased in pre-established burial grounds is a rather recent phenomenon. We can trace the intentionally arranged cemeteries as a continuous and prevalent way of treating the deceased in today’s Slovenia for no more than the last three millennia, from the Late Bronze Age onwards. The treatment of the deceased was much more diverse before that. From the earliest discoveries of human remains in the territory of Slovenia in the Mesolithic (8th–7th mill. BC) to the Bronze Age (2nd mill. BC), three different major manifestations of treating the remains of the deceased are documented. The first and most numerous was to expose and/or bury the deceased in the caves. The second was keeping the excarnated predecessors’ remains close to the daily life in the settlements. The third was to bury human remains in cemeteries. However, recent research revealed the fourth way of handling the dead – the immersion of their remains in the waters. Only from the Late Bronze Age onwards does burying all the deceased of a given community in communal cemeteries become the dominant custom.
In the article a virus transmission model is constructed on a simplified social network. The social network consists of more than 2 million nodes, each representing an inhabitant of Slovenia. The ...nodes are organised and interconnected according to the real household and elderly-care center distribution, while their connections outside these clusters are semi-randomly distributed and undirected. The virus spread model is coupled to the disease progression model. The ensemble approach with the perturbed transmission and disease parameters is used to quantify the ensemble spread, a proxy for the forecast uncertainty. The presented ongoing forecasts of COVID-19 epidemic in Slovenia are compared with the collected Slovenian data. Results show that at the end of the first epidemic wave, the infection was twice more likely to transmit within households/elderly care centers than outside them. We use an ensemble of simulations (N = 1000) and data assimilation approach to estimate the COVID-19 forecast uncertainty and to inversely obtain posterior distributions of model parameters. We found that in the uncontrolled epidemic, the intrinsic uncertainty mostly originates from the uncertainty of the virus biology, i.e. its reproduction number. In the controlled epidemic with low ratio of infected population, the randomness of the social network becomes the major source of forecast uncertainty, particularly for the short-range forecasts. Virus transmission models with accurate social network models are thus essential for improving epidemics forecasting.
Microplastics in the environment are either a product of the fractionation of larger plastic items or a consequence of the release of microbeads, which are ingredients of cosmetics, through ...wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluents. The aim of this study was to estimate the amount of microbeads that may be released by the latter pathways to surface waters using Ljubljana, Slovenia as a case study. For this purpose, microbeads contained in cosmetics were in a first step characterized for their physical properties and particle size distribution. Subsequently, daily emission of microbeads from consumers to the sewerage system, their fate in biological WWTPs and finally their release into surface waters were estimated for Ljubljana. Most of the particles found in cosmetic products were <100 μm. After application, microbeads are released into sewerage system at an average rate of 15.2 mg per person per day. Experiments using a lab-scale sequencing batch biological WWTP confirmed that on average 52% of microbeads are captured in activated sludge. Particle size analyses of the influent and effluent confirmed that smaller particles (up to 60–70 μm) are captured within activated sludge while bigger particles were detected in the effluent. Applying these data to the situation in Ljubljana indicates that about 112,500,000 particles may daily be released into the receiving river, resulting in a microbeads concentration of 21 particles/m3. Since polyethylene particles cannot be degraded and thus likely accumulate, the data raise concerns about potential effects in aquatic ecosystems in future.
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•Polyethylene microbeads are present in cosmetic products.•15.2 mg per person per day of microbeads are released into sewage system.•Smaller particles (up to 70 μm) are captured within activated sludge during biological treatment.•Microbeads concentrations in river can reach 21 particles/m3.
The present moment raises many questions about the workings and resilience of parliamentary democracy in Western-type democracies, including the former socialist states of the East Central European ...region, where various forms of populism and illiberal democracy are taking shape. Among these, Slovenia is taken as a case study, since it is not only a former socialist state, but was also for a long time acknowledged as a post-socialist success story. Focusing on the central state institution in systems of parliamentary democracy, i.e. the parliament, and its members (MPs) this paper considers speech as performed during parliamentary sessions by MPs from populist and non-populist political parties between the years 1992 and 2018, the period of a fully democratic Slovene national parliament. It combines the methodological approaches of cultural history with corpus linguistics in order to map any possible differences in populist and non-populist discourse of MPs. Special attention is given to situations where MPs mentioned the public, thus testing the hypothesis that populist MPs engage more with the public as a part of their populist political style.
We present a map that correlates tectonic units between Alps and western Turkey accompanied by a text providing access to literature data, explaining the concepts used for defining the mapped ...tectonic units, and first-order paleogeographic inferences. Along-strike similarities and differences of the Alpine-Eastern Mediterranean orogenic system are discussed. The map allows (1) for superimposing additional information, such as e.g., post-tectonic sedimentary basins, manifestations of magmatic activity, onto a coherent tectonic framework and (2) for outlining the major features of the Alpine-Eastern Mediterranean orogen. Dinarides-Hellenides, Anatolides and Taurides are orogens of opposite subduction polarity and direction of major transport with respect to Alps and Carpathians, and polarity switches across the Mid-Hungarian fault zone. The Dinarides-Hellenides-Taurides (and Apennines) consist of nappes detached from the Greater Adriatic continental margin during Cretaceous and Cenozoic orogeny. Internal units form composite nappes that passively carry ophiolites obducted in the latest Jurassic–earliest Cretaceous or during the Late Cretaceous on top of the Greater Adriatic margin successions. The ophiolites on top of composite nappes do not represent oceanic sutures zones, but root in the suture zones of Neotethys that formed after obduction. Suturing between Greater Adria and the northern and eastern Neotethys margin occupied by the Tisza and Dacia mega-units and the Pontides occurred in the latest Cretaceous along the Sava-İzmir-Ankara-Erzincan suture zones. The Rhodopian orogen is interpreted as a deep-crustal nappe stack formed in tandem with the Carpatho-Balkanides fold-thrust belt, now exposed in a giant core complex exhumed in late Eocene to Miocene times from below the Carpatho-Balkan orogen and the Circum-Rhodope unit. Its tectonic position is similar to that of the Sakarya unit of the Pontides. We infer that the Rhodope nappe stack formed due to north-directed thrusting. Both Rhodopes and Pontides are suspected to preserve the westernmost relics of the suture zone of Paleotethys.
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•Tectonic map correlates tectonic units between Alps and western Turkey.•Profiles visualize architecture of Alpine-eastern Mediterranean orogens.•Review provides overview of Alpine-type orogens across national boundaries.
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