Scienza Senza Confini

Scienza Senza Confini Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway and Iceland

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

Index INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 5 PART 1 ..................................................................................................................................................... 6 PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH ACTIVITIES AND RESULTS ....................................................................... 6 Psychotherapy. What is family therapy?............................................................................................. 7 The importance of natural environments for the promotion of physical activity - The case of Norway. ............................................................................................................................................... 9 From Small to Large: Using Computer Modelling to Explore the Molecular Behaviour of Chemical Systems.............................................................................................................................................. 13 New therapeutic approaches for personalized breast cancer nanomedicine and nanotheranostics ........................................................................................................................................................... 16 Forecasting rainfall-induced landslides in Norway ........................................................................... 20 TESEO Lab: methods and tools for collaborative invention of interactive artefacts to learn and play ........................................................................................................................................................... 24 Managing large carnivores: the case of the wolf (Canis lupus) in Italy and Norway ........................ 27 Assessing the impact of Roman pottery production on the environment........................................ 32 “In vino veritas”: The eye and the wine. ........................................................................................... 36 HyVar: Scalable Hybrid Variability ..................................................................................................... 40 Cells on the move: culprits or defenders? ........................................................................................ 43 Digital platforms for environmental sustainability: Empirical studies in the Norwegian petroleum sector ................................................................................................................................................. 46 At the roots of scientific risk evaluation: science, philosophy and politics....................................... 51 Investigating loanwords and native words in old and middle Icelandic ........................................... 54 PART 2 ................................................................................................................................................... 59 STORIES AND IDEAS OF ITALIAN RESEARCHERS .................................................................................... 59 Geoscience research in a Norwegian centre of excellence ............................................................... 60 CasaPound Italia ................................................................................................................................ 64 Geomatics for nature research and the data reovlution .................................................................. 66 “Selling ice to the eskimo” – or how an Italian ended up teaching Norwegian literature to Norwegians........................................................................................................................................ 70 The iron experience ........................................................................................................................... 72 Merging law and climate into policies .............................................................................................. 75 Cytogenetic and molecular characterization of rare female genital tract tumors ........................... 77 Security in the EU new protection policy space: adaptation, development and compatibility ........ 80 Knowing Norway through food ......................................................................................................... 83 PART 3 ................................................................................................................................................... 88 RESULTS OF THE SURVEYS ..................................................................................................................... 88 3

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Kick-off meeting in Oslo – 12th May 2017 ......................................................................................... 89 Second meeting in Oslo – 22nd September 2017 ............................................................................... 93

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

INTRODUCTION The project Scienza Senza Confini (Science Without Boudaries) was started with the main aim of starting and promoting a network among researchers and professionals in Norway and Iceland. With this purpose, several activities have been organised in order to involve many Italians. 

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Organization of meetings with researchers and professionals in Oslo, with live connection / realtime on-line streaming. Two meetings were held, on 12/05/2017 and 22/09/2017. Both meetings were successful, with the participation of over 60 people at each event and the active involvement of over 10 people as speakers. The first meeting was the occasion for the presentation of the project: in this occasion we also tried to gather feedback from the participants. The second meeting was an opportunity to get to know each other better, also through the active involvement of different people. This meeting also saw the participation by the Italian Ambassador in Oslo and by two deputies elected in the Foreign Circumscription.

Creation of a list / database of Italian researchers and professionals in Norway and Iceland. In order to facilitate communication and network activities, an archive of researchers and professionals present in Norway and Iceland has been implemented. At the end of the project, data were collected from over 300 researchers. The collected data are public data retrieved through manual searches on the internet. A collection of more detailed data was also started for the creation of an archive accessible not only by the membres and COMITES, which contains almost 50 profiles at the end of the project.

Creation of a popular publication with contributions from Italian researchers in Norway and Iceland. Contributions were collected (in the form of popular articles) of Italian researchers working in Norway and Iceland with the aim of disseminating their experiences. The publication, in English, has been realized with a simple language in order to allow the nonexpert people to understand the topics presented.

Activation of communication channels to / between the research community and Italian professionals in Norway and Iceland. In order to improve communication to / among Italian researchers and professionals in Norway, the following have been created: o A facebook page open to everyone https://www.facebook.com/scienzasenzaconfini.comitesoslo/ o A Facebook group (with restricted emmbership) for researcher and professionals in Norway and Iceland: https://www.facebook.com/groups/prof.norvis/?fref=ts

In addition, some already active COMITES channels have been used, such as the website (where a special section has been added), the Instagram profile, the linkedIn page. Finally, some IT tools have been acquired to facilitate communication / coordination activities.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

PART 1 PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH ACTIVITIES AND RESULTS

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

Psychotherapy. What is family therapy?

Nicoletta Businaro VID Specialized University, Oslo

“How can I have a better life? In the last period I feel very sad, there is nothing that I really want to do, nothing that makes me happy”. “I have problems with my wife and I don’t know if I love her anymore”.

“My mother is seriously sick and I can’t imagine my life without her”.

These are just a few sentences that a psychotherapist could hear. What brings a person to begin a therapy can be quite different. There are situations where the person, who thinks “to be the problem” or “to have a problem”, asks for treatment. In other cases a member of the family makes a call to get information about the possibility to start the therapy. It can also happen that another professional (teacher, doctor, judge, etc.) suggests that the person contacts a psychotherapist.

The situations and the motivations implied in a therapy can be several and they constitute a significant part of the therapeutic process, which need to be taken into account.

There are two premises that are usually very useful in order to have a better experience in therapy: 1. to start a therapy because you want to change something in your life or you desire to understand better what it is going on, and not just because you feel that you “should” do that; 2. the therapy is not for person who are “insane or very sick”, words that are quite often used in the everyday language when it comes to psychologists and psychotherapists, but it is for everyone who wants help to tolerate painful or stressful experiences, or just to make good life great.

The family therapy1, developed from the 1940s and early 1950s2, is based on the theoretical assumption that a man is not an isolate. A person influences and is influenced by the social environment where he/she lives. So the psychotherapist explores the interactions that a person has within significant life contexts. The person (or the couple or the family) is viewed as a system and the relationships between the people as an important factor in the psychological health (Minuchin, 1974). The psychotherapist, following a family and systemic approach, highlights that a change in one part of the system leads to alterations in all the system. In other words, if a person in a family begins to behave in a different way (compared to what was usual and expected), we would probably notice differences in the relations and in the communications with the other members, and consequently also the other family members may behave differently. When there is a change, the entire system needs a re-organization (Bateson, 1973).

During a therapy the psychotherapist inserts his/her self into the family system. It means that the psychotherapist is not the expert who can have an objective and neutral view of the system, but a person who co-operate with the family in order to re-organize the dysfunctional system and make it more functional.

The interactions (and related thoughts, feelings) are seen as the source of the difficulties that a person encounter in his life and they are what the psychotherapist is concerned to change.

So it becomes very clear in the family therapy that “the problem is the problem, the person is not the problem” (White, 1988/9). The process of “externalization” is an approach to therapy that encourage the person to personify the problem that is experienced as oppressive. The problem becomes a separate entity and this process opens up possibilities for the persons to describe themselves and their relationships from a new and non-problem-saturated perspective. According to White, the people create stories about their life that determine the meaning they ascribe to their experience. When there 1

The term “family therapy” refers to therapies in which a single individual, a couple or a entire family is involved. Also when there a single person, the psychotherapist keeps in mind the significant relationships that the person has estabilished with the family and with other people in different life contexts (e.g. work, friendships, sport, living environment).

2 The family therapy developed through the work of various clinicians, such as Bowlby, Jackson, Ackerman, Lidz, Bowen, Whitaker, Satir, Boszormenyi-Nagy, Erickson. In the 1950s the movement received an important boost through the work of Bateson, Haley, Jackson, Weakland, Watzlawick (Palo Alto group). By the mid-1960s, other salient clinicians had a significant impact in the family therapy. We can mention for example Minuchin and Selvini Palazzoli.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway is a problem, the person tells the story of his/her life through the “glasses” of the problem and select all the information and the situations which confirm it. The aim of the therapy concerns to help the person to re-tell his/her life with a “new pair of glasses” in order to open the door of alternative stories about his/her own life.

What I am thinking about is exemplified by what a women told me at the end of the therapy: “I am not another person, but I see the things differently, I think in a different way”. In my opinion this sentence embodies the essence of a therapy, in the sense that a psychotherapist should help a person not to become another person, but to be able to change the way of thinking and consequently the way of approaching life.

When a person is overwhelmed by the difficulties it is not easy to change the point of view of a situation and to see it from a new perspective. This point can better be explained through a simple example. An adolescent, who has problems with the parents and feels that they always have the eyes pointed at him, could easily feel the burden of the parents’ control, the sense of incompetence, the anger and the need of freedom. It could be quite difficult to think that the parents just want to be protective and that they want to show him their love and that they care about him.

In therapy different scenarios are taken into account and the person is driven to think about what other people might think and feel in the same situation. The psychotherapist encourages the person to reflect on and over own and others’ thoughts and feelings.

It is noticeable that the therapeutic process is characterized by the recognition of the person’s resources and points of strength. The person has already the capacities or the ability to build up the competencies to overcome a problem, and the psychotherapist helps him/her to find them.

My experience as psychotherapist and as a researcher makes me reflecting on two important issues in psychotherapy: 1. the need that the person have to be listened to; 2. the absence of a “recipe”.

People often struggle to find an answer to their questions (Why does it happen to me?) or a solution to their problems (How can I resolve this?), and in a specular way the same processes can affect the psychotherapist’s way of thinking and approaching the therapy. Sometimes as a psychotherapist is useful to accept not to have responses and resolutions, but to listen in an active way to the pain that persons carry and lead them to find explanation attempts which are best for them. People need to be listened to and to be encouraged to find a new way to cope with life challenges. The second point that comes to mind derives from the question that the students, who follow a training to become psychotherapists, are used to ask “What is the right thing to do in this situation?”. In therapy there is not the “right” and the “wrong” thing to do or word to say. We can speak more in terms of “appropriate” and “less appropriate”, “useful” and “less useful”, considering the actual moment and the family. It means that what can work for one family, might not be suitable for another.

The therapeutic process implies a deep knowledge of the persons and of the relationship that a psychotherapist has with them. The psychotherapist speaks, acts, thinks, feels emotions together with the family and together they co-construct possible ways to feel better and to have a more appreciable life.

References Bateson, G. (1973). Steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistemology. London: Granada.

Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and Family Therapy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

White, M. (1988/9). The externalizing of the problem and the re-authoring of lives and relationships. In M. White (Ed.), Selected Papers (pp. 5-28). Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

The importance of natural environments for the promotion of physical activity - The case of Norway.

Giovanna Calogiuri Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Elverum

Abstract Being active in nature gives health benefits beyond those given by physical activity alone. Norwegians are generally known for being fond of green exercise. However, viewed in a public health perspective, the amount of weekly participation, as well as the motivational and sociodemographic factors that influence it, are of central importance. This article summarize the findings of three studies that investigated these issues in adult Norwegians. The findings show that green exercise is an important source of weekly physical activity for adult Norwegians, even among those social groups that tend to be less active. Green exercisers showed a distinctive motivational profile. Furthermore, social and environmental factors play an important role in the promotion of this special form of physical activity.

Introduction Insufficient levels of physical activity (PA) and prolonged exposure to sedentary behaviours are among the leading risk factors for poor health and mortality worldwide (WHO, 2010). Not only is PA important for a long and healthy life, regular exercise can also provide better mental health and quality of life (Pucci et al., 2012). The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends adults to engage in moderateintensity aerobic physical activity for at least 150 minutes during a week, or equivalent amounts of moderate- and vigorous-intensity PA. For additional health benefits, adults should increase their moderate-intensity PA to 300 minutes per week, or equivalent amounts of moderate- and vigorousintensity PA (WHO, 2010). Besides the amounts of PA in which people engage, studies have shown that the place in which people are active also matters. Especially, PA in natural environments, a practice also known as ‘green exercise’ (Pretty et al., 2003), can provide greater health benefits than PA in other environments (e.g. indoors). This is mainly because exposure to nature can elicit positive psychological states, helping people coping with stress and recovering from mental fatigue (Bowler, et al., 2010; Thompson Coon et al., 2012). Moreover, natural environments such as parks and coasts are important in the promotion and maintenance of higher levels of PA in the community, both because they provide spaces where people can walk, play, swim, etc. (White et al., 2016), and because they can trigger motivational processes that help people maintaining an active lifestyle (Calogiuri & Chroni, 2014).

Norwegians are generally known for being fond of green exercise. National statistics show that about 80% of Norwegians engaged in some green exercise during the past year (Statistics Norway, 2016).

However, viewed in a public health perspective, the amount of weekly PA is of central importance.

Furthermore, it is important to consider possible social inequalities associated with participation in green exercise: social determinants of health such as a person’s gender, age, socioeconomic status, or place of residence, are in fact known to influence the extent to which people engage in PA. National statistics in Norway have consistently found that people with higher education are more likely to meet the minimum recommendations for PA as compared with those with lower education, and that the amounts of PA are lower in older adults than in younger and middle-aged adults (Helsedirektoratet, 2015). Finally, knowledge on why and why not people engage in green exercise, and how to encourage more people to do so, is also needed. In fact, while studies have shown that gym- and sport-based exercise are driven by different motivations (Frederick & Ryan, 1993; Kilpatrick, Hebert, & Bartholomew, 2005), to date there is virtually no knowledge on what motivates green exercisers, and whether their motivation differs from that of people who prefer gym- or sport-based exercise. Similarly, little is known about how to encourage people to often engage in green exercise.

Method This article summarizes the main findings three studies (Calogiuri, 2016; Calogiuri & Elliott, 2017; Calogiuri, Patil & Aamodt, 2016), which were conducted in collaboration with the organization Norsk 9

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Friluftsliv, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and the University of Exeter. The data for the studies were retrieved from a national survey initiated by Norsk Friluftsliv and carried out by Ipsos MMI (Dalen & Lillebø, 2012). 2186 adults from all over Norway completed an online questionnaire, reporting their weekly PA levels (overall and specific for the type of activity), sociodemographic characteristics, and various believes relative to natural environments and PA. Different statistics, including Principal Components Analysis, Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA), Logistic Regression, and Mediational Analysis, were used to analyse the data.

Results The importance of green exercise as a source of weekly physical activity Green exercise, especially hiking in the woods and engaging in activities by the seaside, was the most popular form of PA among the respondents: about 61% of respondents engaged in some green exercise during a regular week, and most of them (51% in total) did this for at least 1-hour per week (Calogiuri, Patil, & Aamodt, 2016). The prevalence of weekly green exercise was about twice-as-large compared with other popular activities, such as gym-based exercise and active transport. Moreover, unlike the other activates, green exercise was well represented across all various social groups, and in some cases it was more represented in those groups that are more vulnerable to insufficient PA levels (Calogiuri, Patil, & Aamodt, 2016). For example, while gym-based exercise, organized sports, and active transport were less prevalent among people with lower education, the prevalence of green exercise was evenly distributed across educational levels (Figure 1). On the other hand, while all the other actives reduced with increasing age, the opposite trend was observed for green exercise: older Norwegians are more active in nature than in any other activity (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Weekly participation in various physical activities among adults Norwegians by education-level (n = 2168). The graph shows that participation in green exercise is fairly even across the different education-levels, whereas other popular activities like gym-based exercise and active transport are lower in those with lower education.

Why do people exercise in nature?

From our study, it emerged that green exercisers have a distinctive motivational profile, as compared with those who preferred gym- or sport-based PA (Calogiuri & Elliott, 2017). Unsurprisingly, as compared with those who preferred gym- and sport-based PA, motivation for green exercise was highly driven by nature-related motives, such as the desire for enjoying nature and getting fresh air. The nature-relate motives, however, were not the only and strongest motivational drive for green exercise: those who assigned greater importance to convenience-motives (e.g. the fact that the activity is free 10

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway and that one can do it when it suits them best) were more likely to prefer green exercise rather than gym- and sport-based PA. On the other hand, those who assigned more importance to sociability and body-oriented motives were more likely to prefer gym- or sport-based PA, and less likely to prefer green exercise. Health-related motives and affective motives did not significantly differ across the different forms of exercise. However, in the green exercisers, the affective motives were tightly linked to the nature-related motives, supporting the assumption that the positive psychological effects of being in contact with nature can strengthen people’s motivation for PA.

Figure 2. Weekly participation in various physical activities among adults Norwegians by age-group (n = 2168). The graph shows that green exercise is more popular in older adults than in mid-aged and younger adults, as opposed to all other activities.

Environmental and social factors promoting green exercise In Norway there is abundancy and good accessibility of natural environments such as forests or coasts, and in general many people live in proximity of natural environments. However, having any natural environment nearby home does not automatically translate to people visiting and using them for PA. The respondents in the survey generally reported that ‘better access to natural environments’ was not perceived as an important factor for them to engage in more green exercise, whereas ‘better access to PA-supportive places’ was perceived as more important (Calogiuri et al. 2016). Similarly, proximity to natural environments alone was not a significant predictor of weekly green exercise, unlike the extent to which people perceived that the nearby natural environments were supportive for PA (Calogiuri, 2016). Another important factor predicting whether or not people engage in weekly green exercise, was the so-called ‘childhood factor’: the more frequently a person engaged with nature as a child, the greater the likelihood of that person participating in weekly green exercise as an adult (Calogiuri, 2016).

Furthermore, a mediational analysis showed that both, the ‘childhood factor’ and the perceived supportiveness of natural environments for PA, indirectly operated via ‘social networks’ (e.g. engaging in green exercise with friends or being often invited) and ‘feelings towards nature’ (e.g. valuing nature experiences and enjoying nature quietness)(Calogiuri, 2016). In other words, the exposure to quality natural environments, either as a child or as an adult, can strengthen a person’s social networks and feelings for nature, which in turn will make that person more likely to often engage in green exercise.

‘Social support’ was also generally perceived as a relatively important factor promoting green more green exercise (Calogiuri et al., 2016).

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

Conclusion Based on the integrated knowledge produced by these studies, the following ‘take home messages’ are outlined:    

Green exercise is largely practiced in Norway and it is an important source of weekly PA, especially among social groups that tend to be less active.

The motivational processes underling green exercise participation are complex and, despite the positive affective responses associated with nature exposure play an important role, other factors are important.

In addition to the desire of enjoying nature, convenience motives such as accessibility, fewer time constrictions, and the possibility to keep a comfortable pace, are also important motivational drives for green exercise.

Accessibility to PA-supportive natural environments and frequent experiences of nature during childhood can foster participation in green exercise by enhancing people’s attitudes towards nature and their social networks.

Acknowledgment Thanks to Norsk Friluftsliv for providing the data for these studies, and to Lars-Christian Sørlie for help with writing and editing this article.

References Bowler, D. E., Buyung-Ali, L. M., Knight, T. M., & Pullin, A. S. (2010). A systematic review of evidence for the added benefits to health of exposure to natural environments. BMC Public Health, 10, 456. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-10456 Calogiuri, G. (2016). Natural Environments and Childhood Experiences Promoting Physical Activity, Examining the Mediational Effects of Feelings about Nature and Social Networks. Int J Environ Res Public Health, 13(4). doi: 10.3390/ijerph13040439 Calogiuri, G., & Chroni, S. (2014). The impact of the natural environment on the promotion of active living: an integrative systematic review. BMC Public Health, 14, 873. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-14-873 Calogiuri, G., & Elliott, L. R. (2017). Why Do People Exercise in Natural Environments? Norwegian Adults' Motives for Nature-, Gym-, and Sports-Based Exercise. Int J Environ Res Public Health, 14(4). doi:10.3390/ijerph14040377 Calogiuri, G., Patil, G., & Aamodt, G. (2016). Is Green Exercise for All? A Descriptive Study of Green Exercise Habits and Promoting Factors in Adult Norwegians. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(11), 1165.

Dalen, Erik , & Lillebø, Karen (2012). FRIFOs aktivitetskartlegging 2012. In I. MMI (Ed.). Oslo: Ipsos MMI. Frederick, Christina M, & Ryan, Richard M. (1993). Differences in motivation for sport and exercise and their relations with participation and mental health. Journal of sport behavior, 16(3), 124-146.

Helsedurektoratet. (2015). Fysisk aktivitet og sedat tid blant voksne og eldre i Norge – Nasjonal kartlegging 2014– 15. Retrieved from Oslo: https://helsedirektoratet.no/publikasjoner/fysisk-aktivitet-og-sedat-tid-blant-voksne-ogeldre-i-norge-nasjonal-kartlegging-201415 Kilpatrick, M., Hebert, E., & Bartholomew, J. (2005). College students' motivation for physical activity: differentiating men's and women's motives for sport participation and exercise. J Am Coll Health, 54(2), 87-94. doi: 10.3200/jach.54.2.87-94 Pretty, J., Griffin, M., Sellens, M., & Pretty, C. (2003). Green Exercise: Complementary Roles of Nature, Exercise and Diet in Physical and Emotional Well-Being and Implications for Public Health Policy. Retrieved from Colchester: http://www.outdoorfoundation.org/pdf/GreenExercise.pdf Pucci, G.C., Rech, C.R., Fermino, R.C., Reis, R.S. (2012) Association between physical activity and quality of life in adults. Rev Saude Publica. 46(1):166-79.

Statistics Norway (2016). Sports and outdoor activities, survey on living conditions. http://www.ssb.no/en/kulturog-fritid/statistikker/fritid/hvert-3-aar (Retrieved on 20th October 2017) WHO (2010). Physical activity. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs385/en/ (Retrieved on 7th September 2017)

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From Small to Large: Using Computer Modelling to Explore the Molecular Behaviour of Chemical Systems Michele Cascella Department of Chemistry, Hylleraas Centre for Quantum Molecular Sciences, University of Oslo, Oslo

Abstract Computer modelling can be used to simulate the chemical physical properties of complex molecular systems in solution. Nonetheless, the computational bottleneck due to the expensiveness of the calculations is too narrow to efficiently exploit such methods to investigate realistic models of biochemical relevance. The development of novel approaches based on density functional is today opening the way to the possibility of perform long simulations of systems of much greater size than what is today feasible. This paves the way to more and more integrated computational/experimental studies that can have direct impact on the development of novel drugs.

Introduction Autumn is the most beautiful season in Norway, with the changing colours of the leaves on the trees, the breath-taking colours of the sun sets, and the aroma of a warm coffee awaiting you at the end of a walk in the woods. All these phenomena (the colours of the leaves, the lights in the sky, the aroma of the coffee), which macroscopically appear so different, are in fact the result of complex microscopic interactions of molecules with other molecules or with light radiation. The fascinating aspect of such consideration is that what looks so distant is, in fact, regulated by the same fundamental physical laws to which all atoms and molecules obey.

The establishment of both quantum and statistical mechanics theories at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries has provided us with all the fundamental equations that in principle would allow the unravelling of any complex event at the macroscopic scale. Unfortunately, these equations are too complex to be solved without the use of numerical approaches and computers. This problem was clear already to the fathers of quantum and statistical physics. The first strong push for the development of and numerical algorithms and electronic machines for scientific calculus (what we call today “computers”) was boosted in Los Alamos by the same physicists leading the Manhattan project. Even if in the 50-60ies only very simple molecules composed by few atoms, moving for very short times, could be studied, today, thanks to the continuous growth of the computational power also coming from the establishment of massively parallel computational facilities, we can study large molecular systems for relatively long times.

The numerical algorithms required to solve the fundamental equations of matter introduce different levels of approximation that can be viewed like a computational microscope (Figure 1) (Cascella and Vanni, 2016). By using very accurate methods based on the direct solution of the quantum mechanical Schrödinger Equation, one can investigate all the fundamental problems that are directly connected to the interactions among atomic nuclei and electrons. In fact, such high accuracy is so computationally demanding that it can be used to study only relatively very small systems composed by few atoms. The introduction of approximations allows the study of larger and larger systems, at the cost of progressively losing resolution and thus information on the chemical-physical interactions that drive specific phenomena of interest.

Ultimately, today, the challenge is in being able to study systems of very large sizes (Several millions of atoms) for characteristic times in the millisecond range, keeping the molecular resolution accessible (Cascella and Vanni, 2016; Soares et al., 2017).

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

Figure 1. The computational microscope of multiscale models. (From right to left) from very highly accurate quantum mechanical methods where the electronic structure of the system is revealed, progressive approximations allow the study of larger and larger systems at the cost of reducing the resolution of the structural representation of the molecular moieties.

Research In 2017, the Research Council of Norway has funded a group of new Centres of Excellence in different disciplines and, among them, The new Hylleraas Centre for Quantum Molecular Sciences. The Hylleraas centre is primarily located at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Oslo, and it is in partnership with the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. One of the major research themes of the Hylleraas centre is dedicated to multi-scale modelling, that is, in developing novel approaches to simulations of chemical systems that allow the exploration of large systems for long times exploiting more and more accurate methodologies.

Michele Cascella is the principal investigator specifically leading such activities. His current research focuses on extending the hybrid particle-field-molecular dynamics method (hPF-MD) (Milano and Kawakatzu, 2009), originally developed in polymer science, to study biological systems. hPF-MD exploits the fact that condensed systems tend to be locally homogeneous; therefore, the complex interactions among molecules can be described as a simple mean field response to the local perturbation of the density of the system (Milano and Kawakatzu, 2009). Apart from the coupling to this external potential, the molecules present in the systems act as ideal independent particles; therefore, no expensive calculation of molecule-molecule pair interactions is required (Milano et al., 2013).

This computational implementation of such approaches it is straightforward, and allows an optimal exploitation of massively parallel computational architectures: this means that by doubling the number of CPUs in a parallel calculation, the times of the same calculation is reduced by half (Milano et al., 2013). Such dramatic speed-up in computer simulations opens to the possibility of studying complex biological systems of major relevance today for the development of new pharmacological therapies. For example, such new methods could be used to investigate large-scale dynamics in lipid membranes (Soares et al., 2017). Membrane morphology is crucial for critical cellular biology processes like cellular trafficking, protein localization, as well as it is key to cellular signalling, or inflammatory response. Finally, it can be exploited to develop new antimicrobial treatments. The molecular means by which membrane change their morphology are hard to study by the experiment, because of the chemical complexity of such systems, and they are also hard to simulate with computers, due to the intrinsically large sizes and the very slow times at which relevant phenomena occur. Using the hPF-MD approach, we were recently able to describe the complex process of membrane solubilisation by the Triton TX-100 surfactant (Figure

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway 2), showing that indeed hPF-MD can be used to investigate of such kind of phenomena (Pizzirusso et al, 2017).

Figure 2. Deformation of a lipid bilayer (black-yellow beads) induced by interaction with a surfactant (Green beads). Water is in cyan (From Pizzirusso et al., 2017).

Perspective Current activities at the Hylleraas centre comprise the development of a hPF-MD model for proteins, and other important biological macromolecules like nucleic acids and sugars. Together with the development of models for complex lipid moieties, the hPF-MD will be able to provide unprecedented descriptions of membrane remodelling, potentially contributing to future rational design of new membrane-interfering molecular systems, like drug nanocarriers, or antimicrobial drugs.

Acknowledgment Michele Cascella acknowledges the support of the Norwegian Research Council through the CoE Hylleraas Centre for Quantum Molecular Sciences (Grant n. 262695).

References Cascella M., Vanni S. (2016). Toward accurate coarse-graining approaches for protein and membrane simulations. in Chemical Modelling, 12:1-52.

Milano G., Kawakatsu T. (2009). Hybrid particle-field molecular dynamics simulations for dense polymer systems.

J. Chem. Phys. 130:214106.

Milano G., Kawakatsu T., De Nicola A. (2013). A hybrid particle–field molecular dynamics approach: a route toward efficient coarse-grained models for biomembranes. Phys. Biol. 10:045007.

Pizzirusso A., De Nicola A., Sevink G. J., Correa A., Cascella M., Kawakatsu T., Rocco M., Zhao Y., Celino M., Milano G. (2017). Biomembrane solubilization mechanism by Triton X-100: a computational study of the three stage model. Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 19:29780–29794.

Soares T. A., Vanni S., Milano G., Cascella M. (2017). Toward chemically resolved computer simulations of dynamics and remodeling of biological membranes. J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 8:3586–3594.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

New therapeutic approaches for personalized breast cancer nanomedicine and nanotheranostics Catalano E1, Geisler J2, Kristensen VN1, 1

Department of Clinical Molecular Biology (EpiGen), Akershus University Hospital, University of Oslo, Oslo 2

Department of Oncology, Akershus University Hospital, Lørenskog

Abstract Breast cancer is one of the most common cancer diagnosis in women. Moreover, a certain proportion of breast cancer patients present with resistance to drug therapy, making it much more difficult to control the deterioration of the disease. Targeting cellular metabolism is becoming a promising strategy to overcome drug resistance in cancer therapy. Due to serious toxicity of chemotherapeutic agents, we implemented a multiple approach of nanomedicine to be applied in breast cancer treatment.

Nanoparticles may interact with key drug-resistance molecules to prevent a reduction in intracellular drug levels.

Furthermore, a defined subgroup of nanoparticles, particularly the superparamagnetic ones (SPIONs), can release heat during the exposure to an alternating magnetic field (AMF) in order to kill tumor cells with hyperthermic temperatures. The project developed to University of Oslo is implementing an extremely innovative multi-therapeutic strategy that combines the use of SPIONs properties for targeted drug delivery and hyperthermia to target in vitro breast cancer drug-resistant and not drugresistant cell lines. This innovative therapeutic nanomedicine solution for breast cancer treatment is based on biocompatible magnetic nanoparticles to obtain hyperthermia effect, efficient localized and targeted drug delivery of MNPs assembled with anticancer drugs.

Introduction The original intended use of nanomedicine is to improve human health. Nanosized magnetic nanoparticles are some of the best candidates for the development of more efficient methods for the synthesis of nanodrug delivery vehicles based on iron-oxide nanoparticles. Nanotheranostics, the integration of diagnostic and therapeutic function in one system using the benefits of nanotechnology, is extremely attractive for personalized medicine (Funkhouser, 2002).

The progression of nanoscale drug delivery systems, advances in nanoscale imaging suggest the potential for the development of multifunctional “smart” nanoparticles that may facilitate the realization of individualized and targeted cancer therapy (Funkhouser, 2002).

Iron oxide based magnetic nanoparticles (SPIONs) have received remarkable attention in a wide range of applications because of their unique physicochemical properties inherent to the nanoscale. Small size, high surface area, quantum confinement, and novel magnetic and optical effects open up new fields for application of iron oxides. For instance, conventional magnetic materials (ferromagnetic iron oxides) lose their permanent magnetization if they are studied or used as nanoparticles (Bhuniya and Maiti, 2014; Chichet and Skowronek, 2007).

Multifunctional superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) for cancer theranostics can integrate chemotherapeutics, gene therapeutics, photothermal/photodynamic therapeutics, magnetic hyperthermia, fluorescent moieties and targeting moieties can be incorporated in the polymer coating through different strategies (Choi and Liu, 2012) (Figure 1).

The original intended use of nanomedicine is to improve human health. Nanotechnology also has the potential to generate unique and highly effective theraputic agents and revolutionize the cancer treatment of patients to kill cancer cells without affecting the nearby healthy tissue (Hilgher, 2013). The project aims to implement an extremely innovative multi-therapeutic strategy that combines the use of

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles properties for dual tumor targeting therapy on breast cancer cells by exploiting magnetic induced hyperthermia and selective drug delivery to target cancer.

Figure 1. Various approaches explored to target breast cancer using nanomedicines.

Method Doxorubicin-loaded carboxylic acid-coated superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (Fe3O4; CASPIONs) with an average particle size of 30 nm, with high encapsulation efficiencies, were obtained by the electrostatic loading of doxorubicin (DOX) to SPIONs through the electrostatic interaction between the carboxyl group of carboxylic acid functionalized iron-oxide nanoparticles and the amine group of DOX. After formation of the drug-nanoparticle conjugates, they were separated from the free drugs via magnetic separation and washing in the aqueous medium.

The efficacy of iron-oxide nanoparticles were tested in vitro on the following cell lines: MCF-7 (Human breast cancer cells ER+/PR+), Triple negative MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells, MCF-10A (Mammary epithelial cells). In this way we tried to verify the selectivity of magnetic hyperthermia treatment induced by SPIONs on killing breast cancer cells respect to normal mammary epithelial cells.

The therapeutic effect of DOX-CA-SPIONs was evaluated by MTT cell viability assay and apoptosis evaluation. For hyperthermia treatment, cells were exposed to a gradient of external magnetic field (18.5 ± 1.49 kA/m) (Chichet and Skowronek, 2007) for 30 minutes corresponding to a temperature dosage of 43°C, or else cells were left in the incubator at 37°C. At 48 h after hyperthermia, cells viability was tested.

The in vitro efficacy was also tested without hyperthermia treatment. The cytotoxicity of DOX loaded CA-SPIONs was compared with free drug DOX in the absence and presence of magnetic field, also the probable cytotoxicity of the targeted and non-targeted blank nanoparticles were checked.

Apotosis evaluation MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cells were plated in 96-well plates and exposed to uncoated SPIONs, CASPIONs and DOX-CA-SPIONs at a concentration of 50 µg/mL for 24 h.

After the culture period, the medium was removed from each well and replaced with fresh medium.

Cellular apoptosis was detected by Annexin-V/PI (Propidium iodide) staining and studied with the help of flow cytometry.

Results Drug-loading efficiency of doxorubicin showed better results for the CA-SPIONs as compared to the bare ones (Figure 2). For hyperthermia treatment, cells were exposed to a gradient of external magnetic field (18.5 ± 1.49 kA/m) for 30 minutes (Chichet and Skowronek, 2007), corresponding to a temperature dosage of 90 cumulative equivalent minutes, or else cells will be left in the incubator at 37°C. At 24, 28, 72 h after hyperthermia, cells viability was tested. The in vitro efficacy was also tested without hyperthermia treatment. The incubation of MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells with doxorubicin-loaded and doxorubicin-loaded carboxylic acid-coated SPIONs, for 24, 48, 72 h, showed 17

Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway significant IC50 and IC90, respectively, after 72 h of incubation. While, 90% and 93% growth inhibition was seen in MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cells after the 72-h exposure to the doxorubicin CA-SPIONs (p < 0.05), any type of cytotoxic effect was observed on control MCF-10A cells (ATCC, mammary epithelial cells). These data indicate that DOX-CA-SPIONs and the presence of magnetic hyperthermia led to increasing cytotoxic effects of the nanoparticles on breast cancer cells like a very promising new therapeutic approach for cancer therapy.

Apoptosis evaluation The results revealed a dose-dependent induction of early or late apoptotic cell death in the breast cancer cell lines (Figure 3). Compared to MDA-MB-231 cells, the MCF-7 cells showed more cell death.

MCF-7 cells showed 91% apoptosis after the administration of DOX-loaded CA-SPIONs (5 ÂľM; p < 0.05).

While, 87.1% apoptosis was seen in the MDA-MB-231 cells under same conditions (p < 0.05), which indicates that carboxylic acid-functionalized SPIONs could enhance the DOX-induced apoptosis in both of the human breast cancer cell lines.

Figure 2. Doxorubicin (DOX)-loaded CA-SPIONs system induces apoptosis in MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cells. Both cancer cell lines were treated separately with DOX, SPIONs, CA-SPIONs, and DOX-CA-SPIONs for 24 h. Apoptotic cell death was detected by staining the cells with Annexin-V/PI kit and analyzed by flow cytometry.

Figure 3. Intracellular doxorubicin-conjugated iron-oxide nanoparticle (DOX-CA-SPIONs) location by fluorescence microscopy.

Notes: Images of different components of MCF7 and MDA-MB-231 cells exposed to DOX-CA-SPIONs over 24 hours. The colorcoded images on the left represent the overlapping of cytoplasm (green), nuclei (blue), and DOX-CA-SPIONs (red).

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Discussion The results demonstrated the potential of the DOX-CA SPIONs to achieve dual tumor targeting and magnetic-induced drug delivery by magnetic field-guided in breast cancer cells. This may reduce the required dose of doxorubicin and consequently reduction the side effects of this drug. We discovered an intrinsic therapeutic effect of magnetic nanoparticles on cancer growth of breast cancer cells. We produced a novel innovative nanoparticle with multifunctional feature for magnetic targeted tumor diagnosis and anticancer therapy. The nanoplatform produced exhibits the high magnetization, excellent stability as well as high efficiency of targeted drug delivery. Tumor targeting can be obtained under the guidance of an external magnetic field, which improves the specific delivery of nanoparticles to the tumor sites and thus improve the therapeutic efficacy greatly, and this process can be examined

by T1/T2-weighted dual-modal MRI. No appreciable side effects are detected during the process of treatment. This work emphasizes the great potential of iron-oxide nanoparticles for dual-modal MRIguided and magnetic targeted cancer therapies.

Conclusion Theranostic nanomedicines can be used for various different purposes. By improving the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, the biodistribution and the target site localization of conjugated or entrapped pharmacologically active agents, nanotheranostics allow for the optimization of drug delivery systems. In addition, by combining information on overall target site localization with noninvasive imaging insights on the local distribution of the drug and/or the carrier material at the target site, nanotheranostics can also be used for predicting treatment responses. The persistent efforts by multidisciplinary and multilevel approaches, there is a great potential for further breakthrough developments in SPIONs designs for in cancer treatments and by providing real-time feedback on the efficacy of targeted therapeutic interventions, theranostic nanomedicines can also be used to facilitate (pre-) clinical efficacy analysis, to prescreen patients, and to realize the potential of personalized medicine.

Acknowledgment The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-COFUND) under grant agreement n° 609020 - Scientia Fellows.

References Bhuniya, S., Maiti, S. (2014). An activatable theranostic for targeted cancer therapy and imaging. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl, 53, 4469-4474.

ChicheĹ&#x201A;, A., Skowronek, J. (2007). Hyperthermia - description of a method and a review of clinical applications. Rep Pract Oncol Radiother 12(5), 267.15.

Choi, K.Y., Liu, G. (2012). Theranostic nanoplatforms for simultaneous cancer imaging and therapy: current approaches and future perspectives. Nanoscale. 4(2), 330-342.

Funkhouser, J. (2002). Reinventing pharma: the theranostic revolution. Curr. Drug Discov. 2, 17-19.

Hilger, I. (2013). In vivo applications of magnetic nanoparticle hyperthermia. Int. J. Hyperthermia 29(8), 828-834.

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Forecasting rainfall-induced landslides in Norway Graziella Devoli Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, Oslo

Abstract The Section for Forecast Flood and Landslide Hazards at the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) is responsible to coordinate forecasting operations for floods and rainfall-induced landslides in Norway. A short summary of the activities performed by the group is herein presented, like the definition of landslide thresholds and how daily assessments are performed and communicated to emergency authorities and public.

Introduction Rainfall-induced landslides are responsible of large disruptions and damages on roads, railways and buildings, because of their long runout and high velocity. Their occurrence seems to have increased in Norway in the last decade, also due to the more frequent short and intense rainfall events and snow melting episodes that trigger them, as result of the climatic changes. Forecasting services and early warning have become extremely necessary tools in landslide risk prevention (UN-ISDR, 2006) and are based on the principle that if we can predict the amount of rainfall, and/or the degree of snow melting capable of triggering them, so we will be able to predict their occurrence with some days in advance.

The results of the forecasting will be a warning message that if correctly disseminated and communicated will advise local authorities in when to implement emergency plans and to take actions in sparing human casualties and reduce physical damages to infrastructures. Since 2011, a landslide forecasting service is running at the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE). Devoli and her colleagues, from the Section for Forecast Flood and Landslide Hazards, work to better characterize and map historical landslides, in terms of frequency and magnitude; to understand the geological and geomorphological setting where landslide initiate; to understand the weather synoptic types that are capable of producing such kind of events. Main research goal is to find the critical hydrometeorological parameters and geological conditions that triggered them, in order to develop thresholds values to be used in the daily landslide hazard assessment.

Landslides, triggering mechanisms and thresholds The general term "landslide" is used to describe a wide variety of processes that result in the movement down a slope of material including rock, soil, artificial fill, or a combination of these (Hungr et al., 2014).

The different landslide processes can be classified based on the type of material and on the mechanism of failure. The herein so-called â&#x20AC;&#x153;rainfall-induced landslidesâ&#x20AC;? refer to the following categories: debris flows, debris flood, debris avalanches, translational or rotational debris and soil slides and, in Norway, also slushflows (Figure 1). These types often occur under the same rainfall and/or snowmelt episode, they are relatively shallow and not always of large dimensions, but often occur in clusters, in large number and widespread over a large area. In the most of the cases they occur at the same time of floods.

Figure 1. Examples of rainfall-induced landslides. Debris flow (left), two examples of soil slides (middle), and slushflow (right) (source: regobs.no)

Water in form of rainfall and snowmelt is recognize as the main trigger of landslides. Intense or long duration water supply, caused by rain and/or snowmelt, increases the water content in the soil or in the

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway snow cover and built up of water pressure into the ground. The cohesiveness of soil or snow particles decreases with higher water content, increasing the possibility of slope failures.

Landslide thresholds Many investigators have long attempted to determine the amount of water needed to trigger slope failures, to be able to predict their occurrence (also referred as “threshold”).

A threshold is the minimum or maximum level of some quantity needed for a process to take place or a state to change (White et al., 1996). A minimum threshold defines the lowest level below which a process does not occur. A maximum threshold represents the level above which a process always occurs. For rainfall-induced landslides, a threshold may define the rainfall, soil moisture, or hydrological conditions that, when reached or exceeded, are likely to trigger landslides. Landslide thresholds can be defined by using physical (process-based, conceptual) or empirical (historical, statistical) methods (Guzzetti et al., 2007).

In recent years the Section for Forecast Flood and Landslide Hazards at NVE has work to define empirical landslide thresholds by studying historical rainfall and snowmelt episodes that have resulted in landslides. A summary of the existing thresholds for landslides in Norway can be found in Boje et al.

(2014). The national and regional landslides thresholds have been defined by combining different hydrometeorological variables and cross-checked with the time of previous landslide events to identify the relationship that best describes the landslide incidents. The hydrological parameters like runoff, snow conditions, soil water content, groundwater level, etc., are simulated by using a distributed version of the HBV hydrological model (Beldring et al., 2003). The model uses air temperature and precipitation as input data. The different simulated parameters have been combined using different statistical methods, like linear and quadratic discriminant analyses tree classification and Naïve Bayes classification (Boje et al., 2014). The thresholds that best predict landslides are obtained by combining the simulated water supply (rain and snowmelt) and the soil water content parameters. The thresholds (called Hydmet) are plotted in Cartesian coordinates and drawn visually (Figure 2), and also presented in form of grid maps at xgeo.no.

Figure 2. National thresholds for rainfall-induced landslide in Norway.

The Landslide forecasting and warning service in Norway The Norwegian Landslide Forecasting and Warning service provides daily landslide hazard assessments at national level for rainfall-induced landslides. The service is operational since 2013 and delivers two daily updates on the current situation to national and regional stakeholders and the public in general.

The forecaster on duty evaluate every day the landslide hazard for the entire country. The analysis is based on the maps of the forecasted thresholds for the next 6 days, in addition to real time observations of discharge, snow depth, groundwater level, soil water content and frozen soil, etc. When a combination of the threshold values is exceeded, a landslide hazard bulletin is issued and warning 21

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway messages are sent to the public and stakeholders. The messages describes the expected landslide types at a regional level and the awareness level. The messages are issued for a “warning area” (that can be one county, a group of counties or a group of municipalities). For each warning area is given the awareness level, that indicates the expected hazard level and provide suggestions to emergency stakeholders, indicating which measures should be initiated in order to reduce potential damages. Four awareness levels are used (Figure 3). Assessments and updates are published at www.varsom.no and contain the prognosis for the three coming days.

The forecast is valid from 7AM the day of publication to 7AM the following day (8AM to 8AM Daylight Saving Time). The Landslide Forecasting team consists of people with different backgrounds, such as geologists, geophysicists, hydrogeologists and physical geographers. The assessment is done by utilizing observations and prognoses developed by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. The service is developed in cooperation with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway), the Norwegian Public Road Administration (NPRA) and the Norwegian Railway Administration (Bane NOR).

Figure 3. Awareness levels used by the Norwegian landslide forecast and warning service.

Since the operation started in 2013 the forecasting service was able to successfully forecast in advance destructive landslide events that occurred in Southern and Northern Norway in May 2013, Nordland in December 2013, Vestlandet in October 2014, Nordland in December 2014, Trøndelag in October 2015, Vestlandet in December 2015 and Sørlandet in October 2017 among others.

Devoli and colleagues have also initiated international collaborations with other institutions working with landslide forecasting and, a network of professionals have been established with the purpose to share experiences and knowledge on operational regional forecasting services and to discuss the need for international forum in the future (Devoli et al., 2017).

Conclusion Rainfall-induced landslides are expected to be more frequent in the future, because of the more frequent rainfall events that trigger them. Regional forecasting services have become important tools in landslide prevention, because less expensive than structural mitigation measures and easy to apply over large areas. The development of the Norwegian landslide forecasting and warning service was an important initiative across governmental agencies in Norway. Even if still “infant”, due to only 5 years of operation, the landslide forecasting service is well-established and has successfully predict important landslide events in the country, showing a 95% performance in the period 2013-2016. A recent survey among main users indicated that warnings are highly appreciated by most of our users, like municipalities, road and railway authorities, and contingency planners because allow them to be prepare before catastrophic events occur.

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References Boje, S., Colleuille, H., Devoli, G. (2014): Terskelverdier for utløsning av jordskred i Norge. Oppsummering av 30 hydrometeorlogiske terskelstudier ved NVE i perioden 2009 til 2013, NVE-NIFS report 43, http://publikasjoner.nve.no/rapport/2014/rapport2014_43.pdf, last accessed: 20/11/2017, (In Norwegian) Beldring, S., Engeland, K., Roald, L.A., Sælthun, N.R., and Voksø, A. (2003): Estimation of parameters in a linear distributed precipitation-runoff model for Norway. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 7, 304–316, https://doaj.org/article/4a37a40345d044d29658c6be7b3c4d93 Devoli, G. (2017): Workshop «Regional early warning systems for rainfall- and snowmelt-induced landslides. Need for an international forum?», NVE report 4, http://publikasjoner.nve.no/rapport/2017/rapport2017_04.pdf, last accessed: 20/11/2017.

Guzzetti, F., S. Peruccacci, M. Rossi, and C. P. Stark (2007): Rainfall thresholds for the initiation of landslides in central and southern Europe, Meteorol. Atmos. Phys., 98, 239–267, doi:10.1007/s00703-007-0262-7.

Hungr, O., Leroueil S., and Picarelli, L. (2014): The Varnes classification of landslide types, an update, Landslides, 11, 167-194, doi 10.1007/s10346-013-0436-y UN/ISDR (2006): Developing Early Warning Systems: a checklist. EWC III 3rd international Conference on Early warning, From Concept to action, UN/ISDR, http://www.unisdr.org/2006/ppew/inforesources/ewc3/checklist/English.pdf, last accessed: 20/11/2017 White, ID, Mottershead, DN, Harrison, JJ (1996): Environmental systems in Chapman & Hall London, 616

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TESEO Lab: methods and tools for collaborative invention of interactive artefacts to learn and play Monica Divitini, Francesco Gianni, Simone Mora Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm that advocates everyday objects and environments to become interactive because augmented with technology that enable things to sense and interact with the physical world and have exchange information over the Internet. Inventions in this field have a huge impact in many domains raging from healthcare, education and smart cities. Designing novel inventions for the IoT is challenging due to the complexity and novelty of the field and the need for engagement of multiple stakeholders. Our research group at NTNU develops platforms to enable everyone to collaborate towards the invention of novel IoT applications, focusing on what people learn by doing and collaborating with others. With this respect, this short paper presents two platforms: Tiles Toolkit and Anyboard. Tiles toolkit is a set of tools and a workshop methodology to empower non-experts in designing and prototyping augmented objects: things that are more interactive, useful or playful than their ordinary selves. Anyboard is a platform to make, play and learn about hybrid board games.

Introduction The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way we work, play and learn. The core idea of the IoT is that a huge variety of things will be augmented with technology in order to become interactive and connected to the Internet, yet maintain elements of their traditional physical appearance. Technology can be used either to augment an existing purpose of an object, making it more useful, playful or engaging than usual, or to add new functions that are controlled using the object’s affordances; at the extreme, the object may look magical or enchanted.

Designing and prototyping IoT artefacts is challenging because it entails the development of complex hardware/software architectures, blending elements from the digital and physical domains and involving multiple stakeholders. Yet, the creative production of IoT artifacts have been linked to teaching new 21st-century and design literacy skills (Cassell, 2004) via educational programmes that emphasize the development of problem solving, creative thinking and decision-making abilities in new hybrid learning environments “that combines digital fabrication, design thinking and collaborative ideation and innovation” (Smith et. Al, 2015). Designing and prototyping IoT artifacts have the potential to make the symbolic and abstract manipulations involved in creative procedures more concrete and manageable, especially for youngsters (Giannacos & Jaccheri, 2014). For example, artifacts allow students to learn by iteratively testing, rebuilding their designs and working collaboratively. Further, by involving children in the design decisions they begin to develop technological fluency and the needed competences, in a joyful way.

TESEO lab (http://teseolab.org), our research group at NTNU, investigates how empower non-experts like kids, makers and artists to collaborate towards the invention interactive artefacts to learn and play.

Our methodology involves the development of platforms for ideation and prototyping of interactive objects. We use those platforms in workshops with kids aged between 14 and 18 years old to invent solutions to address societal problems, enabling participants to learn basic skills in design and technology by doing. We use empirical results from the workshop to develop theories about making, collaboration and reflection and to improve our tools.

In the following we present two platforms we made to empower the creation of IoT artefacts and interactive board games.

Tiles IoT Toolkit Tiles Toolkit is a set of tools we created to involve non-experts into creative thinking and design of an interactive object, building on augmenting and extending with technology everyday low-tech objects.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway The toolkit includes: 

Tiles Cards: a card-based game to teach the foundations of the Internet of Things thru collaborative brainstorming and design of an interactive object (Figure 1, left).  Tiles Stickers: a hardware prototyping platform to quickly turn ideas generated with Tiles Cards into working prototypes.  Tiles Workshop: a 1-day workshop experience where non-experts (e.g. kids and makers) design and make a prototype of an IoT invention to solve a specific societal problem. During the workshop, participants in groups of 4-6 rapidly move along a set of design thinking activities while supervised by experts. Participants are asked to use Tiles Cards to develop an idea, to sketch a storyboard, make a prototype with Tiles Stickers and prepare an elevator pitch to explain others how their idea can solve the given problem (Figure 1, right).

Tiles has been used with more than 200 students in secondary and high schools and university to invent and learn novel applications. The toolkit has been proven successful in engaging participants in creative dialogue and brainstorming and it led to more than 50 ideas generated to solve challenges such as climate change, smart mobility and engagement of elderly and disabled in civic life. Furthermore, participants of our workshop were able to learn basic skills in design and IoT technology (Mavroudi et al., 2017) The toolkit is available free of charge under creative commons license at http://tilestoolkit.io (Mora et al., 2017).

Figure 1: Tiles Cards (left) and workshop (right)

Anyboard Anyboard (http://anyboardgames.co) is a technology platform to make and play interactive board games that blend the social experience of traditional board games with the interactivity of video games (Mora et al., 2016). Anyboard’s goal is to lower the threshold for the creation of simple interactive board games for users without a background in programming or game design. At the same time, it wants to empower more skilled users to integrate Anyboard with traditional game development frameworks.

Anyboard is composed by: 



Anyboard Game Tokens: a set of interactive game pieces with sensors and actuators that can be customized and re-used across different games. Tokens can be customized adding different cases and physical elements. Tokens can racognized when they are manipulated by a player: dragged on the board, shaken or tilted and trigger rules coded in a software program. Likewise, tokens can display information to the player via visual and haptic feedbacks (Figure 2, left).

Anyboard Studio: a game visual development environment to support non-experts in the creation of simple Anyboard games. Studio provides: (i) a visual board editor for the design and print of interactive game boards (ii) a game asset manager to customize Anyboard’s interactive tokens and (iii) a code builder to implement game mechanics in a computer game engine without writing code We are now in the process of investigating how making a Anyboard games 25

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway can be used as a learning activity in different educational settings; combining the strengths of creating games with the strengths of making interactive objects (Horn et al., 2012). By making Anybord games we expect users to learn several skills, including abstract thinking/logic and coding, for example by translating game rules in a set of logic rules to be coded into a game engine using Anyboard studio; and tinkering or crafting, by customizing or extending Anyboard game tokens (Figure 2, right).

Figure 2: Anyboard game tokens (left) and studio (right)

Conclusion TESEO lab (http://teseolab.org) is a research group at NTNU that investigates how tp empower nonexperts like kids, makers and artists to collaborate towards the invention interactive artefacts to learn and play. Among the lab’s project we have presented two research efforts currently under development.

Tiles (http://tilestoolkit.io), a set of tools and methods for design and prototyping of Internet of Things (IoT) invention; and Anyboard (http://anyboardgames.co), a platform to make interactive board games.

Acknowledgment We thank NTNU students for their contribution to the development of Tiles and Anyboad. We thank all the participants of our workshop and user studies. The Tiles project has been partially funded by the Norwegian Design and Architecture Center. We thank the UMI-Sci-Ed project (http://umi-sci-ed.eu/) for their support to our projects.

References Cassell J. (2004). Towards a model of technology and literacy development: Story listening systems. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 25, 1: 75–105.

Giannakos M. N and Jaccheri L. (2014). Code Your Own Game: The Case of Children with Hearing Impairments.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Entertainment Computing - ICEC 8770, Chapter 14: 108–116.

Horn M.S., Jordan Crouser R., Bers Marina U. (2012). Tangible interaction and learning: the case for a hybrid approach. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16(4), pp.379–389.

Mavroudi A., Divitini M., Mora S. and Gianni F. (2017). Game-Base Learning for IoT: the Tiles inventor toolkit.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Interactive Mobile Communication, Technologies and Learning (IMCL).

Mora S., Gianni F. and Divitini M. (2017). Tiles: A Card-based Ideation Toolkit for the Internet of Things. Proceedings of the International Conference on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS).

Mora S., Fagerbekk T., Monnier M., Schroeder E. and Divitini M. (2016). “Anyboard: a Platform for Hybrid Board Games”. Proceedings of the International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC).

Smith R. C., Iversen O. S., and Hjorth M. (2015). Design thinking for digital fabrication in education. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 5: 20–28.

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Managing large carnivores: the case of the wolf (Canis lupus) in Italy and Norway Lucrezia Gorini and Barbara Zimmermann Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Elverum

«Conservation problems are, at their root, people problems» (Nie 2001)

Abstract Managing the wolf is an example of the complexity of nature management in general and, on a broader societal perspective, the symbol of a range of other conflicts between urban and rural areas. The case of wolf management in Italy and Norway shows many similarities and a few significant differences and is a reflection of the challenges that large carnivore management in Europe faces nowadays.

Introduction Wildlife management is a discipline which in order to be successful, that is, in order to achieve the goals that it sets, depends on the implementation of a collaborative process among all stakeholders, integrating ecological concerns, socio-economic interests and ethical values. This is true for nature management in general and it is particularly true for management of large carnivores. The topic is complex and has a series of ethical dilemmas at its base (Gamborg et al. 2012) that have characterized nature conservation since the very beginning of its movements in the 19 th century in North America (e.g. Yellowstone was established in 1873 as the world`s first National Park). Principle of nature conservation and management range from maintaining wilderness pristine and untouched, to a sustainable use of natural resources for our economic profit or recreational benefit. When it comes to large carnivores, and in particular when it comes to wolves (Canis lupus), interests come inevitably in direct conflict and successful management relies almost entirely on the capacity of mitigating such conflicts. Wolves have a symbolic value rooted in our culture: they are a symbol of wilderness and of a healthy ecosystem but also of cruel predators who kill livestock and pets and are a danger to people (Fox & Bekoff 2011). This dichotomy in the way wolves can be perceived has been part of our history for centuries and has shaped our relationship with this species since the domestication of wild wolves led to the origin of a new subspecies, Canis lupus familiaris, the domestic dog, a process which started around 12 000 years ago (Linnell & Lescureux 2015). From being widespread throughout Europe for centuries, wolves (as most other European large carnivores) were extirpated or strongly reduced in most areas by the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Norway wolves became functionally extinct by the 1960s. In Italy, wolves became nearly extinct at about the same time, but never completely disappeared from the country. This development had significant repercussions on the farming traditions as well since the need of protecting livestock from wild carnivores became less of a priority as density of these species declined. In the early 1970s wolf became a protected species under National Laws both in Norway and in Italy and has since then recovered. From being (nearly) extinct to the current population densities one could say that the protection and recovery has been successful. However, the population size in Norway is still so low, ca. 110 wolves in winter 2016-17, half of those living across the NorwegianSwedish border (Svensson et al. 2017), that the species is classified as critically endangered in the Norwegian Red List for Species 2015 (Norwegian Environment Agency, Miljødirektoratet, government agency under the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and Environment). The neighbouring country Sweden hosts the major share of the Scandinavian wolf population which by last winter counted an estimated total of 430 wolves. So far the Scandinavian population is the result of no more than five immigrant wolves from the geographically distinct Finnish-Russian population (Figure 1). As a consequence, there is a high degree of inbreeding with measurable effects on reproduction and survival (Liberg et al 2005, Åkesson et al. 2016). In Italy the peninsular population, with an estimated population size of 1070 individuals (minimum number, Boitani & Solvari 2017), is classified as vulnerable (population status: viable), and the alpine population, with an estimated size of 100 individuals (minimum number, Boitani & Solvari 2017), is classified as endangered (population status: not viable) according to the IUCN criteria (see Figure 1 for an overview on wolf distribution in Europe). Despite legal protection followed by recovery in the last 30-40 years, the management of the wolf is far from being “conflict-free” and the 27

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway debate about how many wolves should be allowed to thrive in each country, and the contrasts between different groups of interest (e.g. hunters, farmers, public, conservationists), have now reached new extremes. Our contribution intends to present a brief description of the current situation of wolf management in Norway and Italy, focussing on similarities (many) and differences (few but significant).

We will conclude attempting to identify the major issues at the core of this conflict both in Norway and Italy but also in the other European countries which are witnessing, or have witnessed, a recent return of the wolf. We will emphasize measures for mitigating conflicts which have already been suggested and in some cases locally successfully implemented, hoping that this contribution can be a reflection on conservation and management of a controversial species.

Figure 1. Distribution of wolves in Europe as of 2011 (www.lcie.org).

The wolf in Norway and in Italy: similarities and differences As pointed out above, both countries have seen a recovery of the wolf population since its protection in the 1970s. The species is however still ranked as critically endangered in Norway and as vulnerable and endangered in Italy (for the peninsular and the alpine population respectively). Management is controversial in both countries for similar reasons: 1) wolf depredation on livestock; 2) direct competition with hunters for wild ungulates; 3) perceived threat to personal safety in certain areas. In addition, a more recent, but for the time being important, cause of conflict in Norway is the risk that free-running hunting dogs are attacked and killed by wolves. On the other hand in Italy, an important issue of conflict, and of direct threat to the preservation of the species “Canis lupus”, is the hybridization of wolves and stray dogs. Poaching represents an important threat to the species in both countries (Boitani & Solvari 2017, Liberg et al. 2011) (see Table 1 for a summary of status and threats).In Scandinavia, inbreeding due to minimal immigration of wolves to the geographically isolated population is also considered a threat.

Current situation: management and policy In both countries, general protection regulation lies at the National level: i.e. the Ministry of Climate and Environment (Klima- og Miljødepartementet, KLD) in Norway and the Ministry of the Environment and Protection of Land and Sea (Ministero dell`Ambiente e della Tutela del territorio e del mare, MATTM) in Italy. Both countries (as most European countries) are contracting parties to the Bern Convention (1979, ratified in 1986 in Norway), which is a wildlife conservation treaty aiming at “conserving wild flora and fauna and their natural habitats” (Trouwborst et al. 2017a). As contracting parties, both countries have ratified laws at the national level to respect the requirements and principles 28

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway defined in the Convention. There is an on-going legal debate as to what extent the current wolf policy in Norway is indeed in accordance with the principles and requirements set in the Convention and ratified by the country (Trouwborst et al. 2017a, WWF-Norway). As an EU member state, Italy`s wolf policy is in addition determined by the European Habitat Directive (1992), a legally binding document on international nature conservation (Trouwborst et al.2017b). Also the Habitat Directive, however, presents aspects where interpretation and misunderstanding have created confusion: among these the definition of “Favourable Conservation Status, FCS” (one of the aim of the Directive is to safeguard a “favourable conservation status” for selected species and habitats) and the scale at which this should be measured (Trouwborst et al. 2017b). This is particularly crucial in the case of a species like the wolf, whose distribution in Europe crosses several countries. This is true both for Norway, which shares the population with a EU member state, Sweden; and it`s true for Italy, which shares the Alpine population with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. How can each country alone fulfil a requirement like FCS, or the ones set by the Bern Convention, when its wolf population is distributed across borders and shared with the neighbouring countries ecologically and genetically? Several studies are addressing these important legal and policy issues (see Trouwborst et al. 2017a and Trouwborst et al. 2017b for a review on the Bern Convention and the European Habitat Directive respectively).

Table 1. The status of the wolf (Canis lupus) in Norway and Italy. * For management purposes, the Italian wolf population is divided into two subpopulations: the peninsular one (roughly along and around the Appenines and starting from Colle di Cadibona) and the alpine one (along the Alps) (Boitani & Solvari 2017). **On going culling of the Norwegian resident population (as of 14.01.2018).

Norway

Italy

Distribution

South-eastern Norway, along the border with Sweden

Peninsular and alpine. The alpine population is shared with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia*

Population size

54/56 in Norway and 51-56 “border wolves”** as part of the Scandinavian population estimated at 430 wolves

Peninsular: 1070 (min.est.)

Alpine: 100 (min. est.) (up to 150 including dispersing individuals)

Status

Critically endangered (Norwegian Red List)

Peninsular: vulnerable Alpine: endangered (IUCN)

Conflicts with hunters and farmers, poaching, low population size, inbreeding

Conflicts with hunters and farmers, poaching, low population size (for the alpine population), hybridization

Threats

Protection

Norwegian ratification of the Bern European Habitat Directive and Convention and Norwegian Biodiversity National legislation based on the Act latter As of January 2018, the Norwegian KLD has allowed the culling of 42 individuals shared between and outside the Wolf Area, the only area within Norway where, in principle, wolves are allowed to live. The Wolf Area covers approximately 5 % of the whole Norwegian country (KLD 2016) and is located in the south-eastern part along the border with Sweden. A similar quota (47 individuals) for culling was proposed in 2016 by the relevant Regional Management Authorities but was then reduced to 15 individuals by KLD (Trouwborst et al.2017a). The Ministry`s decision at the time appeared to be partly motivated by the requirements imposed by the Bern Convention (Trouwborst et al.2017a). This year a similar process seemed to unfold, with the culling of 75 % of the Norwegian wolf population being proposed by the Regional Management Authorities and WWF-Norway issuing first a legal complaint and then taking the Norwegian state to court to stop the culling (similar to what happened in 2016).

However, it seems that this year the Ministry is supporting the proposal and has, for the time being, allowed the culling of 42 individuals while the injunction filed by WWF-Norway in order to stop this 29

Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway winter´s wolf hunt was dismissed by Oslo District Court (5. January, https://www.wwf.no/?54906/WWFAbsurd-that-the-Norwegian-government-wants-a-new-wolf-culling). The culling has already started and as of January 12th 2018, 17 wolves have been shot. The decision on the number of individuals to be culled has been the center of a heated debate reported heavily on the Norwegian newspapers and with conflicts between the Regional Management Authorities and the Ministry, the hunter and farmer associations and the WWF. Research data on population size, area use and genetic composition used for management have been questioned and heavily attacked as well (Morgenbladet 2017).

In Italy, the new Action Plan for the wolf (Boitani & Solvari 2017) contains over 20 actions which are to be implemented in a coordinated manner for a successful wolf management. The new Plan was completed over a year ago, however its approval is still delayed due to disagreements centred mostly around the inclusion of the possibility of legal removal of selected individuals when a series of specific requirements are met (in accordance with Art. 16 of the European Habitat Directive). Although such a possibility is already envisaged, and strictly regulated, in the European Habitat Directive and the Italian legislation, the inclusion in the Action Plan appears to have stirred a heated debate between conservation organizations and farmers. In the meantime, there have been episodes of illegal killing of animals in several regions with animals mutilated and put on display (e.g. in Emilia Romagna, http://bologna.repubblica.it/cronaca/2017/11/04/news/rimini_lupo_ucciso_e_appeso_alla_fermata_ dell_autobus-180205326/ - in Italian).

Mitigating conflicts: some examples A successful wolf management builds on three pillars: prevention, compensation and, only as a last resort, surgical removal of specific individuals (Boitani, http://www.origamisettimanale.it/2017/11/22/speciali/origami/linalienabile-diritto-di-essere-lupoPP5FEJdOjRhubPZvg8BTIJ/pagina.html - in Italian). Emphasis is to be put on prevention, as even compensation may create frustration in the long term (Boitani & Solvari 2017) and removal of specific individuals may in some cases only be a short-term solution. Many studies have shown that the use of nonlethal measures such as fences, especially electrical ones, of trained livestock guarding dogs and of night-time gathering of livestock flocks into enclosures work as good deterrent against wolf depredation on livestock (e.g. Linnell & Luscureux 2015, Stone et al. 2016). There is no one-solution-fits-all example, but a combination of these measures and the local traditions and current situation (e.g. whether large carnivores have remained present in the area continuously or whether they have come back after decades of absence, what kind of farming development has the country had among others) are factors to be taken into account when identifying the best solution for the specific case in question (Linnell & Luscureux 2015).

The Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe (www.lcie.org) and the European Commission (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/conservation/species/carnivores/index_en.htm) have gathered a large number of useful resources on measures to mitigate conflicts and the use of trained livestock guarding dogs (see also Linnell & Luscureux 2015 for additional references).

Conclusion Our brief summary of the current situation of the wolf in Norway and Italy aims to highlight how management of a large carnivore like the wolf is complex and a perfect example of the interdisciplinary nature of wildlife management. In the case of the wolf we see that issues range from emotional to legal, from ecological to political and cultural. Societal studies also suggest that the underlying conflict to this debate finds its roots in the conflict between urban vs. rural development and that the wolf (like other large carnivores) becomes the symbol of a range of other conflicts between urban and rural areas (www.lcie.org, Skogen et al. 2017). It is paramount to provide information to the public and all stakeholders on a continuous base and this information has to be accurate and transparent. Dialogue, collaborative and transnational management are equally paramount for a successful management of the species as it is the promotion of best practices in management methods. In Italy there are good examples of cooperation across countries for the alpine population (such as the Wolf Alpine Group and the Convention for Alps), but it is the political and administrative cooperation which needs to be 30

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway strengthened (Boitani & Solvari 2017). In Norway, an important Swedish-Norwegian project (GRENSEVILT, funded by INTERREG and led by Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) has just started and will address some of the crucial aspects in the wolf management debate. This project will focus especially on the transnational element of wolf management, addressing and promoting ways of cooperation and dialogue among stakeholders and administrative and management bodies on both sides of the border.

The wolf`s recovery represents a conservation success for Europe: our next goal, and challenge, is to make it also a management success - hopefully based on the principle set by international treaties such as the Bern Convention and the Biodiversity Act and by developing a best practice of collaborative and transnational nature management.

References Boitani, L., Solvari, V. (2017). Piano di Conservazione e Gestione del Lupo in Italia (gennaio 2017). 58 pages. In italian.

Fox, C. H., Bekoff, M. (2011). Integrating values and ethics into wildlife policy and management – lessons from North America. Animal (Basel), 1 (1): 126-143.

Gamborg, C., Palmer, C. & Sandoe, P. (2012). Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation: What Should We Try to Protect? Nature Education Knowledge, 3 (10).

KLD (2016). Stortingsmelding «Ulv i norsk natur», Meld. St. 21, see here https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/meld.-st.-21-20152016/id2480008/sec1.

(in

Norwegian):

Liberg, O., Andrén, H., Pedersen, H. C., Sand, H., Sejberg, D., Wabakken, P., ... & Bensch, S. (2005). Severe inbreeding depression in a wild wolf Canis lupus population. Biology letters, 1(1), 17-20.

Liberg, O., Chapron, G., Wabakken, P., Pedersen, H. C., Hobbs, N. T., Sand, H. (2011). Shoot, shovel and shut up: cryptic poaching slows restoration of a large carnivore in Europe. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 279 (1730): 910 – 915.

Linnell, J.D.C., Luscureux, N. (2015). Livestock guarding dogs – cultural heritage icons with a new relevance for mitigating conservation conflicts. Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Trondheim: 1-76.

Nie (2001). The sociopolitical dimension of wolf management and restoration in the United States. Research in Human Ecology, 8 (1): 1-12.

Skogen, K., Krangle, O., Figari, H. (2017). Wolf conflicts – a sociological study. Berghahn Books ISBN 978-1-78533420-7. 226 pages.

Stone, A. S., Edge, E., Fascione, N., Miller, C., Weaver, C. (2016). Livestock and wolves, a guide to nonlethal tools and methods to reduce conflicts. Defenders of Wildlife (Second Edition) 1130 17th Street, NW Washington, D.C. 20036-4604. 28 pages.

Svensson, L., Wabakken, P., Maartmann, E., Åkesson, M & Flagstad, Ø. (2017). Bestandsovervåking av ulv vinteren 2016-2017. Bestandsstatus for store rovdyr i Skandinavia 1-2017. 49 s.

Trouwborst, A., Fleurke, F.M. & Linnell, J.D.C. (2017a). Norway`s wolf policy and the Bern Convention on European wildlife: avoiding the “Manifestly Absurd”. Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy, 20 (2).

Trouwborst, A., Boitani, L. & Linnell, J.D.C. (2017b). Interpreting ‘favourable conservation status’ for large carnivores in Europe: how many are needed and how many are wanted? Biodiversity and Conservation, 26(1): 3761.

Ulvetider i forskning, Morgenbladet.

13 Oktober https://morgenbladet.no/aktuelt/2017/10/ulver-i-mosen.

2017,

see

here

(in

Norwegian):

Åkesson, M., Liberg, O., Sand, H., Wabakken, P., Bensch, S., & Flagstad, Ø. (2016). Genetic rescue in a severely inbred wolf population. Molecular ecology, 25(19), 4745-4756.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

Assessing the impact of Roman pottery production on the environment Lorenza La Rosa Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Oslo

Abstract In this short paper, after an introduction about ceramic studies in archaeology, I will describe my PhD project started in September 2017 at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo. The aim of my research is to assess the environmental impact of the production of terra sigillata italica and tardo italica in Pisa and Arezzo (Tuscany, Italy), a big scale pottery manufacture during the Roman late republic end early empire periods. Through the study of the production and the technology, I am interested in quantifying the exploitation of natural resources, such as clay and wood, and estimating how a mass production site may have influenced and transformed the landscape and possibly even represented an environmental threat.

Introduction Pottery is the commonest portable artefact from the Neolithic period onwards and potsherds are found in big quantities during archaeological excavations.

Unlike metal or glass, potsherds could not be melted and reused as second raw material and clay was simple to retrieve and use to create new items. But after discard ceramics survive indefinitely underground or underwater, and in normal condition require little more than washing after recovery from excavation. Furthermore, thanks to constant modifications in technology, shape and decoration, pottery is a valuable tool for dating archaeological contexts. In the Roman world pottery was used for a wider range of purposes than in most other periods and cultures from prehistory to the Middle Ages: pottery containers were produced for transportation and storage, cooking, dining tables, lamps, bricks, tiles and other construction materials. Therefore, pottery studies appear to be essential to understanding not only the production technology, and the distribution of the ceramic items, but to explore many broader aspects of the economy and society in the Roman world, such as the organization of labour, the mechanisms of terrestrial and maritime trades and the daily use of products (Greene 1992, p. 6).

Terra sigillata was a fine table-ware with a smooth glossy bright red surface; top quality and massproduced in Italy first and then in other provinces, such as Gaul and Germany, from the first century BCE. Italian centres as Arezzo, Pisa, Puteoli and many others produced this pottery on an enormous scale and exported it all over the Roman world and beyond. Shapes were standardised and the repertoire included principally cups, small bowls and plates of various sizes, sometimes decorated with moulded elements (Greene 1992, pp. 8-10; Peacock 1982, pp. 114-122). Its high standardization and widespread distribution allowed to compile the first typological classification of pottery material by Hans Dragendorff (1895) and to date sites anywhere in Western Europe.

The sophisticated firing technology required to obtain a red and glossy sintered surface implies a specific type of kilns and high temperature management (1050-1100°C; Cuomo di Caprio 2007, pp. 326-347).

Consequently, the firing process was really demanding in terms of expertise, quantity of wood used as a fuel, its availability, and possibly the type of wood that might have implied the location of these big manufacture districts in areas close to extensive forests to exploit.

Case studies of my project are two terra sigillata italica districts in Tuscany. Arezzo was the first and most famous productive centre, with several workshops from the second half of the first century BCE (Menchelli 2005). Pisa had two productive districts - one close to the Roman city and the other in the northern suburbs, next to the harbour – active from 15 BCE to the second half of the II century CE (Pasquinucci, Menchelli 2017). Both areas are characterised by the fluvial system important not only for water supply and proximity to the harbour, but also for the availability of good quality clay.

32

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Former studies have shown how the landscape underwent notable changes, especially related to water management and the spatial extent of wetlands and forest coverage during Roman times (La Rosa 2016). Human activities like intensive agriculture and exploitation of stone and wood as raw material impacted the environment and caused at least part of these changes. The aim of my research is to obtain a better understanding of the role of ceramic mass production in landscape management (for instance the presence of reserved forests to provide wood for fuel with plans of periodic reforestation) and transformations of the natural landscape (deforestation, redefinition of parts of the river system).

Method For several years the main goal of pottery studies was the compilation of catalogues and ceramic typologies. In 1982, David Peacock published a fundamental text in the promotion of ceramic production studies: this work focused for the first time on modes of production by classifying industries according to organizational complexity, shifting the attention from the final product to the production cycle itself. In Roman archaeology subsequent studies followed this direction to make pottery not only an index fossil for chronology but an important indicator of technology and society, as stated in the former paragraph.

Quoting Jeroen Poblome, Daniele Malfitana, and John Lund (2012, p. 2): “When considering the production of Roman pottery, no single line of inquiry should be considered in isolation, but the production unit must be considered as a complex network of social, cultural, economic, and technological interactions that constantly influence and recursively are influenced by each other, and which can be elucidated from the material record”. Building upon this statement, I am shifting focus from the study of production cycles or products per se towards a more comprehensive study of pottery manufacture as part of a network of various human and environmental factors.

The method presented here is based on the combination of studies on ancient texts, archaeological sites, pottery material, and environmental contexts with a view to retracing the production of terra sigillata showing the deep entanglement of humans, natural resources and technology.

Quantifying the production The first step is quantifying the production in terms of years of activities and number of items produced per year, thanks to epigraphic texts, material findings and comparisons with well-known productive districts with well-preserved kilns. In particular, two groups of graffiti, one from Pisa (Camodeca 2006) and the other from La Graufesenque (Aveyron, France; Marichal 1988, pp. 114-122) provide lists of workers and items interpreted as batch countings. Another precious tool is the Corpus Vasorum Arretinorum (Oxé et al. 2000), a collection of all the attested stamps on terra sigillata potsherds. The vessels often present a stamp with the name of the fabricant: this information was revealed to be pretty useful for an estimation of the number of workers in the manufactures, their social rank and the organization of the work; together with the countings, it’s possible to assess a a reconstruction of work phases and seasonal activities. The quantification of items produced will be therefore used to estimate the quantity of clay exploited during the production.

Quantifying the use of wood Wood was the key resource for pottery production: the pottery cooking procedure required a great amount of fuel, and terra sigillata was particularly demanding. Several thousand tonnes of wood with high calorific value were put in the kiln, in order to reach a temperature sufficiently high to make the slip red and glossy. The presence of forests was therefore a favourable environmental condition not only necessary to establish a production site, but also to maintain it. Consequently, pottery production could have affected the environment with gradual changes in the availability of fuel, due to a massive exploitation of slow-growing forests, with a recursive impact in production quantity, and possibly also in the economic crisis in some areas.

Archaeometric analysis will be carried out on potsherds (e.g. provenance and technology studies, by means of thin-section petrography and Scanning Electron Microscopy coupled with Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy) in order to get information about the firing temperature obtained and the required 33

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway firing time. The estimation of firing temperature together with the production output will allow hypothesizing about the amount of wood used throughout the production period. Ethno-archaeological comparisons with modern traditional productions (Costin 2000) and examples from experimental archaeology will complete the study.

Result Main goal of this project is assessing the environmental impact of the production of pottery in the Roman World, paying particular attention to the use of natural resources detectable in the consequent ecological transformations occurring on the production sites. To summarize, this research will contribute to highlight the aspect of consumption of a manufacture district in terms of quantity and provenance of the clay used, and wood used as fuel and its impact on the environment through deforestation (and eventually reforestation).

The interdisciplinary approach aims to move beyond chronological aspects of ceramics to shed light on the production cycle as a whole, and to connect the archaeology of production with other important themes: such as the transformations in the landscape during Roman times, the management of natural resources, and the perception of nature in the ancient world.

Conclusion “There is a continual dialectical tension between our dependence on things, our reliance on their various affordances, and the constraints and entrapments that the reliance on things entails. We can talk of and study the networks, meshworks, symmetries and engagements between humans and things as so many have done over recent years, but this is to miss the key nodal point about human-thing relations, that they involve asymmetrical tensions and a dialectical co-dependency.” (Hodder 2016, p.2).

According to the theory expressed by Ian Hodder, not only humans depend on things, but things also depend on humans and on other things. Therefore, human-made things certainly depend on human action for their production, use, maintenance and discard, but the relations go further: humans and things are entangled not in an empty space or in a place separated from the environment they live in, so the environment itself with its rules is part of the entanglement.

My research wants to assess the impact on Roman ceramic production and its relation with the environment taking into account the Human-Thing Entanglement concept, overcoming the causation model too often used in studies about human-environment interactions (Moran and Brondízio 2012), and including the whole relation system between humans and their ideas; natural resources; transformation process and technology used; final objects and their life.

Acknowledgment Thanks to the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History (university of Oslo) and to the Department of Civilisations and Forms of Knowledge (Pisa University).

References Camodeca, G. (2006). Graffito con conto di infornata di sigillata tardo-italica da Isola di Migliarino (Pisa). In Territorio e produzioni ceramiche: paesaggi, economia e società in età romana (eds. Menchelli, S., and Pasquinucci M.). Plus, Pisa: 207-216.

Costin, C.L. (2000). The use of ethnoarchaeology for the archaeological study of ceramic production. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 7(4): 377-403.

Cuomo di Caprio, N. (2007). La ceramica in archeologia 2. Antiche tecniche di lavorazione e moderni metodi di indagine. L’Erma di Bretschneider, Rome.

Dragendorff, H. (1895). ‘Terra sigillata’, Bonner Jahrbücher 96: 18-155.

Greene, K. (1992). Roman Pottery. British Museum Press, Avon.

Hodder, I. (2016). Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement. Open access book.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway La Rosa, L. (2016). Pisa romana. Analisi spaziali per la ricostruzione del paesaggio, MA Thesis, Pisa University, Pisa, Italy.

Marichal, R. (1988). Les graffites de La Graufesenque. 47 suppl. à Gallia. CNRS, Paris.

Moran, E.F., and Brondízio, E. S., (2012). Introduction to Human-Environment Interactions Research. In Humanenvironment interactions: current and future directions (eds. Brondízio, E. S., Moran, E.F.). Springer Science & Business Media, New York: 1-24.

Oxé, A., Comfort, H., and Kenrick, P. (2000). Corpus vasorum arretinorum: A Catalogue of the Signatures. Shapes and Chronology of Italian Sigillata. Habelt, Bonn.

Pasquinucci, M., and Menchelli, S. (2017). Rural, Urban and Suburban Communities and Their Economic Interconnectivity in Coastal North Etruria (2nd century BC-2nd Century AD). In The Economic Integration of Roman Italy (eds. De Hasss, T.C.A, Tol, G.W.). Brill, Leiden: 322-341.

Peacock, D.P. (1982). Pottery in the Roman world: an ethnoarchaeological approach. Longman, New York.

Poblome, J., Malfitana, D., and Lund, J., 2012. Pottery, Roman Empire, in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (eds.

Bagnall, R. S., Brodersen, K., Champio, C.B., and Erskine, A.). Wiley, Malden, MA.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

“In vino veritas”: The eye and the wine.

Bruno Laeng Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo

Abstract In a study combining cognitive psychology and marketing research, young Norwegians looked at professionally-designed labels of Italian wines while an eye-tracker measured their eye fixations while examining the images of the labels on wine bottles. This revealed that the time spent on a particular bottle among three others was highly correlated with choices of the preferred bottles (i.e. labels). The participants, who were naïve about the wines, spent little time looking at the names of either the wine or winemaker and spent most of the time looking at the pictorial designs on the labels. Although some of the labels actually used in the market were preferred, several alternative labels, previously discarded by the winemakers, were actually preferred. The findings suggest that wine labels’ design and selection could be improved by the use of evidence-based procedures, like eye-tracking.

Introduction Norwegians are good wine drinkers and they particularly prize Italian wine, which tends to be at the top of the wine sales at Vinmonopolet (the state-run wine monopoly in Norway). Indeed, in 2016, Norwegians bought about 1 million bottles of Prosecco, being by far the most popular sparkling wine in the country. For wines and their export in general, this year’s vintage (2017), despite being difficult and likely not of the best quality, maintains Italy at the forefront of worldwide exports (41.1 million hectolitres), followed by Spain (38.3 million hectolitres) and then France (37.2 million hectolitres).

Clearly, what decides the success of a wine must be its taste, but several other factors can come into play, like the reputation of the country or region of production and of some wineries, as well as the experts’ opinions (from magazines, websites). However, several other “external” factors can play a significant role on sales, most relevantly the design of the product or package, in this specific case, the bottle’s appearance and especially its label. Importantly, marketing research shows that it is most common to consume wine at home, after choosing a wine bottle out of many others on the shelf of a supermarket. Remarkably, a few seconds are the typical viewing time for deciding what to purchase among a line-up of items on a shelf (Ruso & Leclerc, 1994). Thus, the design aspects of the label could play a crucial role for making similarly quick wine choices. This is particular true for new generations of consumers (e.g., “millennials”), who can be passionate wine drinkers but tend to have little knowledge about wines and are rather variable and somewhat impulsive in their choices.

Below I present a study performed at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, where a group of Norwegian university students viewed images of bottles of Italian wines shown on a computer screen.

The experimental situation resembled the one described above in the supermarket: Participants looked at 4 bottles lined up together, all identical except the labels, and then chose the one they liked best.

Importantly, an eye-tracker recorded simultaneously their eye-movements. The study had two main objectives: 1) by analysing eye-movements, it can be determined how gaze reflects choice and also which elements of a label capture the most attention; 2) by use of eye-tracking as a procedure for measuring consumers’ attention on different labels designed for a same wine, the method could assist the selection of the optimal labels.

Method Participants. All participants (N= 19) were Norwegian students at the University of Oslo. They all reported drinking wine at least once a week. All were unfamiliar with the specific wines shown in the study.

Equipment. A remote Eye Tracking device (built by SMI in Germany) registered eye fixations at 60 Hz sampling rate. The equipment is contact-free and can measure gaze movement and eye fixations with high precision, allowing to reveal the path of the eyes and information about the ‘dwell time’ of gaze on

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway particular parts of an object or scene. A computerized algorithm detects as a fixation whenever they eye dwells for a minimum gaze duration of 80 ms within a region with maximal dispersion of 100 pixels.

The wine labels images. The D&A (www.donieassociati.it/studio.asp) design studio in Florence provided all the images of wine labels used as the test stimuli. The labels consisted of sets of four different labels that were designed for eight different wines (in total 32) from well-known winemakers in Tuscany (e.g., Mazzei: http://www.mazzei.it/en/ ). Of the four labels designed by D&A for each wine type, only one was actually used in the market, whereas the other three had been previously discarded by the winemaker.

Experimental procedure. We showed on computer screen 4 bottle images so that each of the labels designed for the same wine would appear in each of the four possible permutations of positions. Each screen display was shown for 10 seconds. After this, a “response display” appeared showing four identical bottles with the letters A, B, C and D in place of the original labels. The participants indicated which one of the four previous bottles was “most preferred” by pressing a letter key.

Result Choices of bottle and related looking. Only three out of the eight marketed labels were selected most often by the Norwegian participants and another three of these target labels were in second place for preference; however, two of the marketed labels were chosen the least compared to other, previously discarded, labels. A simple regression statistical analysis showed a highly significant and positive correlation between percentage choices for each label and the mean percent fixation time on the same label, r = 0.84; F(1,30) = 75.3, p = 0.0001. That is, the greater was the preference for an item, the longer participants maintained gaze on it. Indeed, most of the variance in total gaze behavior was accounted for by preference, R2 = 0.72; Y =12.4 + 0.22 * X. The position of the bottle on the virtual shelf did not play any significant role, despite there was a significant tendency to pay more attention to the bottle immediately to the left of center.

Wine label elements. More detailed analyses of the eye fixations revealed that the Norwegian participants spent most of the time looking at the pictorial elements on the label and little on the names of the wines, wineries or varietals.

Conclusion The study confirms that monitoring gaze with specialized equipment can lead to information which has a high probability of predicting someone’s choices. The aesthetic aspect of the label might have been crucial for the choices made by these naïve consumers, since they spent very little time examining anything else than the pictorial elements of the labels. Although the Italian names on the labels were probably meaningless for our Norwegians participants, it is likely that their behavior can be generalized, since other studies obtained similar results with observers who could read the language on packages or ads (Pieters and Wedel, 2004). Because the Norwegian participants were naïve about the wines or their winemakers’ reputation, they may have chosen a label exclusively on the basis of its visual aspects or their aesthetics. Based on the present results and considering the large amount of wine world exports from Italy, it seems particularly important that during the creation and selection of a label’s design, its aesthetic properties are taken into account. Although some of the marketed labels were preferred, for some items the preference was clearly in favor for alternative labels. Thus, the process of selection of a final label’s design could be improved by testing its efficacy first with evidence-based procedures, including eye-tracking methods (Laeng, Suegami & Aminihajibashi, 2016).

Acknowledgment I am grateful to my collaborators on the wine labels’ project, Takashi Suegami and Samira Aminihajibashi, and to Simonetta Doni and Massimo Tommaso Mazza of D&A Studio in Firenze for their support of the study.

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Figure 1. In the above illustration, bottles can be shown repeatedly and occupying different positions each time on the screen, to control the tendency, known by psychologists (Wilson & Nisbett, 1978; Glaholt, Wu, & Reingold, 2010), for preferring a specific position on a shelf or rack. Also in the Figure (second row) the same images are shown with the eyes’ paths superimposed (of a 24 years old, female, student, completely naïve about Italian wines). Below is the so-called "focus maps", where the brightness is proportional to the time spent by the eye over a specific region of the image, so that parts in the dark indicate regions never looked at by this student. The bottom image shows a quantitative analysis of the eye fixations on selected areas of interest; in this case, the wine’s name (“brand”) and the pictorial image. The percentages of time within these areas for each participant and each trial can be used in the statistical analyses, which can determine not only which bottle is looked the most but also which part of it.

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References Glaholt, M. G., Wu, M.-C., & Reingold, E. M. (2010). Evidence for top-down control of eye movements during visual decision making. Journal of Vision, 10(5), 1–10. doi:10.1167/10.5.15 Laeng, B., Suegami, T., & Aminihajibashi, S. (2016). Wine labels: an eye-tracking and pupillometry study.

International Journal of Wine Business Research, 28(4), 327- 348. doi: 10.1108/IJWBR-03-2016-0009 Pieters, R. and Wedel, M. (2004), “Attention capture and transfer in advertising: brand, pictorial, and text-size effects”, Journal of Marketing, 68, 36-50.

Ruso, J.E., & Leclerc, F. (1994). An eye-fixation analysis of choice processes for consumer nondurables. Journal of Consumer Research, 21, 274-290.

Shimojo, S., Simion, C., Shimojo, E. and Scheier, C. (2003). Gaze bias reflects and influences preference. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 1317-1322.

Wilson, T.D., & Nisbett, R.E. (1978). The accuracy of verbal reports about the effects of stimuli on evaluations and behavior. Social Psychology, 41, 118-131.

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HyVar: Scalable Hybrid Variability Jacopo Mauro University of Oslo, Oslo

Abstract This paper presents the work conducted at the University of Oslo within the HyVar European Project that addresses continuous software evolution in distributed systems and, in particular, in the automotive sector.

Introduction Before describing the work that was performed within the project HyVar “Scalable Hybrid Variability”, I would like to spend few words to present myself.

I am Jacopo Mauro, a researcher at the department of computer science of the University of Oslo. I conducted all my studies in Italy, first getting a bachelor degree and a master degree in computer science from the University of Udine, and then in 2012 getting a PhD degree from the University of Bologna. I work in different areas of computer science dealing with the optimization of systems, the proof of their correctness (Formal Methods), Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing and the design of programming languages. After getting my PhD, I worked in three different countries doing postdoctorate experiences at INRIA (the equivalent of the Italian CNR in France), the University of Paris Diderot (France), the University of Bologna (Italy), and in 2015 I moved to the University of Oslo (Norway). I moved here to work at the HyVar project which is financed by the European Union for three years and collaborate with different partner institutions coming from academia and industry. In particular, I work also with Italian companies (Santer Reply S.p.A., Magneti Marelli S.p.A.) and the University of Turin.

HyVar project The HyVar project goal is to propose and develop a framework for the continuous and individualized evolution of distributed software applications running on remote devices in heterogeneous environments. The framework combines variability modelling from software product lines (i.e., a developing approach particularly suited for the development of a set of products like the car versions that share some common features) with formal methods and software upgrades, and be integrated into existing software development processes. HyVar objectives are 

develop a Domain Specific Variability Language (DSVL) and a toolchain to support software variability for such applications;



develop a cloud infrastructure that exploits software variability as described in the DSVL to track the software configurations deployed on remote devices and to enable the collection of data from the devices to monitor their behaviour and secure and efficient customized updates;



develop a technology for over-the-air updates of distributed applications which enable continuous software evolution after deployment on complex remote devices that incorporate a system of systems;



test HyVar approach as described in the above objectives in an industry-led demonstrator to assess in quantifiable ways its benefits.

HyVar goes beyond the state-of-the-art by proposing hybrid variability; i.e., the automatic generation and deployment of software updates combines the variability model describing possible software configurations with sensor data collected from the device. HyVar scalable cloud infrastructure elastically supports monitoring and customization for numerous application instances. Upgrades will be seamless and sufficiently non-intrusive to enhance the user quality experience, without compromising the robustness, reliability, and resilience of the distributed application instances.

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An image that exemplifies the use of the HyVar outcome in the automotive sector is the following.

Imagine having a fleet of cars that, for security purposes, the change of legislation, or component upgrade, need to receive software updates. Right now these cars are “recalled” and a mechanic needs to physically access the car to update the software. With HyVar instead, it will be possible to design the software in such a way that cars could exploit their new hardware to send, using a 3G connectivity, information (e.g., sensor data) to a Cloud infrastructure. This infrastructure process the data and using a reasoning engine called HyVarRec understands if and what kind of update the cars need. The update can be personalized for the driver/car taking into account the driver preferences (e.g., what kind of car setting the driver likes most). The updates are created by a Variant Generator and sent back to the cars that update their software.

Within the project, I was in particular the responsible for the developing of HyVarRec and the optimization of the Cloud Infrastructure. More information about the project is available at http://www.hyvar-project.eu.

Conclusion The HyVar project is close to its end and we are currently finalizing all the components developed and testing the entire framework.

I would like to conclude saying what a tremendous opportunity was to work on this project at the University of Oslo. The move from a country like Italy to Norway is not that easy: there are some cultural barriers to overcome, you do not find food that you are accustomed to (e.g., you cannot find the Mulino Bianco brand in Norway) and, especially during winter, it is colder and you do not get a lot of light. This, however, is compensated by the great working environment and the tremendous job opportunities that can be found here. Paradoxically, for instance, I could say that during the working days I am actually 41

Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway seeing more sun here in Oslo than when I was in Bologna due to the fact that now I have a beautiful office at the 8th floor of a modern steel and glass building while in Bologna I was working in the underground with windows only facing the drain channel. I would like to finish mentioning another perk of working at the University of Oslo: academics work very tightly with industries. As an example, since 2016, I am a member of the SIRIUS project (http://sirius-labs.no/), a Norwegian Centre for Researchdriven Innovation that addresses the problems of scalable data access in the oil & gas industry. Within this group I work and meet on regular basis people working in companies such as Statoil and IBM, and, as academic, I believe that this is a tremendous opportunity to focus not only on theoretical works but try to solve real and big new challenges emerging in the world.

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Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

Cells on the move: culprits or defenders?

Cinzia Progida, Noemi Guadagno Cell dynamics group, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo

Abstract The main aim of our research is to understand the mechanisms that regulate the movement of cells, with a special focus on cancer and immune cells. Here, we shortly describe the relevance of our research and provide an example of how we study this using a fish model.

Introduction The movement of the cells in the body, or cell migration, is a very complex process that is fundamental for several physiological situations (e.g. during development), but also in pathological conditions such as cancer. A better knowledge about what regulates cell movement can therefore be very useful in the fight of several disease including cancer and immune disorders.

Our group studies the mechanisms regulating cell migration focusing in particular on cancer and immune cells. We use a multidisciplinary approach that includes cell and molecular biology, proteomics, biophysics and biochemistry, taking advantage of the most modern microscopy techniques available at the University of Oslo.

We have recently discovered an unexpected role for a specific group of proteins previously known to function only as master regulators of the transport between the different compartments inside the cell, the Rab proteins. In more detail, we have seen that some members of this family of proteins, Rab7 proteins, are important regulators of cell migration (Borg et al., 2014; Margiotta et al., 2017). Rab7 proteins are active in cancer cells that move. However, inhibition or inactivation of these proteins results in a reduced cell migration (Borg et al., 2014; Margiotta et al., 2017).

Does it mean that we can simply turn off the entire Rab7 gene to inhibit cancer cell migration?

In theory, yes, we can do that. Unfortunately, removing Rab7 will also have negative consequences for the healthy cells. In addition, preliminary results from our group indicate that at least one of the Rab7 proteins is also necessary for the proper migration of immune cells (Borg Distefano et al., unpublished), and a proper and efficient migration of immune cells towards the lymph nodes is fundamental to generate an effective immune response. Consequently, we cannot simply turn off the gene to reduce the migration of cancer cells as this would negatively affect the efficiency of the immune system at the same time. Therefore, our strategy is directed towards the search of the molecules that cooperate with Rab7 in the cell, and we look for specific molecules present only in either cancer or immune cells.

Figure 1. Cervical cancer cell. Blue: Knowing the molecules connected to Rab7 in different cell types will nucleus; Red: actin cytoskeleton; Green: help us to understand in more detail the mechanisms used by the Green-fluorescent-Rab7b. cells to migrate and how to selectively either stop (for cancer cells) or promote their movement (for example to have a more efficient immune response).

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Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Today, little is known about the relationship between intracellular transport molecules such Rab proteins and how they regulate cell movement. Based on our results that demonstrate the involvement of Rab proteins in cell migration, we aim to further identify and characterize novel members of this family of proteins and their interaction partners involved in the process of cell migration.

Methods To study how different proteins regulate cell migration, we use different approaches. One of the most common ways used to study how intracellular proteins, such as Rab proteins, behave in cells is by using cell culture. Through this method, we grow cells that express our proteins of interest fluorescently labelled and therefore can be analyzed under a microscope (Figure 1).

In our lab we everyday use this approach to unravel how Rab proteins are involved in cell migration and in the dynamics of the cytoskeleton. The modern and advanced imaging techniques indeed allow us to study these dynamics in much more detail and higher resolution compared to the past. However, in order to strengthen, confirm or complement the results obtained from experiments performed using cell culture (also called in vitro experiments), we also use an in vivo approach. This means that we study the role of Rab proteins of interest directly in a living organism with the advantage of studying cell behaviour directly in the more complex physiological environment. For our in vivo experiments we use as animal model the tropical freshwater fish Zebrafish.

Since the 1960s, this fish has been used for research purposes (Abedi and McKinley, 1967). Why? First of all, 84% of the genes known to be associated with human diseases have a Zebrafish counterpart (Howe et al., 2013) and, as a vertebrate, Zebrafish has the same major organs and tissues as humans.

Moreover, Zebrafish embryos are transparent, allowing to easily examining the internal structures by microscopy.

Hence, we use Zebrafish to study how the depletion of Rab proteins affects cancer cell migration in vivo after transplantation of the cells in the embryos. We inject fluorescently labelled cancer cells in the otic vesicle as this is a quite easy site to recognize and also it is a relatively confined area where the cells can migrate from. We then track cells 24 and 48 hours after transplantation (Figure 2).

Time 0

24h p.i.

Figure 2.

Left: Cancer cells (in red) were injected in the otic vesicle of Zebrafish embryo.

Right: Migration of cancer cells was measured 24 hours after injection (p. i.). Note the cells that have already started to move outside the injection area (yellow arrows).

Result and Conclusion Our experiments in Zebrafish embryos showed that already 24 hours after injecting cancer cells into the otic vesicle, the lack of a specific Rab protein strongly promoted the egress of cancer cells from the otic vesicle compared to control cells expressing the protein, indicating that this protein may be a tumor suppressor. In the future, we will validate whether this Rab protein is equally important for migration of immune cells.

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Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway In sum, our group is trying to unravel the mechanisms used by cells to move in the body, aiming to understand what specifically contributes to make a cancer cell migrating faster that is not required for physiological migration as, for example, in immune cells. In this way, our long-term goal is to identify specific pathways that can be manipulated to inhibit migration of cancer cells and therefore metastasis.

Acknowledgment The work in our group is supported by Norges ForskningsrĂĽd and Kreftforeningen.

References Abedi, Z.H., and W.P. McKinley. 1967. Bioassay of captan by zebrafish larvae. Nature. 216:1321-1322.

Borg, M., O. Bakke, and C. Progida. 2014. A novel interaction between Rab7b and actomyosin reveals a dual role in intracellular transport and cell migration. J Cell Sci. 127:4927-4939.

Howe, K., M.D. Clark, C.F. Torroja, J. Torrance, C. Berthelot, M. Muffato, J.E. Collins, S. Humphray, K. McLaren, L. Matthews, S. McLaren, I. Sealy, M. Caccamo, C. Churcher, C. Scott, J.C. Barrett, R. Koch, G.J. Rauch, S. White, W. Chow, B. Kilian, L.T. Quintais, J.A. Guerra-Assuncao, Y. Zhou, Y. Gu, J. Yen, J.H. Vogel, T. Eyre, S. Redmond, R. Banerjee, J. Chi, B. Fu, E. Langley, S.F. Maguire, G.K. Laird, D. Lloyd, E. Kenyon, S. Donaldson, H. Sehra, J. AlmeidaKing, J. Loveland, S. Trevanion, M. Jones, M. Quail, D. Willey, A. Hunt, J. Burton, S. Sims, K. McLay, B. Plumb, J. Davis, C. Clee, K. Oliver, R. Clark, C. Riddle, D. Elliot, G. Threadgold, G. Harden, D. Ware, S. Begum, B. Mortimore, G. Kerry, P. Heath, B. Phillimore, A. Tracey, N. Corby, M. Dunn, C. Johnson, J. Wood, S. Clark, S. Pelan, G. Griffiths, M. Smith, R. Glithero, P. Howden, N. Barker, C. Lloyd, C. Stevens, J. Harley, K. Holt, G. Panagiotidis, J. Lovell, H. Beasley, C. Henderson, D. Gordon, K. Auger, D. Wright, J. Collins, C. Raisen, L. Dyer, K. Leung, L. Robertson, K. Ambridge, D. Leongamornlert, S. McGuire, R. Gilderthorp, C. Griffiths, D. Manthravadi, S. Nichol, G. Barker, et al.

2013. The zebrafish reference genome sequence and its relationship to the human genome. Nature. 496:498-503.

Margiotta, A., C. Progida, O. Bakke, and C. Bucci. 2017. Rab7a regulates cell migration through Rac1 and vimentin.

Biochim Biophys Acta. 1864:367-381.

For more information http://www.mn.uio.no/ibv/english/research/sections/fyscell/groups/cell-dynamics-Progida/

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Digital platforms for environmental sustainability: Empirical studies in the Norwegian petroleum sector Elena Parmiggiani Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim

Abstract This short paper presents selected results from my research on the digital transformation that is occurring across the Norwegian oil and gas industry, and its relationship with issues of environmental sustainability. Digital transformation is here used to describe how work is not automated, but deeply transformed by the introduction of digital technologies. Rather than a merely technical issue, this transformation occurs as a network of economic, sociopolitical, technical, and environmental factors in the oil and gas sector. I will discuss this aspect by analyzing one empirical case; the development of realtime systems for monitoring environmental risk during oil and gas offshore operations. My results invite researchers and practitioners working with digital systems for environmental risk assessment to take into better account the way digital representations of the environment are never independent of the material and socio-political conditions of their production.

Introduction This article presents the results of my research in the field of Information Systems, a branch of computer science that elaborates methods and theories to better understand how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are developed and used by individuals or groups in different parts of work and everyday life, from companies, to healthcare, the public sector, and entertainment. We in the Information Systems field like to see ourselves a bit like a bridge between the worlds of industry and research. I belong to a research group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, headed by prof. Eric Monteiro and comprising myself, senior researcher Thomas Østerlie, and PhD student Mina Haghshenas. We are broadly concerned with the study the development and use of distributed information systems in different areas: the oil and gas industry, environmental monitoring research, and healthcare. Our focus aims to shed light on the way modern technological arrangements – under popular banners such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 – are changing rather than replacing human work, and thus the way humans make sense of the world. Here, I will focus on my contribution to one of my group’s studies: the implementation of a digital platform for monitoring environmental risk during oil and gas offshore operations in real time.

The study covers a span of almost six years. It started in early 2012 when I began my PhD at the Department of Computer Science at NTNU (2012-2015) and it constituted the main case study for my research, as part of my collaboration with a large Scandinavian oil company (dubbed “NorthOil” to maintain anonymity). NorthOil has been actively developing a new online infrastructure to monitor the health of the subsea environment (corals, fish, and other marine biomass such as plankton) (Figure 1).

The company and its industrial partners worked on the development of novel algorithms to predict possible risks for the subsea marine resources in real time, especially before and during well drilling.

The aim was to supplement traditional methods of assessing environmental risk only after a pollutant has been identified in the water, with an approach to prevent any harm to marine life. Indeed, the traditional method of assessing environmental risk on the continental shelf is generally offline. Usually, environmental experts from third-party service companies conduct offshore monitoring campaigns every third year. The common practice is to collect samples of the water to measure its pH, of the sediments on the seabed, and of the benthic flora and fauna around an installation. Samples, pictures, and measurements are later taken onshore and analyzed, with temporal gaps of 9-12 months. The parameters for collection vary depending on the availability of detailed guidelines from authorities.

The main environmental resources that the new online platform developed by NorthOil and its partners has been set to monitor are fish species such as Atlantic cod and herring, and cold-water coral reefs, mainly for the following three reasons. The first motivation is commercial: the Norwegian continental shelf is one of the world’s main fishing grounds for cod and herring. The second reason is technical: the 46

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway acoustic sensors used to detect the fish could only detect fish with a swim bladder – an air-filled organ that allows the fish to float. Fish without a bladder, such as mackerel, although commercially relevant, were not visible to the instruments, thus not tracked. The third reason is social: the Norwegian continental shelf is home to the world’s largest population of a cold-water coral species called Lophelia pertusa.

Finally, this study acquired a political flavor. The main area where NorthOil has concentrated its efforts is the seabed off the Lofoten-Vesterålen-Senja region in northern Norway – the only portion of the continental shelf where operations are not allowed by the Norwegian authorities because of the vulnerability of the natural resources, but which constitute an important door to the Arctic. The issue of granting – or not granting – oil and gas companies permission to operate in the area is constantly at the center of heated debates in the Norwegian parliament, and one of the main driver of the coalitions among the bigger and smaller parties (F. M., 2017).

Figure 1. Two mockups of the online approach developed by NorthOil and its partners. Left: The seafloor outside North Norway is divided in squared areas. The risk for each area is estimated to range from high (red) to low (green), based on the amount of fish currently located there (adapted by NorthOil from havmiljø.no). Right: Reproduction of a map of the sea floor and modeling of the spreading of rock particles and other cuttings predicted to be generated during a future drilling activity. The identified coral reefs and the discharges are marked in different colors based on the level of risk (red, orange, yellow, green).

The risk matrix (below) indicates a small probability of severe consequences for coral structure CR-01 close to the drilling point.

As I moved into my current position in 2015 as postdoctoral researcher in the same department, I continue to analyze the data I collected during my PhD to produce different insights and analyses.

Together with my former PhD supervisor and colleague Eric Monteiro, we have developed a conceptual framework to understand the use of digital platform that ensure environmental sustainability within the existing structures of a controversial sector such as the oil and gas industry (see for example Parmiggiani and Monteiro, 2016).

More recently, we have analyzed the link between the technological aspects of development with scientific discussions on the climate change in light of the “Arctic oil rush” (Luhn, 2016). On the one hand, oil and gas companies push technological and social boundaries to extract oil in the Arctic, where an estimated 25% of the remaining unexplored oil is located (Bird et al., 2008), but which is vulnerable to pollution and hosts the richest fishing grounds on the planet. On the other hand, the permanent Arctic ice is melting because of human-induced climate change. This situation has thus provided an unprecedented scenario for understanding how digital innovation is intimately related to measures of assessments of sustainability. Prior to one of the recent licensing rounds where operational blocks were assigned to oil companies in the Barents Sea, the Norwegian government proposed to push northwards the border of the permanent ice in the Norwegian Arctic. The argument was that the ice, now melted, would not hamper human operations (Koranyi, 2015).

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

Method Following one of the traditions in Information Systems, the type of research that I conduct is empirical – or field-based (a field is a site that the researcher considers worth investigating). Findings from this type of research can be used to understand how digital systems can be better and more effectively developed and used. The evidence we collect is qualitative – that is to say, based on non-numeric data such as interviews, documents, images, notes or recordings taken during field observations. By analyzing these data, we abstract patterns and themes that are then developed into either a better insight into a specific empirical problem (in this case, the adoption of digital platforms for sustainable oil and gas operations); or a theoretical framework that explains the phenomena observed (Oates, 2006).

The method I adopted to collect the data for this research is ethnographic (Myers, 1999), an approach that originates in anthropology the researcher ‘immerses’ herself in a reality and spends a considerable amount of time with a selected group of informants. In my case, I obtained access to NorthOil’s research center in Norway. My data consist of observations, interviews, informal conversations, and documentation, occasionally assisted by Eric Monteiro. The primary source is observations. I conducted the fieldwork three days a week on average in the period April 2012–April 2014 and one day a week in the period June 2014–December 2014. The primary setting was an office with five NorthOil employees involved in different environmental monitoring projects, but I also travelled to the headquarters of NorthOil and its partner companies on several occasions to participate in meetings and workshops. In addition, I conducted 38 interviews with environmental experts, IT advisors, and engineers both at NorthOil and at the partner companies. Finally, I was granted access to current and historical internal documentation (e.g., MS SharePoint team sites, Internet-based public information). The data analysis process was conducted in subsequent steps, by confronting the emerging theoretical themes with my colleagues.

On a personal level, the fieldwork activity has been the main motivation for learning Norwegian. Despite having spent one semester as a visiting master student at NTNU in 2010, I did not speak Norwegian when I began my PhD in February 2012. The activities I had to study, however, were conducted only in Norwegian, so I had to learn the language as I was conducting my study. It has been a steep and stressful learning curve which has resulted in hilarious situations – for example, I once sat in a meeting for four hours, listening to a project manager complaining about a certain “dokker” that had not done a proper job. After the meeting, I asked one of my office mate at NorthOil who this “dokker”-person might be.

That was my first, head-first encounter with trøndersk. In general, I must thank my co-supervisor Vidar Hepsø for always taking the time to answer my questions when I did not understand something, and for teaching me that the letter “h” in Norwegian is an important one.

Results and Conclusion One of the contributions of my PhD and postdoc research is a conceptual framework to describe how digital transformation changes and is changed by our perception of what environmental sustainability – and therefore risk – mean. Our conception of environmental risk and the technologies that we use to assess it are always mutually influencing each other: we know only what we can measure, and the more we measure one phenomenon, the more our understanding of it evolves (see also Parmiggiani, 2015).

In general, the results of my PhD work point to one key observation: the representations of the environment that inform decision-making processes are always constructed. This provocative statement aims to underline that baselines – in this case environmental trends – are never neutral. The algorithms which compute them turn nature into ordered ‘facts’ for professional audiences: the models of the environment are neither complete nor accurate but serve purposes related to situated tasks or problem solving (Edwards, 1999), e.g., allowing engineers to answer such questions as “Is it safe to drill here?”

Adding on to this, we find that the data that constitute facts invariably involve the material/technological means by which they are known: what we know is how we know it (Bowker, 2005). This theme is also relevant on the level of national and international forms of governance, which tend to regulate organizational activities by conflating measures of environmental sustainability with the availability of baselines of environmental behavior. For example, the European Union requires to assess the 48

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway environmental impact of new technologies against “the current state of the environment (baseline scenario)” (European Environment Agency, 2015; European Union, 2014). The “baseline” is assumed to be a reliable ‘photograph’ of the state of the environment.

On the contrary, my analysis hopes to raise awareness on what we talk about – or do not talk about – when we talk about the environment, and thus on the definitions of a quantified ‘object’ against which a digital system should be sustainable. Ultimately, we should remember that the process of turning nature – which is undifferentiated and continuous – into discrete facts defines what counts as a baseline environment. This process is guided by both pragmatic (What can be measured?) and political (What is relevant/interesting to measure?) purposes. In the case of projects like the one I study, for instance, due to the reasons I sketched above, corals and some commercial fish species are often at the center of attention, while marine mammals are not considered. On the one hand, only some fish species are measurable, and on the other, the corals make a good impression on the newspapers for the public.

The corollary of this finding is that we, as scientist, should remember that environmental risk assessment practices do not provide an absolute truth about nature, but are meant to turn nature into relevant and meaningful facts for various professional audiences to allow them to answer pragmatic questions about the sustainability of their activities, and to inform government policy. Paying better attention to the way this process evolves in the age of digitalization could therefore enable us to better inform industrial activities and government policies.

To conclude, this topic is, I admit, politically controversial on the light of the recent debates about “fake” or “fabricated” news. As sociologist of science Bruno Latour recently pointed out in a popular interview, however, saying that representations of the environment are constructed does not mean that they are fabricated. Quite the opposite, it is part of long-standing research tradition recognizing that there is no distinction between the social and technical elements of science (de Vrieze et al., 2017).

Acknowledgment My research would not be possible without my ongoing conversations and cooperation with Eric Monteiro. I would also like to thank Thomas Østerlie and Vidar Hepsø for being a constant source of inspiration. My research has been supported by the following projects funded by the Norwegian Research Council: Digital Oil (www.doil.no; #213115), Sirius (www.sirius-labs.no; #237898), and the Center for Integrated Operations in the Petroleum Industry (www.iocenter.no).

References Bird, K. J. et al. (2008). Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal: Estimates of Undiscovered Oil and Gas North of the Arctic Circle. [online]. Available from: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2008/3049/ (Accessed 3 June 2015).

Bowker, G. C. (2005). Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press.

Edwards, P.N. (1999). Global Climate Science, Uncertainty and Politics: Data-laden Models, Model-filtered Data.

Science and Culture, Vol. 8: 437–472.

European Environment Agency (2015). EU 2010 biodiversity baseline — adapted to the MAES typology (2015). [online]. Available from: http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/eu-2010-biodiversity-baseline-revision (Accessed 18 November 2016). [online].

European Union (2014). Directive 2014/52/EU. [online]. Available from: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legalcontent/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32014L0052 (Accessed 13 November 2016). [online].

F. M. (2017). Why Norway may leave $65bn worth of oil in the ground. The Economist. 29 August. [online].

Available from: https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/08/economist-explains-12 (Accessed 28 October 2017).

Koranyi, B. (2015). Norway redefines Arctic ice edge in potential boost for oil exploration. Reuters. 20 January. [online].

Available from: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/20/norway-oil-arcticidUSL6N0UZ0L020150120 (Accessed 6 March 2015).

Luhn, A. (2016). Arctic oil rush: Nenets’ livelihood and habitat at risk from oil spills. The Guardian. 23 December. [online]. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/23/arctic-oil-rush-nenetslivelihood-and-habitat-at-risk-from-oil-spills (Accessed 22 October 2017).

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Myers, M. D. (1999). Investigating information systems with ethnographic research. Communications of the ACM. Vol 2.

Oates, B. J. (2006). Researching Information Systems and Computing. SAGE Publications Ltd. Parmiggiani, E. (2015). Integration by Infrastructuring: The Case of Subsea Environmental Monitoring in Oil and Gas Offshore Operations (PhD Thesis). Trondheim, Norway: NTNU. [online]. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2358470.

Parmiggiani, E. & Monteiro, E. (2016). A measure of ‘environmental happiness’: Infrastructuring environmental risk in oil and gas off shore operations. Science & Technology Studies. Vol 29 (1): 30-51. de Vrieze, J. et al. (2017). Bruno Latour, a veteran of the ‘science wars,’ has a new mission [online]. Available from: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/latour-qa (Accessed 28 October 2017).

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At the roots of scientific risk evaluation: science, philosophy and politics Elena Rocca Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås

Abstract My research is aimed to providing a new foundation for causal evidencing of potential risks for human health, due to exposure to chemicals. I am interested both in exposure to environmental contamination, and to prescription drugs. I am aiming to create an integrative approach of the science, philosophy and politics of scientific risk evaluation.

Main Text In the last decades, technological growth has multiplied the opportunities for economic and cultural expansion. Unfortunately however, such opportunities do not come alone. They are accompanied by knowledge gaps and uncertainties with regard to the potential threats to human health and environmental safety. This represents one of the most pressing challenges of contemporary governance: which of the risks are worth taking? And are we actually fully aware of those risks in the context of decision-making?

Scientific risk assessment has so far been considered a key tool in helping decision—making about the safety and sustainability of human interventions (Jasanoff 2005). The reliance on scientific expertise for this purpose, however, keeps disappointing for several reasons. In the case of new technologies, for instance, the accumulated evidence is too limited and the degree of uncertainty too high for a reliable scientific verdict (Miller & Wickson 2015). Also for established industrial practices, such as oil extraction, evidencing long-term effects of chronic exposure to industrial waste remains a challenge. In Ecuador for instance, where millions of barrels of by-products from oil extractions were dumped for years, researcher struggle with contradictory results about the incidence of long-term sickness such as cancer (O’Callaghan-Gordo et al. 2016). Crucially, even when a reasonable amount of evidence is collected, experts often disagree on the evaluation of the related risk. For instance, it is striking how, in legal cases trying to demonstrate the impacts of industrial waste for environment and human health, scientific equips of opposing parts can argue for opposite risk evaluation starting from the same evidence (Sawyer & Loja 2015; Checker 2007; Brandmayr 2017). Another remarkable example is the scientific controversy about the evidence needed to document the safe use of genetically modified crops in agriculture.

Scientists disagree on the question whether the evidence required from the producer is adequate and sufficient to guarantee safe use. Interestingly, for the last 20 years this discrepancy has not been accommodated by the production of new evidence. New findings are hardly ever followed by a rediscussion of the premises, rather by methodological criticism (statistical power, conditions, type of experimental model etc) or accusations of irrelevance and inconclusiveness (for instance compare Ricroch et al. 2010 and Bøhn et al. 2012).

The problem of evidencing potential harm from environmental contamination is thus not mainly an empirical or scientific one. Risk assessment is not merely a matter of measurements and methodology.

And, yet, the role of social dynamics, value judgements, basic philosophical assumptions, and the way in which they relate to each other, are not subject to public or governmental scrutiny (Hartley et al.

2016; Wickson & Wynne 2012). Addressing this blind spot is the task of my research.

With my work, I am trying to show that this problem is only a symptom of two deeper difficulties in current thinking. The first difficulty is acknowledging and accepting that there is not such a thing as ‘value-free science’. We need to understand the role of socio-political structures and dynamics in shaping scientific results. I am not alone in this view. On the contrary, it is becoming increasingly evident that extra-scientific values can (or even should) enter the internal processes of science, and that all scientific enquiries, whether rigorous or biased, are value-laden (Douglas 2000; Longino 1990). In the light of these ideas, what is then the ‘best available evidence’ from science, and how should it be pursued?

51

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway The second difficulty concerns basic assumptions of a philosophical nature: how to evidence causation in cases of complexity and variation. There is an emerging concern, started in but not limited to medicine, about the philosophical foundation of evidence-based methodologies (Anjum & Mumford 2016; Cartwright & Munro 2010; Cartwright & Hardie 2012). The predominance of quantitative data, idealised models and causal isolation has been questioned, and also how results from such studies can be used to evidence potential risk over a variety of heterogeneous contexts. Official agencies and researchers recognise the need for better frameworks for risk assessment, especially when the potential harm concerns complex systems such as health and ecological resources (e.g. U.S. EPA 1997; 2003; 2007; Meek et al. 2011 (WHO)). Cumulative Risk Assessment, which emphasises risk as a complex, cumulative matter, has been suggested as one such competing frameworks to the standard approach (Gallagher 2015). At the Center for Applied Philosophy of Science, we propose that this methodological crisis cannot be solved without a systematic philosophical renewal, starting from a study of the basic assumptions that are tacitly motivating risk assessment methodologies, including the notions of causation, probability and complexity.

In order to respond to these difficulties, I have so far moved in three directions.

Together with Fredrik Andersen, we are analyzing a number of scientific disagreements about the safety of agricultural biotechnology. Our hypothesis is that such disagreements are not rooted in physical evidence (which is the same for both parts), but in dissenting basic intuitions about nature. By analyzing scientific hypotheses and argumentations from both positions, we identify such dissenting intuitions, or background assumptions, and we propose that the real disagreement resides at this level. We suggest that, in order to have a constructive debate, the deeper level of disagreement should be made explicit and subject to public scrutiny (Rocca & Andersen 2017).

Together with Rani Anjum, we are analyzing the different theories of causation underlying different risk assessment methodologies, and we propose that a genuine improvement of risk evidencing in complex system must start by choosing the most appropriate theory of causation, and then move to the methodological choice consistently (Rocca et al forthcoming). In a future project, we would like to apply Anjum’s innovative theory of causation to risk assessment methodologies.

Finally, I am looking at the social dynamics of the scientific community, and at how it can hinder or favor the prompt discovery of potential harm from a chemical exposure. For this, I look in particular at risk assessment of prescription drugs’ undesired effects. The issue in this case is that, while the best chance to discover secondary drugs effects is in the messy reality of clinical life, this type of evidence is generally met with skepticism because of its high degree of uncertainty. The result is a delayed process in which an initial signal of harm takes decades to be recognized as significant. My theory is that, in order to speed up the process, clinicians and researchers should work as a unified community, rather than as two separated groups. Indeed, the discovery of a potential secondary effect of a drug should not be seen as important only for the immediate improvement of clinical care. On the contrary, it has the potential of improving the general scientific understanding about the mechanism of the drug’s action (Rocca 2017).

Acknowledgment My research is funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

References Anjum & Mumford (2016) A philosophical argument against evidence-based policy, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice Bøhn T, Primicerio R, Traavik T (2012). The German ban on GM maize MON810: scientifically justified or unjustified? Environmental Science Europe;24(1):22.

Brandmayr (2017) How social scientists make causal claims in court, Science, Technology & Human Values, 42: 346-80 Cartwright & Hardie (2012) Evidence-based Policy, Oxford UP.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Cartwright & Munro (2010) The limitations of RCTs in Predicting Effectiveness, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 16: 260-6 Checker (2007) “But I know it’s true”: environmental risk assessment, justice, and anthropology, Human Organization, 66: 112-124 Douglas (2000) Inductive risk and values in science, Philosophy of Science, 67: 559-79 Gallagher et al. (2015) Cumulative risk assessment lessons learned, Chemosphere, 120: 697-705 Hartley et al. (2016) Essential features of responsible governance of agricultural biotechnology. PLoSBio 14: e1002453 Jasanoff (2005) Designs on nature: Science and democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton University Press Meek et al. (2011) Risk assessment of combined exposure to multiple chemicals. Regul Toxicol Pharmacol, 60: S114 Miller & Wickson (2015) Risk analysis of nanomaterials, Review of Policy Research, 32: 485-512 Longino (1990) Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton UP O’Callaghan-Gordo et al. (2016) Health effects of non occupational exposure to oil extraction. Environmental Health, 15: 56 Ricroch A, Bergé JB, Kuntz M (2010). Is the German ggsuspension of MON810 maize cultivation scientifically justified? Transgenic Research;19(1):1–12.

Rocca, E. (2017) Bridging the Boundaries between Scientists and Clinicians - Mechanistic Hypotheses and Patient Stories in Risk Assessment of Drugs. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 23, 114-120.

Rocca, E., Anjum, R.L., Mumford, S. Causal Insights for Failure. Post-Marketing Risk Assessment of Drugs as a Way to Uncover Causal Mechanisms. Forthcoming in: La Caze, Adam and Osimani, Barbara (eds) "Uncertainty in Pharmacology: Epistemology, Methods and Decisions" Boston Series for the History and Philosophy of Science, Springer.

Rocca, E., Andersen, F. (2017). How biological background assumptions influence scientific risk evaluation of stacked genetically modified plants: an analysis of research hypotheses andargumentations. Life Sciences, Society and Policy; DOI 10.1186/s40504-017-0057-7.

Sawyer & Loja (2015) Crude contamination: law, science, and indeterminacy in Ecuador and beyond, Subterannean Estates: 126-46 U.S. EPA (1997) Guidance on Cumulative Risk Assessment, Science Policy Council U.S. EPA (2003) Framework for Cumulative Risk Assessment, Risk Assessment Forum, Office of Research and Development U.S. EPA (2007) Concepts, Methods and Data Sources for Cumulative Health Risk Assessment of Multiple Chemicals, Exposures and Effects, National Center for Environ. Assessment.

Wickson & Wynne (2012) Ethics of science for policy in the environmental governance of biotechnology, Ethics, Policy & Environment, 15: 321-40

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Investigating loanwords and native words in old and middle Icelandic Matteo Tarsi University of Iceland, Reykjavík

Abstract The present paper gives an overview of the actual state of my Ph. D. research on the coexistence and competition of loanwords and endogenous words in Old and Middle Icelandic. After a brief introduction, an insight is given on the researched texts as well as research aims, questions, and methodology.

Subsequently, the dynamics of the researched phenomenon are discussed in a separate section, where they are contextualized according to the present state of the research.

Introduction The Icelandic language is usually looked at as archaizing, not least from a lexicological standpoint (for an overview on the morphological archaizing aspect of Icelandic see Kjartan G. Ottósson 1987). In fact, current linguistic policy dictates that loanwords should be avoided in favor of native words, viz. words consisting of native lexical material, be they new words (neologisms, e.g. tölva ‘computer’, structural calques, e.g. málvísindii ‘linguistics’, cf. Dan. sprogvidenskab and Ger. Sprachwissenschaft), or previously existing words, which are subsequently given new semantic hues according to the needs of the speakers. This latter case comprises both the so-called semantic calques, but also loans from Old Icelandic (e.g. sími ‘telephone’ < OIcel. ‘thread’). This policy is however often misunderstood outside Iceland to the extent that Icelandic is sometimes believed to be a language free from loanwords. On the contrary, loanwords, both ancient and recent, are actually present and widely used in the language, and their use often distinguishes informal, colloquial, everyday language from formal or written language, or again older from younger speakers. This is particularly true for recent loanwords (e.g. apótek (< Dan. apotek, informal/spoken language) vs. lyfjabúð (formal/written language), altan (< Dan. altan, older speakers) vs. svalir ‘balcony’ (younger speakers, current Iceandic), see furthermore Ari Páll Kristinsson and Hilmarsson-Dunn 2015) The aim of the present essay is to present the core and actual state of my Ph. D. project in Icelandic Linguistics at the University of Iceland. The project’s main objective is to answer the following question: How are loanwords and native words used in Icelandic prior to the advent of Icelandic purism, i.e. before ca. 1600?3 The object of this study are thus word couples formed by loanword and respective native equivalent (e.g. , angist - ótti ‘fear’, kápa - feldr ‘cape’, prestr - kennimaðr ‘priest’, tesaurr - fjárhlutr ‘treasure’ etc.).

Corpus and Methodology As the aim of the project under discussion here is to thoroughly investigate the interplay between loanwords and native words in Icelandic prior to ca. 1600, it is of uttermost importance to examine the phenomenon in a corpus of texts, which are representative for the literary production of the period under research. Thus the need of choosing a good number of texts for each of the literary genres present in the researched period. The corpus is explained in Table 1.

Poetry has been excluded for it is usually treated separately in Icelandic linguistic scholarship, its investigation requiring a set of different analytic tools (e.g. metrics), and for which a separate study is desirable. Moreover, it has been decided to include in the corpus the Icelandic translation of the New Testament (1540), which technically pertains to the earliest stage of Modern Icelandic. Its inclusion in the corpus is due to the fact that it constitutes an unavoidable milestone in the Icelandic religious

3

For an overview of the history of Icelandic purism see Kjartan G. Ottósson 1990.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway literature of the first half of the sixteenth century and thus an interesting term of comparison in the analysis of the phenomenon under discussion.

Table 1. Corpus

RELIGIOUS TEXTS

Icelandic Homily Book, Elucidarius, Stjórn I, New Testament (1540)

LAW TEXTS AND DIPLOMATA Grágás, Jónsbók, Icelandic diplomata (from Islandske originaldiplomer indtil 1450) TREATISES

Icelandic grammatical treatises (I–IV), Physiologus, Algorismus,

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TEXTS

Íslendingabók, Veraldar saga, Kristni saga

BISHOPS' SAGAS AND OTHER Hungrvaka, Þorláks saga helga, Laurentius saga byskups, exempla translated from HAGIOGRAPHICAL TEXTS Middle English, Transitus Mariæ, exempla from Reykjahólabók (translated from Middle Low German) SAGAS OF THE ICELANDERS

Egils saga, Gísla saga, Grettis saga, Víglundar saga, Fljótsdæla saga

KINGS' SAGAS

Sverris saga, Óláfs saga helga (Heimskr.), Knýtlinga saga

CHIVALRIC SAGAS

Alexanders saga, Karlamagnúss saga, Þiðreks saga af Bern, Sigurðar saga þögla, Dínus saga drambláta

LEGENDARY SAGAS

Völsunga saga, Ásmundar saga kappabana, Hrólfs saga kraka, Hjálmþés saga ok Ölvis

The project is carried out following a threefold line of research: 





1) With reference to texts and manuscripts: ◦

1a) Intertypological analysis: to investigate whether different text typologies reflect the (prevailing) use either of loanwords or of endogenous words, when these form an isosemantic or quasi-isosemantic couple in the lexicon.

◦

1b) Intrastemmatic analysis: to investigate whether different witnesses of a given text differ in the use of loanwords and native words, these being an isosemantic or quasi-isosemantic couple.

2) Typological analysis: ◦

2a) To classify single word couples according to their lexical typology, e.g. technical terminology, geographic names etc.

◦

2b) To classify the native words according to their typology with reference to Betz’s (1959) model (semantic calque, structural calque, neoformation), and possibly to identify the foreign source of semantic and structural calques.

3) Etymology/Word history ◦

3a) To investigate and possibly correct, when appropriate, older etymologies of loanwords (as done e.g. in Tarsi 2016a).

◦

3b) To determine whether a given native word has been created after the corresponding loanword had entered the lexicon, or vice versa, i.e. whether the native word existed before

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway the acquisition of the loanword (with reference to Halldór Halldórsson 1964 and Gusmani 1981 and 1983).

The originality of the project resides in the fact that little, if anything, has been so far said about the prehistory of Icelandic lexical purism, viz. the lexical tendencies which evolved during the history of literary production in the vernacular in Iceland, being the present project a study of the actual state of the interplay between loanwords and native words in the period preceding the beginning of Icelandic purism, i.e. before the coexistence and competition of loanwords and native words was given politicoideological hues.

Partial Results To the present day, data has been elicited from Religious Texts, Sagas of the Icelanders, and some other texts pertaining to different literary genres (Grágás, Íslendingabók, Transitus Mariæ, Grammatical Treatises I-III). Data analysis and thesis writing have been moreover carried out for the Religious Texts and partially for the Sagas of the Icelanders. In addition, the partial results reached so far have already been divulged as four conference papers (one in 2015, two in 2016, and one more in 2017) and two articles (Tarsi 2016b and forthcoming). As data elicitation and analysis are still currently ongoing, it is only possible to illustrate the general tendencies of the researched phenomenon in the Religious Texts.

The Religious Texts, whose period of composition ranges from the late twelfth century to 1540, comprise what is most probably the highest number of word couples in a given literary genre (96). The dynamics of this phenomenon in the literary genre under discussion are composite. First of all, there is the simple loanword/native word alternation, which consists of the use of either loanword or native word in a given text as such, i.e. not in a given place in a text with reference to other manuscript witnesses. Such lexical variation is the most common, as it is evenly present in all the surveyed texts and it is moreover not tied to any specific semantic field. In addition to the simplest manifestation of the phenomenon under discussion there appear other ways in which the researched phenomenon makes its appearance. In the Religious Texts, these are in-text translations, dittologies, and special uses of Latin integral borrowings.

In-text translations are those cases in which a loanword is followed by an explicative clause (e.g. þat er ‘that is’ and similar) which introduces the native term. The specular case is also possible however rare, as it occurs only once in the surveyed texts, namely in the case of Hierusalem - Jórsalaborg ‘Jerusalem’ in the Elucidarius.

A dittology is defined as a figure of speech in which two words of similar or identical semantic content are linked by the coordinative conjunction and (Icel. og, OIcel. ok) or the disgiuntive/explanatory conjunction or (Icel. eða, eð(u)r) in order to convey a certain meaning by reaching a particular stylistic reinforcing, yet pleonastic, effect. Dittologies are distinct from hendiadys, which, however structured in a similar fashion, are constituted of words, which can be semantically related but are usually not synonyms, or are used in place of a compound word of which they are the constituents. Dittologies have previously also been referred to as tautologies in relevant literature (e.g. in Astås 1987, 33-34). The term dittology is however preferable because it better circumscribes the structure and uses of such figure of speech. As this stylistic device is overwhelmingly present in Stjórn I, it is clear that it is to be put in relation with the style of that work, namely the so-called “florissant” style.

Latin integral borrowings appear widely in the surveyed religious texts. Geographic names (Apulea, Danubius, Ethiopia, etc.), terms which form dittologies with their respective endogenous equivalents (antipes, apokalipsis, formica, etc.), and moreover Latin words which are used independently in the text (decanus, exemplum, oleum) should be disregarded, as they constitute per se different categories. A 56

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway small number of Latin integral borrowings is however most often used as scribal abbreviations and thus constitutes a special case in the light of the present analysis. These abbreviations may be used independently in the text, or as further designations of given characters (e.g. evangelista, propheta). In the case of discipulus and magister in the Elucidarius instead, these two abbreviated terms serve a precise textual function, namely that of marking the lines by the disciple or the master in the text.

Following the suggestion by Hreinn Benediktsson (1965, 94), it can thus be claimed that these words were not meant to be read in Latin, but rather constituted a means of optimization of the use of parchment, as they in most cases occur very frequently. The Latin words, viz. scribal abbreviations, which happen to fall in the scope of the present research are however far from being the only ones interested by this phenomenon. In addition to these it should also be mentioned that one of the nomina sacra par excellence, i.e. that of Jesus Christ, mostly occurs in abbreviated form, this being the Latin ihs, the Greek xpc, or the endogenous Icelandic cſtr, and related, as well as declined forms.

Finally, geographic names deserve special mention, for they constitute a particular lexical category.

Their existence, and thus their meaning, is exclusively related to the existence of a given geographic entity, be it a human settlement, a river, a mountain, etc. The creation of geographic names may thus be regarded as following a process, which is in part removed from that of nouns or verbs. However, what brings together geographic names and other lexical borrowings is that they also obey to the general principles of phonological resemblance, particularly when adapted from a foreign language, and motivation, in particular with reference to their creation. Motivation is thus to be seen here as that principle by which a geographic name acquires its designation in relation to something meaningful in the language in which it arises, and this may also include paretymological processes as well as structural calques. Geographic names appear in the surveyed texts mostly as in-text translations, where the Latinate name is followed by its endogenous counterpart by means of an explicative sentence. In one case, that of HIERUSALEM – JÓRSALABORG (Elucidarius), the Latin name seems to have been most commonly known, as the in-text translation in which the two toponyms appear follows an opposite scheme, namely ENDOGENOUS WORD + LOANWORD. An independent use of the Latin and the endogenous term is then appreciable in SCITHIA – MIKLA SVÍÞJÓÐ (Stjórn I) and OLIVETI (FJALL) – VIÐSMJÖRSVIÐARFJALL (New Testament). With regard to the endogenous renderings of geographic names in the surveyed texts, it is worth noting that, with the sole exception of OLIVETI (FJALL) – VIÐSMJÖRSVIÐARFJALL which is a structural calque, all the encountered geographic names are endogenous neoformations, be they adaptations of the foreign name, as e.g. Gyðingaland or Púll, paretymological formations, as e.g. Jórsalaborg, viz. Jórsalir, or fully endogenous neoformation, i.e. with no overt foreign model (e.g. Miklagarðr, Mikla Svíþjóð).

Conclusion The dynamics which underlie the researched phenomenon are still to be fully understood. The importance of the present research resides in the fact that little has previously be said about how loanwords and endogenous words coexisted and competed in the Icelandic lexicon prior to the advent of lexical purism. As the core aim of the present research is to unveil the nature of this phenomenon in the pre-puristic period, this study constitutes an asset in current research in the field of the history of the Icelandic language. Moreover, as the phenomenon under research is by no means tied exclusively to Icelandic, the present research might also constitute an interesting point of departure for future research in the field of historical lexicology and language policy studies.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank here the members of my Doctoral Committee, Prof. Jón Axel Harðarson (University of Iceland), Prof. Veturliði Óskarsson (Uppsala University), and Prof. Ari Páll Kristinsson (The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies), for their support and expertise.

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References Ari Páll Kristinsson and Amanda Hilmarsson-Dunn. (2015). Implications of language contact: Evaluating the appropriateness of borrowings in written Icelandic. In Hilpert, Martin et al. (eds.), New Trends in Nordic and General Linguistics (pp. 55-67). Linguæ et Litteræ 42. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Astås, Reidar. (1987). Lærd stil, høvisk stil og florissant stil i norrøn prosa. Maal og minne, 1987 (1–2): 24–38.

Betz, Werner. (1959). Lehnwörter und Lehnprägungen im Vor- und Frühdeutschen. In Maurer, Friedrich und Friedrich Stroh (Hrsgg.), Deutsche Wortgeschichte, Bd. 1 (pp. 127-147). Berlin: de Gruyter.

Gusmani, Roberto. (1981-1983). Saggi sull’interferenza linguistica. Firenze: Le Lettere.

Halldór Halldórsson. (1964). Nýgervingar í fornmáli. In: Halldór Halldórsson (ritstj.), Þættir um íslenzkt mál (pp.

110-33). Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið.

Hreinn Benediktsson. (1965). Early Icelandic Script. Reykjavík: Manuscript Institute of Iceland.

Kjartan G. Ottósson. (1987). An archaizing aspect of Icelandic purism: The revival of extinct morphological patterns.

In Pirkko, Lilius and Mirja Saari (eds.), The Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics 6: Proceedings of the sixth international conference of Nordic and general linguistics in Helsinki, August 18-22, 1986 (pp. 311-324). Helsinki: Helsinki University Press.

Kjartan G. Ottósson. (1990). Íslensk málhreinsun: sögulegt yfirlit. Rit Íslenskrar málnefndar ; 6. Reykjavík : Íslensk málnefnd.

Tarsi, Matteo. (2016a). On the origin of the oldest borrowed Christian terminology in Icelandic. Orð og tunga, 18: 85‒101.

Tarsi, Matteo. (2016b). Af erlendum orðum og innlendum: Um rannsókn á orðaforða fyrri alda. Mímir, 52: 129‒ 150.

Tarsi, Matteo. (forthcoming). Alle origini del purismo islandese: Il caso dei testi religiosi. In: Rosselli-Del Turco, Roberto (ed.), Atti del XVIII Seminario Avanzato di Filologia Germanica (Università di Torino). Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.

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Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

PART 2 STORIES AND IDEAS OF ITALIAN RESEARCHERS

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

Geoscience research in a Norwegian centre of excellence Sara Callegaro and Valentina Magni The Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics, Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo

CEED – A Norwegian Centre of Excellence As a righteously renowned Norwegian Center of Excellence, the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) surprises its newcomers with informal attitude and jovial vibe, but also with some welldeserved pride. In fact, we both started this new job as post-doctoral fellows at CEED at the beginning of March 2016, when the Centre celebrated its third birthday. Being welcomed with a lavish dinner and a series of seminar talks from several big names in the geological community, all in an outstanding location – the Norwegian Academy of Science, can be intimidating and thrilling at the same time.

Where are we?

None of us was aware of what it means to be part of a centre of excellence. It means you have to shine, but it also means you can do things your way. It means you have to be yourself, but it also means you have to blend in. Or else, you are “kindly requested” to do all these things. Because despite the international working environment (ca. 70% or the employees are actually non-norwegians) we are still in Norway. We were hired by CEED on three-year contracts after submitting our own projects for a massive call advertised in 2015, at the aim of finding 5 post-docs before the end of the year. To our ears, it sounded like unprecedented wealth: as far as we know, projects of this scale are not funded by the Italian government. Norway instead turns out to be willing to bet a considerable amount of kroner on a scientific task force to organize their research in centres (called Centres of Excellence) in order to reach ambitious scientific goals. Of course, the research should be innovative and have major potential to generate ground-breaking results that advance the international research frontier. Each year, the Research Council of Norway distributes roughly nine billion NOK to research and innovation activities.

As of today, the Norwegian government funded 43 Centres of Excellence since 2013, with variable budgets, CEED for example was funded 155 millions NOK (Forskningsrådet, 2018). You might think about these numbers next time you unwillingly pay that unreasonable amount of money for a beer, because taxes are of course paying for Centre of Excellence. The University of Oslo has 10 Centres of Excellence active at the moment and 5 that will start in 2018. The research topics of these centres are very diverse and they span from biomedicine to social studies, from mental health disorders to planetary science, from evolutionary biology to musicology. And of course there is CEED, the centre where we work. The idea of bringing together few but outstandingly good geologists and geophysicists to clarify the dynamics of the Earth system, from its interior to the biosphere, was at the base of Trond H. Torsvik’s project, kick-started in 2013. The Centre is structured in six teams, all containing the word “Earth”, to symbolize a unity of goal linking the teams, throughout the different approaches applied and topics addressed. The Deep Earth team studies mantle minerals and the structure of our planet using mineral physics and seismology. Dynamic Earth studies plate motions, history, and deformation through geological, geophysical and numerical methods. Earth Laboratory uses paleomagnetic data to reconstruct the position of continents in the past. Earth Modelling investigates the dynamics of the Earth’s mantle and crust with a numerical approach. Earth Crises studies the links between plate motions, volcanism, environmental changes and mass extinctions. Earth and Beyond looks into the differences and similarities between Earth and other planet of the Solar System.

Time, as always, is an issue: some of the Centres’ promises must be maintained in 5 years, so that additional 5 years can be sponsored. Turns out that in its first 5 years CEED was way more successful than expected, granting the next half of the centre’s journey. Of course, this is also good news for the second half of our adventure at CEED. The differences with a regular academic post-doc are not many, in reality, although a certain broader independence seems to be the rule and the almost total lack of teaching obligations allows to focus entirely on research. The fact that the centre is so well funded means that it is fairly easy to pay for sample analyses at expensive cutting-edge facilities and attend 60

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway conferences that are relevant for our research. It also means that very often, at least once a week during the semesters, we have international scientists from other institutions around the world visiting CEED to give seminars and discuss research with us and our colleagues. Post-docs and PhD students are encouraged to invite scientists that work on topics related to their projects, which is scientifically both very useful and inspiring.

Our projects at CEED Valentina Magni - Modelling plate tectonics It all started with the ‘Ring of Fire’. The incredibly large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occurring all around the Pacific Ocean has always fascinated me. The Pacific Ocean is surrounded by subduction zones, which are areas where a tectonic plate moves under another and sinks into the Earth’s mantle. Direct consequences of subduction are not only the presence of volcanoes and the occurrence of earthquakes, but also the formation of mountain belts, the movement of the plates and the opening of new oceans (Uyeda, 1981). In other words, subduction, and more generally plate tectonics, is shaping our planet and it has been doing so for more than 3 billion years. Knowing how subduction works is key to understand how all natural processes related to it work as well. This is what my research is about.

Figure 1. Schematic cartoon that shows the main processes related to subdcution. Water released from the slab triggers mantle melting. This melt rises towards the surface, interacts with the overriding plate, and eventually forms a volcanic arc.

At the interface between the plates most of the earthquakes, represented by the yellow stars, happen. Beyond the arc, the overriding plate can get very thin, causing the mantle to rise up, melt, and form new oceanic crust.

For the past eight years I studied different aspects of subduction. First in Rome, at University of Roma Tre, where I focused on how the margins between two plates migrate and how continental collision can evolve in different types of mountain belts. Then, at Durham University (UK), I looked into how the water released from the subducting plate triggers and affects the volcanism at the surface both at present and in the geologic past, when the mantle was hotter. Now, at CEED, I am working on a project that aims at studying the formation of new oceanic crust in subduction zones. There are many places on Earth where this is happening right now and yet we know little about it; new crust is not only produced at mid-ocean ridges (those big fractures that run through the oceans where mantle material is rising and reaches the surface), but also, at a much smaller scale, in the upper plates of subduction zones in places called backarc basins. The Tyrrhenian Sea, in Italy, for instance, did not even exist until about 10 Myrs ago. It opened up because the slab (i.e., the part of the subducting plate that sinks into the mantle) that is now below Southern Italy migrated from the Southern coasts of Spain and France to its actual position [(Magni et al., 2014). In doing so, it stretched the upper plate so much that the mantle below the crust was able to rise close to the surface and create brand new oceanic crust (Faccenna et al., 2001).

The way the mantle flows below the surface and around the slab has major consequences on the composition of the new crust and the type of volcanism in the Aeolian islands and other submarine volcanoes. However, this is still poorly known mostly because we cannot directly observe it since the time scale of these geological processes is much larger than the ‘human timescale’. For our studies we 61

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway then have to rely on indirect tools, such as numerical models. I use numerical codes to simulate the evolution of subduction zones in three dimensions. I run models that are essentially fluid dynamics models, as at the geological time scale we can consider the mantle like a very viscous fluid. These models use temperature, viscosity and density variations within the system and its complex geometry to compute the evolution of the mantle flow and the movements of the plates. By testing different setups and parameters we can hopefully have a better understanding of how subduction evolves and how the mantle flows below the crust.

Sara Callegaro – Volcanoes, climate change and extinctions: what is the link?

Before starting my fellowship at CEED, my task at the University of Padova was to study volcanic rocks from the past, and understand the processes that led to and accompanied their emplacement. That means, understanding what happened to these rocks all along their voyage from their mantle source (the deep origin of basaltic melts, in the Earth’s mantle) to the surface, where these eruptions changed the composition of the atmosphere by releasing enormous amounts of greenhouse and toxic gases – the same CO2, NOx, SO2 and CFC of which we are worried nowadays.

My research was focused in particular on the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, an enormous event that saw the Pangaea supercontinent punctuated by sudden and widespread volcanic activity right before its breakup, some 200 million years ago. Now, at CEED, I extended my investigations to another magmatic province, the Siberian Traps, emplaced over Siberia some 250 million years ago. What do these magmatic provinces have in common? Turns out, from paleontological studies, that both of them were coeval with global biotic crises, during which a high percentage of animal and plant species on land and sea went extinct. This temporal connection between magmatism and mass extinctions appears not to be a coincidence, since it happened several more times in the Earth’s history – at least 5 times in the last 500 million years - the Phanerozoic eon (Wignall, 2001). However, it is difficult to prove what was the killing mechanism.

Figure 2. Schematic cartoon showing the sources and processes that lead to the release of large amounts of gases during volcanism. Volatiles are released directly from the mantle through magmatism, but an important fraction is released following intrusion of sills in sedimentary sequences (particularly shales, limestones and evaporites). The magma constituting the sills transfers heat to the country rocks, releasing volatiles by thermal metamorphism.

Gases are transferred to the atmosphere along fractures or through explosive pipes.

My analyses and calculations are devoted to quantify the amount of gases released by these magmatic episodes, and this is done by understanding the proportion between gases that are still entrained in volcanic rocks and crystals, and those that escaped to the atmosphere (Callegaro et al., 2014). Another process that leads to gas production by magmatism is the heating of volatile-rich sediments by intrusive rocks, in particular by sills, sheet-shaped magmatic bodies emplaced within crustal rocks, following and exploiting their layering and discontinuities (Svensen et al., 2009). Observing, describing and analyzing core samples from deep boreholes cutting through the Siberian Traps sills allows us to touch with our 62

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway hands what happened when the magma came in contact with the sediments, vaporizing the volatile components in them. Greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide were released, but also ozone-disruptive compounds called methyl-halides. These are similar to the infamous anthropogenic chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), gases released into the atmosphere since the XX century from airconditioning, refrigeration and propellants in aerosol cans, probably responsible for the ozone hole in the Southern Hemisphere. Quantifying the amount of gases released to the atmosphere serves as an important starting point and benchmarking for atmospheric scientists that numerically model the climate response. Such studies are certainly useful to clarify what happened in the past, but perhaps their most intriguing implication is that they might help understanding what can happen in the future if mankind keeps loading the atmosphere with gaseous pollution. In other words, they may serve as stark warnings.

References Callegaro, S., Baker, D.R., DeMin, A., Marzoli, A., Geraki, K., Nestola, F., Viti, C. (2014). Microanalyses link sulfur from large igneous provinces and Mesozoic mass extinctions. Geology 42, 895–898 Faccenna, C., Becker, T.W., Lucente, F.P., Jolivet, L., Rossetti, F. (2001). History of subduction and back-arc extension in the central Mediterranean. Geophysical Journal International 145, 809–820.

Forskningsrådet, (2018). https://www.forskningsradet.no/prosjektbanken/#/explore/statistics/Kilde=FORISS&chart=bar&calcType=fundin g&Sprak=no&sortBy=date&sortOrder=desc&Organisasjon.3=UNIVERSITETET%20I%20OSLO&Organisasjon.5=Cen tre%20for%20Earth%20Evolution%20and%20Dynamics%20(CEED) Magni, V., Faccenna, C., van Hunen, J., Funiciello, F. (2014). How collision triggers backarc extension: Insight into Mediterranean style of extension from 3-D numerical models. Geology 42(6), 511–514.

Svensen, H., Planke, S., Polozov, A.G., Schmidbauer, N., Corfu, F., Podladchikov, Y.Y., Jamtveit, B. (2009). Siberian gas venting and the end-Permian environmental crisis. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 277, 490–500.

Uyeda, S. (1981). Subduction zones and back arc basins - A review. Geologische Rundschau 70 (2), 552-569.

Wignall, P.B. (2001) Large igneous provinces and mass extinctions. Earth-Science Reviews, 53, 1–33.

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CasaPound Italia Elisabetta Cassina Wolff Centre for Research on Extremism– C-REX, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Oslo

Abstract Political radicalism as a challenge to liberal democratic principles, methods and institutions has been a growing phenomenon in Italy over the last ten years. The Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) by Beppe Grillo is openly promoting online direct/plebiscite democracy and verbally expressing contempt for the existing system. The party Lega Nord (LN), under the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, has definitively abandoned its regionalist stance and has lately focused on anti-immigration, xenophobic and openly racist political propaganda. The post-fascist party Fratelli d’Italia-Alleanza Nazionale (Fd’I-AN) defends a national-conservative political line, but does not hide, as evidenced in its logo, historical and ideological links to the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI: 1946-1995). While we have considerable literature on the above-mentioned parties4, which all have a place in parliament, academia is paying less attention to the movements outside of parliament and political organizations that are present in the public debate with clearly radically positioned arguments and propositions.

My research focuses on themes and political ideas belonging to CasaPound Italia (CPI) as specific Italian national radical movement and party. The recent relative political success of CPI gives the opportunity to further explore the ideological origins of this party. While existing research insists on the intervention of external factors such as the economic crisis of 2008 in order to explain a new ‘wave’ of right-wing radicalism in Italy5, I intend to follow the constant evolving of right-wing radical discourse over a longer historical period. The analysis delves mainly into the ideological and political connections between CPI leader Gianluca Iannone and three previous and/or contemporary leading exponents of the Italian and European radical right: Pino Rauti, Roberto Fiore and Gabriele Adinolfi. Through a narrative style, I argues that their experiences represent indeed the roots and sources for Iannone’s project with CPI. My work aims to be a contribution to the ongoing debate among scholars concerning the question of whether recently formed radical/extremist/neo-fascist parties represent a new phenomenon and a breach with the fascist tradition or whether they remain close to a fascist ideological core. The analysis casts doubt on the ideological transformation of ‘new’ parties, taking CPI as study case, and instead emphasizes the continuity of fascist and neo-fascist topics and interpretations from the post-war period to the present. My analysis aims at examining the patterns of continuity in Italian and European rightwing radicalism using a historical approach and qualitative analysis. Hence, it aims at giving complementary knowledge to quantitative studies on right-wing terrorism and extremism coming from the fields of sociology and political science.

Method With regards to method and sources, my work uses a historical-qualitative approach to examine patterns of continuity and/or discontinuity within the radical/extreme right. The historical exploration gives priority to the qualitative reading and interpreting of written texts according to a hermeneutic approach typical of the humanities. Moreover, special attention is reserved to biographical data that

4

The work edited by Filippo Tronconi on M5S is the most comprehensive on the subject: Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement.

Organization, Communication and Ideology (2015). Farnham: Ashgate. On Lega Nord there is an immense literature that deals with both radical and populist features of this ever changing party. See for example the works by Anna Cento Bull and Daniele Albertazzi. On Movimento Sociale Italiano see the works by Piero Ignazi (1998), Alessandro Tarchi (1995), Giuseppe Parlato (2006) and Elisabetta Cassina Wolff (2012).

5 See the works by Daniele di Nunzio and Emanuele Toscano (2011), Piero Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio (2014), Maddalena Gretel Cammelli (2015).

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Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway contribute to shed light not only on the individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role, but also on the connections, national and transnational, between individuals, groups and parties.

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Geomatics for nature research and the data reovlution Matteo De Stefano Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Trondheim

Abstract This document describes my experiences as a geomatics engineer at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA). What is geomatics about? How it can be applied to Natural Sciences and many other disciplines? With some examples and study cases, I will try to answer to such questions, depicting the potential, the challenges and the usefulness of the wide universe of geomatics techniques and facets, such as: GIS, remote sensing, GPS, web maps and international standards for geospatial data and metadata management. I will describe also how the work shifted slowly from spot support activities to major reorganizations of the data management workflows in NINA.

Introduction Whenever Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m asked about my occupation, it is not easy to describe my work. Often, oversimplifying, I answer that I work with maps and geographic information, with modern techniques. As an example, I often refer to some commonly used interactive mapping tools which almost anyone uses and knows, for finding a place or the best way to reach it. But, is it just about mapping? Sometimes a nice looking map is the final result of the work. Maps are powerful visualisation tools which allow to represent valuable information at the eyesight: a decision maker can obtain crucial information in a very short time, just by looking at the thematic information represented on a map. But maps are often only the top of the iceberg. They are obtained from complex chains of operations, which often start with data collection from multiple sources, including fieldwork or technologically advanced remote sensors such as satellites or GPS collars. Data need to be collected, stored, processed, validated and corrected from multiple error sources, shared among colleagues or distributed to a wider public, and enriched by relevant metadata. Such data can be stored in databases or multiple file formats, managed by scripting or programming languages for elaboration, visualization, statistical analysis, mapping, or loaded in different software solutions for the same purposes. Data with a geographic dimension usually are managed by Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which are part of a wider domain called geomatics.

Geomatics, or geospatial science, is the discipline of gathering, storing, processing and delivering geographic or spatially referenced information, and is constantly growing and gaining importance, in a wide (and increasing) range of scientific disciplines. Working within the geomatics domain usually means using some specific GIS software, such as QGIS or GRASS (free and open source), or many solutions for serving and visualizing geographical information on the internet (web-GIS). It requires specific data types designed to represent geographic objects as geometries (vectors), or pixel-based spatial representations (rasters), and specific formats used for such data types (shapefiles, spatial databases, geotiffs, etc.). The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defines and describes many formats and technical solutions as international standards for geographic data and metadata management.

Geomatics in NINA NINA is the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. NINAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s researchers work on a wide range of topics, using the research tools from multiple disciplines. Although most of the work is conducted on the field, on multiple species across a diversity of ecosystems, NINA has a number of modern laboratory facilities, including a large freshwater research facility, a genetics laboratory, laboratories for autopsy and study of mammals, fish, or invertebrates. In recent years NINA has invested considerable resources in the development of software platforms suitable for insertion, storage, sharing and communication of data.

Most of the information related to natural sciences has a spatial dimension, and can be localized by geographic coordinates. This is why geomatics plays an increasing role also in NINA. In order to better explain how geomatics are used in NINA, I will describe some examples of my everyday work as a geomatics engineer, being part of a group of analysts and developers supporting research activities.

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Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Tracking animal movement The movement of organisms is one of the most fundamental characteristics of life. It has an important ecological value, and is the result of complex evolutionary mechanisms. In past tracking animal movement was challenging, but the recent technological improvements, and in particular the availability of more and more efficient and miniatured GPS devices, allow to track regularly animal movement (Urbano et al, 2014). In NINA, GPS tracking data is collected from collars and automatically delivered as SMS to receivers, and stored in specific databases. Millions of records of points showing the position of individuals of reindeer, or moose, or carnivors are stored, together with useful metadata about biometric parameters, such as age, sex, weight and others measures. Points of the same individual in time become tracks, showing its movement on a map. Multiple other datasets, such as road networks, land cover, human presence and other can be combined applying GIS analysis techniques. By tracking animal movement, ecologists can obtain precious information suitable for implementing crucial conservation and management actions (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Moose tracks in the Dyreposisjoner Web-GIS application.

Developing a QGIS plugin for adding fish occurrence data Some colleagues working in the aquatic department are involved in a project studying the impact of invasive fish species. Usually data is being collected in rivers and lakes, by capturing fish samples, and recording occurrences. Occurrence information is one of the biodiversity basic information, and describes which species are observed at a given moment and a given location, with all the related biometric information. Occurrence data is a typical georeferenced information, and GIS is a perfect tool for visualising species distributions, building species distribution maps and distribution models. In order to facilitate the process of collecting information, and properly storing the information in spatial databases, we developed a QGIS plugin written in python (a scripting and programming language) for simplifying the data insertion process into the Norwegian Fish Atlas database (NOFA). The occurrence information follows the Darwin Core standard, which provides a glossary of terms and naming conventions suitable for sharing the information at a global level. Thanks to the Darwin core standard, the information can be disseminated through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) portal, used by thousands of international researchers (Figure 2).

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Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

Figure 2. The NOFAInsert QGIS plugin for adding fish occurrence data to NOFA database.

Observing forest species with remote sensing Some botanist colleagues working in the terrestrial department are involved in a project studying the risk of spread of alien spruce species planted for timber production near forested areas, endangering the local biodiversity. Using the potential of earth observation techniques, NINA researchers could use spruce distribution maps obtained from remote sensing. The maps were obtained from automatic classification of multispectral satellite imagery. Objects on the earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surface, in fact, can be recognized from their spectral signatures (every objects interacts differently with the solar radiation, and such differences can be registered in satellite images). Field sampling areas were selected and mapped with GIS techniques, and the researchers performed field work evaluating the probability of short range spread of invasive spruce, and validated the classification maps obtained from remote sensing.

The data management revolution Beside all the support offered to researchers for specific data management or GIS analysis tasks, as described in the previous examples, important efforts in NINA are oriented towards a general improvement of the data management workflows and practices. Research is facing a revolution in data management, we are almost flooded with increasing volumes of digital information, and need to rethink the usual approaches to data handling (Kitchin R., 2014). One of the main challenges is the lack of standardization. In NINA (as in many other institutions) the researchers often follow different procedures for their own data collection, storage and analysis. Often the same source datasets are downloaded multiple times by researchers for personal use (with connection-burdening redundancy and increased costs for storage), maybe just because not aware that someone else had already used the same. Some researchers use spreadsheets, some others local databases, some other share their information using public repositories on the web, some others even keep the information written on paper. Even when using similar technologies, or working in the same domain, different versions of the same datasets could have different formats, or just different naming conventions (if any), and combining the information from different sources often requires hours of work to harmonize the inputs for further elaboration. Sometimes there is not a strong willingness towards sharing the information. The trend is currently changing, and there is an increased sensitivity towards better data management practices.

The concept of open data is slowly diffusing, and gaining importance. Since most of the research data is obtained with public funds, the research data should be free and open, without unnecessary 68

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway restrictions. Free and accessible data improves the quality of research, and public funding institutions started making it a mandatory requirement.

Building a Spatial Data Infrastructure and a Catalogue for Geospatial Information In order to improve the internal data management practices, NINA decided to follow the FAIR data principles. FAIR is the acronym of “Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable”, and is a set of guiding principles for improved data management, in a “open data” perspective (Wilkinson et al, 2016).

Data requires to have rich metadata, data management plans, unique identifiers, open protocols, standard formats, clear licenses, suitable sharing tools, and follow some well described best practices.

Many efforts have been put into building a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), based on centralized servers for data storage, with open source databases and open source software for data handling. One of the next steps, a work in progress, will be building a metadata catalogue describing the available geospatial datasets, reachable both in the intranet (for NINA researchers) and from the internet (for external stakeholders). Such a Catalogue, based on international metadata standards, allows machine based metadata harvesting operations, and guarantees data visibility and accessibility.

Conclusion The increased availability of data, and constantly improving technologies, offer the opportunity for reorganizing the data management practices in NINA. It’s a challenging but rewarding effort to build new infrastructures for storing, cataloguing and providing access to the rich variety of information which is the basis for good scientific results. We have the vision of optimizing the data workflow, by upgrading the procedure for data collection in the field, by providing seamless connection with the database and storage repositories, by providing a more and more integrated cluster of software and tools for scientific data management and elaboration and by providing catalogues for finding easily whatever dataset required. We are at the early stages of our little but fundamental inner data revolution.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Roald Vang, Frank Hanssen, Monica Ruano, Siw Berge, Øystein Solberg, Stefan Blumentrath, Bram Van Moorter, Manuela Panzacchi and all the colleagues in NINA who share my wonderful everyday working experience in Norway.

References Kitchin R., (2014). The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & their consequences. Book.

SAGE. Urbano F., Cagnacci F., Basille M., Conway J., Van Moorter B. (2014). Spatial Database for GPS Widlife Tracking Data. Book. Springer International Publishing.

Wilkinson M. D., et Al. (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.

Scientific Data, 3 (160018).

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“Selling ice to the eskimo” – or how an Italian ended up teaching Norwegian literature to Norwegians Giuliano D’Amico Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo

When I find myself reflecting on my job as a Norwegian literature scholar, I cannot help thinking to the Italian idiom vendere ghiaccio agli eschimesi, or “sell ice to the eskimo” – which obviously refers to an outsider who is bringing up knowledge or expertise in a place or milieu that has enough of it from before.

Being an Italian that teaches Norwegian literature to Norwegian university students might sound as a bizarre career choice. However, as I will try to explain, I am not the only one in this situation, and I find my and my foreign colleagues’ peculiarity as an interesting mirror in order to understand better the current workforce situation in Norwegian universities.

My interest in Norwegian language and culture dates back from my teenage, when I developed an interest in Norwegian black metal – an interest that soon turned into a fascination for the country’s literature, history and culture. Another bizarre fascination, you would say? Probably not, as it has been documented – most notably by the Norwegian TV show Typisk norsk – how Norwegian black metal has functioned as a bridge to Norway for many people of my generation. In any case, this early interest soon led to a degree in foreign languages from the university of my hometown, Turin, and to an Erasmus scholarship at the University of Oslo. As for many students of my age, this experience turned out to be crucial for my personal and professional development.

For it was thanks to that scholarship that I developed the expertise that enabled me to teach Norwegian language and Scandinavian literature at the universities of Turin and Milan. And it was during my year as an exchange student that I got in contact with the Ibsen milieu in Oslo, which became a fundamental partner when I took my ph.d. at the University of Oslo a few years later.

As a foreigner, I never thought I would have had a possibility of teaching Norwegian students about their most sacred national treasure, Norway’s literature and its main representative, Henrik Ibsen. But reality proved me wrong. After an unsuccessful attempt at getting a university position in Italy, I quickly understood that I had to play my cards in Norway. And the way I was welcomed by the institutions I worked with – Volda University College first, NTNU in Trondheim later, and lastly my alma mater, the University of Oslo – has always astonished me. As the only foreigner in a stab of Norwegian colleagues, I have always felt cherished and an object of curiosity – but never questioned about my competence to teach Norwegian culture to Norwegians.

Such remarks might sound obvious to many scholars (research, as they say, is cosmopolite per definition), but are nevertheless worth mentioning when talking of “Norwegian” subjects such as literature, history or language. Since the autumn of 2016, a debate has arisen in the Norwegian press about the increasing number of foreign academics getting a position in Norwegian universities. One side of this complex and multi-faceted debate has concerned the risk that an increasing internationalization poses to said “Norwegian” subjects. Do foreign scholars have the necessary language competence to teach Norwegian history, literature or language? Have they developed, or can they develop, the necessary knowledge about local culture with its written and unwritten laws? These were some of the questions raised by the sceptics. A summary of the debate is to be found at this link.

It is certainly not up to me to say whether I have the necessary competence to do my job – but I choose to trust the committees that appointed me and the students that I have taught and supervised, and that apparently were not damaged by my “foreign” presence. I believe, nevertheless, that my status as a foreigner teaching a Norwegian subject can be a possible starting point for a more general reflection about the role that an increasingly international academic staff will have for the development of Norwegian academia in the decades to come.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway In the first place, I am not as exceptional as some may think – just taking into consideration people with permanent positions in Norwegian literature, I know of at least 2 Germans and 1 American doing my same job, in addition to a bunch of people from other Scandinavian countries and quite a good number of ph.d.s and postdocs. All of these have developed the necessary linguistic and scholarly competence to do research on Norwegian matters and to teach in Norwegian to people that have grown up here.

And this group is just the tip of the iceberg: in Norwegian universities there are a lot of foreign researchers, working in many different subjects, that have worked hard to develop the necessary expertise to do research and teach in a Norwegian environment.

Second, all these people represent an ideal knowledge pool in order to meet the cultural challenge of the increasing internationalization, i.e., making sure that their (our) new colleagues from abroad, who have not developed the necessary linguistic skills yet, do it as soon as possible, so that they are able to carry on their research, teaching and administrative duties in the same way as everyone else. What seems to be at stake now, is the sore need of a better infrastructure within universities, that helps the integration of our new colleagues. Both the university leadership and us “selling ice to the eskimo” will have to make a common effort with our Norwegian colleagues to make local academia a wellfunctioning, Norwegian as well as international environment.

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway

The iron experience Sonia Distante Metabolic Molecular Biology research group, Department of Medical Biochemistry, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo

Prologue After a bachelor degree in “Genetics“(1990) and a medical degree (1995), both from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. The author has since tried to combine her interests in genetics, molecular biology and medicine. Contemporaneous work in clinical medicine and research at Aker University Hospital resulted in a Doctoral thesis presented at the Medical faculty, University of Oslo (2003) and titled: Genetic predisposition to iron overload: prevalence, phenotypic expression and disease association of hemochromatosis associated HFE- C282Y gene mutation.

The thesis covered epidemiological and genetic studies of hemochromatosis in Norway. These studies were the first in Norway to describe the prevalence of the most common genetic mutation (C282Y) associated with hemochromatosis. They mapped this condition in the Nordic countries by showing that 15% of the normal population carries the mutation. These studies were also among the very first to show that not all individuals homozygous for this mutation develop the disease. An original observation subsequently confirmed internationally by many others.

After her medical doctorate, the author’s clinical work continued at the department of haematology and later at the department of medical biochemistry at Rikshospitalet, where she is currently appointed as senior medical consultant and responsible with other doctors for the correct measuments of blood samples and test.

View from the Foyer at Rikshospitalet

The author is also associated with the Metabolic Molecular Biology research group at the same department. The Metabolic Molecular Biology research group focus is to understand the mechanisms of inborn errors of metabolism. Recruiting cases through the national laboratory for metabolic diseases.

Aim is to identify disease provoking mutations, study metabolic pathways and predict the effect of mutations in protein structures.

The author specific research interest has been all to do with iron metabolism from the inner workings of the cell, at the level of the mitochondria to the clinical effect of iron overall in the human body.

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Extracts from a recent publication as an example: Blood removal therapy in hereditary hemochromatosis induces a stress response resulting in improved genome integrity (Distante S, et al. (2016), Transfusion, 56 (6), 1435-41 Introduction Hemochromatosis is a condition of iron overload, a disorder that causes the body to absorb too much iron from the diet. The excess iron is stored in the body's tissues and organs, particularly the liver, pancreas, heart and joints. Humans cannot regulate the excretion of iron; excess iron can therefore overload and eventually damage tissues and organs.

Early symptoms of hereditary hemochromatosis are nonspecific and may include fatigue, joint pain, abdominal pain, and loss of sex drive. Later signs and symptoms can include arthritis, liver disease, diabetes, heart abnormalities, and skin discoloration. The appearance and progression of symptoms can be affected by environmental and lifestyle factors such as the amount of iron in the diet, alcohol use, and infections.

Hereditary hemochromatosis is classified depending on the genetic cause, the most common form is that caused by the C282Y mutation on the 6th chromosome. Patients with this mutation typically develop symptoms between the ages of 40 and 60, and women usually develop symptoms after menopause.

Hemochromatosis caused by C282Y is one of the most common genetic disorders worldwide and affects primarily people of Northern European descent. Other types of hemochromatosis are rare and have been studied in only a small number of families worldwide.

Diagnosis, disease progression and therapy are monitored by blood samples and measurement of proteins involved in iron metabolism like ferritin and transferrin saturation levels .

Patients with hemochromatosis are effectively managed by phlebotomy (blood removal) as a direct way of removing excessive iron.

The aim of this study was to elucidate the impact of iron removal by phlebotomy at the subcellular level.

In particular the impact on mitochondria and DNA genome integrity.

Methods Patients attending the hemochromatosis clinic at Rikshospitalet were recruited together with sex and age matched healthy controls. Blood samples were collected before and after treatment by phlebotomy and were analysed at our laboratories

Results Phlebotomy alters levels of iron-binding mitochondrial proteins in patients’ white blood cells.

Manganese Superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) an oxidative stress biomarker, was significantly increased in treated patients compared to untreated patients and controls. Increased MnSOD confers protection against reactive oxygen species (ROS). This suggests that phlebotomy may induce a state of increased “stress tolerance” in the cell.

Phlebotomy therapy reduced both the total amount and the heterogeneity of DNA damage among patients, resulting in improved genome integrity.

Discussion There is evidence that blood removal has been practised since ancient times by healers and practitioners by using leeches or vein cutting (Figure 1 and Figure 2).

Recent research has shown that regular blood donors report general improvement of health after blood removal, that is feelings of satisfaction, greater alertness and increased wellbeing. Regular blood donations improve insulin sensitivity, protect from type2 diabetes and possibly improve liver damage in fatty liver disease.

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Figure 1. Phlebotomy: Ceramic detail from 5. Century AD

Figure 2. Phlebotomy treatment in Varmland, Norway 1922

Conclusion There might be more to phlebotomy then meets the eye. Blood donation may contribute to a state of increased “stress tolerance” at the cellular lever and perhaps justify the perceived “increased wellbeing” after blood donation.

Acknowledgment To deceased Professor and Doctor Helge Bell, the first in Norway to develop an interest and who started research on patients with hemochromatosis. To the many good colleagues with whom the author has shared busy hospital days, and to all the patients and relatives who inspire and whom one strives to help. Their gratitude has been the driving force.

References For a full list of publications see Oslo University Hospital link: http://ous-research.no/home/elgstoen/Group%20members/15477 74

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Merging law and climate into policies Rosa Manzo Department of Public and International Law, University of Oslo, Oslo

Rosa Manzo is a researcher with particular expertise in general international law and international environmental law. She is currently working as a Ph.D Candidate in Climate Change Law at PluriCourts’ Environmental Pillar.

Prior to joining PluriCourts in March 2015, Rosa held a MA Degree in Law at Cattolica University of Milano (Italy, 2012). She spent one semester in the Netherlands at the Radbound University of Nijmegen (2011). Rosa successfully defended her master dissertation on the topic of unjustified enrichment and tort law according to Italian and Dutch Law. She received the Realmonte Prize for the best thesis in civil law (2013). She worked as trainee in two law firms in Italy. In 2014 she received her MA Degree in Public International Law with option in International and Environmental Energy Law at University of Oslo.

During her studies Rosa was President of the European Law Students’ Association (ELSA) in Milan. She worked as a research assistant for the International Development Law Organization (IDLO, Aichi Project, 2014) and as a research assistant for the environmental pillar in PluriCourts (Jan-Feb, 2015). She has been awarded from the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF) to finance her stay as a visiting scholar at the New Zealand Center for Environmental Law. She has been Fulbright scholar at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia University (New York).

She is writing under the supervision of the Professor Christina Voigt.

Current Research Rosa’s main research interest as part of PluriCourts is tied to a hypothesis on treaty interpretation using the principle of equity. Presently, this research is centred on the following question: how could the principle of equity (Art.3 UNFCCC) help design the post 2020 Climate Change Regime?

About the project The adoption of the Paris Agreement challenges the common understanding of the principle of equity in the climate change regime. So far the principle has been interpreted synonymously with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR/RC). This has put the burden of mitigation obligations exclusively upon developed countries as those historically responsible for CO2 emissions. While the Paris Agreement does not contain any reference to historical responsibility, references to the principle of equity are made in important provisions. First of all, the preamble to the Agreement encompasses a direct reference to intergenerational equity. This is followed by a set of provisions in the body of the Agreement. According to Art. 2.2, the Agreement will be implemented to reflect equity and CBDR in light of different national circumstances. Art. 4.1 instructs the Parties to “undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, […] on the basis of equity”. Last but not least, Art. 10 sets the regime for a collective assessment of national efforts (hereafter global stocktaking) which is to be carried out in the light of equity and the best available science. While the first couple of provisions have a potential impact on the adoption of the rules of implementation and accordingly on the implementation of the Agreement itself, the last ones pertains a specific mechanism which has to be set up. Rosa’s research project aims to find an answer to the following questions: How is the principle of equity defined in the context of the Paris Agreement?

What is the difference between the concept of equity and the abstract concept of justice? Could equity be defined in terms of due diligence? How is the Agreement defined in light of equity? Based on which criteria should the rules of implementation be evaluated? How could equity be operationalized when it comes to the global stocktaking? The overarching plan is that the first part will be focused on the theory of law on the concept of equity in public international law and environmental law. From there the research focuses on the role played by the equity principle in shaping the Climate Change Regime. It will track the principle from its first formulation in United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to its most recent adoption in the Paris Agreement. Rosa is particularly interested in the 75

Scienza Senza Confini â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway development of the transparency framework being the most useful tool for assessing the fairness of Partiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; contribution as well as in the establishment of the global stocktaking mechanism. In order to do that, Rosa is looking at the contribution in form of submissions, inputs and informal papers handed by the major players US, EU, India, and China- to the Ad Hoc Working Group for the Paris Agreement (APA) which is in charge of releasing the rules for the implementation of the Agreement in 2020. The topic itself is timely as well as controversial, making it very interesting. Literature on this specific subject is not extensive. This topic is still under discussion at the table of the APA. Therefore Rosa is engaged in a comparative work by looking at how the principle of equity has been operationalized in other environmental and non legal regimes.

Rosaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s other areas of research interest are energy law and energy market. She is particularly interested in investigating the role of international law in transitioning toward a low-carbon economy.

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Cytogenetic and molecular characterization of rare female genital tract tumors Francesca Micci Section for Cancer Cytogenetics, Institute for Cancer Genetics and Informatics, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo Institute for Biosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo

Abstract Micci’s interest in gynecologic malignancies dates back 19 years when she came to Norway. During this period, she has published 37 original articles (18 as first author and 10 as last) and two book chapters on the subject. Most papers were published in specialized cancer genetics journals, but Micci is also first author of articles published in high-ranked general journals such as Leukemia, PLoS Biology, and Oncogene. Micci’s scientific proficiency can also be measured by her supervisory activity: She was the main supervisor for two PhD students who defended their thesis in May 2014 and March 2017, respectively. She co-supervised two PhD students whom defended in May and December 2016. She is currently supervising one PhD student as well as two Erasmus students. In 2013, Micci was appointed “professor II” at the Institute for Biosciences where she currently teaches the course MBV3020: “Molecular genetics and developmental biology.”

The fact that she deals daily also with diagnostic samples, helps her remember her research focus: There is always a patient behind every laboratory analysis!

Introduction Acquired genetic alterations are the driving force behind cellular neoplastic transformation. Many of the mutations involve large enough quantities of DNA to be microscopically visible when the chromosomes condense during mitosis, and can thus be registered as structural and numerical chromosome abnormalities. All types of neoplasia studied in sufficient number to draw conclusions, have acquired clonal chromosomal changes. The abnormal karyotypes are informative with regard to pathogenesis, the clonal evolution of the neoplastic cell population, and they also carry diagnostic and prognostic information of great clinical significance. Many of the recurrent changes are with remarkable specificity associated with distinct tumor subtypes. Molecular studies of cancer-associated chromosomal rearrangements have shown that they often exert their effect through deregulation, usually overexpression, of a gene in one breakpoint or creation of a chimeric or fusion gene through melting together parts of two genes, one in each breakpoint. The first mechanism is common in lymphoid malignancies whereas the second one, the formation of fusion genes, occurs widely in hematological disorders, malignant lymphomas, and sarcomas. Hence, valuable insights into the origin of neoplasms may be gained from identifying fusion genes and studying their effects on cellular processes.

Methods The methodology of choice to detect fusion genes in tumors used to start with cytogenetic analysis of tumor cells to identify a characteristic chromosomal rearrangement, including mapping of the translocation breakpoints to a distinct band on each chromosome. The second step was the utilization of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques on abnormal metaphase plates using various and numerous probes such as BACs, PACs, and Fosmids to find the probe which spans the chromosomal breakpoint. The third step involves molecular cloning to localize the breakpoint more precisely and identify the genes fused by the chromosomal rearrangement. Although laborious, the above-mentioned sequential approach is quite robust and reliable and a plethora of fusion genes have been cloned by such means. The introduction of next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques has opened up new possibilities and whole transcriptome sequencing was shown to be a powerful tool to detect fusion genes in cancer. Since six years ago, Micci’s group has increasingly used the latest NGS technology to investigate tumor genomes for the presence of acquired fusion genes. This approach (chromosome analysis followed by sequencing) has proved to be successful and has so far resulted in the publication of 18 research articles. Although the NGS methodology has attracted a lot of attention lately, the 77

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway sequential use of karyotyping followed by sequencing is unique in this context and one we have spearheaded.

Finding the pathogenetically essential fusion genes in different types of cancer and even in individual neoplasms is a key to more specific therapies along the principle of “personalized medicine”. Ideally, each patient should be treated individually and in the best possible way. To identify the pathogenetic mechanism active in each tumor is a prerequisite to eventually arrive at tailor-made treatments.

Aim(s) The general purpose of Micci’s research is to understand the pathogenesis of cancer in cytogenetic and molecular terms so as to improve classification and diagnosis of cancerous diseases, opening up for the possibility of finding specific medical treatments that counteract exactly those molecular rearrangements that render the cells neoplastic. More specifically, Micci wants to extend our strategy, based on the sequential use of karyotyping followed by sequencing, to the female genital tract tumors.

We are the first group in Norway to use this strategy with any success; we were in fact the first group in Europe linking this technique to cancer cytogenetics. The approach has proved successful for the study of single neoplasms, e.g., erythroleukemias and mesenchymal chondrosarcoma but has also helped detect recurrent fusion transcripts in larger series of tumors, e.g., squamous cell carcinomas (SCC) of the vulva and endometrial stromal sarcomas (ESS). Micci is now examining larger series of five uncommon tumor entities of the female reproductive tract. The specific aim is to characterize and understand better the nonrandom acquired genomic rearrangements of ESS, SCC and melanoma of the vulva, carcinosarcomas of the uterus and ovaries, and less common subtypes of ovarian carcinomas.

Which are the rearrangements, what is their chromosomal and genic composition, exactly which genes are fused/amplified/mutated, and how can we translate knowledge about them into more general knowledge about the tumorigenic processes of the female genital tract?

Importance The present research project is unique in its field despite the fact that the methodology involved, i.e., NGS, is currently claimed to be used by many groups. However, we are among the few that are publishing/have already published a number of articles with results obtained using this technique. Our sequential approach is also unique; initial karyotyping followed by sequencing analysis is something only few groups can make use of since very few research groups have the required skills and knowledge in cancer, not to mention solid tumor, cytogenetics. The latter competence rests on the ability to culture the relevant neoplastic cells in vitro from a suitable tissue sample, harvest the dividing cells at the appropriate moment, i.e., when they are in metaphase, and stain (chromosome banding) and analyse the metaphase plates. Our biobank and database contains 1200 gyneacological tumors and 300 karyotyped samples. Each tumor has been histologically analysed and classified at the Department of Pathology at our hospital. For each patient we have (through collaboration with gynecological oncologists) clinical data including information on recurrences, treatment (if applicable), and survival time. This research will lead to new knowledge about how the respective tumors develop, but the nature of this new information of necessity remains unknown. We do believe in the principle that new treatments must build on biologically significant steps forward, and this is our contribution towards this goal.

Potential impact Since we work intimately (sharing the same facilities) with a diagnostic cytogenetic section at the largest cancer hospital in Scandinavia, we are daily in contact with clinicians, pathologists, and doctors of other specialities whose ambition it is to obtain an as correct cancer diagnosis as possible. The identification of different but specific fusion genes would constitute a crucial element in such a state-of-the-art diagnosis and may eventually pave the way for a more specific/personalized treatment of cancer patients.

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Conclusion Through such efforts the entire field of cancer medicine will gain in its attempts to provide patients with tailor-made therapies directed only against the neoplastic cells; the very same success story that happened to chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) patients whose prognosis is now vastly improved over what it was 20 years ago.

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Security in the EU new protection policy space: adaptation, development and compatibility Claudia Morsut Centre for Risk Management and Societal Safety, University of Stavanger, Stavanger

I present here a short version of my post doc project, which is on-going and has produced some partial results in terms of publications and activities (participation in Conferences, workshops, other projects).

In addition, I am member of the Nordic Centre of Excellence for Security Technologies and Societal Values (NordSTEVA) and I am interested in the EU crisis and risk governance of migrants and refugees.

Introduction Over the years, the study of security has become relevant due to the growth of threats and emergencies all over Europe and the growing expectations of citizens. States and international organisations have enlarged their view about security issues and moved from the need to respond to traditional threats to security (wars) to the need to develop capabilities for new security risks (cyber-attacks). In this respect, the European Union (EU) has contributed to broaden the notion of security, mainly anchored in national foreign policy and defence, now pursued in a framework of cooperation and solidarity among EU member states and associated countries to respond to any societal threat inside and beyond the European borders (Boin et al. 2007). The rise of ‘transboundary’ crises (events transcending political, sectoral and geographical boundaries) demands multilevel response (Eriksson and Rhinard 2009) and the EU has become a key actor in this multilevel risk management governance (Ekengren et al. 2006) by implementing tools and increasing governmental cooperation and solidarity among states. This development has led to a complex structure which cuts across different levels of governance (international/regional/national/local) and of decision-making actors (EU institutions, ministries, agencies, departments, as well as local communities), with different resources, capabilities, skills, norms and regulations. This may lead to various challenges regarding cooperation among the involved actors to foresee and respond to threats and emerging risks.

Within this complex structure, the EU is trying to shape a ‘new protection policy space’ (Boin et al. 2006; Rhinard et al. 2006:512), since the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) (Council 2003), which describes key security challenges at global level (terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, state failure, and organised crime). While the ESS focuses on external and global threats that can jeopardise European security, the creation of the Internal Security Strategy (ISS) in 2010 draws together the EU’s approach to the security of European citizens (Council 2010). The EU new protection policy space has implications at three levels: (a) national, in terms of adaptation, (b) European, in terms of institutional design and capacity building, and (c) international, in terms of modes of cooperation with international actors like UN, NATO and WHO. At each level, we can recognise a wide range of activities, rules and norms, established for the diversified security challenges and for the different intervening actors.

In the effort to create recognisable patterns in security at European and international level, the 2009 Lisbon Treaty reforms show that the EU seeks to increasingly engage itself in global humanitarian aid, as well as provide civil protection cooperation tools for the protection of individuals and key societal infrastructures. Civil protection is, indeed, one of the areas inside the EU new protection policy space, where the EU seems particularly active in enhancing greater coherence and harmonisation of different and existing systems at national level and of agencies and institutions at international level (Morsut 2014). Civil protection is characterised by sharing and pooling resources and capabilities between the EU and European states as an important condition for all the ʻactivities to prepare and carry out the rescue and relief of people, property and the environment in the event of a crisis’ (Olsson 2009:84).

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What I do in my research I divided my post doc project in three parts.

The first part of the project foresees to establish a comprehensive overview of the EU as a security actor and serves as an introduction to the core of my research. My argument here is that the EU has always dealt with security, although guaranteeing the security of citizens in one of the main tasks of a state. As Davis Cross points out: “The European project has always been about security” (2013:3) since the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. The evolution of the EU as security actor has gained momentum with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. It has continued with the establishment of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) in the 1990s, and with a portfolio that has evolved remarkably in the last 10 years (see the wide variety of threats - cyber security and natural and manmade disasters – that the EU addresses). In this part, I seek to answer to the following questions: Is there still room for the EU in making a difference at global level or security should continue to be a national affair or a core task of ‛true’ international security actors (like NATO)? Has the EU’s comprehensive and multidimensional approach to security reached an end in view of the last developments (Brexit, Visegrad group…)? Will these challenges hinder or trigger the future of EU security cooperation? Will the defence and security cooperation be pursued in a truly community style or by building on bilateral cooperation?

The second part is the core of my research and focuses on the governance of the (European) Union civil protection Mechanism, an emergency tool put in place in 2001. By pooling the civil protection capabilities of the participating states (28 EU member states in addition to Iceland, Montenegro, Norway, Serbia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Turkey), the Mechanism can ensure a better protection of people and the natural and cultural environments inside the EU and beyond its borders. The Mechanism is interesting to investigate in order to verify a) to what extent the EU and the participating states share the same approach to security; b) whether or not the EU has reached vertical consistency and coherence; c) the EU’s interventions via the Mechanism outside its borders and their implications for the EU. Questions relevant here are: Which are the working practices of the Mechanism? Are they dictated at European level or is there a strong influence from the member states?

Which effects does the Mechanism produce on enabling a common understanding of civil protection?

The third part focuses on two national civil protection systems (Norway and Italy) to understand their legal, cultural, organisational and operational diversity and how they relate to the Mechanism. These two parts make use of the ‘Europeanisation’ analytical framework. This framework helps to explain how national contexts are shaped by European developments but also vice-versa – how national experience shape European developments, and according to Johan P. Olsen (2002), how European developments may be exported to the international sphere. Specifically, the Europeanisation helps exanimating the possible effects of EU level development at three levels: politics (changes in social transactions), polity (changes in organisational forms), and policy (changes in legal rules) (Börzel and Risse 2003).

Results I published partial results of my research in the following: Morsut Claudia and Daniela Irrera (eds.), Security beyond the State: the EU in an Age of Transformation, Barbara Budrich Publishers, forthcoming 2018.

Morsut Claudia and Kruke Bjørn Ivar (2016). The (European) Union Civil Protection Mechanism: A Reliable Crisis Governance Tool?, in Walls, Revie & Bedford (eds.), Risk, Reliability and Safety: Innovating Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis Group, London, 494 – 501 (proceedings ESREL Conference 2016).

Kruke Bjørn Ivar and Morsut Claudia (2015). Resilience in a Multilevel Crisis Governance Context: A tale of joint implementation of community, regional, national and EU response capabilities, in Podofillini et al. (eds.), Safety and Reliability of Complex Engineered Systems, Taylor & Francis Group, London, 187194 (proceedings ESREL Conference 2015).

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Morsut Claudia (2014). The EU’s Community Mechanism for Civil Protection: Analysing its Development Special issue Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, Volume 22(3), 143-149.

Morsut Claudia and Iturre Maite J. (2012). The United Nations – European Union co-operation in aid and relief. The Haiti case, in Fulvio Attinà (ed.), The Politics and Policies of Relief, Aid and Reconstruction, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 133-150.

References Boin A., Ekengren M., Missiroli A., Rhinard M., Sundelius B. (2007). Building societal security in Europe: the EU’s role in managing emergencies, EPC Working Paper 27.

Boin A., Ekengren M. and Rhinard M. (2006). Special Issue: Protecting the Union: The Emergence of a New Policy Space, Journal of European Integration 28(5), 405-529.

Börzel T.A and Risse T. (2003). Conceptualising the domestic impact of Europe, in K. Featherstone and C. Radaelli (eds.), The Politics of Europeanization, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 57-80.

Council (2010). Internal Security Strategy (ISS).

Council (2003). European Security Strategy (ESS).

Davis Cross M.K. (2013). Security Integration in Europe. The University of Michigan Press.

Ekengren M., Matzen N., Rhinard M. and Svantesson M. (2006). The New Security Role of the European Union: Transnational Crisis Management and the Protection of Union Citizens, Acta B35, Swedish National Defence College, Stockholm.

Eriksson J. and Rhinard M. (2009). The Internal-External Security Nexus. Notes on an Emerging Research Agenda, Cooperation and Conflict 44(3), 243-267.

Morsut Claudia (2014). The EU’s Community Mechanism for Civil Protection: Analysing its Development Special issue Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, Volume 22(3), 143-149.

Olsen J.P. (2002). The Many Faces of Europeanization, Journal of Common Market Studies 40(5), 921-952.

Olsson S. (ed.) (2009). Crisis management in the EU. Cooperation in the face of emergencies, Springer, Dodrecht.

Rhinard M., Ekengren M. and Boin A. (2006). The European Union Emerging Protection Space: Next Steps for Research and Practice, Journal of European Integration 28(5), 511-527.

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Knowing Norway through food Laura Terragni Department of Nursing and Health Promotion, Faculty of Health Sciences, Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo

Norwegian wife: You cannot eat potatoes chips!

Italian husband: Why? Norwegian wife: Because it’s Wednesday!

Abstract Food is an important part of the history and culture of a country. Based on my experience as a food sociologist, this contribution wants to provide an understanding of the Norwegian food culture. The chapter is based on findings from research projects on food consumption conducted in Norway between 2002 and 2014. The Norwegian food culture seems to be characterized by three main features: the high trust Norwegians have in (Norwegian) food; the deep bond that Norwegians have with nature, and, finally, the Calvinistic spirit pervading the Norwegian food culture. There are many unwritten norms about what is allowed to eat in which circumstances and people coming from abroad may face challenges in the encounter with this highly moralized food culture. Food represents an interesting way of knowing more about societies, particularly for those of us who have not grown up with “matpakke” and Pizza Grandiosa.

Introduction One of the first things I do when I go to a foreign country as a tourist, is to look for a food market, go to a grocery store, or find a small restaurant where I can to taste local foods. Food is a way to get to know other cultures and societies. As an immigrant to Norway in the autumn of 1999, I experienced this process of learning about a new culture through food on both a personal and a professional level. I obtained my Ph.D. as a sociologist in Italy and my original research fields were gender studies and violence against women (Terragni, 1997). When I moved to Norway, however, I started to work as a food sociologist. Through my food-related research projects, I have learned much about Norwegian food, Norwegian society and, ultimately, about Norwegians. Based on my experience as a food sociologist, the aim of this contribution is to provide an understanding of the Norwegian food culture and, indirectly, of the Norwegian society. Why is the choice of food so limited, when compared with other European countries? Why has not the market for organic products taken off? Why cannot we eat potato chips on a Wednesday but have to wait until Saturday? How can migrants cope with the new food culture?

Methods This chapter draws primarily on results of some research projects I participate in between 2002 and 2014. The first one was an European Study of the Social and Institutional Conditions for the production of Trust (TRUSTINFOOD), funded by the European Commission. The study involved six European Countries (Norway, Denmark, United Kingdom, Portugal, Germany and Italy). It consisted of a survey conducted among consumers of each of these six countries and of qualitative interviews with key persons responsible for food safety, nutrition policies and food production(Kjærnes, Harvey, & Warde, 2007). The second one is the Welfare Quality® project. The project focused on animal welfare. It included qualitative studies of the perception and opinions of producers and consumers on animal welfare, as well as the analysis of the retail system and a population survey(Skarstad, Terragni, & Torjusen, 2007).

The other two studies I will refer to, are projects about food habits among immigrant families from South Asia and Africa (SOMAH and INNBAKOST). Through qualitative interviews, the SOMAH project aimed to identify possible challenges faced by immigrant families in their encounter with a new food environment, and how they navigated their eating practices between two cultures (Garnweidner, Terragni, Pettersen, & Mosdøl, 2012; Terragni, Garnweidner, Pettersen, & Mosdøl, 2014). INNBAKOST, finally, included both a breast-feeding and a dietary assessment and a qualitative study on child feeding 83

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway practices among Somali and Iraqi mothers (Grewal, Kolve, Terragni, & Torheim, 2016; Kolve, Grewal, Terragni, & Torheim, 2016; Wandel et al., 2016).

Findings There are several reasons why the Norwegian food culture and eating practices are the way they are.

Being aware that the following is a simplification of a rather more complex picture, three main reasons can be pointed out. The first is the high trust that Norwegians have in (Norwegian) food; the second is the deep bond that Norwegians have with nature; and the last one is linked to the Calvinistic spirit pervading the Norwegian (food) culture.

The Trust in Norwegian food In 2002, I joined an European comparative project on how to restore consumers’ trust in food in the aftermath of the dramatic crisis due to the mad cow disease (BSE). All across Europe, skepticism toward food had grown dramatically.

However, this crisis only marginally touched Norway. The results of the comparative project “TRUSTINFOOD”(Kjærnes et al., 2007) indicated that Norway decidedly ranked first in the trust people had in their food. Italy, on the other hand, was among the countries with the lowest trust. This trust Norwegians have towards their food has not diminished throughout the years. More recent studies indicate in fact that Norwegian consumers’ trust is still high (Lavik, 2017).

The roots of this trust can be traced back to the formation of the Norwegian state and in its development during the post war period. As indicated by welfare state expert Esping-Andersen, the main feature of the Scandinavian welfare state was the alliance between the farmers and the labour party(EspingAndersen, 2013). Agricultural interests have been able to influence strategic decisions. The food issue, for instance, was one of the main reasons why, in 1994, Norway said no, for a second time, to joining the European Community(Terragni, 2004). The discursive framing of Norwegian food as safe, in contrast to “foreign” food—described as cheaper but dangerous—became one of the major themes in the political debate preceding the referendum. “Through EU participation, we will obtain a larger choice of foods, also food with better quality regarding taste. But, on the other hand, the quality will be worse: there will be many more germs in food; the number of additives and their use will increase as well” (Nei til EU, 1994). The BSE crisis, which struck many European countries but not Norway, was the icing on the cake that reinforced the “Norwegian food as safer” discourse (Terragni, 2006). Quality and variation was offered on the altar of Norwegian production. As the French-Norwegian food researcher Amilien noted “local identities have been canceled for the benefit of quantity and standardization” (Amilien & Hegnes, 2013). Also food consumption activism tend to be less widespread than in other European countries (Terragni & Kjærnes, 2005) and Norwegian food consumers are regarded as less critical than their European counterpart. (Terragni, Torjusen, & Vittersø, 2009) (Halkier et al., 2007). Norwegian consumers tend to agree to the idea that consumer interests are best taken care of by a state regulation that can be trusted.

Norwegians’ trust in their food system cannot be seen apart from the strict bonds that the Norwegians have with their country. Norwegians are among the most satisfied with regard to their political system and they have a higher level of trust both toward institutions and toward other citizens(Listhaug & Ringdal, 2008). Norwegian icons include the King, taking the tram to go skiing and paying for his ticket, and the national day parade, where the city center is filled with by school children dressed in their finest clothes and waving flags. On important days, including the 1st of May and birthdays, Norwegians hang the national flag outside their window. Rather than being a sign of a chauvinistic attitude, this can indeed be interpreted as a sign of closeness between the state and the citizens. No wonder then, that the food label “good Norwegian” with the Norwegian flag is one of the most prominent strategies in the 84

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway marketing of the food products, and that the most popular cheese is a 1 kilogram square brick called Norvegia!

Harvesting from nature Another important aspect that can help us to understand the Norwegian food culture is the relationship Norwegians have with nature. Norway is one of the least densely populated countries in Europe. The Norwegian countryside, with its forests, small rivers and valleys covered with snow, is an important aspect of Norwegian culture and often represents the framework within which food discourses are situated. “We do not think that our world is as spoiled as other societies, where people live much more densely than we do” (Terragni, 2006).

Harvesting from nature is central to the concept of food that is “good to think” (as the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss would have said). Walking in nature, picking mushrooms and wild berries or fishing are common family leisure activities. A study conducted in 2015 showed that one in two Norwegians picked blueberries in the previous 12 months (Bugge, 2015). The popular appreciation of these activities and interest in ingredients from “nature” are reflected in (and perhaps equally encouraged by) cookbooks, lifestyle magazines and television programs. It is hardly a coincidence that one of the most distinguished chefs in Norway, Arne Brimi, presents the philosophy behind his cuisine, “Harvesting from nature” is central to his ideas. Eating animals that have lived as close to nature as possible is associated with the idea of “eating meat with clear conscience” and elk with lingonberries is the ultimate ideal food for Norwegians (Skarstad et al., 2007). This closeness to nature and the idea of Norwegian food as natural, and -as we have described above- “safe”, can been seen as one of the reasons for the lack of interest toward organic products, at least until very recently. In many other European countries the consumption of organic food has grown as a criticism towards industrialized food production (Roos, Terragni, & Torjusen, 2007). Why bother about buying (more expensive) organic food if one can get “pure” food directly from nature or if the conventional (Norwegian) food is regarded as pure enough?

Candies just on Saturdays The third aspect characterizing Norwegian food is represented by the Calvinistic attitudes related to food habits. Frugality and disapproval of gluttony (as portrayed in Blixen’s Babette’s Feast) are at the roots of the Norwegian food morality. It must also be recalled that until the 1970s, when the oil fields were discovered, Norway was one of Europe’s poorest countries. As told by Norwegians migrated to the US in the second half of 1800, bread was made with flour and bark, sometimes with a lot of bark(Notaker, 2009). Norwegian current eating habits are still characterized by strong references to norms about frugality and proper eating, and a distinction about what is allowed to eat (or drink) and when (Bugge, 2015; Døving, 2003).

The most obvious symbol of the frugality of everyday practices of food consumption is represented by the “matpakke”: the typical Norwegian lunch consisting of slices of whole wheat bread, a light layer of butter, one—and only one—slice of salami topped with a slice of cucumber. Possible variations are a slice of “brown cheese” or “yellow cheese” decorated with red bell pepper. The parsimony of the week is interrupted on the weekend, where the consumption of otherwise prohibited and more extravagant food (and drinks) is allowed and even encouraged (Døving, 2003). One extravagant food that became popular as a “Saturday dish” during the 1980s was pizza, or, to be more precise Pizza 85

Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Grandiosa. This was, and still is, Norway’s best-selling frozen pizza6 . In the 1990s, another exotic food became popular: the Tex-Mex taco. This has become such a classic Friday dinner that has gained its own name (“fredagstaco”). Norwegians are socialized into this morality related to food consumption from their childhood. Kids are in fact allowed to eat candies just on Saturdays (“lørdagsgodt” or “Saturday sweets”). The “lørdagsgodt” can be regarded as a successful disciplinary effort. and a form of regulation of sweets consumption in Norwegian families, at least ideally.

The encounter with a new food culture When people migrate to a new country, they are confronted with new food cultures. The food that is available, the organization of meals, what is consider as proper food in different occasions can in fact be slightly different from their country of origin (Terragni et al., 2014). The rules that regulate food consumption, as for instance the above-mentioned division between everyday foods and food for special occasions, are part of a series of non-written norms, people who have not grown up in Norway are unaware of. The immigrant families I met during my studies on food and migration (which unfortunately for the moment do not include the Italians) emphasize that these unwritten norms are difficult to understand and that it is easy to make mistakes (Terragni et al., 2014). These mistakes tend not to be unnoticed, and food can become a way to socialize newcomers into Norwegian practices and values. An Iraqi mother, for instance, recounted that she once sent her daughter to kindergarten with a slice of white bread with Nutella (!). That same day, a note was sent home to her saying that “here” chocolate is not allowed for lunch, together with a brochure on how to prepare a healthy “matpakke.”

Conclusion Food is an important part of the history and culture of a country. The reasons people eat the way they do has to be understood in a wider social context. The case of food in Norway sheds light on various aspects of the Norwegian society such as its trust in the political system, the ideals related to harvesting from nature and the high moralization of food consumption. Food represents an important aspect of the migrant experience and learning what and how to eat in a new country can be challenging as new norms about food consumption have to be learned. I hope that this brief article contributed to a better understanding of the Norwegian food culture and society, particularly for those of us who have not grown up with “matpakke” and Pizza Grandiosa.

Acknowledgments TRUSTINFOOD was funded by the European Commision Research Directorate-General “Quality of Life and Management of living resources” (EU-contract QLK1-CT-2001-00291) WelfareQuality® was funded by European Union, FP6 Priority 5 “Food Quality and Safety”. Project number FOOD-CT-2004-506508 SOMAH was funded by grants from the Research Council of Norway (SHP 194547).

InnBakost has been supported and financed by the Norwegian Research Council (grant number 213460/ H10)

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Døving, R. (2003). Rype med lettøl : en antropologi fra Norge. Oslo: Pax. Esping-Andersen, G. (2013). The three worlds of welfare capitalism: John Wiley & Sons.

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In 2016, 47 million frozen pizzas were sold. https://www.nettavisen.no/na24/finans/nordmenn-har-aldri-spist-merfrossenpizza-enn-i-ar/3423295028.html

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Scienza Senza Confini – Experiences and Projects of Italians in Norway Garnweidner, L. M., Terragni, L., Pettersen, K. S., & Mosdøl, A. (2012). Perceptions of the Host Country’s Food Culture among Female Immigrants from Africa and Asia: Aspects Relevant for Cultural Sensitivity in Nutrition Communication. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 44(4), 335-342.

Grewal, N. K., Kolve, C. S., Terragni, L., & Torheim, L. E. (2016). InnBaKost 6 måneder 2013-2014. Skriftserien.

Halkier, B., Holm, L., Domingues, M., Magaudda, P., Nielsen, A., & Terragni, L. (2007). Trusting, Complex, Quality Conscious or Unprotected? Construction the food consumer in different European national contexts. Journal of Consumer Culture, 7(3), 379-402.

Kjærnes, U., Harvey, M., & Warde, A. (2007). Trust in food : a comparative and institutional analysis. Hampshire [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kolve, C. S., Grewal, N. K., Terragni, L., & Torheim, L. E. (2016). InnBaKost 12 måneder 2013-2014. Skriftserien.

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Notaker, H. (2009). Food culture in Scandinavia: Greenwood Publishing Group.

Roos, G., Terragni, L., & Torjusen, H. (2007). The local in the global. Creating ethical relations between producers and consumers. Anthropology of Food(S2).

Skarstad, G., Terragni, L., & Torjusen, H. (2007). Animal welfare according to Norwegian consumers and producers: definitions and implications. International Journal of Sociology of Food and Agriculture, 15(3), 74-90.

Terragni, L. (1997). Su un corpo di donna : una ricerca sulla violenza sessuale in Italia. Milano, Italy: FrancoAngeli.

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Terragni, L., Garnweidner, L. M., Pettersen, K. S., & Mosdøl, A. (2014). Migration as a Turning Point in Food Habits: The Early Phase of Dietary Acculturation among Women from South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Countries Living in Norway. Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 53(3), 273-291.

Terragni, L., & Kjærnes, U. (2005). Ethical consumption in Norway: Why is it so low? Political consumerism: its motivations, power, and conditions in the Nordic countries and elsewhere (pp. 529): Nordisk Ministerråd.

Terragni, L., Torjusen, H., & Vittersø, G. (2009). The dynamics of alternative food consumption: contextes, opportunities and transformations. Anthropology of Food(Sept.).

Wandel, M., Terragni, L., Nguyen, C., Lyngstad, J., Amundsen, M., & de Paoli, M. (2016). Breastfeeding among Somali mothers living in Norway: Attitudes, practices and challenges. Women and Birth, 29(6), 487-493.

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Kick-off meeting in Oslo – 12th May 2017

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Second meeting in Oslo – 22nd September 2017

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