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Imagery and Morphology of the Ex-votos Painted in Provence and in Italy. A database of four thousand painted ex-votos from Provence and ten thousand from Italy are the basis of the study that the two authors have been carrying out for over forty years with a quantitative and qualitative approach. A historical, sociological, semiological and morphological picture emerges that delivers to the reader the cultural models that are conveyed through social representations and the imagery of painted votive tablets. We are talking about a format that, born in the wealthiest classes about five centuries ago, has maintained the initial principles of composition and has spread becoming an integral part of popular material culture, without solution of continuity. The ex-votos show the strategies that men and women have adopted to survive, persist and replicate themselves, as biological and cultural entities.

Network reconfiguration is an important mechanism for network operators to optimize network performance and optical flow transfer. It concerns unicast and multicast connections. Multicast connections are required to meet the bandwidth requirements of multicast applications, such as Internet Protocol-based TeleVision (IPTV), distance learning, and telemedicine. In optical networks, a multicast connection is made possible by the creation of an optical tree-shaped path called a light-tree. The problem of light-tree pair reconfiguration is addressed in this study. Given an initial light-tree used to transfer an optical flow and a final light-tree that is computed by the network operator to optimize network performance, the goal is to migrate the optical flow from the initial light-tree to the final light-tree without flow interruption. Flow interruption is not desirable for network operators because it forces them to pay financial penalties to their customers. To solve this problem, existing methods use a branch approach that is inefficient if some network nodes do not have wavelength conversion capability. Therefore, we proposed in this study a sub-tree-based method. This approach selects and configures sub-tree pairs from the light-tree pair (initial light-tree, final light-tree) to be reconfigured. Then, we produce a sequence of configurations. The performance study confirms that our method is efficient in solving the problem of light-tree pair reconfiguration because our method does not cause flow interruption.

Flex-grid technology is an effective means to improve the spectral efficiency of optical communication. For a given amplifier spectral bandwidth, it gives rise to the increase in the number of optical channels as it reduces channel spacing. Therefore, in order to reap full benefits from the flex-grid saved spectrum, further amplification power is required with respect to conventional fixed grid. This is a strong limitation if the legacy amplifiers cannot meet this new requirement due to their optical power limits. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting the link margins allows the support of this increase while maintaining in use legacy amplifiers.