On regular drawn symbolic picture languages

Drawn symbolic pictures are an extension of drawn pictures obtained by associating a symbol from an alphabet to each point of the picture. In the paper we will address some new interesting issues derived from the introduction of the symbols and we will identify the conditions, which ensure the preservation of properties holding for drawn pictures in the setting of the proposed extension.     

Photovoltaic characterization of amorphous hydrogenated and chlorinated silicon films

Hydrogenated and chlorinated silicon films were used to deposit Schottky barrier solar cells. Photovoltaic characterization, together with the results of electronic transport measurements, led to the conclusion that the presence of chlorine is detrimental to the properties of this kind of device.     

Degradation of lincomycin in aqueous medium: Coupling of solar photocatalysis and membrane separation

The photocatalytic oxidation of a common antibiotic, the lincomycin was carried out in aqueous suspensions of polycrystalline TiO₂ Degussa P25 irradiated by sunlight. In order to improve the performance of the lincomycin degradation a hybrid system consisting of a solar photoreactor with the photocatalyst in suspension coupled with a membrane module, used to confine both photocatalyst and pollutants in the reaction environment, was tested.A preliminary study was carried out in order to determine some kinetics parameters of the drug photodegradation. The influence of initial substrate concentration on the lincomycin photooxidation rate was investigated. The photooxidation rate follows a pseudo-first order kinetics with respect to the lincomycin concentration under the used experimental conditions. The presence of the membrane reactor allows the catalyst separation and to operate in continuous mode as the membranes rejection for lincomycin and its oxidation products was quite high.     

Semantic annotation of narrative media objects

This paper addresses the annotation of the narrative features of media objects. Based on a relevant narratological and computational background, we introduce an ontology?Cbased model called Drammar, an annotation schema for the narrative features of media objects based on Drammar and a software tool, Cinematic, for annotating these objects and validating the annotation. Annotated media objects can also be automatically edited into sequences, with the twofold goal of testing the validity of the annotation??through the reconstruction of the baseline sequence??and exploring the possibility of alternative sequences. The software tool encodes both the narrative model and the annotation itself in ontological format, and relies on external ontologies for representing world knowledge and limit the arbitrariness of the annotation. The paper opens the way to the design of a general annotation schema for narrative multimedia with the long?Cterm goal of building large corpora of annotated video material and of bridging the gap between the low?Clevel signal analysis and the high?Clevel semantic representation of the narrative content of the media objects. Finally, the paper illustrates a few projects elaborated with the Drammar annotation and the Cinematic tool, with purposes of artistic research and cross?Cmedia analysis, that provide an empirical validation of the annotation process.     

Synthesis and characterization of polyurea microcapsules containing essential oils with antigerminative activity

In this paper we report on the preparation and characterization of polyurea‐based microencapsulated systems, containing essential oils as core materials, for potential applications in controlled‐release formulations of agrochemicals. Microcapsules were synthesized by interfacial polymerization in o/w emulsion between polyfunctional isocyanates and diamines, to investigate the effect of the monomer kind on the morphology and properties of the produced samples. The synthetic conditions that gave the best results were used to microencapsulate four essential oils, able to interfere with the seed germination and radicle elongation of some test plants. The produced samples were characterized, with the aim to analyze their morphology and to verify the effectiveness of essential oil microencapsulation. Moreover, preliminary bioassay based on seed germination and subsequent radical growth were carried out to study the effects of the microencapsulated essential oils. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 2007     

Protein ultrafiltration: an experimental study

An experimental study was carried out on the ultrafiltration (UF) of protein-containing solutions under different conditions, as compared with a solution of a linear synthetic polymer. Three different fluidynamic regimes were investigated, namely, unstirred batch system, stirred batch system, and recirculating system. The results obtained substantially agree with the predictions of the gel polarization model. A significant effect of the electrolytes on the UF flux has been observed, which can be attributed to solute–solute interaction. The influence of different UF membranes has also been investigated.     

Binary and m-ary encoding in applications of tree-based genetic algorithms for QoS routing

Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing (UPC) applications often have Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. These become constraints for the UPC network infrastructure. In this paper, we refer to Mobile ad Hoc Networks, one of the most important technologies supporting UPC, and investigate on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for QoS routing. GAs are part of the soft computing paradigm and can solve the NP search of QoS routes with multiple constraints. We elaborate on tree-based GAs, which represent the set of paths from source to destination as a tree and encode them through the crossed junctions. While their most well-known applications use m-ary encoding representing single paths in the chromosomes, in this paper we discuss a binary encoding with the objective of improving the convergence speed. The binary encoding represents classes of paths in the chromosomes and allows local search on classes of paths. These classes are both collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive. Simulation results compare convergence speed and scalability of GA applications with binary and m-ary encoding in networks with an increasing number of nodes and links per node. As the per-class processing is reason of additional computational cost, an hybrid GA application that uses both binary and m-ary encoding is introduced.     

Exchange of free cholesterol between plasma and erythrocytes from hyperthyroid and hypothyroid ratsin Vitro

In our previous studies, we found that circulating thyroid hormone levels alter cholesterol partition between plasma and erythrocytes by changing the phospholipid content of erythrocytes (Ruggiero, F.M.,et al. (1984)Horm. Metabol. Res. 16, 37–40; Ruggiero, F.M.,et al. (1987)Lipids 22, 148–151). As an extension of this work, we now followed the exchange of free cholesterol between plasma and erythrocytes in control, hyperthyroid and hypothyroid rats under various experimental conditionsin vitro. In control rats, erythrocytes incubated with plasma at 37°C for 4 hr lose 10% of cholesterol which was esterified by lecithin: cholesterol acyltransferase (LCAT) present in the plasma. In hyperthyroid rats, erythrocytes incubated with plasma lose 30% of cholesterol within the same time. By contrast, in the case of hypothyroid rats incubation for 4 hr was necessary to transfer 24% of free cholesterol from plasma to erythrocytes. Inhibition of cholesterol esterification did not affect the loss of erythrocyte cholesterol in control and in hyperthyroid rats. Ca²⁺ increased the LCAT activity in the plasma of these rats. The findings shed light on the role of thyroid hormones in regulating cholesterol levels in plama through active cholesterol transfer between plasma and erythrocytes.     

Recommending multimedia visiting paths in cultural heritage applications

The valorization and promotion of worldwide Cultural Heritage by the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies represent nowadays some of the most important research issues with a large variety of potential applications. This challenge is particularly perceived in the Italian scenario, where the artistic patrimony is one of the most diverse and rich of the world, able to attract millions of visitors every year to monuments, archaeological sites and museums. In this paper, we present a general recommendation framework able to uniformly manage heterogeneous multimedia data coming from several web repositories and to provide context-aware recommendation techniques supporting intelligent multimedia services for the users—i.e. dynamic visiting paths for a given environment. Specific applications of our system within the cultural heritage domain are proposed by means of real case studies in the mobile environment related both to an outdoor and indoor scenario, together with some results on user’s satisfaction and system accuracy.