Unit Testing in ASPIDE

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative logic programming formalism, which is employed nowadays in both academic and industrial real-world applications. Although some tools for supporting the development of ASP programs have been proposed in the last few years, the crucial task of testing ASP programs received less attention, and is an Achilles' heel of the available programming environments. In this paper we present a language for specifying and running unit tests on ASP programs. The testing language has been implemented in ASPIDE, a comprehensive IDE for ASP, which supports the entire life-cycle of ASP development with a collection of user-friendly graphical tools for program composition, testing, debugging, profiling, solver execution configuration, and output-handling.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on Logic Programming (WLP 2011

Age and support for public debt reduction

Horizon 2020(H2020)852334Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviou

Slings and meshes in the therapy of prolapse and urinary incontinence: Efficacy and side-effects

Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is an important health issue for women, with up to 20% of women undergoing one or more operations to correct prolapse over their lifetime [1]. The reported rate or stress urinary incontinence (SUI) coexisting with POP is as high as 63–80% [2]. The classical anterior colporrhaphy has a high relapse rate for anterior compartment descent (26–58%), and anti-SUI effectiveness of this non-prosthesis method is only negligible (42%–62%) [3,4], so according to the current guidelines anterior colporrhaphy is not indicated in case of SUI . It is also known that the postoperative complication rate for very effective prosthesis operations is high. Permanent implants have been associated with higher rates for de novo stress incontinence (relative risk 1.39), bladder perforation (relative risk 3.92) and postoperative dyspareunia [5]. Synthetic transvaginal mesh has been employed in the treatment of POP with increasing popularity and is usually highly effective in controlling the principal symptoms of prolapse. Based on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warnings of 2008 and 2011, specialists should arrive at a more precise balance between the low success rate for non-mesh techniques and the higher number of postoperative complications of prosthesis methods [6]. Therefore, in a retrospective study, we aimed to evaluate and compare anti-POP efficacy, anti-stress incontinence (anti-SUI) efficacy, and the early (six weeks) and late (36 months) postoperative complication rates for anterior vaginoplasty and the most commonly used transvaginal mesh (TVM) operations. In our series, we found that the TVM operations were significantly better in the reconstruction of POP (91.3% vs. 66.3%; p<0.001) and SUI (90% vs. 55%, p<0.001) after three years of follow-up. Hence, in our study, de novo urge incontinence (DNUS) was significantly more frequently observed (11.86% vs. 0%). Extrusion of the implanted mesh was found in 8.3% of cases involving a prosthesis. In our cases, the implanted mesh was fixed to the peri-urethral tissue with two anchoring stitches, as we had hypothesised; this is superior to the original TVM for anti-incontinence. Previous studies have reported that mesh operations provide unfavourable SUI cure rates. Therefore, the anchoring used as additional anti-incontinence surgical strategies is increasingly being scrutinized to achieve better postoperative continence without any significant side-effects for patients with both POP and SUI. A randomized prospective study was designed to evaluate the anti-SUI effectiveness of that anchoring technique. Mesh contraction and bunching may cause nerve entrapment as well as excessive tension on the fixed mesh arms, which both lead to pain. It is documented that mesh folding and contraction are among the reasons for chronic pelvic pain, dyspareunia and mesh extrusion. A new concept involving an anchorless implant was developed to reduce the side-effects of prosthesis operations. The assumption was that an anchorless neo-pubocervical fascia would accurately mimic the physiological support system, therefore providing adequate support. A new type of mesh was designed with a flexible frame. In our multi-centre study, seventeen patients (84.2%) had Stage 0 prolapse and three patients (15.8%) had Pelvic Organ Prolapse Quantification system (POP–Q) (International Continence Society (ICS)) Stage 1 prolapse after two years of follow-up. No cases of mesh erosion or chronic pelvic pain were documented at follow-up. There has been a drop in the rates for intra-operative bladder perforations and vesicovaginal fistulas (VVF) after the introduction of infra-pubic operative techniques, but the suitable reconstructive technique is still questionable. We reintroduced an “oldy but goody” operative technique of Lehoczky’s island flap implantation for prosthesis-induced VVF. In our short series, all the operated cases were free of fistulas after three months of follow-up. Although the rate for concomitant SUI in patients with POP is as high as 63–80% [2], the effective treatment for coexisting SUI and POP is still debated. The anti-SUI efficacy of the prosthetic placement is barely 72–83% [34-36]. Therefore, the research group developed a modification to the transobturator four-arm TVM to increase its anti-incontinence effect. The proposed modification to the original surgical procedure includes the suture of the anterior part of the mesh to the mid-urethra to prevent the mesh sliding. We think that the appropriate elevation of the mid-urethra would thus occur with the anterior arms and that would achieve a more effective anti-incontinence. We designed a single-centre, prospective, double-blind (participant, investigator/surgeon, outcome assessor), randomized, controlled trial to evaluate the anti-SUI success rate for the modified TVM

Italy: defence industries and the arms trade 1949-1989

Italy became one of the major exporters of arms by the early 1980s, behind only the United States, the Soviet Union, and France. Although its position was later overtaken, it remained one of Europe's main producers and suppliers, without the presence of pronounced military and foreign policy ambitions at the state level. The military industries grew as a result of Italy's close association with other Western and in particular the American defence establishment beginning in the late 1940s. The Italians had access to some of the most advanced military technology through co-production and licence arrangements with its senior allies. By the 1970s, the defence area became the fastest growing sector of the Italian economy when markets were exploited mainly in the Third World.Although about two-thirds of the industry was state-owned, Italian businessmen acted independently in selling arms through Italian trade networks which thrived with very little government direction or intervention. The absence of government assistance actually appeared to favour the export of Italian weapons, because the lack of interest in the sector also meant that Italy maintained perhaps the most lenient export legislation in the West. As the industry expanded, manufacturers availed themselves increasingly of representatives of the foreign trade ministry, the secret services and military attaches abroad in the promotion of Italian war equipment. And as Italy came into the circle of the world's major economic powers, its politicians attempted for a time to adopt the defence industry a's a tool of international prestige. However supporters of the industry did not resolve the contradiction between the low priority Italy continued to give to defence and foreign policy, and the success of the country's industrialists in supplying arms to areas of tension. As business began to decline sharply in the late 1980s for Italy's defence firms, industrialists turned to the possibility of reconversion programs

Rethinking Answer Set Programming Templates

In imperative programming, the Domain-Driven Design methodology helps in coping with the complexity of software development by materializing in code the invariants of a domain of interest. Code is cleaner and more secure because any implicit assumption is removed in favor of invariants, thus enabling a fail fast mindset and the immediate reporting of unexpected conditions. This article introduces a notion of template for Answer Set Programming that, in addition to the don't repeat yourself principle, enforces locality of some predicates by means of a simple naming convention. Local predicates are mapped to the usual global namespace adopted by mainstream engines, using universally unique identifiers to avoid name clashes. This way, local predicates can be used to enforce invariants on the expected outcome of a template in a possibly empty context of application, independently by other rules that can be added to such a context. Template applications transpiled this way can be processed by mainstream engines and safely shared with other knowledge designers, even when they have zero knowledge of templates