Impact of transport modelling on the 60^{60}Fe abundance inside Galactic cosmic ray sources

The ACE-CRIS collaboration has recently released the measurement of radioactive $^{60}$Fe nuclei abundance in Galactic Cosmic Rays, in the energy range $\sim 195-500$ MeV per nucleon. We model Cosmic Ray propagation and derive from this measurement the $^{60}$Fe/$^{56}$Fe ratio that is expected in the sources of Galactic Cosmic Rays. We describe Cosmic Ray origin and transport within the framework of the disk/halo diffusion model, namely a scenario in which the matter and the Cosmic Ray sources in our Galaxy are confined to a thin disk, while Cosmic Ray propagation occurs in a much larger halo with negligible matter density. We solve the Cosmic Ray transport equation accounting for spallation reactions, decay and ionization losses as well as advection. We find that the $^{60}$Fe/$^{56}$Fe ratio at the source must be very close to the value detected in the local Cosmic Ray spectrum at Earth, due to the fact that spallation reactions are more effective for $^{56}$Fe than for $^{60}$Fe. Such a result could help identify the sources of Galactic Cosmic Rays.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in PR

Rocking behaviour of multi-block columns subjected to pulse-type ground motion accelerations

Ancient columns, made with a variety of materials such as marble, granite, stone or masonry are an important part of the European cultural heritage. In particular columns of ancient temples in Greece and Sicily which support only the architrave are characterized by small axial load values. This feature together with the slenderness typical of these structural members clearly highlights as the evaluation of the rocking behaviour is a key aspect of their safety assessment and maintenance. It has to be noted that the rocking response of rectangular cross-sectional columns modelled as monolithic rigid elements, has been widely investigated since the first theoretical study carried out by Housner (1963). However, the assumption of monolithic member, although being widely used and accepted for practical engineering applications, is not valid for more complex systems such as multi-block columns made of stacked stone blocks, with or without mortar beds. In these cases, in fact, a correct analysis of the system should consider rocking and sliding phenomena between the individual blocks of the structure. Due to the high non-linearity of the problem, the evaluation of the dynamic behaviour of multi-block columns has been mostly studied in the literature using a numerical approach such as the Discrete Element Method (DEM). This paper presents an introductory study about a proposed analytical-numerical approach for analysing the rocking behaviour of multi-block columns subjected to a sine-pulse type ground motion. Based on the approach proposed by Spanoset al.(2001) for a system made of two rigid blocks, the Eulero-Lagrange method to obtain the motion equations of the system is discussed and numerical applications are performed with case studies reported in the literature and with a real acceleration record. The rocking response of single block and multi-block columns is compared and considerations are made about the overturning conditions and on the effect of forcing function’s frequency.</jats:p

A Hypergraph Data Model for Expert-Finding in Multimedia Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have found widespread applications in every area of our life. A large number of people have signed up to OSN for different purposes, including to meet old friends, to choose a given company, to identify expert users about a given topic, producing a large number of social connections. These aspects have led to the birth of a new generation of OSNs, called Multimedia Social Networks (MSNs), in which user-generated content plays a key role to enable interactions among users. In this work, we propose a novel expert-finding technique exploiting a hypergraph-based data model for MSNs. In particular, some user-ranking measures, obtained considering only particular useful hyperpaths, have been profitably used to evaluate the related expertness degree with respect to a given social topic. Several experiments on Last.FM have been performed to evaluate the proposed approach's effectiveness, encouraging future work in this direction for supporting several applications such as multimedia recommendation, influence analysis, and so on

Design of a Wearable Healthcare Emergency Detection Device for Elder Persons

Improving quality of life in geriatric patients is related to constant physical activity and fall prevention. In this paper, we propose a wearable system that takes advantage of sensors embedded in a smart device to collect data for movement identification (running, walking, falling and daily activities) of an elderly user in real-time. To provide high efficiency in fall detection, the sensor’s readings are analysed using a neural network. If a fall is detected, an alert is sent though a smartphone connected via Bluetooth. We conducted an experimental session using an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board in inside and outside environments. The results of the experiment have shown that the system is extremely portable and provides high success rates in fall detection in terms of accuracy and loss. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Enhancing Random Forest Classification with NLP in DAMEH: A system for DAta Management in EHealth Domain

The use of pervasive IoT devices in Smart Cities, have increased the Volume of data produced in many and many field. Interesting and very useful applications grow up in number in E-health domain, where smart devices are used in order to manage huge amount of data, in highly distributed environments, in order to provide smart services able to collect data to fill medical records of patients. The problem here is to gather data, to produce records and to analyze medical records depending on their contents. Since data gathering involve very different devices (not only wearable medical sensors, but also environmental smart devices, like weather, pollution and other sensors) it is very difficult to classify data depending their contents, in order to enable better management of patients. Data from smart devices couple with medical records written in natural language: we describe here an architecture that is able to determine best features for classification, depending on existent medical records. The architecture is based on pre-filtering phase based on Natural Language Processing, that is able to enhance Machine learning classification based on Random Forests. We carried on experiments on about 5000 medical records from real (anonymized) case studies from various health-care organizations in Italy. We show accuracy of the presented approach in terms of Accuracy-Rejection curves

Management of duodenal stump fistula after gastrectomy for gastric cancer: systematic review

AIM: To identify the most effective treatment of duodenal stump fistula (DSF) after gastrectomy for gastric cancer. METHODS: A systematic review of the literature was performed. PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, CILEA Archive, BMJ Clinical Evidence and UpToDate databases were analyzed. Three hundred eighty-eight manuscripts were retrieved and analyzed and thirteen studies published between 1988 and 2014 were finally selected according to the inclusion criteria, for a total of 145 cases of DSF, which represented our group of study. Only patients with DSF after gastrectomy for malignancy were selected. Data about patients' characteristics, type of treatment, short and long-term outcomes were extracted and analyzed. RESULTS: In the 13 studies different types of treatment were proposed: conservative approach, surgical approach, percutaneous approach and endoscopic approach (3 cases). The overall mortality rate was 11.7% for the entire cohort. The more frequent complications were sepsis, abscesses, peritonitis, bleeding, pneumonia and multi-organ failure. Conservative approach was performed in 6 studies for a total of 79 patients, in patients with stable general condition, often associated with percutaneous approach. A complete resolution of the leakage was achieved in 92.3% of these patients, with a healing time ranging from 17 to 71 d. Surgical approach included duodenostomy, duodeno-jejunostomy, pancreatoduodenectomy and the use of rectus muscle flap. In-hospital stay of patients who underwent relaparotomy ranged from 1 to 1035 d. The percutaneous approach included drainage of abscesses or duodenostomy (32 cases) and percutaneous biliary diversion (13 cases). The median healing time in this group was 43 d. CONCLUSION: Conservative approach is the treatment of choice, eventually associated with percutaneus drainage. Surgical approach should be reserved for severe cases or when conservative approaches fail