The Design of Effective Maintenance Outsourcing Contracts

Recent developments in maintenance planning and management demonstrate that the establishment of optimized maintenance policies may drastically improve the performance and reduce the operating cost of facilities. However maintenance activities are typically outside of the core business of production facilities, hence enterprises often fail to catch the opportunities that may originate by properly optimized management strategies. A strategic maintenance management should hence encompass the possibility of outsourcing maintenance activities to ensure the necessary perfomance of production systems, while allowing enterprises to concentrate their resources on their core activities. In order to be effectively undertaken an outsourcing strategy must be supported by a proper performance oriented contract. The present paper aims to provide an adequate methodology to address such issues and to define a framework for the definition of the relevant contract variables such as availability levels, penalty policies, rewards and service cost. The methodology here proposed is based upon the evaluation of the expected profit function of both the outsourcer and the provider, by performing a trade-off analysis on the basis of the transaction costs

Artificial Neural Networks for Predicting the Water Retention Curve of Sicilian Agricultural Soils

Modeling soil-water regime and solute transport in the vadose zone is strategic for estimating agricultural productivity and optimizing irrigation water management. Direct measurements of soil hydraulic properties, i.e., the water retention curve and the hydraulic conductivity function, are often expensive and time-consuming, and represent a major obstacle to the application of simulation models. As a result, there is a great interest in developing pedotransfer functions (PTFs) that predict the soil hydraulic properties from more easily measured and/or routinely surveyed soil data, such as particle size distribution, bulk density (ρb), and soil organic carbon content (OC). In this study, application of PTFs was carried out for 359 Sicilian soils by implementing five different artificial neural networks (ANNs) to estimate the parameter of the van Genuchten (vG) model for water retention curves. The raw data used to train the ANNs were soil texture, ρb, OC, and porosity. The ANNs were evaluated in their ability to predict both the vG parameters, on the basis of the normalized root-mean-square errors (NRMSE) and normalized mean absolute errors (NMAE), and the water retention data. The Akaike's information criterion (AIC) test was also used to assess the most efficient network. Results confirmed the high predictive performance of ANNs with four input parameters (clay, sand, and silt fractions, and OC) in simulating soil water retention data, with a prediction accuracy characterized by MAE = 0.026 and RMSE = 0.069. The AIC efficiency criterion indicated that the most efficient ANN model was trained with a relatively low number of input nodes

Editorial. Special Issue: working on the ground to contest inequalities. Insights about ethnic minorities, indigenous communities and migrants navigating geographies worldwide

Editorial. Special Issue: working on the ground to contest inequalities. Insights about ethnic minorities, indigenous communities and migrants navigating geographies worldwid

Editorial. Special Issue: Roma communities navigating and coping with the current and future effects of the COVID19 Crisis

Editorial. Special Issue: Roma communities navigating and coping with the current and future effects of the COVID19 Crisi

Editorial. Special Issue: working on the ground to contest inequalities. Insights about ethnic minorities, indigenous communities and migrants navigating geographies worldwide

Editorial. Special Issue: working on the ground to contest inequalities. Insights about ethnic minorities, indigenous communities and migrants navigating geographies worldwid

Transición escuela-universidad

En este trabajo se presentan resultados parciales de una investigación en el área de Orientación Vocacional Ocupacional de la Universidad Nacional de San Luis, sobre el tema "Transición Escuela-Universidad", en el que se ofrece información, obtenida a través de una encuesta, sobre la vinculación del sector educación con los organismos, personas y programas del área de trabajo y empleo. Se hace referencia a la información que reciben los distintos participantes así como a la importancia que le otorgan a dicha vinculación. Se discute el interés de los resultados obtenidos con vistas a optimizar las intervenciones de la especialidad, a partir de la consideración de la necesidad de la articulación de acciones entre las áreas involucradas.Departamento de Psicologí

The transition school-university

his paper presents partial results of a research in the area of Vocational Occupational Guidance at the National University of San Luis on the subject "Transition School-University". The information offered here follows a survey on the relationship between the educational area and the organizations, persons and programs of the work and employment area. Reference is made to the information the different participants get as well as the importance they assign to said relationship. The interest of the results obtained is discussed with a view to optimize interventions in the speciality by taking into account the need of articulation of actions between the areas involved.Departamento de Psicologí

Promoting Admiration of Foucault Hiding his Defense of Rape and Pederasty

Foucault has been quoted as a great intellectual contributor to feminism and education, despite his defense of decriminalizing rape and pederasty. Since the MeToo movement, there is an increasing criticism of Foucault’s persona and works. However, in order to avoid recognizing their mistake, some authors say that Foucault’s defense of sexual violence was unknown before. This article shows this is not backed by evidence. Data was collected via interviews with 19 subjects with diverse profiles, employing the communicative methodology. The results shed light on the fact that some professors who have included Foucault’s works in their classes hid Foucault’s position in favor of sexual violence to their students. Interviewees state that there are several reasons why they think those professors hid this fact: a) the most critical thinker; b) the transgressor; c) a relativist intellectual; d) “a shield to hide behind”; and e) the idea that the intellectual must be separated from the person. This study indicates that in transmitting those images and hiding or even justifying Foucault instead of critically analyzing the implication of his works and his defense of sexual violence, perpetuating its justification, such professors act as his “hooligans”

Sangiovese cv Pomace seeds extract-fortified Kefir exerts anti-inflammatory activity in an in vitro model of intestinal epithelium using Caco-2 cells

Inflammatory bowel disease and food allergies are a growing topic in the field of nutrition science. Polyphenols, which are the most important secondary metabolites of plants, demonstrated to modulate the expression and/or production of numerous proteins, but also to regulate the intestinal ecosystem. In this context, our aim was the investigation of protective effects against the gastrointestinal mucosa of fortified milk kefir obtained by adding seeds extract from Sangiovese cv. Pomace. Methods: An ultrasound-assisted method was used to obtain the extracts. All the extracts were assayed for the antioxidant activity. The best extract was used as an additive of fermented milk kefir to obtain a fortified final product. Kefir samples were analyzed by NMR spectroscopy. The efficiency of the barrier functions was evaluated by measuring trans-epithelial electric resistance (TEER) using a voltmeter. Results: the enriched kefir (Ksgn) possesses higher antioxidant performances compared to the unfortified sample (Kwht). Kwht and Ksgn did not alter Caco-2 TEER in basal condition