Non-spatial skills differ in the front and rear peri-personal space

In measuring behavioural and pupillary responses to auditory oddball stimuli delivered in the front and rear peri-personal space, we find that pupils dilate in response to rare stimuli, both target and distracters. Dilation in response to targets is stronger than the response to distracters, implying a task relevance effect on pupil responses. Crucially, pupil dilation in response to targets is also selectively modulated by the location of sound sources: stronger in the front than in the rear peri-personal space, in spite of matching behavioural performance. This supports the concept that even non-spatial skills, such as the ability to alert in response to behaviourally relevant events, are differentially engaged across subregions of the peri-personal space

Using psychophysical performance to predict short-term ocular dominance plasticity in human adults

Binocular rivalry has become an important index of visual performance, both to measure ocular dominance or its plasticity, and to index bistable perception. We investigated its interindividual variability across 50 normal adults and found that the duration of dominance phases in rivalry is linked with the duration of dominance phases in another bistable phenomenon (structure from motion). Surprisingly, it also correlates with the strength of center-surround interactions (indexed by the tilt illusion), suggesting a common mechanism supporting both competitive interactions: center-surround and rivalry. In a subset of 34 participants, we further investigated the variability of short-term ocular dominance plasticity, measured with binocular rivalry before and after 2 hours of monocular deprivation. We found that ocular dominance shifts in favor of the deprived eye and that a large portion of ocular dominance variability after deprivation can be predicted from the dynamics of binocular rivalry before deprivation. The single best predictor is the proportion of mixed percepts (phases without dominance of either eye) before deprivation, which is positively related to ocular dominance unbalance after deprivation. Another predictor is the duration of dominance phases, which interacts with mixed percepts to explain nearly 50% of variance in ocular dominance unbalance after deprivation. A similar predictive power is achieved by substituting binocular rivalry dominance phase durations with tilt illusion magnitude, or structure from motion phase durations. Thus, we speculate that ocular dominance plasticity is modulated by two types of signals, estimated from psychophysical performance before deprivation, namely, interocular inhibition (promoting binocular fusion, hence mixed percepts) and inhibition for perceptual competition (promoting longer dominance phases and stronger center-surround interactions)

Satellite university campuses and economic development in peripheral regions

Satellite university campuses – whereby established universities decentralise part of their activities, often to areas previously lacking a university – contribute to the diversification of university systems. While satellite campuses, due to their small scale and limited resources, might perform some activities less efficiently than their larger parent universities, we argue that they are uniquely placed to serve the needs of their localities. Based on the case of a satellite campus in North-West Italy, we show that: (i) the campus’ main contribution lies in widening access to higher education to residents who would not attend university in the absence of local provision; (ii) the campus contributes to local development also through research and business and community engagement, and by stimulating local demand for knowledge-intensive services; (iii) research and engagement are more effective for local development where local firms possess relevant absorptive capacity and where there is a favourable institutional framework

Maximal Consistency and Theory of Evidence in the Police Inquiry Domain

We present the architecture of an Inquiry Support System whose aim is to help a detective or a judge in eliciting a maximally consistent set of beliefs as the most believable piece of knowledge to reason with. This is done by (1) finding incoherence inside and across the various depositions; (2) generating the alternate maximally consistent set of beliefs; (3) estimating the degree of reliability of the various informants; and (4) estimating the degree of credibility of the various evidences. The solution of the case is searched among the various possible plots compatible with the maximally consistent set of beliefs retained by the system as the most believable one

Il Difensore Civico e la burocrazia. Diritto, discrezionalit\ue0 e controllo

Il punto di vista dell\u2019Ombudsman realizza un riequilibrio dell'originario rapporto di potere che vede i cittadini di gran lunga svantaggiati rispetto ai burocrati, senza tuttavia sposare pregiudizialmente la causa dell\u2019interesse privato n\ue9 esprimere un interesse pubblico specifico. In questo senso possiamo ipotizzare che grazie all\u2019attivit\ue0 dell\u2019Ombudsman, cio\ue8 nel corso delle relazioni sociali che si intrecciano attorno a questa figura, molti profili discrezionali dell'attivit\ue0 amministrativa, che diversamente resterebbero occulti o sottostimati, potrebbero invece emergere ed essere sottoposti a maggiori controlli e garanzie di giustizia. I contributi degli autori affrontano questi temi, e altri ad essi connessi, in un itinerario originale che costituisce un tentativo di affrontare nell\u2019ottica socio-giuridica e teorica il nodo della discrezionalit\ue0 nella pubblica amministrazion

Effect of dietary clenbuterol and cimaterol on muscle composition, b-adrenergic and androgen receptor concentrations in broiler chickens Effect of dietary clenbuterol and cimaterol on muscle composition, b-adrenergic and androgen receptor concentrations i

Availability: This is the author's manuscrip

From Artificial Intelligence and Databases to Cognitive Computing: Past and Future Computer Engineering Research at UNIVPM

In the last decades, Computer Engineering has shown an impressive development and has become a pervasive protagonist in daily life and scientific research. Databases and Artificial Intelligence represent two of the major players in this development. Today, they are quickly converging towards a new, much more sophisticated and inclusive, paradigm, namely Cognitive Computing. This paradigm leverages Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to design approaches and build systems capable of (at least partially) reproducing human brain behavior. In this paradigm, an important role can be also played by Mathematical Programming. Cognitive systems are able to autonomously learn, reason, understand and process a huge amount of extremely varied data. Their ultimate goal is the capability of interacting naturally with their users. In the last 50 years, UNIVPM has played a leading role in scientific research in Databases and Artificial Intelligence, and, thanks to the acquired expertise, is going to play a key role in Cognitive Computing research in the future

Environmental impact of heavy pig production in a sample of Italian farms. A cradle to farm-gate analysis

Four breeding piggeries and eight growing-fattening piggerieswere analyzed to estimate potential environmental impacts of heavy pig production (N160 kg of live height at slaughtering). Life Cycle Assessment methodology was adopted in the study, considering a system from breeding phase to growing fattening phase. Environmental impacts of breeding phase and growing-fattening phasewere accounted separately and then combined to obtain the impacts of heavy pig production. The functional unit was 1 kg of live weight gain. Impact categories investigated were global warming (GW), acidification (AC), eutrophication (EU), abiotic depletion (AD), and photochemical ozone formation (PO). The total environmental impact of 1 kg of live weight gain was 3.3 kg CO2eq, 4.9 E−2 kg SO2eq, 3.1 E−2 kg PO4 3−eq, 3.7 E−3 kg Sbeq, 1.7 E−3 kg C2H4eq for GW, AC, EU, AD, and PO respectively. Feed production was the main hotspot in all impact categories. Greenhouse gases responsible for GWwere mainly CH4, N2O, and CO2. Ammonia was the most important source of AC, sharing about 90%. Nitrate and NH3 were the main emissions responsible for EU, whereas P and NOx showed minor contributions. Crude oil and natural gas consumption was the main source of AD. A large spectrum of pollutants had a significant impact on PO: they comprised CH4 from manure fermentation, CO2 caused by fossil fuel combustion in agricultural operations and industrial processes, ethane and propene emitted during oil extraction and refining, and hexane used in soybean oil extraction. The farm characteristics that best explained the results were fundamentally connected with performance indicators Farms showed a wide variability of results, meaning that there was wide margin for improving the environmental performance of either breeding or growing-fattening farms. The effectiveness of some mitigation measures was evaluated and the results that could be obtained by their introduction have been presented