Endocrine disruptors and obesity

The purpose of this review is to summarise current evidence that some environmental chemicals may be able to interfere in endocrine regulation of energy metabolism and adipose tissue structure. Recent findings demonstrate that such endocrine disrupting chemicals, termed “obesogens”, can promote adipogenesis and cause weight gain. This includes compounds to which the human population is exposed in daily life through their use in pesticides/herbicides, industrial and household products, plastics, detergents, flame retardants and ingredients in personal care products. Animal models and epidemiological studies have shown that an especially sensitive time for exposure is in utero or the neonatal period. In summarising the actions of obesogens, it is noteworthy that as their structures are mainly lipophilic, their ability to increase fat deposition has the added consequence of increasing the capacity for their own retention. This has the potential for a vicious spiral not only of increasing obesity but also increasing retention of other lipophilic pollutant chemicals with an even broader range of adverse actions. This might offer an explanation as to why obesity is an underlying risk factor for so many diseases including cancer

Sibyl: A Framework for Evaluating the Implementation of Routing Protocols in Fat-Trees

Several data centers adopt fat-tree topologies, where high bisection bandwidth is achieved by interconnecting commodity hardware and by using specific routing solutions. These solutions, which include protocol implementations and configurations, are difficult to evaluate and test both for the density of fat-trees and for the complexity of the protocols. Also, since most issues show up only when a fault happens, it is unfeasible to perform such tests in a production environment. Additionally, the lack of standard testing procedures motivates an effort in developing solutions for such a critical task. In this paper, we propose a methodology devised for testing fat-tree routing protocol implementations. It adopts a wall-clock independent method to establish metrics, which permits normalizing the results of different routing protocol implementations independently from the execution environment. The methodology is implemented by Sibyl, a software framework developed to perform repeatable tests on arbitrary fat-tree topologies automatically. Sibyl also provides a set of tools to analyze the results and investigate implementation behaviors. We evaluate the methodology and Sibyl in three use cases. Such use cases witness a wide spectrum of situations where Sibyl is effective for analyzing, comparing, developing, and debugging routing protocol implementations

Robin George Collingwood e la formazione estetica I Volume

L'analisi della formazione estetica è un particolare della produzione dell'idealismo inglese, interconnesso all'italiano, che è stato affrontato dagli autori in molti diversi approfondimenti. Il convegno che ha raccolto i saggi è stato frequentato da altri autori ancora non editi nel primo volume

Popsophia, teoria e pratica di un nuovo genere filosofico

La prima monografia in Italia dedicata al genere della pop-filosofia. Il volume, curato da Lucrezia Ercoli, direttrice artistica di Popsophia (www.popsophia.it), raccoglie gli interventi di trenta filosofi, giornalisti e giovani ricercatori che hanno raccontato con le parole della filosofia il mondo variegato della cultura di massa contemporanea