3,073 research outputs found
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC UNDERWATER AND UAS SURVEYS OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES: THE CASE STUDY OF THE ROMAN SHIPWRECK OF TORRE SANTA SABINA
The 2020 underwater archaeological research in the inlet of Torre Santa Sabina – Baia dei Camerini (Municipality of Carovigno, Brindisi, Italy) represented the first phase of the pilot intervention of the Interreg Italia-Croatia UnderwaterMuse project. The project aims to enhance and make accessible the vast underwater heritage of the areas involved; this will be done by creating submerged archaeological parks and using virtual reality's narrative and communicative tools and platforms. During the 2020 campaign, different survey activities were carried out using several techniques and methodology to produce the area's multi-scale documentation. First of all, the entire stretch of coast was mapped with UASs (Uncrewed Aerial Systems) flights to reconstruct the coastal landscape in various phases. Furthermore, an underwater photogrammetric survey carried out by expert scuba divers has been achieved in the wreck's aft area (the site analyzed during the 2020 excavation activities). The fruitful synergy between the various actors involved and the support of the territory and the community has allowed the achievement of this campaign's objectives, preliminary to the broader and more articulated intervention foreseen for the following year
Photogrammetric underwater and UAS surveys of archaeological sites: the case study of the Roman shipwreck of Torre Santa Sabina
The 2020 underwater archaeological research in the inlet of Torre Santa Sabina - Baia dei Camerini (Municipality of Carovigno,
Brindisi, Italy) represented the first phase of the pilot intervention of the Interreg Italia-Croatia UnderwaterMuse project. The project
aims to enhance and make accessible the vast underwater heritage of the areas involved; this will be done by creating submerged
archaeological parks and using virtual reality's narrative and communicative tools and platforms. During the 2020 campaign, different
survey activities were carried out using several techniques and methodology to produce the area's multi-scale documentation. First of
all, the entire stretch of coast was mapped with UASs (Uncrewed Aerial Systems) flights to reconstruct the coastal landscape in various
phases. Furthermore, an underwater photogrammetric survey carried out by expert scuba divers has been achieved in the wreck's aft
area (the site analyzed during the 2020 excavation activities). The fruitful synergy between the various actors involved and the support
of the territory and the community has allowed the achievement of this campaign's objectives, preliminary to the broader and more
articulated intervention foreseen for the following year
Evaluating Pre-Trained Transformers on Italian Administrative Texts
In recent years, Transformer-based models have been widely used in NLP for various downstream tasks and in different domains. However, a language model explicitly built for the Italian administrative language is still lacking. Therefore, in this paper, we decided to compare the performance of five different Transformer models, pre-trained on general purpose texts, on two main tasks in the Italian administrative domain: Name Entity Recognition and multi-label document classification on Public Administration (PA) documents. We evaluate the performance of each model on both tasks to identify the best model in this particular domain. We also discuss the effect of model size and pre-training data on the performances on domain data. Our evaluation identifies UmBERTo as the best-performing model, with an accuracy of 0.71, an F1 score of 0.89 for multi-label document classification, and an F1 score of 0.87 for NER-PA
Use of mixed study techniques in the evaluation of coastline dynamics - the “Porto Cesareo” MPA case of study
In recent decades, the much-discussed climate changes with the consequent
variations in sea and weather conditions and the rise of the mean sea level are causing an
indisputable set of negative actions on the entire coastal system mainly due to the increase
of the erosive phenomenon along the shorelines. These critical scenarios have a major
impact even on a local scale, and because of that, we decided to study a well knows tract of
rocky/sandy mixed coast, in a highly anthropized area, even if located inside the “Porto
Cesareo” Marine Protected Area (MPA) (Ionian Sea, Gulf of Taranto, Puglia Region, Italy).
The high naturalistic and archaeological value of this area calls for a greater institutional
effort in the study of erosional phenomena. Several historical documents from other studies
point out that this coastal area is an ideal place for this kind of research. The effects of
coastal erosion and anthropic pressures along this tract of coast require adequate efforts for
a consistent and rapid evaluation of the coastal dynamics. The methodologies proposed in
this work are based on mixed techniques from different fields of study, integrating recent
aero photogrammetry surveys with drones, aerial images acquired by the Italian Military
Geographic Institute (IGM), elaboration of paleoshorelines related by underwater
archaeological markers and their dating, and finally on the elaboration of satellite products
useful for the study of vast areas. The monitoring of coastal areas and the evaluation of
shoreline dynamics are core topics in the implementation of managing actions of decision makers on a local, regional, national, and international scale, above all in places like the
chosen one, inside an MPA. Remote sensing through the use of RPAS (Remotely Piloted
Aircraft Systems or Drones) has proved to be very useful for identifying phenomena that
act on a small spatial scale and in supporting and implementing protective measures
according to the adaptive management approach, through multi-year surveys on habitats of
conservation interest [18]. For the implementation of fine-scale monitoring actions, we
have chosen products from the Sentinel satellite of the Copernicus constellation (European
Space Agency - ESA). In this context, the use of satellite products provides a recurrent
view of the ground, useful in the short and long-term monitoring of changes in wide coastal
areas, and in particular, offers a coastline positioning evaluation in near real-time. Local
monitoring actions performed in recent years have already shown an erosive trend in the
past decades, and even, negative forecasts for the next decade, so further surveys with
mixed methodologies could be crucial in the evaluation of the evolution of this particular
coastal area by local authorities
Challenging specialized transformers on zero-shot classification
This paper investigates the feasibility of employing basic prompting systems for domain-specific language models. The study focuses on bureaucratic language and uses the recently introduced BureauBERTo model for experimentation. The experiments reveal that while further pre-trained models exhibit reduced robustness concerning general knowledge, they display greater adaptability in modeling domain-specific tasks, even under a zero-shot paradigm. This demonstrates the potential of leveraging simple prompting systems in specialized contexts, providing valuable insights both for research and industry
Mechanism of leptin expression in breast cancer cells: role of hypoxia-inducible factor-1alpha.
We reported previously that the obesity hormone leptin
is overexpressed in breast cancer biopsies. Here, we investigated molecular mechanisms involved in this process,
focusing on conditions that are associated with obesity,
that is, hyperinsulinemia and induction of hypoxia. By
using quantitative real-time PCR, immunofluorescent
detection of proteins and enzyme-linked immunosorbent
assays, we found that treatment of MCF-7 breast cancer
cells with high doses of insulin or the hypoxia-mimetic
agent CoCl2, or culturing the cells under hypoxic
conditions significantly increased the expression of leptin
mRNA and protein. Notably, the greatest leptin mRNA
and protein expression were observed under combined
hyperinsulinemia and hypoxia or hypoxia-mimetic treatments. Luciferase reporter assays suggested that
increased leptin synthesis could be related to the activation
of the leptin gene promoter. DNA affinity precipitation
and chromatin immunoprecipitation experiments revealed
that insulin, CoCl2 and/or hypoxia treatments augmented
nuclear accumulation of hypoxia-inducible factor-1a
(HIF-1a) and increased its interaction with several
upstream leptin regulatory sequences, especially with the
proximal promoter containing four hypoxia-response
elements and three GC-rich regions. By using reverse
chromatin precipitation, we determined that loading of
HIF-1a on the proximal leptin promoter concurred with
the recruitment of p300, the major HIF coactivator,
suggesting that the HIF/p300 complex is involved in leptin
transcription. The importance of HIF-1a in insulin- and
CoCl2-activated leptin mRNA and protein expression was
confirmed using RNA interferenc
Knockdown of menin affects pre-mRNA processing and promoter fidelity at the interferon-gamma inducible IRF1 gene
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The tumor suppressor menin (<it>MEN1</it>) is mutated in the inherited disease multiple endocrine neoplasia type I, and has several documented cellular roles, including the activation and repression of transcription effected by several transcription factors. As an activator, MEN1 is a component of the Set1-like mixed lineage leukemia (MLL) MLL1/MLL2 methyltransferase complex that methylates histone H3 lysine 4 (H3K4). MEN1 is localized to the signal transducer and activator of transcription 1 (STAT1)-dependent gene, interferon regulatory factor 1 (<it>IRF1)</it>, and is further recruited when <it>IRF1 </it>transcription is triggered by interferon-γ signaling.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>RNAi-mediated knockdown of MEN1 alters the H3K4 dimethylation and H3 acetylation profiles, and the localization of histone deacetylase 3, at <it>IRF1</it>. While MEN1 knockdown does not impact the rate of transcription, <it>IRF1 </it>heteronuclear transcripts become enriched in MEN1-depleted cells. The processed mRNA and translated protein product are concomitantly reduced, and the antiviral state is attenuated. Additionally, the transcription start site at the <it>IRF1 </it>promoter is disrupted in the MEN1-depleted cells. The H3K4 demethylase, lysine specific demethylase 1, is also associated with <it>IRF1</it>, and its inhibition alters H3K4 methylation and disrupts the transcription start site as well.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Taken together, the data indicate that MEN1 contributes to STAT1-activated gene expression in a novel manner that includes defining the transcription start site and RNA processing.</p
Prognostic value of diabetes and metformin use in a real-life population of head and neck cancer patients
Introduction: Head and neck carcinoma (HNC) is a disease with a poor prognosis despite currently available treatments. The management of patients with this tumor is often complicated by several comorbidities. Among these, diabetes is the second most frequent and its influence on the prognosis is not known.Methods: In this work, we collected data on progression free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) of one hundred twenty-three patients with HNC who received biweekly cetuximab maintenance treatment after first-line chemotherapy. We then compared the survival of nondiabetic patients versus diabetics' one.Results: Surprisingly, both PFS (4 vs. 5 months, HR 2.297, p < 0.0001) and OS (7 vs. 10 months, HR 3.138, p < 0.0001) were in favor of diabetic patients, even after excluding other clinical confounding factors. In addition, we also studied survivals in patients taking metformin, a widely used oral antidiabetic drug that has demonstrated antitumor efficacy in some cancers. Indeed, diabetic patients taking metformin had better PFS and OS than those not taking it, 7 vs. 5 months (HR 0.56, p = 0.0187) and 11 vs. 8.5 months (HR 0.53, p = 0.017), respectively.Discussion: In conclusion, real-world outcomes of biweekly cetuximab maintenance remain comparable to clinical trials. The prognostic role of diabetes and metformin was confirmed to be significant in our series, but further prospective studies are needed for a definitive evaluation
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