Emotional Reactions to the Perception of Risk in the Pompeii Archaeological Park

The assessment of perceived risk by people is extremely important for safety and security management. Each person is based on the opinion of others to make a choice and the Internet represents the place where these opinions are mostly researched, found and reviewed. Social networks have a decisive impact: 92% of consumers say they have more trust in social media reviews than in any other form of advertising. For this reason, Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis have found interesting applications in the most diverse context, among which the most innovative is certainly represented by public safety and security. Security managers can use the perceptions expressed by people to discover the unexpected and potential weaknesses of a controlled environment or otherwise the risk and security perception of people that sometimes can be very different from real level of risk and security of a given site. Since the perceptions are the result of mostly unconscious elaborations, it is necessary to go deeper and to search for the emotions, triggered by the sensorial stimuli, that determine them. The objective of this paper is to study the perception of risk within the Pompeii Archaeological Park, giving emphasis to the emotional components, using the semantic analysis of the textual contents present in Twitter.Peer reviewe

Charge storage characteristics of ultra-small Pt nanoparticle embedded GaAs based non-volatile memory

Charge storage characteristics of ultra-small Pt nanoparticle embedded devices were characterized by capacitance-voltage measurements. A unique tilt target sputtering configuration was employed to produce highly homogenous nanoparticle arrays. Pt nanoparticle devices with sizes ranging from ∼0.7 to 1.34 nm and particle densities of ∼3.3–5.9 × 1012 cm−2 were embedded between atomic layer deposited and e-beam evaporated tunneling and blocking Al2O3 layers. These GaAs-based non-volatile memory devices demonstrate maximum memory windows equivalent to 6.5 V. Retention characteristics show that over 80% charged electrons were retained after 105 s, which is promising for device applications

SVtL: System Verification through Logic: tool support for verifying sliced hierarchical statecharts

SVtL is the core of a slicing-based verification environment for UML statechart models. We present an overview of the SVtL software architecture. Special attention is paid to the slicing approach. Slicing reduces the complexity of the verification approach, based on removing pieces of the model that are not of interest during verification. In [18] a slicing algorithm has been proposed for statecharts, but it was not able to handle orthogonal regions efficiently. We optimize this algorithm by removing false dependencies, relying on the broadcasting mechanism between different parts of the statechart model

Qualitative and quantitative analysis of antibody response in childhood tuberculosis against antigens of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Purpose: Serodiagnosis of tuberculosis in children, using available crude antigens, has been difficult. The tests lack sufficient sensitivity and/or specificity. In this study, western blot analysis of M. tuberculosis H37Rv culture filtrate antigen (CFA) was carried out, to identify diagnostically useful antigens. In addition, the CFA was also used in enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), to measure antibodies of multiple isotypes. Methods: Specific IgG, IgA and IgM antibodies were estimated in the sera from 26 clinically/ bacteriologically diagnosed cases of childhood tuberculosis (CTB) and 61 normal children (CNHS), using culture filtrate antigen. Western blot analysis with culture filtrate antigen was carried out to qualitatively compare the antibody profile among the CTB, with childhood normal controls and adult TB. Results: IgG positivity was only 7.6% with culture filtrate antigen in the CTB group, while 3.2% among the controls were also positive. However, the results of IgA and IgM isotypes were better. By combination of all the three isotypes an increased sensitivity of 57.7% with a specificity of 93.5%, was obtained. Immunoblot analysis revealed marked difference among antibodies in the region of 16, 19, 38 and 45kDa between CTB and CNHS. Conclusions: Our findings point to a limited sensitivity of 57.7% in ELISA with culture filtrate antigen. However, antibodies around 16, 19,38 and 45kDa region may be useful in differentiating the CTB patients from CNHS by immunoblot assay

Armodafinil-induced wakefulness in animals with ventrolateral preoptic lesions

Armodafinil is the pharmacologically active R-enantiomer of modafinil, a widely prescribed wake-promoting agent used to treat several sleep-related disorders including excessive daytime sleepiness associated with narcolepsy, shift work sleep disorder, and obstructive sleep apnea/hypopnea syndrome. Remarkably, however, the neuronal circuitry through which modafinil exerts its wake-promoting effects remains unresolved. In the present study, we sought to determine if the wake-promoting effects of armodafinil are mediated, at least in part, by inhibiting the sleep-promoting neurons of the ventrolateral preoptic (VLPO) nucleus. To do so, we measured changes in waking following intraperitoneal administration of armodafinil (200 mg/kg) or the psychostimulant methamphetamine (1 mg/kg) in rats with cell-body specific lesion of the VLPO. Rats with histologically confirmed lesions of the VLPO demonstrated a sustained increase in wakefulness at baseline, but the increase in wakefulness following administration of both armodafinil and methamphetamine was similar to that of intact animals. These data suggest that armodafinil increases wakefulness by mechanisms that extend beyond inhibition of VLPO neurons

Aggregation and biofilm formation of bacteria isolated from domestic drinking water

The objective of this study was to investigate the autoaggregation, coaggregation and biofilm formation of four bacteria namely Sphingobium, Xenophilus, Methylobacterium and Rhodococcus isolated from drinking water. Auto and coaggregation studies were performed by both qualitative (DAPI staining) and semi-quantitative (visual coaggregation) methods and biofilms produced by either pure or dual-cultures were quantified by crystal violet method. Results from the semi-quantitative visual aggregation method did not show any immediate auto or coaggregation, which was confirmed by the 40 ,6 diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI) staining method. However, after 2 hours, Methylobacterium showed the highest autoaggregation of all four isolates. The Methylobacterium combinations showed highest coaggregation between dual species at extended period of times (72 hours). Biofilm formation by pure cultures was negligible in comparison to the quantity of biofilm produced by dual-species biofilms. The overall results show that coaggregation of bacteria isolated from drinking water was mediated by species-specific and time-dependent interactions with a synergistic type of biofilm formation. The results of this study are therefore a useful step in assisting the development of potential control strategies by identifying specific bacteria that promote aggregation or biofilm formation in drinking water distribution systems

Context-Bounded Analysis For Concurrent Programs With Dynamic Creation of Threads

Context-bounded analysis has been shown to be both efficient and effective at finding bugs in concurrent programs. According to its original definition, context-bounded analysis explores all behaviors of a concurrent program up to some fixed number of context switches between threads. This definition is inadequate for programs that create threads dynamically because bounding the number of context switches in a computation also bounds the number of threads involved in the computation. In this paper, we propose a more general definition of context-bounded analysis useful for programs with dynamic thread creation. The idea is to bound the number of context switches for each thread instead of bounding the number of switches of all threads. We consider several variants based on this new definition, and we establish decidability and complexity results for the analysis induced by them

Evolution of the Hepatitis E virus hypervariable region

The presence of a hypervariable (HVR) region within the genome of hepatitis E virus (HEV) remains unexplained. Previous studies have described the HVR as a proline-rich spacer between flanking functional domains of the ORF1 polyprotein. Others have proposed that the region has no function, that it reflects a hypermutable region of the virus genome, that it is derived from the insertion and evolution of host sequences or that it is subject to positive selection. This study attempts to differentiate between these explanations by documenting the evolutionary processes occurring within the HVR. We have measured the diversity of HVR sequences within acutely infected individuals or amongst sequences derived from epidemiologically linked samples and, surprisingly, find relative homogeneity amongst these datasets. We found no evidence of positive selection for amino acid substitution in the HVR. Through an analysis of published sequences, we conclude that the range of HVR diversity observed within virus genotypes can be explained by the accumulation of substitutions and, to a much lesser extent, through deletions or duplications of this region. All published HVR amino acid sequences display a relative overabundance of proline and serine residues that cannot be explained by a local bias towards cytosine in this part of the genome. Although all published HVRs contain one or more SH3-binding PxxP motifs, this motif does not occur more frequently than would be expected from the proportion of proline residues in these sequences. Taken together, these observations are consistent with the hypothesis that the HVR has a structural role that is dependent upon length and amino acid composition, rather than a specific sequence

Eosinophils Are Important for Protection, Immunoregulation and Pathology during Infection with Nematode Microfilariae

Eosinophil responses typify both allergic and parasitic helminth disease. In helminthic disease, the role of eosinophils can be both protective in immune responses and destructive in pathological responses. To investigate whether eosinophils are involved in both protection and pathology during filarial nematode infection, we explored the role of eosinophils and their granule proteins, eosinophil peroxidase (EPO) and major basic protein-1 (MBP-1), during infection with Brugia malayi microfilariae. Using eosinophil-deficient mice (PHIL), we further clarify the role of eosinophils in clearance of microfilariae during primary, but not challenge infection in vivo. Deletion of EPO or MBP-1 alone was insufficient to abrogate parasite clearance suggesting that either these molecules are redundant or eosinophils act indirectly in parasite clearance via augmentation of other protective responses. Absence of eosinophils increased mast cell recruitment, but not other cell types, into the broncho-alveolar lavage fluid during challenge infection. In addition absence of eosinophils or EPO alone, augmented parasite-induced IgE responses, as measured by ELISA, demonstrating that eosinophils are involved in regulation of IgE. Whole body plethysmography indicated that nematode-induced changes in airway physiology were reduced in challenge infection in the absence of eosinophils and also during primary infection in the absence of EPO alone. However lack of eosinophils or MBP-1 actually increased goblet cell mucus production. We did not find any major differences in cytokine responses in the absence of eosinophils, EPO or MBP-1. These results reveal that eosinophils actively participate in regulation of IgE and goblet cell mucus production via granule secretion during nematode-induced pathology and highlight their importance both as effector cells, as damage-inducing cells and as supervisory cells that shape both innate and adaptive immunity

Chromosome Mis-segregation Generates Cell-Cycle-Arrested Cells with Complex Karyotypes that Are Eliminated by the Immune System

Aneuploidy, a state of karyotype imbalance, is a hallmark of cancer. Changes in chromosome copy number have been proposed to drive disease by modulating the dosage of cancer driver genes and by promoting cancer genome evolution. Given the potential of cells with abnormal karyotypes to become cancerous, do pathways that limit the prevalence of such cells exist? By investigating the immediate consequences of aneuploidy on cell physiology, we identified mechanisms that eliminate aneuploid cells. We find that chromosome mis-segregation leads to further genomic instability that ultimately causes cell-cycle arrest. We further show that cells with complex karyotypes exhibit features of senescence and produce pro-inflammatory signals that promote their clearance by the immune system. We propose that cells with abnormal karyotypes generate a signal for their own elimination that may serve as a means for cancer cell immunosurveillance. By examining the immediate consequences of chromosome mis-segregation, Santaguida et al. show that aneuploidy causes genomic instability and the evolution of cells with complex karyotypes. Such cells undergo senescence and produce pro-inflammatory cytokines that promote their clearance by natural killer cells. Keywords: aneuploidy; cancer; immune system; genome instability; senescenceNational Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant CA206157)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant GM118066)National Institute of General Medical Sciences (U.S.) (Grant T32GM007753