Are there monojets in high-energy proton-nucleus collisions?

We study high-energy proton-nucleus collisions within the Colour Glass Condensate framework, and compute the probabilities of having a definite number of scatterings in the nucleus with a momentum transfer larger than a given cut. Various properties of the distribution in the number of multiple scatterings are investigated, and we conclude that events with monojets are very unlikely, except for extreme values of the saturation scale Qs.Comment: 4 pages, 4 eps-figures. Talk given at Quark Matter 2006, Shanghai, 14-20 Nov. 200

Factors affecting the quality of XBT data - results of analyses on profiles from the Western Mediterranean Sea

EXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT) temperature profiles collected in the framework of the Mediterranean Forecasting System - Toward Environmental Prediction (MFS-TEP) project have been compared with CTD measurements. New procedures for the quality control of recorded values have been developed and checked. Some sources of possible uncertainties and errors, such as the response time of the apparatus (XBT probe, thermistor and readout chain), or the influence of initial conditions are also analysed. To deal with the high homogeneity of Mediterranean waters, a new technique to compute the fall rate coefficients, that give a better reproduction of the depth of thermal structures, has been proposed, and new customized coefficients have been calculated. After the application of a temperature correction, the overall uncertainties in depth and in temperature measurements have been estimated

Improved quality check procedures of XBT profiles in MFS-VOS

International audienceSippican T4/DB XBT profiles, collected in the framework of Mediterranean Forecasting System ? Toward Environmental Prediction, are analysed, namely the possible influence of launching position height, ship speed and of probes' characteristics. Comparison of XBT vs CTD profiles have suggested some changes in quality control procedures and, more important, in the values of fall rate coefficients customised for the Mediterranean. The effects of these new procedures on the overall uncertainty on depth and on temperature measurements are estimated

Indication of recent warming process at the intermediate level in the Tyrrhenian Sea from SOOP XBT measurements

The Tyrrhenian Sea is a sub-basin of the western Mediterranean crossed by intermediate and deep waters from the eastern basin. Across this sub-basin, temperature profiles of the water column from expendable bathythermographs (XBT) have been acquired for sixteen years along transects realized thanks to the use of commercial vessels. Since 1999 an increase of temperature has been observed at intermediate depths even if interspersed with periods of decrease. This increase involves deeper and deeper depths along the years then involving the whole sub-basin in the range 200-800 m in September 2014 when largest anomalies over the whole period are found. The paper shows evidences of this rapid heating, giving insights into the origin and the diffusion of the warmer intermediate waters then showing its evolution in years and its relationship with the Eastern Mediterranean Transient

Joint analysis of eye blinks and brain activity to investigate attentional demand during a visual search task

In several fields, the need for a joint analysis of brain activity and eye activity to investigate the association between brain mechanisms and manifest behavior has been felt. In this work, two levels of attentional demand, elicited through a conjunction search task, have been modelled in terms of eye blinks, brain activity, and brain network features. Moreover, the association between endogenous neural mechanisms underlying attentional demand and eye blinks, without imposing a time-locked structure to the analysis, has been investigated. The analysis revealed statistically significant spatial and spectral modulations of the recorded brain activity according to the different levels of attentional demand, and a significant reduction in the number of eye blinks when a higher amount of attentional investment was required. Besides, the integration of information coming from high-density electroencephalography (EEG), brain source localization, and connectivity estimation allowed us to merge spectral and causal information between brain areas, characterizing a comprehensive model of neurophysiological processes behind attentional demand. The analysis of the association between eye and brain-related parameters revealed a statistically significant high correlation (R > 0.7) of eye blink rate with anterofrontal brain activity at 8 Hz, centroparietal brain activity at 12 Hz, and a significant moderate correlation with the participation of right Intra Parietal Sulcus in alpha band (R = -0.62). Due to these findings, this work suggests the possibility of using eye blinks measured from one sensor placed on the forehead as an unobtrusive measure correlating with neural mechanisms underpinning attentional demand

Relationships and events: towards a general theory of reification and truthmaking.

We propose a novel ontological analysis of relations and relationships based on a re-visitation of a classic problem in the practice of knowledge repre- sentation and conceptual modeling, namely relationship reification. Our idea is that a relation holds in virtue of a relationship's existence. Relationships are therefore truthmakers of relations. In this paper we present a general theory or reification and truthmaking, and discuss the interplay between events and rela- tionships, suggesting that relationships are the focus of events, which emerge from the context (the scene) they occur in

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

Neurophysiological vigilance characterisation and assessment: Laboratory and realistic validations involving professional air traffic controllers

Vigilance degradation usually causes significant performance decrement. It is also considered the major factor causing the out-of-the-loop phenomenon (OOTL) occurrence. OOTL is strongly related to a high level of automation in operative contexts such as the Air Traffic Management (ATM), and it could lead to a negative impact on the Air Traffic Controllers’ (ATCOs) engagement. As a consequence, being able to monitor the ATCOs’ vigilance would be very important to prevent risky situations. In this context, the present study aimed to characterise and assess the vigilance level by using electroencephalographic (EEG) measures. The first study, involving 13 participants in laboratory settings allowed to find out the neurophysiological features mostly related to vigilance decrements. Those results were also confirmed under realistic ATM settings recruiting 10 professional ATCOs. The results demonstrated that (i) there was a significant performance decrement related to vigilance reduction; (ii) there were no substantial differences between the identified neurophysiological features in controlled and ecological settings, and the EEG-channel configuration defined in laboratory was able to discriminate and classify vigilance changes in ATCOs’ vigilance with high accuracy (up to 84%); (iii) the derived two EEG-channel configuration was able to assess vigilance variations reporting only slight accuracy reduction

Analysis of viral nucleic acids in duodenal biopsies from adult patients with active celiac disease: in search for an etiological relationship

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Celiac Disease (CD) is a multisystemic chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease which develops in genetically predisposed subjects and it is triggered by the ingestion of gluten. After the interaction between HLA-DQ2/DQ8 and gluten-derived peptides, lymphocytes T CD4+ start a specific immune response which ends in a chronic inflammation and mucosal damage. CD pathogenesis is complex and not entirely understood, probably due to an alteration in the gastrointestinal immune system or to its aberrant regulation. Furthermore, many environmental and immune factors could be involved, particularly viral infections. The aim of the study was to observe possible relationships between CD and infections from HHV-6 A/B, EBV, CMV, adenovirus and rotavirus. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Thirty-nine adult patients (aged 18-65 yrs) have been enrolled: specifically, 24 duodenal biopsies from active CD patients and 15 biopsies from non-CD patients were analyzed. CD diagnosis has been performed by means of serological antibodies, histology of duodenal biopsies and duodenal biopsy organ culture. Viral nucleic acids were extracted from duodenal biopsies and then amplified using Real-Time PCR technique. RESULTS: HHV-6B was found in 62.5% of CD patients and in 73.3% of non-CD patients (p=0.13). EBV was found in 4.5% of CD patients and 6.7% of non-CD patients (p=0.35). Nucleic acids from HHV-6A, CMV, adenovirus and rotavirus were not detected in any group. HHV-6B viral load in CD patients was higher than in non-CD patients, but data were not statistically significant (p=0.54). CD patients with HHV-6B viral load >50000 copies/ml resulted to be younger and had lower anti-tTG antibody titers found at organ culture than patients with lower HHV-6B viral load (p>0.05). CONCLUSIONS: There seems to be no difference in viral load and/or in the detection of viruses between CD and non-CD patients. Thus, our data do not support the possible relationship between CD and viral infections, although a larger population is needed to confirm our study results

Instanceeasytl: an improved transfer-learning method for EEG-based cross-subject fatigue detection

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is an effective indicator for the detection of driver fatigue. Due to the significant differences in EEG signals across subjects, and difficulty in collecting sufficient EEG samples for analysis during driving, detecting fatigue across subjects through using EEG signals remains a challenge. EasyTL is a kind of transfer-learning model, which has demonstrated better performance in the field of image recognition, but not yet been applied in cross-subject EEG-based applications. In this paper, we propose an improved EasyTL-based classifier, the InstanceEasyTL, to perform EEG-based analysis for cross-subject fatigue mental-state detection. Experimental results show that InstanceEasyTL not only requires less EEG data, but also obtains better performance in accuracy and robustness than EasyTL, as well as existing machine-learning models such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Transfer Component Analysis (TCA), Geodesic Flow Kernel (GFK), and Domain-adversarial Neural Networks (DANN), etc