530 research outputs found
Towards a Conceptualization of Sociomaterial Entanglement
In knowledge representation, socio-technical systems can be modeled
as multiagent systems in which the local knowledge of each individual agent can
be seen as a context. In this paper we propose formal ontologies as a means to
describe the assumptions driving the construction of contexts as local theories and
to enable interoperability among them. In particular, we present two alternative
conceptualizations of the notion of sociomateriality (and entanglement), which
is central in the recent debates on socio-technical systems in the social sciences,
namely critical and agential realism.
We thus start by providing a model of entanglement according to the critical realist
view, representing it as a property of objects that are essentially dependent on
different modules of an already given ontology. We refine then our treatment by
proposing a taxonomy of sociomaterial entanglements that distinguishes between
ontological and epistemological entanglement. In the final section, we discuss the
second perspective, which is more challenging form the point of view of knowledge
representation, and we show that the very distinction of information into
modules can be at least in principle built out of the assumption of an entangled
reality
Metabolic disorders and cardiovascular risk in HIV-infected patients treated with antiretroviral agents.
The clinical management of HIV-infected individuals is based on highly active antiretroviral combination therapy, which provides significant clinical benefit in most patients, but causes in a high proportion of them a metabolic syndrome that includes body fat redistribution, hypercholesterolemia, hypertriglyceridemia, and insulin resistance. These effects are particularly evident in patients treated with protease inhibitors. It is likely that the metabolic disorders related to anti-HIV treatment will eventually translate into an increased cardiovascular risk in patients submitted to such regimens
High occurrence of Flavescence dorée phytoplasma early in the season on grapevines infected with grapevine yellows
Research NoteA survey for the presence of phytoplasmas associated with grapevine yellows in about 500 Italian vineyards was conducted from 1999 to 2004. Grapevines with the earliest symptoms were mostly infected with Flavescence dorée type C phytoplasma (FD-C). As the season advanced, a steady relative decrease in the occurrence of FD-C coincided with a clear relative increase in Bois noir phytoplasma. The relative occurrence of Flavescence dorée type D phytoplasma remained stable.
Quality of life, coping ability, and metabolic control in patients with type 1 diabetes managed by group care and a carbohydrate counting program.
Group care is a clinical-pedagogic model in which traditional routine visits are substituted by sessions of group education. This approach improves quality of life and metabolic control in patients with type 2 diabetes (1) but only quality of life in those with type 1 diabetes (2). The latter must match multiple daily insulin administrations with blood glucose monitoring, dietary intake, and energy expenditure (3). We hypothesized that to improve their coping strategies, patients with type 1 diabetes need more specific training in the technical aspects of day-to-day management of insulin therapy. To verify this, we studied the effects of embedding a carbohydrate counting program within group care on quality of life, knowledge
Cocoa Powder as Delivery Medium for Probiotic Lactobacillus Strains
Three Lactobacillus strains previously isolated from artisanal Italian cheeses and identified by species-spe-
cific PCR as L. helveticus, L. paracasei and L. rhamnosus, were evaluated for the presence of functional
traits, such as acidifying activity, cell surface hydrophobicity, antibiotic resistance, survival in low pH and in
presence of bile salts, in comparison with two commercially available probiotic strains (Lactobacillus aci-
dophilus La-5 and L. rhamnosus GG). Subsequently, with the aim to develop a new non-dairy functional
product, cocoa powder was used as a medium for incorporating freeze-dried cultures of each tested strain and
survival at different time/temperature conditions was investigated. The results obtained demonstrated that
artisanal dairy products are interesting sources of new probiotic strains; in particular, the dairy origin strain L.
rhamnosus showed a good probiotic performance and the highest level of survival during storage. Finally,
we showed that cocoa powder represents a good delivery medium for lactobacilli: it could be considered a
novel functional food exhibiting high antioxidant power and presenting probiotic potentia
Towards an Ontological Modelling of Preference Relations
Preference relations are intensively studied in Economics,
but they are also approached in AI, Knowledge Representation, and
Conceptual Modelling, as they provide a key concept in a variety of
domains of application. In this paper, we propose an ontological foundation
of preference relations to formalise their essential aspects across
domains. Firstly, we shall discuss what is the ontological status of the
relata of a preference relation. Secondly, we investigate the place of preference
relations within a rich taxonomy of relations (e.g. we ask whether
they are internal or external, essential or contingent, descriptive or nondescriptive
relations). Finally, we provide an ontological modelling of
preference relation as a module of a foundational (or upper) ontology
(viz. OntoUML).
The aim of this paper is to provide a sharable foundational theory of
preference relation that foster interoperability across the heterogeneous
domains of application of preference relations
Visualizing Natural Image Statistics
Natural image statistics is an important area of research in cognitive sciences and computer vision. Visualization of statistical results can help identify clusters and anomalies as well as analyze deviation, distribution and correlation. Furthermore, they can provide visual abstractions and symbolism for categorized data. In this paper, we begin our study of visualization of image statistics by considering visual representations of power spectra, which are commonly used to visualize different categories of images. We show that they convey a limited amount of statistical information about image categories and their support for analytical tasks is ineffective. We then introduce several new visual representations, which convey different or more information about image statistics. We apply ANOVA to the image statistics to help select statistically more meaningful measurements in our design process. A task-based user evaluation was carried out to compare the new visual representations with the conventional power spectra plots. Based on the results of the evaluation, we made further improvement of visualizations by introducing composite visual representations of image statistics
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