Technical and health governance aspects of the External Quality Assessment Scheme for the SARS-CoV-2 molecular tests: Institutional experience performed in all clinical laboratories of a Regional Health Service

Objectives: Since December 2019, the worldwide public health has been threatened by a severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by Coronavirus-2. From the beginning, a turning point has been the identification of new cases of infection, in order to minimize the virus spreading among the population. For this reason, it was necessary introducing a panel of tests able to identify positive cases, which became crucial for all countries. Methods: As a Regional Reference Centre, the CRQ Laboratory (Regional Laboratory for the Quality Control) developed and conducted an External Quality Assessment (EQA) panel of assay, so as to evaluate the quality of real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which were used by 62 Sicilian laboratories, previously authorized to issue certificates for the COVID-19 diagnosis, on behalf of the Public Health Service. Results: The qualitative performance test was based on pooled samples with different viral loads of SARS-CoV-2 or human Coronavirus OC43. 75% of the participating laboratories tested all core samples correctly, while the remaining 25% interpreted incorrectly the EQA exercise samples matching negatively the standards required. Conclusions: Subsequent inspection visits confirmed the issue of incorrect positive and negative certifications for COVID-19 by private and public laboratories, despite the possession of the authorization requirements currently provided for by current regulations, with a significant impact on the SSR

Facies architecture and Latest Pleistocene-Holocene depositional hystory of the Po Delta (Comacchio area), Italy

Integrated sedimentological and micropaleontological study of 16 cores and 137 piezocone penetration tests, approximately 40 m deep, in the Comacchio area enables the documentation of the depositional history of southeastern Po Plain in the last 30 ka, in response to fluctuating sea level. Sedimentation within an alluvial plain was the dominant feature across the entire study area during the pronounced sea level fall that culminated in the Last Glacial Maximum. Thin lowstand fluvial sediments form the lower part of a shallow incised valley above the Last Glacial Maximum unconformity, whereas a characteristic paleosol separates the last glacial alluvial plain deposits from the overlying postglacial deposits in the interfluves. Transgressive and highstand deposits show a well-developed stacking pattern of retrogradational (coastal plain and estuarine) and progradational (deltaic) facies. Detailed reconstruction of transgressive paleogeography shows evolutionary features that can be useful for refined interpretation of coeval and ancient analogs. At relatively early stages of transgression (10.5-9 ka B. P.), sedimentation in a coastal plain was restricted to the incised valley, whereas nondeposition and pedogenesis took place on the interfluves. With rising sea level (9-6 ka B. P.), a wave-dominated, barred estuary developed in the former topographic low. At peak transgression, after filling up of the estuarine systems with coastal, back-barrier sediments, wide areas outside the valleys were flooded, aggradation extended onto the interfluve unconformity, and a shallow marine depositional environment developed across most of the study area. The depositional history during the subsequent highstand phase was dominated by progradation of the early Po Delta and reflects the complex interplay between high-frequency sea level fluctuations, climate, subsidence, and autocyclic processes

Interesterification of rapeseed oil catalyzed by tin octoate

The interesterification of rapeseed oil was performed for the first time by using tin octoate as Lewis acid homogeneous catalysts and methyl or ethyl acetate as acyl acceptors in a batch reactor, within the temperature range 393e483 K. The yields in fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE) and triacetin (TA) after 20 h of reaction time increased from 8% and 2%eto 61% and 22%, respectively, when the reaction temperature increased from423 to 483 K. An optimum value of 40 for the acyl acceptor to oil molar ratio was found to be necessary to match good fatty acid alkyl ester yields with high enough reaction rate. The rate of generation of esters was significantly higher when methyl acetate was used as acyl acceptor instead of its ethyl homologue. The collected results suggest that tin octoate can be used as effective catalyst for the interesterification of rapeseed oil with methyl or ethyl acetate being highly soluble in the reaction system, less expensive than enzymes and allowing the operator to work under milder conditions than supercritical interesterification processes

Goal-oriented agent patterns with the PRACTIONIST framework

When developing BDI agent-based systems, some design patterns such as incompatible intentions, multiple strategies, intention decomposition, etc. would be very useful for specifying some desired agent behaviours. As BDI agent programmers, our desire would be to have a framework that natively supports such common patterns. The PRACTIONIST framework provides a goal-oriented approach for developing agent systems according to the BDI model. In this paper we first describe the goal model of PRAC-TIONIST agents and how they use such a model to reason about goals during their deliberation process and means-ends reasoning. Then, we show how some useful BDI agent patterns can be directly and actually implemented with our framework, which natively supports such designlevel solutions. In other words, in our framework we wanted to solve some common design problems, by providing some built-in solutions that programmers can easily adopt when developing their intentional agents.

Intentional Agent Patterns with the PRACTIONIST Framework

When developing BDI agent-based systems, some design patterns such as incompatible intentions, multiple strategies, intention decomposition, etc. would be very useful in order to catch some desired agent behaviours. As BDI agent programmers, our desire would be to have a framework that natively support such common patterns. The PRACTIONIST framework provides a goal-oriented approach for developing agent systems according to the BDI model. In this paper we first describe the goal model of PRAC-TIONIST agents and how they use such a model to reason about goals during their deliberation process and means-ends reasoning. Then, we show how some useful BDI agent patterns can be directly and actually implemented with our framework, which natively supports such design-level solutions. In other words, in our framework we wanted solve some common design problems, by providing some built-in solutions that programmers can easily adopt when developing their intentional agents.

Group fitness activities on elderly: who is eligible and who is not.

Introduction While it is impossible to prevent every injury, literature suggests that injury rates could be reduced by 25% if people took appropriate preventative action. On the other side, one major problem of Group Fitness Instructors is to find the right intensity/level suitable for every attendee during classes (e.g. ballroom dancing). Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine the opportunity to adopt already validated function ability tests on group fitness activities with the aim to prevent injuries and maintain or increase quality of life. Methods The study was conducted with a quasi-experimental design. The Berg Balance Scale (BBS) and the Barthel index (BI) were administered to an experimental group (EG) and a control group (CG) of elderly persons living in an inner city area of Palermo, Italy. EG was enrolled in three classes of ballroom dancing. Participants were assessed by BI and then submitted the BBS. The exclusion criteria were: 1) persons aged less than 58; 2) persons with a diagnosis of a disabling disease; 3) ex-professional athletes; 4) for EG, no more than 2 months of previous ballroom dancing experience. Means and SD were used to report preliminary descriptive results. For the purposes of our study a score of 70% for both scales (BBS-70% and BI-70%) was identified as the threshold value between a good and a poor performance. The STATISTICA software was adopted to perform the K-S normality test. Results One hundred twenty people participated to the study. We recruited 66 people as a CG (77.2 ± 6.4 yrs; 26.4 ± 4.4 BMI) and 54 people as EG (69.3 ± 8.3 yrs; 26.6 ± 4.4 BMI). The BI and BBS of CG were 76.51 ± 32 and 31.3 ± 13.2 respectively, while the BI and BBS of EG were 97.5 ± 7.7 and 51.2 ± 5.9, respectively. The BI of CG showed 0.33 K-S values while the same analysis for SG gave 0.47. We found the same trend on BBS values of CG (0.06) compared to EG (0.22). In EG, BBS-70% included 92.6% of cases compared with 24.2% of CG. The Barthel Index indicated a very similar profile: for EG BI-70% accounted for 98.1 of cases while BI-70% of CG 69.7%. Discussion BBS and BI promise to be able to predict who is eligible to start with Group Fitness and who is not. Indeed, the majority of the elderly persons belonging to EG reported higher BBS and BI values than the 70% threshold. Larger numbers and an accurate statistical analysis are necessary to confirm these findings. Preliminary results are very encouraging. References 1. Muir SW, Berg K, Chesworth BM, Klar N, Speechley M. Modifiable Risk Factors Identify People Who Transition from Non-fallers to Fallers in Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Prospective Study. Physiother Can 2010; 62 (4): 358-67. 2. Hackney ME, Earhart GM. Effects of dance on movement control in Parkinson’s disease: a comparison of Argentine tango and American ballroom. J Rehabil Med 2009; 41 (6): 475-81