The synergistic effect between positivity, socio-demographic factors and smoking cessation: results of a cohort study

OBJECTIVE: To examine the extent to which a effect does exist between Positivity (POS), smoking and socio-demographic factors in determining quitting smoking in subjects participating in a Group Counselling Program (GCP) for smoking cessation.METHODS: 481 subjects were contacted through a telephone call. A logistic regression analysis was carried out. Possible interaction between sociodemographic variables and POS level was tested using the Synergism Index (SI).RESULTS: For individuals with a POS level over or equal to 3.4 the odds of being smoker was significantly higher among females (OR = 1.55), who smoked at home (OR = 2.16) and lower if there had children at home (OR = 0.53). For individuals with a POS level under 3.4, the only significant variable associated with smoking was beinga female (OR = 2.58). As far concerns the synergistic effect between the variables considered does exist between POS levels and having children at home (SI=1.13) and female gender (SI = 2.8).CONCLUSIONS: The synergistic effect between POS and sociodemographic factors adds evidence on the use of POS as possible determinants of individual happiness

The durability of carbon fiber/epoxy composites under hydrothermal ageing

Studies on fibre reinforced composites are now receiving greater attention. Industrial applications have been successful in areas like aerospace, automobile, marine, construction and sporting goods. The first generation of epoxy resins for use in carbon fibre composites are able to achieve optimized high stiffness modules and high heat resistance by a high crosslink density, reached through thermal curing. However, these formulations can be very toxic and brittle with low crack resistance, which was a major disadvantage for structural applications. In the last years the use of ionizing radiation as alternative to thermal curing has been proposed as an environmentally friendly process. Furthermore, in order to enhance toughness mechanical requirements for their applications, the formulation generally consists of blends of epoxy resins and engineering thermoplastics. In terms of durability (service life and reliability), in these materials it depends on different environmental conditions (temperature, moisture, etc.), and it is very important to know how their properties are modified after the exposure to different temperature and moisture absorption cycles. In this work carbon fibre composites produced by ionizing radiation induced curing of the epoxy based matrices have been subjected to thermal and moisture absorption ageing and the influence of these treatments on the thermal and mechanical properties has been investigated through dynamic mechanical thermal analysis and mechanical fracture toughness tests

Synthetic collagen fascicles for the regeneration of tendon tissue.

The structure of an ideal scaffold for tendon regeneration must be designed to provide a mechanical, structural and chemotactic microenvironment for native cellular activity to synthesize functional (i.e. load bearing) tissue. Collagen fibre scaffolds for this application have shown some promise to date, although the microstructural control required to mimic the native tendon environment has yet to be achieved allowing for minimal control of critical in vivo properties such as degradation rate and mass transport. In this report we describe the fabrication of a novel multi-fibre collagen fascicle structure, based on type-I collagen with failure stress of 25-49 MPa, approximating the strength and structure of native tendon tissue. We demonstrate a microscopic fabrication process based on the automated assembly of type-I collagen fibres with the ability to produce a controllable fascicle-like, structural motif allowing variable numbers of fibres per fascicle. We have confirmed that the resulting post-fabrication type-I collagen structure retains the essential phase behaviour, alignment and spectral characteristics of aligned native type-I collagen. We have also shown that both ovine tendon fibroblasts and human white blood cells in whole blood readily infiltrate the matrix on a macroscopic scale and that these cells adhere to the fibre surface after seven days in culture. The study has indicated that the synthetic collagen fascicle system may be a suitable biomaterial scaffold to provide a rationally designed implantable matrix material to mediate tendon repair and regeneration

Spatial averaging and apparent acceleration in inhomogeneous spaces

As an alternative to dark energy that explains the observed acceleration of the universe, it has been suggested that we may be at the center of an inhomogeneous isotropic universe described by a Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) solution of Einstein's field equations. To test this possibility, it is necessary to solve the null geodesics. In this paper we first give a detailed derivation of a fully analytical set of differential equations for the radial null geodesics as functions of the redshift in LTB models. As an application we use these equaions to show that a positive averaged acceleration $a_D$ obtained in LTB models through spatial averaging can be incompatible with cosmological observations. We provide examples of LTB models with positive $a_D$ which fail to reproduce the observed luminosity distance $D_L(z)$. Since the apparent cosmic acceleration $a^{FLRW}$ is obtained from fitting the observed luminosity distance to a FLRW model we conclude that in general a positive $a_D$ in LTB models does not imply a positive $a^{FLRW}$.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures. Explicit derivation of the fully analytical null geodesic equations has been added. Published in GR

Brain-informed speech separation (BISS) for enhancement of target speaker in multitalker speech perception

Hearing-impaired people often struggle to follow the speech stream of an individual talker in noisy environments. Recent studies show that the brain tracks attended speech and that the attended talker can be decoded from neural data on a single-trial level. This raises the possibility of “neuro-steered” hearing devices in which the brain-decoded intention of a hearing-impaired listener is used to enhance the voice of the attended speaker from a speech separation front-end. So far, methods that use this paradigm have focused on optimizing the brain decoding and the acoustic speech separation independently. In this work, we propose a novel framework called brain-informed speech separation (BISS)1 in which the information about the attended speech, as decoded from the subject’s brain, is directly used to perform speech separation in the front-end. We present a deep learning model that uses neural data to extract the clean audio signal that a listener is attending to from a multi-talker speech mixture. We show that the framework can be applied successfully to the decoded output from either invasive intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) or non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from hearing-impaired subjects. It also results in improved speech separation, even in scenes with background noise. The generalization capability of the system renders it a perfect candidate for neuro-steered hearing-assistive devices

School Bike Sharing Program: Will it Succeed?

Encouraging active and sustainable transport modes in order to limit the excessive use of cars, as well as reducing pollutant emissions and creating livable urban environments, has become one of the priorities for policymakers in recent years. The introduction of innovative systems increasingly being introduced in modern cities, such as bike sharing, can certainly contribute to the spread of cycling and thus allow a radical change in the mobility habits of their citizens. This can be especially true for high-school students who are often otherwise accompanied by their parents with private cars. This article aims to assess the influence that a bike sharing program for students has on modal share and on city mobility. As a case study, the city of Palermo was chosen, where the use of the car for home-school trips is prevalent. The "Go2School" project, which involves the creation of a bike sharing program for four schools, with the construction of cycle docks and cycle paths in the nearby areas, will soon become a reality. Thanks to appropriate surveys and questionnaires, a multinomial logit model was calibrated to estimate the modal share towards bike sharing for the students and evaluate the demand for this transport mode

A Web-based Architecture for Interoperability of Lexical Resources

In this paper we present aWeb Service Architecture for managing high level interoperability of Language Resources (LRs) by means of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the use of ISO standards, such as ISO LMF. We propose a layered architecture which separates the management of legacy resources (data collection) from data aggregation (workflow) and data access (user requests). We provide a case study to demonstrate how the proposed architecture is capable of managing data exchange among different lexical services in a coherent way and show how the use of a lexical standard becomes of primary importance when a protocol of interoperability is defined

Corrections to the apparent value of the cosmological constant due to local inhomogeneities

Supernovae observations strongly support the presence of a cosmological constant, but its value, which we will call apparent, is normally determined assuming that the Universe can be accurately described by a homogeneous model. Even in the presence of a cosmological constant we cannot exclude nevertheless the presence of a small local inhomogeneity which could affect the apparent value of the cosmological constant. Neglecting the presence of the inhomogeneity can in fact introduce a systematic misinterpretation of cosmological data, leading to the distinction between an apparent and true value of the cosmological constant. We establish the theoretical framework to calculate the corrections to the apparent value of the cosmological constant by modeling the local inhomogeneity with a $\Lambda LTB$ solution. Our assumption to be at the center of a spherically symmetric inhomogeneous matter distribution correspond to effectively calculate the monopole contribution of the large scale inhomogeneities surrounding us, which we expect to be the dominant one, because of other observations supporting a high level of isotropy of the Universe around us. By performing a local Taylor expansion we analyze the number of independent degrees of freedom which determine the local shape of the inhomogeneity, and consider the issue of central smoothness, showing how the same correction can correspond to different inhomogeneity profiles. Contrary to previous attempts to fit data using large void models our approach is quite general. The correction to the apparent value of the cosmological constant is in fact present for local inhomogeneities of any size, and should always be taken appropriately into account both theoretically and observationally.Comment: 16 pages,new sections added analyzing central smoothness and accuracy of the Taylor expansion approach, Accepted for publication by JCAP. An essay based on this paper received honorable mention in the 2011 Essay Context of the Gravity Research Foundatio