Easylife: the data reduction and survey handling system for VIPERS

We present Easylife, the software environment developed within the framework of the VIPERS project for automatic data reduction and survey handling. Easylife is a comprehensive system to automatically reduce spectroscopic data, to monitor the survey advancement at all stages, to distribute data within the collaboration and to release data to the whole community. It is based on the OPTICON founded project FASE, and inherits the FASE capabilities of modularity and scalability. After describing the software architecture, the main reduction and quality control features and the main services made available, we show its performance in terms of reliability of results. We also show how it can be ported to other projects having different characteristics.Comment: pre-print, 17 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacifi

Visualization, Exploration and Data Analysis of Complex Astrophysical Data

In this paper we show how advanced visualization tools can help the researcher in investigating and extracting information from data. The focus is on VisIVO, a novel open source graphics application, which blends high performance multidimensional visualization techniques and up-to-date technologies to cooperate with other applications and to access remote, distributed data archives. VisIVO supports the standards defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance in order to make it interoperable with VO data repositories. The paper describes the basic technical details and features of the software and it dedicates a large section to show how VisIVO can be used in several scientific cases.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figures, accepted by PAS

EZ: A Tool for Automatic Redshift Measurement

We present EZ (Easy redshift), a tool we have developed within the VVDS project to help in redshift measurement from otpical spectra. EZ has been designed with large spectroscopic surveys in mind, and in its development particular care has been given to the reliability of the results obtained in an automatic and unsupervised mode. Nevertheless, the possibility of running it interactively has been preserved, and a graphical user interface for results inspection has been designed. EZ has been successfully used within the VVDS project, as well as the zCosmos one. In this paper we describe its architecture and the algorithms used, and evaluate its performances both on simulated and real data. EZ is an open source program, freely downloadable from http://cosmos.iasf-milano.inaf.it/pandora.Comment: accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacifi

Data Reduction and Analysis Graphical Organizer

Spectroscopic surveys are undergoing a rapid expansion in their data collecting capabilities, reaching the level of hundreds of spectra per pointing. An efficient use of such huge amounts of information requires a high degree of interconnection between the various tools involved in preparing the observations, reducing the data, and carrying out the data analysis. DRAGO (Data Reduction and Analysis Graphical Organizer) attempts to easy the process, by integrating in a global framework the main data handling components: from reduction pipelines, to data organization, plotting, and browsing tools, to storing the data reduction results in a database for further analysis. DRAGO allows the use of the astronomer own's preferred tools, by "plugging them in" in an environment which handles transparently the communications between them. See http://cosmos.mi.iasf.cnr.it/pandora .Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, ADA III conference proceedin

Spectroscopic surveys:a different approach to data reduction

We present VIPGI, an automatized human supervised reduction environment, developed within the VIRMOS project to handle VIMOS guaranteed time data. VIPGI is now offered to the international community to be used on site in Milano and Marseille. Born to handle the highly multiplexed MOS VIMOS data, it has been extended to accomodate also IFU data. The widespread and extensive use of VIPGI has suggested the idea of an integrated environment allowing users not only to reduce, but also to organize data in logical structures, to insert results in a database, and use any user defined plugin for data reduction, analysis and inspection. See http://cosmos.mi.iasf.cnr.it/pandoraComment: Astronomical Data Analysis III conference proceedin

El bicentenario desde los hospitales de la UBA

Fil: Abbate, Eduardo H. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Tisioneumonología Prof. Dr. Raúl F. Vaccarezza; Argentina.Instituto de oncología Angel Roffo: \nExcelencia médica en la lucha contra el cáncer. Instituto de investigaciones médicas Alfredo Lanari: \nCincuenta años formando médicos de la UBA. Instituto de tisioneumonología Raúl F. Vaccarezza: \nCiencia al servicio de la lucha contra la tuberculosis. Hospital de Clínicas José de San Martín: \nLa medicina en la Revolución de Mayo de 1810

Genotoxicity testing for radon exposure: Dolichopoda (Orthoptera, Rhaphidophoridae) as potential bio-indicator of confined environments

Abstract Radon represents the major source of natural radioactivity in confined environments. Despite the clear evidence of a direct association between residential exposure and human lung cancer provided by case-control studies, results relating indoor exposure and genotoxic/mutagenic effect induction are still contradictory. The present study attempts to estimate the genotoxic effects induced by exposure to radioactive radon in wild cricket populations sampled from caves where varying concentrations of radon are present. Cave crickets are also tested as possible bio-indicator organisms of genotoxic potential of contaminated residential and confined environments. Six caves in Central Italy are considered covering a broad spectrum of radon radioactivity concentration (221–26, 000 Bq/m3). Dolichopoda specimens were sampled from each cave; both haemocytes and brain cells taken from individuals were tested for responsiveness to DNA damage induced by radon through the Comet assay. Specimens from the least radioactive cave, housed in controlled conditions for 60 days before analysis, were used as control group. Statistically significant increase of DNA damage was found in all groups of individuals from each cave, for both cell types. Very low values of all Comet parameters were found in control group individuals, which gave indications of a good responsiveness of the organism to the variable environmental levels of radioactive contamination. Results indicate that cave crickets represent a reliable tool for the detection of genotoxic potential induced by radioactive contamination of confined environments and can be proposed as a possible bio-indicator system for air (-radioactive) pollution related to indoor exposure

Population assessment without individual identification using camera-traps: a comparison of four methods

The use of camera traps to estimate population size when animals are not individually recognizable is gaining traction in the ecological literature, because of its applicability in population conservation and management. We estimated population size of synthetic animals with four camera trap sampling-based statistical models that do not rely on individual recognition. Using a realistic model of animal movement to generate synthetic data, we compared the random encounter model, the random encounter and staying time model, the association model and the time-to-event-model and we investigated the impact of violation of assumptions on the population size estimates. While under ideal conditions these models provide reliable population estimates, when synthetic animal movements were characterised by differences in speed (due to diverse behaviours such as locomotion, grazing and resting) none of the model provided both unbiased and precise density estimates. The random encounter model and the time-to-event-model provided pre- cise results but tended to overestimate population size, while the random encounter and staying time model was less precise and tended to underestimate population size. Lastly, the association model was unable to provide precise results. We found that each tested model was very sensitive to the method used to estimate the range of the field-of-view of camera traps. Density esti- mates from both random encounter model and time-to-event-model were also very sensitive to biases in the estimate of ani- mals’ speed. We provide guidelines on how to use these statistical models to get population size estimates that could be useful to wildlife managers and practitioners