Preventive strategies in oral health for special needs patients

As regards to the most common oral disease in pediatric patients, intellectual disability is not a risk factor for caries disease itself, but it rather reduces the individual capability to self-care and therefore to his own oral care. Children suffering of systemic pathologies and/or with different stages of disability are to be considered at high risk for dental caries development. According to recent guidelines for oral health prevention in childhood, individual additional strategies for a preventive care should be applied for these patients. All the health providers, family and caregivers should be involved with the aim of being aware, motivated and informed on oral health issues, and a better access system to the dental care structure, both logistic, professional and economical should be assured

AMuSE-WSD: an all-in-one multilingual system for easy word sense disambiguation

Over the past few years, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) has received renewed interest: recently proposed systems have shown the remarkable effectiveness of deep learning techniques in this task, especially when aided by modern pretrained language models. Unfortunately, such systems are still not available as ready-to-use end-to-end packages, making it difficult for researchers to take advantage of their performance. The only alternative for a user interested in applying WSD to downstream tasks is to rely on currently available end-to-end WSD systems, which, however, still rely on graph-based heuristics or non-neural machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose AMuSE-WSD, the first end-to-end system to offer high-quality sense information in 40 languages through a state-of-the-art neural model for WSD. We hope that AMuSE-WSD will provide a stepping stone for the integration of meaning into real-world applications and encourage further studies in lexical semantics. AMuSE-WSD is available online at http://nlp.uniroma1.it/amuse-ws

The origin of the X-ray emitting plasma in the eastern edge of the Cygnus Loop

The Cygnus Loop is interacting with a protrusion of the cavity wall in its eastern edge (the XA region), where the X-ray emission is very bright. The complexity of the environment and the non-linear physical processes of the shock-cloud interaction make the origin of the X-ray emission still not well understood. Our purpose is to understand the physical origin of the X-ray emission in the XA region, addressing, in particular, the role of thermal conduction in the interaction process. We analyzed two XMM-Newton data sets, performing image analysis and spatially resolved spectral analysis on a set of homogeneous regions. We applied a recently developed diagnostic tool to compare spectral analysis results with predictions of theoretical models, and to estimate the efficiency of thermal conduction on the X-ray emitting shocked plasma. We found that the inhomogeneous cavity wall contains both large clumps (the protrusion) and small isolated clumps with different densities. A large indentation bent over to the south is detected. The abundance of the surrounding ISM is ~0.2 times solar value. We confirmed the important role of thermal conduction in the evolution of X-ray emitting plasma during shock-cloud interaction.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, MNRAS in pres

Chemical elements in Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes - The reference mushrooms as instruments for investigating bioindication and biodiversity

Fungi in the wild are among the principal agents in biogeochemical cycles; those cycles of matter and energy that enable ecosystems to work. By investigating the biodiversity of Italian fungal species and concentration levels of chemical elements in them, it may be possible to use these fungi as biological indicators for the quality of forest, woodland and semi-natural environments. The database of this EUR Report record the dry-material concentrations of 35 chemical elements, including heavy metals, in over 9,000 samples of higher mushrooms (Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes). These samples represent approximately 200 genera and a thousand species. As the database has attained statistical stability it has been possible to define the concept of a “reference mushroom”. The use of a “reference mushroom” may benefit – perhaps only as a methodological approach – various fields of mycological and environmental research; from biodiversity and bioindication, through taxonomy right up to health and sanitation issues. The sheer volume of the collected data may prove to be useful as a comparison for data collected in the future; such results would also allow a better and more exhaustive interpretation of the effects of environmental protection laws that have been in place over the years to reduce or remedy current climate change phenomena and the environmental damage caused by human activity. Studies pertaining to the frequency of occurrence and the ecology of the various fungal species found on Italian soil have tended to link the reference habitats used to European classification guidelines (Natura 2000, CORINE Land Cover, CORINE Biotopes and EUNIS). Thereby the foundations have been laid for the use of mushrooms as biological indicators for the measurement of soil and ecosystem quality.JRC.DDG.H.5-Rural, water and ecosystem resource

WINGS: A Parallel Indexer for Web Contents

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Load-Sensitive Selective Pruning for Distributed Search

A search engine infrastructure must be able to provide the same quality of service to all queries received during a day. During normal operating conditions, the demand for resources is considerably lower than under peak conditions, yet an oversized infrastructure would result in an unnecessary waste of computing power. A possible solution adopted in this situation might consist of defining a maximum threshold processing time for each query, and dropping queries for which this threshold elapses, leading to disappointed users. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a different approach, where, given a set of different query processing strategies with differing efficiency, each query is considered by a framework that sets a maximum query processing time and selects which processing strategy is the best for that query, such that the processing time for all queries is kept below the threshold. The processing time estimates used by the scheduler are learned from past queries. We experimentally validate our approach on 10,000 queries from a standard TREC dataset with over 50 million documents, and we compare it with several baselines. These experiments encompass testing the system under different query loads and different maximum tolerated query response times. Our results show that, at the cost of a marginal loss in terms of response quality, our search system is able to answer 90 % of queries within half a second during times of high query volume

Unveiling pure-metal ejecta X-ray emission in supernova remnants through their radiative recombination continuum

Spectral analysis of X-ray emission from ejecta in supernova remnants (SNRs) is hampered by the low spectral resolution of CCD cameras, which creates a degeneracy between the best-fit values of abundances and emission measure. The combined contribution of shocked ambient medium and ejecta to the X-ray emission complicates the determination of the ejecta mass and chemical composition, leading to big uncertainties in mass estimates and it can introduce a bias in the comparison between the observed ejecta composition and the yields predicted by explosive nucleosynthesis. We explore the capabilities of present and future spectral instruments with the aim of identifying a spectral feature which may allow us to discriminate between metal-rich and pure-metal plasmas in X-ray spectra of SNRs. We studied the behavior of the most common X-ray emission processes of an optically thin plasma in the high-abundance regime. We investigated spectral features of bremsstrahlung, radiative recombination continua (RRC) and line emission, by exploring a wide range of chemical abundances, temperatures and ionization parameters. We synthesized X-ray spectra from a 3D hydrodynamic (HD) simulation of Cas A, by using the response matrix from the Chandra/ACIS-S CCD detector and that of the XRISM/Resolve X-ray calorimeter. We found that a bright RRC shows up when the plasma is made of pure-metal ejecta, and a high spectral resolution is needed to identify this ejecta signature. We verified the applicability of our novel diagnostic tool and we propose a promising target for the future detection of such spectral feature: the southeastern Fe-rich clump of Cas A. While there is no way to unambiguously reveal pure-metal ejecta emission with CCD detectors, X-ray calorimeters will be able to pinpoint the presence of pure-metal RRC and to recover correctly absolute mass and the chemical composition of the ejecta.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Mejoramiento de la productividad aplicando herramienta carta balance, en proyecto Condominio Bicentenario, Trujillo, La Libertad

La presente tesis titulada Mejoramiento de la productividad aplicando herramienta Carta Balance, en proyecto Condominio Bicentenario, Trujillo, La Libertad; tuvo como objetivo incrementar la productividad de las partidas utilizando herramienta Carta Balance en el Condominio Bicentenario. Esta herramienta Lean recoge datos en intervalos de tiempos definidos sobre el tipo de trabajo ejecutado por los obreros, los mismos que se clasifican en: Trabajo Productivo (TP), Trabajo Contributorio (TC), Trabajo No Contributorio (TNC). La investigación es aplicada de tipo descriptiva, donde en primer lugar se busca realizar un diagnóstico al estado actual de la obra en curso, para después ejecutar la herramienta Carta Balance en campo, cuantificando el uso del tiempo y sus variaciones, asimismo identificando y dividiendo las actividades en TP, TC Y TNC, para posteriormente reconocer cuales son los problemas en la ejecución de los trabajos que estén influyendo en la productividad de la obra; y que de esa manera finalmente, mediante los datos obtenidos, se pueda plantear un protocolo de mejora. Aplicando un protocolo de mejora se busca incrementar el porcentaje de Trabajo Productivo e índice de productividad de las partidas analizadas, dejando en evidencia que mediante esta herramienta Lean, Carta Balance, se pueden identificar y optimizar las actividades de cada partida creando así un proceso de mejora continua en lo que resta de la ejecución del proyecto.This thesis entitled, Improvement of productivity by applying the Balance Chart, in the Bicentennial Condominium project, Trujillo, La Libertad; The objective was to increase the productivity of the work using the Balance Chart tool in the Bicentennial Condominium. This Lean tool collects data at defined time intervals on the type of work performed by the workers, which are classified as: Productive Work (TP), Contributory Work (TC), Non-Contributory Work (TNC). The research is applied of a descriptive type, where in the first place a diagnosis of the current state of the work in progress is sought, then execute the Carta Balance tool in the field, quantifying the use of time and its variations, also identifying and dividing the activities in TP, TC and TNC, to later recognize which are the problems in the execution of the works that are influencing the productivity; and that in this way finally, through the data obtained, an improvement protocol can be proposed. By applying an improvement protocol, the aim is to increase the percentage of Productive Work and the productivity index of the items analyzed, making it clear that through this Lean tool, Balance Chart, the activities of each item can be identified and optimized, thus creating an improvement process continues in the remainder of the execution of the project.Tesi

Fabrication of biocompatible free-standing nanopatterned films for primary neuronal cultures

Devising and constructing biocompatible devices for nervous system regeneration is an extremely challenging task. Besides tackling the issue of biocompatibility, biomaterials for neuroscience applications should mimic the complex environment of the extracellular matrix, which in vivo provides neurons with a series of cues and signals to guide cells towards their appropriate targets. In this work, a novel nanopatterned biocompatible poly-ε-caprolactone (PCL) film is realized to assist the attachment and growth of primary hippocampal neurons. Costly and time-consuming processes can be avoided using plasma-surface nanotexturing obtained by a mixed gas SF6/Ar at -5 °C. The intrinsic composition and line topography of nanopatterned PCL ensure healthy development of the neuronal network, as shown by confocal microscopy, by analysing the expression of a range of neuronal markers typical of mature cultures, as well as by scanning electron microscopy. In addition, we show that surface nanopatterning improves differentiation of neurons compared to flat PCL films, while no neural growth was observed on either flat or nanopatterned substrates in the absence of a poly-d-lysine coating. Thus, we successfully optimized a nanofabrication protocol to obtain nanostructured PCL layers endowed with several mechanical and structural characteristics that make them a promising, versatile tool for future tissue engineering studies aimed at neural tissue regeneration