The “silken thread”: a TIS/GIS application for the enhancement of a cultural itinerary of Cuneo area

The "Fabbriche Magnifiche Systems" is in Cuneo area, Piedmont Region (Italy), an historical heritage -even still preserved, but often abandoned or crumbling- for silk manufacturing, last testimony of early industrial System in XII Century. Now, Because of public and private resources are lacking, there is a lack of policies and actions for refurbishment interventions of historical memory and of territorial circuits. Fir this purpose, the Authors realized a "Silk Cultural Routes (SCR) TIS (Territorial Information System),a prototype for monitoring, analyzing, evaluating and managing open data repository for decision making to increase the value of this cultural asset. The TIS allow data mining and managing thanks to: 1. Information interoperability, 2) data exchange, 3) immediate and map-based results visualisation, by georeferencing. These strategies are an integral part of policies in support of the Silk Cultural Routes advised by the Council of Cultural Cooperation European in 1987 and institutionalized in 1988, with admission of two Italian reagional routes: one intinerary in Como-Lecco territory and the present case-history. This TIS is expected to develpo ad WebTIS, or as a means of cirtuits dissemination oriented towards different types of users, through a dynamic consultation engine of the database by researchers, students and visitors/tourists by way of intercative station

The “silken thread”: a TIS/GIS application for the enhancement of a cultural itinerary of Cuneo area

The "Fabbriche Magnifiche Systems" is in Cuneo area, Piedmont Region (Italy), an historical heritage -even still preserved, but often abandoned or crumbling- for silk manufacturing, last testimony of early industrial System in XII Century. Now, Because of public and private resources are lacking, there is a lack of policies and actions for refurbishment interventions of historical memory and of territorial circuits. Fir this purpose, the Authors realized a "Silk Cultural Routes (SCR) TIS (Territorial Information System),a prototype for monitoring, analyzing, evaluating and managing open data repository for decision making to increase the value of this cultural asset. The TIS allow data mining and managing thanks to: 1. Information interoperability, 2) data exchange, 3) immediate and map-based results visualisation, by georeferencing. These strategies are an integral part of policies in support of the Silk Cultural Routes advised by the Council of Cultural Cooperation European in 1987 and institutionalized in 1988, with admission of two Italian reagional routes: one intinerary in Como-Lecco territory and the present case-history. This TIS is expected to develpo ad WebTIS, or as a means of cirtuits dissemination oriented towards different types of users, through a dynamic consultation engine of the database by researchers, students and visitors/tourists by way of intercative station

Spatial representations in blind people: The role of strategies and mobility skills

The role of vision in the construction of spatial representations has been the object of numerous studies and heated debate. The core question of whether visual experience is necessary to form spatial representations has found different, often contradictory answers. The present paper examines mental images generated from verbal descriptions of spatial environments. Previous evidence had shown that blind individuals have difficulty remembering information about spatial environments. By testing a group of congenitally blind people, we replicated this result and found that it is also present when the overall mental model of the environment is assessed. This was not always the case, however, but appeared to correlate with some blind participants' lower use of a mental imagery strategy and preference for a verbal rehearsal strategy, which was adopted particularly by blind people with more limited mobility skills. The more independent blind people who used a mental imagery strategy performed as well as sighted participants, suggesting that the difficulty blind people may have in processing spatial descriptions is not due to the absence of vision per se, but could be the consequence of both, their using less efficient verbal strategies and having poor mobility skills

The YheI/YheH heterodimer from Bacillus subtilis is a multidrug ABC transporter

AbstractABC (ATP-binding cassette) transporters form the largest family of membrane proteins in micro-organisms where they are able to transport a wide variety of substrates against a concentration gradient, in an ATP-dependent process. Two genes from the same putative Bacillus subtilis operon, yheI and yheH, encoding possibly two different ABC transporters, were overexpressed in Escherichia coli in high yield, either separately or jointly. Using membrane vesicles, it is shown here that both subunits were required to detect, (i) the transport of four structurally unrelated drugs, and (ii) a vanadate-sensitive ATPase activity. Mutation of the invariant Walker-A lysine to an alanine residue in both subunits led to an inactive transporter. Moreover, after membrane solubilization by detergent, both wild-type subunits co-purified on a Ni-Agarose affinity column while only the YheH subunit contained a hexa-histidine tag. This shows that YheI and YheH are indeed able to interact together to form a heterodimer. Importantly, expression of both yheI and yheH genes in B. subtilis could be strongly stimulated by addition of sub-inhibitory concentrations of various unrelated antibiotics. Therefore, B. subtilis YheI/YheH forms a new heterodimeric multidrug ABC transporter possibly involved in multiple antibiotic resistance in vivo

Le problème de l'action subrogatoire contre l'État de l'assureur d'un militaire

International audienceNote sous CE, 7 mai 2010, n° 304376, Assurances générales de France (Cie), Philippot, Lebon ; AJDA 2010. 983 ; ibid. 1138, chron. S.-J. Liéber et D. Bottegh

Frequency versus magnitude of reinforcement: New data with a different procedure

Two pigeons, with previous exposure to concurrent schedules, were submitted to 29 sessions of 8 hours each with concurrent variable-interval variable-interval schedules in which reinforcement parameters changed from session to session. In the first nine sessions reinforcement durations were equal in both schedules while reinforcement frequencies varied; in Sessions 10 through 18, both frequency and duration of reinforcement were varied; in Sessions 19 through 29, only reinforcement duration was varied. Results with this different procedure confirm previous findings that behavior is more sensitive to changes in reinforcement frequency than to reinforcement magnitude

Choice, experience, and the generalized matching law.

Five pigeons were exposed to different pairs of concurrent variable-interval, variable-interval schedules on nine experimental conditions of 30 sessions each. For every session, the parameters of the generalized matching equation were computed for the first five, six, seven, eight, and nine experimental conditions. The exponent a, both for response and time distribution, tended to decrease with increases in number of experimental conditions and to increase with number of sessions per condition, but values of k (bias) varied unsystematically. When the subjects were exposed to five new pairs of schedules, with 55 sessions per condition, the findings were confirmed. Data from the literature on the generalized matching law suggest that the variability of exponent values may be explained in part by the use of naive or experienced subjects in different investigations and by the variability in number of experimental conditions and in number of sessions per condition