Life Monza: project description and actions’ updating

The introduction of Low Emission Zones, urban areas subject to road traffic restrictions in order to ensure compliance with the air pollutants limit values set by the European Directive on ambient air quality (2008/50/EC), is a common and well-established action in the administrative government of cities. The impacts on air quality improvement are widely analysed, whereas the effects and benefits concerning the noise have not been addressed in a comprehensive manner. As a consequence, the definition, the criteria for the analysis and the management methods of a Noise Low Emission Zone are not clearly expressed and shared yet. The LIFE MONZA project (Methodologies fOr Noise low emission Zones introduction And management - LIFE15 ENV/IT/000586) addresses these issues. The first objective of the project, co-funded by the European Commission, is to introduce an easy-replicable method for the identification and the management of the Noise Low Emission Zone, an urban area subject to traffic restrictions, whose impacts and benefits regarding noise issues will be analyzed and tested in the pilot area of the city of Monza, located in Northern Italy. Background conditions, structure, objectives of the project and actions’ progress will be discussed in this article

Subclassification of the “Grey Zone” of Thyroid Cytology; A Retrospective Descriptive Study with Clinical, Cytological, and Histological Correlation

Undetermined thyroid cytology precludes any definitive distinction between malignant and benign lesions. Recently several classifications have been proposed to split this category into two or more cytological subcategories related to different malignancy risk rates. The current study was performed retrospectively to investigate the results obtained separating “undetermined” cytologic reports into two categories: “follicular lesion” (FL) and “atypia of undetermined significance” (AUS). Biochemical, clinical, and echographic features of each category were also retrospectively analyzed. Altogether, 316 undetermined fine-needle aspirated cytologies (FNACs) were reclassified as 74 FL and 242 AUS. Histological control leads to a diagnosis of carcinomas, adenomas, and nonneoplastic lesions, respectively, in 42.2%, 20%, and 37.8% of AUS and in 8.3%, 69.4%, and 22.2% of FL. Among biochemical, clinical, cytological, and echographic outcomes, altered thyroid autoantibodies, multiple versus single nodule, AUS versus FL, and presence of intranodular vascular flow were statistically significant to differentiate adenoma from carcinoma and from nonneoplastic lesions, whereas no significant differences were found between carcinomas and nonneoplastic lesions for these parameters. The results of this retrospective study show that undetermined FNAC category can further be subclassified in AUS and FL, the former showing higher malignancy rate. Further prospective studies are needed to confirm our results

Different spectroscopic behavior of coupled and freestanding monolayer graphene deposited by CVD on Cu foil

The growth of graphene on copper foil has been performed, following the well-known low-pressure chemical vapor (LP-CVD) procedure. The as-deposited monolayer graphene clearly exhibits two different coupling behaviors with the metal substrate, as demonstrated by visual microscopic investigation and by other experimental techniques, like Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and micro-Raman spectroscopy. The single graphene sheet shows both large areas where it is coupled to the metal substrate and others where it exhibits freestanding-like characteristics. This phenomenology appears to be related to oxidation of the copper surface. In addition, we demonstrate the possibility to induce a variation of the coupling state by visible-light irradiation above a proper power threshold. The resulting change of the coupling with the metal substrate is associated to a local variation of the work function. Applications in high-performance electronic devices can be suitably tailored by optical methods and, in principle, by any local probe producing "hot spots" such as Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) tips and electron beams.</p

Measurement of differential cross sections for top quark pair production using the lepton plus jets final state in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV

National Science Foundation (U.S.

Particle-flow reconstruction and global event description with the CMS detector

The CMS apparatus was identified, a few years before the start of the LHC operation at CERN, to feature properties well suited to particle-flow (PF) reconstruction: a highly-segmented tracker, a fine-grained electromagnetic calorimeter, a hermetic hadron calorimeter, a strong magnetic field, and an excellent muon spectrometer. A fully-fledged PF reconstruction algorithm tuned to the CMS detector was therefore developed and has been consistently used in physics analyses for the first time at a hadron collider. For each collision, the comprehensive list of final-state particles identified and reconstructed by the algorithm provides a global event description that leads to unprecedented CMS performance for jet and hadronic tau decay reconstruction, missing transverse momentum determination, and electron and muon identification. This approach also allows particles from pileup interactions to be identified and enables efficient pileup mitigation methods. The data collected by CMS at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV show excellent agreement with the simulation and confirm the superior PF performance at least up to an average of 20 pileup interactions

Identification of heavy-flavour jets with the CMS detector in pp collisions at 13 TeV

Many measurements and searches for physics beyond the standard model at the LHC rely on the efficient identification of heavy-flavour jets, i.e. jets originating from bottom or charm quarks. In this paper, the discriminating variables and the algorithms used for heavy-flavour jet identification during the first years of operation of the CMS experiment in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, are presented. Heavy-flavour jet identification algorithms have been improved compared to those used previously at centre-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV. For jets with transverse momenta in the range expected in simulated $\mathrm{t}\overline{\mathrm{t}}$ events, these new developments result in an efficiency of 68% for the correct identification of a b jet for a probability of 1% of misidentifying a light-flavour jet. The improvement in relative efficiency at this misidentification probability is about 15%, compared to previous CMS algorithms. In addition, for the first time algorithms have been developed to identify jets containing two b hadrons in Lorentz-boosted event topologies, as well as to tag c jets. The large data sample recorded in 2016 at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV has also allowed the development of new methods to measure the efficiency and misidentification probability of heavy-flavour jet identification algorithms. The heavy-flavour jet identification efficiency is measured with a precision of a few per cent at moderate jet transverse momenta (between 30 and 300 GeV) and about 5% at the highest jet transverse momenta (between 500 and 1000 GeV)

Search for heavy resonances decaying to a top quark and a bottom quark in the lepton+jets final state in proton–proton collisions at 13 TeV

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Evidence for the Higgs boson decay to a bottom quark–antiquark pair

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Pseudorapidity and transverse momentum dependence of flow harmonics in pPb and PbPb collisions

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis