Capacity assessment of railway infrastructure: Tools, methodologies and policy relevance in the EU context

The transport sector is increasingly faced with several issues related to the rising of traffic demand such as congestion, energy consumption, noise, pollution, safety, etc.. Due to its low external and environmental costs, railway can be considered (together with inland waterways and short-sea-shipping) as a key factor for the sustainable development of a more competitive and resource-efficient transport system (European Commission, White Paper 2011). In order to reinforce the role of rail in European transport , there is a strong need of addressing the efficiency of the system and customers' satisfaction through targeted actions, i.e. rising reliability and quality of service. This becomes particularly pressing as many parts of the existing railway infrastructures are reaching their maximum capacity thus shrinking their capability to provide users and customers a higher or even adequate level of service. Taking also into account that transport demand forecasts for 2030 clearly show a marked increase of rail activity across the whole Europe, we aim to address the issue of rail congestion in the context of relevant policy questions: Is the actual rail Infrastructure really able to absorb forecasted traffic, without significant impacts on punctuality of the system? Would the already planned interventions on the European railway infrastructure guarantee an adequate available capacity and consequently adequate reliability and level of service? To which extent would the coveted competition in an open railway market be influenced by capacity scarcity, mainly during peak hours or along more profitable corridors? An accurate estimation of capacity of the rail network can help answer these questions, leading policy makers to better decisions and helping to minimize costs for users. In this context this report explores the issue of capacity scarcity and sets this issue in the context of other relevant policy issues (track access charges, cost/benefit and accessibility measures, maintenance programmes, freight services’ reliability, external, marginal congestion or scarcity cost for rail, impacts of climate changes, etc.), providing a methodological review of capacity and punctuality assessment procedures. To better explore the real applicability and the time and/or data constraints of each methodology, the study reports some practical applications to the European railway network. Finally in the last section the report discusses the topic from a modelling perspective, as the quantitative estimation of railway capacity constraints is a key issue in order to provide better support to transport policies at EU level.JRC.J.1-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transpor

XML Schema for Wordnet and Ontology

This deliverable describes the XML schema adopted to represent all the data related to the management of the multi-language wordnets and the ontology; they constitute the set of linguistic and semantic resources of KYOTO system

Adrenal Ganglioneuroma with Multifocal Retroperitoneal Extension: A Challenging Diagnosis

A ganglioneuroma (GN) is the rarest and most benign of the neuroblastic tumors and originates from neural crest cells wherever sympathetic nervous tissue exists, such as in the retroperitoneum and adrenal gland. The diagnosis can be very challenging, given the rarity and asymptomatic presentation of this neoplasia, and can be achieved only by means of histological evaluation. Although benign, a few cases of metastatic GNs have been reported in the literature. The prognosis, however, seems to be excellent after surgical resection. We describe a rare case of multifocal retroperitoneal GN, diagnosed incidentally in a 46-year-old woman, with para-aortic and adrenal localizations. After intraoperative pathological diagnosis was made, complete excision of all the visible masses was performed. The postoperative period was uneventful and she was recurrence free 3 months after surgery. To our knowledge, this is the first case report of a multifocal retroperitoneal GN. Among the broad differential diagnoses of adrenal incidentalomas, an adrenal location of neuroblastic tumors should not be forgotten

Las estrategias de control de contaminación acústica en la calidad ambiental del distrito de Nuevo Chimbote en el año 2022

La presente investigación se desarrolló considerando la gran importancia de las acciones y trabajo por parte de las autoridades del distrito en mitigar la contaminación sonora y restablecer la calidad de salud para la población con el objetivo general de identificar las estrategias de control de la contaminación acústica en la calidad ambiental del Distrito de Nuevo Chimbote. Se utilizó un enfoque cualitativo, investigación tipo básica y el diseño de estudio fue descriptiva y teoría fundamentada. Se utilizó la Guía de Entrevista como instrumento para copilar información en base a interrogantes según su experiencia a 10 trabajadores entre fiscales, abogados y funcionarios de la municipalidad distrital de Nuevo Chimbote. Entre los resultados, mostraron que los expertos entrevistados están convencidos, las estrategias de control tienen como finalidad la prevención, y son acciones que permiten controlar este fenómeno. Se concluye que las estrategias de control de contaminación acústica son acciones y medidas preventivas implementadas por nuestras autoridades para mitigar el ruido ambiental. Se recomienda un mayor compromiso y un mejor trabajo en conjunto por nuestras autoridades del distrito de Nuevo Chimbote para controlar la contaminación acústica

Volatile Organic Compounds from Entomopathogenic and Nematophagous Fungi, Repel Banana Black Weevil (Cosmopolites sordidus)

Fungal Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) repel banana black weevil (BW), Cosmopolites sordidus (Germar, 1824), the key-pest of banana [Musa sp. (Linnaeus, 1753)]. The entomopathogens Beauveria bassiana (Bb1TS11) and Metarhizium robertsii (Mr4TS04) were isolated from banana plantation soils using an insect bait. Bb1TS11 and Mr4TS04 were pathogenic to BW adults. Bb1TS11, Bb203 (from infected palm weevils), Mr4TS04 and the nematophagous fungus Pochonia clamydosporia (Pc123), were tested for VOCs production. VOCs were identified by Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry–Solid-Phase Micro Extraction (GC/MS-SPME). GC/MS-SPME identified a total of 97 VOCs in all strains tested. Seven VOCs (styrene, benzothiazole, camphor, borneol, 1,3-dimethoxy-benzene, 1-octen-3-ol and 3-cyclohepten-1-one) were selected for their abundance or previous record as insect repellents. BW-starved adults in the dark showed the highest mobility to banana corm in olfactometry bioassays. 3-cyclohepten-1-one (C7), produced by all fungal strains, is the best BW repellent (p < 0.05), followed by 1,3-dimethoxy-benzene (C5). The rest of the VOCs have a milder repellency to BW. Styrene (C1) and benzothiazole (C2) (known to repel palm weevil) block the attraction of banana corm and BW pheromone to BW adults in bioassays. Therefore, VOCs from biocontrol fungi can be used in future studies for the biomanagement of BW in the field.This research was funded by H2020 European Project Microbial Uptakes for Sustainable management of major bananA pests and diseases with project number 727624

A Tensor Marshaling Unit for sparse tensor algebra on general-purpose processors

This paper proposes the Tensor Marshaling Unit (TMU), a near-core programmable dataflow engine for multicore architectures that accelerates tensor traversals and merging, the most critical op-erations of sparse tensor workloads running on today’s computing infrastructures. The TMU leverages a novel multi-lane design that enables parallel tensor loading and merging, which naturally pro-duces vector operands that are marshaled into the core for efficient SIMD computation. The TMU supports all the necessary primitives to be tensor-format and tensor-algebra complete. We evaluate the TMU on a simulated multicore system using a broad set of ten-sor algebra workloads, achieving 3.6×, 2.8×, and 4.9× speedups over memory-intensive, compute-intensive, and merge-intensive vectorized software implementations, respectively.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (contract PID2019-107255GB-C21), the Generalitat of Catalunya (contract 2021-SGR-00763), the Arm-BSC Center of Excellence, the European HiPEAC Network of Excellence, and the European Processor Initiative (EPI), which is part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 826647. M. Siracusa has been supported through an FI fellowship [2022FI_B 00969] and V. Soria-Pardos through an FPU fellowship [FPU20-02132]. A. Armejach is a Serra Hunter Fellow.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

KIR-HLA Genotypes in HIV-Infected Patients Lacking Immunological Recovery despite Effective Antiretroviral Therapy

BACKGROUND: In HIV-infected individuals, mechanisms underlying unsatisfactory immune recovery during effective combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) have yet to be fully understood. We investigated whether polymorphism of genes encoding immune-regulating molecules, such as killer immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIR) and their ligands class I human leukocyte antigen (HLA), could influence immunological response to cART. METHODS: KIR and HLA frequencies were analyzed in 154 HIV-infected and cART-treated patients with undetectable viral load divided into two groups: 'immunological non responders' (INR, N = 50, CD4(+) T-cell count <200/mm(3)) and full responders (FR, N = 104, CD4(+) T-cell count >350/mm(3)). Molecular KIR were typed using polymerase chain reaction-based genotyping. Comparisons were adjusted for baseline patient characteristics. RESULTS: The frequency of KIR2DL3 allele was significantly higher in FR than in INR (83.7% vs. 62%, P = 0.005). The functional compound genotype HLA-C1(+)/KIR2DL3(+), even at multivariable analysis, when adjusted for nadir CD4(+) T-cell count, was associated with reduced risk of INR status: odds ratio (95% Confidence Intervals) 0.34 (0.13-0.88), P = 0.03. CONCLUSIONS: Reduced presence of the inhibitory KIR2DL3 genotype detected in INR might provoke an imbalance in NK function, possibly leading to increased immune activation, impaired killing of latently infected cells, and higher proviral burden. These factors would hinder full immune recovery during therapy