The impact of ocean acidification on the skeletal ossification in herring larvae (Clupea harengus, L.)

In the era of pervasive mobile computing, human encounters can be leveraged to enable new forms of social interactions mediated by the personal devices of individuals. In this framework, emerging needs, such as content dissemination, social discovery and question&answering, advocate the raising of novel communication paradigms where the binding content-recipients is not provided by the sender (in the classical IP addressing style), but directly executed by specific recipients with interest on it. This allows tagged contents to be freely advertised on the network according to a content-driven approach; human encounters drive the information towards potential recipients that extract it from the stream when content type and personal interest match. This very active research area has recently produced a few preliminary solutions to this networking problem; they inherently confine message delivery inside a specific location and/or community. This covers only a part of users needs, as emerging from everyday life experience and recent studies in human sciences. This paper proposes a novel communication protocol, named InterestCast, or I Cast, solving the problem for a wide range of social scenarios and applying to a delay tolerant ad hoc network whose nodes are the personal device of moving individuals, possibly interacting with fixed road-side devices. The protocol is able to chase users interests decoupling content tags from locations and social communities. The main advantages the proposal achieves are: it ensures remarkable performance results; it is simple and, thus, it is feasible and keeps computational and networking costs low; it preserves users privacy.erant ad hoc network whose nodes are the personal device of moving individuals, possibly interacting with fixed road-side devices. The protocol is able to chase users interests decoupling content tags from locations and social communities. The main advantages the proposal achieves are: it ensures remarkable performance results; it is simple and, thus, it is feasible and keeps computational and networking costs low; it preserves users privacy

Fine-Grained Tracking of Human Mobility in Dense Scenarios

This paper envisions an urban scenario where people carry radio devices that can be dynamically networked, by exploiting human contact opportunities, to create unplanned, improvised and localized wireless connectivity, which has been recently called pocket switched networks (PSN).The paper focuses on the radio device (pocket mobility trace recorder, or PMTR) we have on purposely designed and developed to improve this understanding by enabling the gathering of rich and detailed mobility data sets from experiments in real mobility settings. The main contribution of the paper is twofold: we firstly describe the architecture of the radio devices and, secondly, we provide some evidence of the impact short contacts have on forwarding in dense settings

Morphological evolution of Bardigiano horse

The Bardigiano horse is a local breed of the province of Parma. Since the institution of the Stud Book in 1977, the breed has improved its diffusion and is currently present with 110 stallions and over 1700 mares in 43 provinces in Italy and beyond that in Germany, Switzerland and Hungary

Team dynamics in emergency surgery teams: results from a first international survey

Background: Emergency surgery represents a unique context. Trauma teams are often multidisciplinary and need to operate under extreme stress and time constraints, sometimes with no awareness of the trauma\u2019s causes or the patient\u2019s personal and clinical information. In this perspective, the dynamics of how trauma teams function is fundamental to ensuring the best performance and outcomes. Methods: An online survey was conducted among the World Society of Emergency Surgery members in early 2021. 402 fully filled questionnaires on the topics of knowledge translation dynamics and tools, non-technical skills, and difficulties in teamwork were collected. Data were analyzed using the software R, and reported following the Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys (CHERRIES). Results: Findings highlight how several surgeons are still unsure about the meaning and potential of knowledge translation and its mechanisms. Tools like training, clinical guidelines, and non-technical skills are recognized and used in clinical practice. Others, like patients\u2019 and stakeholders\u2019 engagement, are hardly implemented, despite their increasing importance in the modern healthcare scenario. Several difficulties in working as a team are described, including the lack of time, communication, training, trust, and ego. Discussion: Scientific societies should take the lead in offering training and support about the abovementioned topics. Dedicated educational initiatives, practical cases and experiences, workshops and symposia may allow mitigating the difficulties highlighted by the survey\u2019s participants, boosting the performance of emergency teams. Additional investigation of the survey results and its characteristics may lead to more further specific suggestions and potential solutions

Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

Utility-based forwarding: a comparison in different mobility scenarios

Several proposals are available in the literature that deal with the problem of message forwarding in Opportunistic Networks (ONs). These proposals attempt to derive the path from source to destination that minimizes delivery latency and traveled hops, and maximizes the probability of successful delivery, while saving the overall system resources through a limitation of the number of message copies. Utilitybased forwarding achieves these goals through the use of functions that discriminate among nodes in terms of their utility to reach a destination. Although the approach is very promising, so far, there is no understanding about the tight relationship between utility functions and the mobility scenario in which they operate and, as a consequence, we are unable to design efficient solutions for practical ONs. In this work, we focus on this point by analysing five well known utility functions in five different scenarios. We establish relationships between the mechanisms adopted by the utility functions to discriminate among candidate relays, and the characteristics of the environment in terms of people mobility and the structure of their communities. The results can be useful to select an appropriate forwarding mechanism when deploying an experimental Opportunistic Network, and to design a novel utility function able to adapt to variable mobility patterns

Providing reliable and fault-tolerant broadcast delivery in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks are making a new class of mobile applications feasible. They benefit from the fast deployment and reconfiguration of the networks, are mainly characterized by the need to support many-to-many interaction schema within groups of cooperating mobile hosts and are likely to use replication of data objects to achieve performances and high data availability. This strong group orientation requires specialized solutions that combine adaptation to the fully mobile environment and provide the adequate level of fault tolerance. In this paper, we present the reliable broadcast protocol that has been purposely designed for mobile ad-hoc networks. The reliable broadcast service ensures that all the hosts in the network deliver the same set of messages to the upper layer. It represents the building block to obtain higher broadcast and multicast services with stronger guarantees and is an efficient and reliable alternative to flooding. The protocol is constructed on top of the wireless MAC protocol, which in turn sits over the clustering protocol. It provides an exactly once message delivery semantics and tolerates communication failures and host mobility. Temporary disconnections and network partitions are also tolerated under the assumption that they are eventually repaired, as specified by a Liveness property. The termination of the protocol is proved and complexity and performance analyses are also provided

Content dissemination on location-based communities : a comparative analysis

This paper focuses on content dissemination in location-centered communities and provides the first comparative analysis of two forwarding algorithms on real scenario, namely, ProfileCast - which has been on purposely designed for this environment - and InterestCast - which by contrast addresses more general settings. The paper provides quantitative evaluation of relevant metrics (i.e. community coverage, delivery delay, energy/message efficiency) to be considered whenever attempting to spread contents to the persons that are used to visit the same location. Moreover, the experiment allows to give an insight on the problems arising when deploying these protocols on real settings and an empirical evaluation of two different approaches. ProfileCast leverages mechanisms to automatically extract the intrinsic characteristics of the users from their behavior pattern; a content generated by a node is implicitly addressed to users with similar behavior as the source. InterestCast matches content tags against interests explicitly expressed by the users