Updates on the bryophyte flora of the lowland Woods and temporary ponds west of Lake Trasimeno (Central Italy).

A study of the bryophytes of the lowlands west of Lake Trasimeno, a very peculiar territory for its geological, biogeographical and bioclimatic traits, was carried out. The data here reported were collected in a mosaic of woods and Mediterranean temporary ponds, the latter indicated as priority natural habitats under the Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC with the code 3170*. Research led to the identification of 44 taxa of bryophytes (13 liverworts and 31 mosses), among which 5 liverwort and 8 moss species are new records for the Umbria region, while one is confirmed. Particularly interesting is the presence of 13 liverwort taxa considered, according to the European Committee for Conservation of Bryophytes (ECCB), under threat at different levels in Europe. The study offers new outcomes on neglected aspects of the flora of central Italy and represents a considerable improvement of the floristic, biogeographical and ecological understanding of its bryophytic component

Complexity of qualitative timeline-based planning

The timeline-based approach to automated planning was originally developed in the context of space missions. In this approach, problem domains are expressed as systems consisting of independent but interacting components whose behaviors over time, the timelines, are governed by a set of temporal constraints, called synchronization rules. Although timeline-based system descriptions have been successfully used in practice for decades, the research on the theoretical aspects only started recently. In the last few years, some interesting results have been shown concerning both its expressive power and the computational complexity of the related planning problem. In particular, the general problem has been proved to be EXPSPACE-complete. Given the applicability of the approach in many practical scenarios, it is thus natural to ask whether computationally simpler but still expressive fragments can be identified. In this paper, we study the timeline-based planning problem with the restriction that only qualitative synchronization rules, i.e., rules without explicit time bounds in the constraints, are allowed. We show that the problem becomes PSPACE-complete

La riabilitazione termale nel 150° Anniversario dell'Unità d'Italia. Un testimonial d'eccezione: Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Nell’anno in cui si celebra il 150° Anniversario dell’Unità d’Italia, il riemergere di alcune lettere di Giuseppe Garibaldi - che fanno riferimento ad un periodo di cure termali effettuato presso le Terme della Ficoncella e di Traiano (vicino Civitavecchia, Roma) - ci ha dato lo spunto per questo lavoro che intende considerare i numerosi trattamenti effettuati presso diverse stazioni termali italiane dall’Eroe dei Due Mondi per una patologia reumatica (probabilmente una poliartrite reumatoide) e per gli esiti di varie ferite di guerra, in particolare la ben nota ferita da arma da fuoco subita a livello dell’arto inferiore destro nel corso della battaglia d’Aspromonte, nel 1862

A novel automata-theoretic approach to timeline-based planning

Timeline-based planning is a well-established approach successfully employed in a number of application domains. A very restricted fragment, featuring only bounded temporal relations and token durations, is expressive enough to capture action-based temporal planning. As for computational complexity, it has been shown to be EXPSPACE-complete when unbounded temporal relations, but only bounded token durations, are allowed. In this paper, we present a novel automata-theoretic characterisation of timeline-based planning where the existence of a plan is shown to be equivalent to the nonemptiness of the language recognised by a nondeterministic finite-state automaton that suitably encodes all the problem constraints (timelines and synchronisation rules). Besides allowing us to restate known complexity results in a fairly natural and compact way, such an alternative characterisation makes it possible to finally establish the exact complexity of the full version of the problem with unbounded temporal relations and token durations, which was still open and turns out to be EXPSPACE-complete. Moreover, the proposed technique is general enough to cope with (infinite) recurrent goals, which received little attention so far, despite being quite common in real-word application scenarios

Bryophytic vegetation of fragile and threatened ecosystems: the case of the Mediterranean temporary ponds in inland Central Italy.

The first overview of the bryophytic vegetation of the Mediterranean temporary ponds in Umbria region is reported. Phytosociological relevés were carried out in a scattered system of ephemeral pools, where seasonal fluctuation in the water level is the main driving factor. By applying Braun-Blanquet's approach to sample the bryo-communities and multivariate analysis tools to analyse data, the identification of some bryophyte communities was possible, one of which is here described as new association. It is Entosthodono fascicularidis-Archidietum alternifolii ass. nova, referable to the class Psoretea decipientis. The other bryo-communities have been framed into the classes Cladonio digitatae-Lepidozietea reptantis, Ceratodonto purpurei-Polytrichetea piliferii and Psoretea decipientis again

Chromosome 1p13 genetic variants antagonize the risk of myocardial infarction associated with high ApoB serum levels

PMCID: PMC3480949This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Drafting a prioritized checklist of Crop Wild Relatives and Wild Harvested Plants of Italy: problems and solutions

The National checklists of Crop Wild Relatives (CWR) and Wild Harvested Plants (WHP) are the basic tools for the development of in situ and ex situ conservation strategies of plant genetic resources. Here we discuss the methodologies and the prioritization process we previously used in the preparation of the prioritized checklist of CWR and WHP for Italy. The starting point were the most up-to-date Italian checklists of native and alien flora with their updates used as a nomenclatural and distributive source of data. Sardinia and Sicily were kept separate from peninsular Italy to perform detailed analyses focused on the taxa of the two major islands. The origin, the endemic status, cultivation, economic importance, uses, gene pool or taxon group, and the Red List status information were added. The WHP status was attributed to all the taxa with known direct uses. A qualitative approach was adopted in the prioritization process, the main criteria used were: 1) the inclusion of wild relative taxa of crops listed in Annex I of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) and/or by the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) for cultivated areas and yield in the last 5 years; 2) the threatened taxa occurring in national or global Red lists; 3) the endemism. This prioritization process generated 102 taxa as most in need of specific protection and /or monitoring measures, 57 taxa requiring monitoring because of their restricted distribution although not requiring specific protection measures and 735 taxa not requiring any specific protection. However, different prioritization processes could have been applied to the Italian checklists yielding different results. Here we discuss the matter

Support to Design for Air Traffic Management: An Approach with Agent-Based Modelling and Evolutionary Search

To enhance Air Traffic Management (ATM) and meet the future traffic demand and environmental requirements, present ATM system is going to be modified (SESAR Joint Undertaking, 2017), designing new services to be integrated in future architecture considering the evolution of present fragmented structure of the airspace and the entanglement of air routes. Such a change process is complicated due to the nature of ATM, which is a large-scale Socio-Technical System (STS), typically involving a complex interaction between humans, machines and the environment. In such kind of systems, managing their evolution is a complex and difficult task since the social and technical implications of any proposed concept should be fully assessed before a choice is made whether or not to proceed with the related development. Often, simulation tools are also used to support the design of the concept itself by enabling what-if-analyses. However, these may be too effort and time consuming due to the exponential growth of the required analysis cases. A quite common mismatch between the performance evaluations in simulated conditions and those achieved in real life is represented by the partial assessment of human aspects that can be performed throughout the new concept lifecycle from its lowest maturity level up to “ready to market”. The proposed work defines an approach to support the design of new ATM solutions, including the evaluation on human behaviour. The approach adopts a combined paradigm, which involves Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation (ABMS) to specify and analyse the ATM models, and Agent-based Evolutionary Search (AES) to optimize the design of the new solutions. A specific case study is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Transition from Direct Routing Airspace (DRA) to Free Routing Airspace (FRA), respectively described by Solution #32 and Solution #33 in the SESAR solutions catalogue (SESAR Joint Undertaking, 2017), is used for both validation and experimentation activities. In detail, the proposed experimentation case regards the design of sector collapsing/decollapsing configuration to optimize controller workloads. The achieved results are presented and discussed

Taming troubled teens: The social production of mental morbidity amongst young mothers in Pelotas, Brazil

Copyright @ 2011 Elsevier Ltd. This is a post-print version of the article. The published version of the article can be viewed at the link below.Explanations for the association between teen-childbearing and subsequent mental morbidity vary considerably, from those based on neurological theories of development to those investigating underlying social and economic determinants. Based on longitudinal epidemiological and ethnographic sub-studies of the 1982 Pelotas birth cohort study, this paper explores the hypothesis that teen childbearing and subsequent mental morbidity have become associated through the interplay of culture, society, and biology in situations where teen pregnancy has become a stigmatised object of scientific and public health attention. Results show that the effect of teen childbearing on subsequent mental morbidity remained significant in the multivariate analysis. Ethnographic analysis, together with epidemiological effect modification analyses, suggest that this association is partially accounted for by the fact that it is more pronounced amongst a specific subgroup of women of low socio-economic status who, being more politicised about societal injustice, were also more critically engaged with – and thus troubled by – the inequitable institutionalisation of life-cycle transitions. With time, these women became highly critical of the institutionalised identification of early childbearing as a key violation of life-cycle norms and the differential class-based application of scientific knowledge on its causes and consequences. Public health campaigns should consider how the age-based institutionalisation of developmental norms has enabled the stigmatisation of those identified as transgressors.The 1982 cohort study has been funded by The Wellcome Trust, the World Health Organisation, the PanAmerican Health Organisation, the European Union, the Programa Nacional para Centros de Excelência (PRONEX), the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), the Brazilian Ministry of Health, and the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Rio Grande do Sul (Fapergs). D Béhague received support from a US National Science Foundation Doctoral Fellowship and a Postdoctoral Training Fellowship from The Wellcome Trust (Grant no. GR077175MA)