A Data-Driven Approach for Tag Refinement and Localization in Web Videos

Tagging of visual content is becoming more and more widespread as web-based services and social networks have popularized tagging functionalities among their users. These user-generated tags are used to ease browsing and exploration of media collections, e.g. using tag clouds, or to retrieve multimedia content. However, not all media are equally tagged by users. Using the current systems is easy to tag a single photo, and even tagging a part of a photo, like a face, has become common in sites like Flickr and Facebook. On the other hand, tagging a video sequence is more complicated and time consuming, so that users just tag the overall content of a video. In this paper we present a method for automatic video annotation that increases the number of tags originally provided by users, and localizes them temporally, associating tags to keyframes. Our approach exploits collective knowledge embedded in user-generated tags and web sources, and visual similarity of keyframes and images uploaded to social sites like YouTube and Flickr, as well as web sources like Google and Bing. Given a keyframe, our method is able to select on the fly from these visual sources the training exemplars that should be the most relevant for this test sample, and proceeds to transfer labels across similar images. Compared to existing video tagging approaches that require training classifiers for each tag, our system has few parameters, is easy to implement and can deal with an open vocabulary scenario. We demonstrate the approach on tag refinement and localization on DUT-WEBV, a large dataset of web videos, and show state-of-the-art results.Comment: Preprint submitted to Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU

Clowns Benefit Children Hospitalized for Respiratory Pathologies

The study aims at evaluating health-generating function of humor therapy in a hospital ward hosting children suffering from respiratory pathologies. The main scope of this study is to investigate possible positive effects of the presence of a clown on both the clinical evolution of the on-going disease, and on some physiological and pain parameters. Forty-three children with respiratory pathologies participated in the study: 21 of them belonged to the experimental group (EG) and 22 children to the control group (CG). During their hospitalization, the children of the EG interacted with two clowns who were experienced in the field of pediatric intervention. All participants were evaluated with respect to clinical progress and to a series of physiological and pain measures both before and after the clown interaction. When compared with the CG, EG children showed an earlier disappearance of the pathological symptoms. Moreover, the interaction of the clown with the children led to a statistically significant lowering of diastolic blood pressure, respiratory frequency and temperature in the EG as compared with the control group. The other two parameters of systolic pressure and heart frequency yielded results in the same direction, without reaching statistical significance. A similar health-inducing effect of clown presence was observed on pain parameters, both by self evaluation and assessment by nurses. Taken together, our data indicate that the presence of clowns in the ward has a possible health-inducing effect. Thus, humor can be seen as an easy-to-use, inexpensive and natural therapeutic modality to be used within different therapeutic settings

Effects of plate stiffness on the fatigue resistance and failure location of pipe-to-plate welded joints under bending

A series of tests have been carried out using specimens made of a tube, having a thickness of t=10 mm, joined to a plate by fillet welding. Two different kinds of specimen were employed, differing in the plate geometry (stiffness). Both kinds of specimen were tested under bending (prevalent load) and shear loading in as welded conditions. Different initiation regions for the fatigue cracks were found and significantly different fatigue resistances were obtained for the two geometries in terms of the nominal stress approach (or in terms of applied load vs cycles to failure). Two local methods for the fatigue life assessment were then applied to independently analyse the experimental results: the fictitious notch rounding approach proposed by Radaj, which is also recommended by some international standards and the more recently proposed peak stress method, which is based on the NSIF concept. It is shown that the nominal stress method, which is by far the simplest method among those recommended in standards for analysing the joint under study, fails to explain the observed different endurances. On the other side, the methods based on local stresses account for the different joint stiffness and provide a reduced scatter in the results. However, even if local approaches, accounts for differences in the structural behaviour of the joint, the knowledge of the actual geometry of the weld need to be accounted for, in order to be able to identify the fatigue crack initiation region. For a design purpose, a safe prediction of the fatigue endurance of the joint can be obtained by all the analysed methods, if the corresponding recommended design curve is used

Fatigue endurance of welded joints subjected to different blocks of bending and torsion loading

The fatigue strength of pipe-to-plate welded joints under bending, torsion and combined (in-phase and out-of-phase) bending and torsion has been already investigated in previous works by the authors. The specimen consisted of a pipe joined by seam welding to a plate. Both the pipe and the plate were made of S355JR steel. The test apparatus allows to apply any combination of proportional and non-proportional bending and torsion loads to the specimen. For the analysed specimens failure originated mainly from the weld root, where a severe notch is present, even if some failure from the weld toe was observed in case of bending loading. However, the crack propagation and fracture surface under bending and under torsion were significantly different. For this reason, in order to investigate any possible influence of the loading order on the fatigue endurance, the effect of different loading blocks was analysed in this work. This subject has not been widely investigated in the technical literature about welded joints. In a first series of tests, specimens were loaded in bending for a given fraction of the estimated endurance and then were loaded in torsion till failure. A similar series of tests was then conducted by varying the loading order: specimens were loaded in torsion for a given fraction of the estimated endurance, followed by a block of bending loading till failure. The whole test campaign was repeated for two different fractions of the estimated life, i.e. 0.3 and 0.45, respectively. The failure was intended as the presence of a through the thickness crack, whose presence was monitored by a drop in the internal pressure of the pipe. Results are discussed in terms of the Miner’s rule based on nominal stresses and to the cumulative damage suggested by Eurocode and IIW

La nazione italiana nell'esercito di Alessandro Farnese nei Paesi Bassi: nuove prospettive

The multinational army, under Alessandro Farnese, had a large presence of Italians. In the light of new archival documentation this paper deals with their recruitment, careers and employment. The preferential treatment accorded by the general to his fellow countrymen created him problems with soldiers of other nationalities and with the Spanish court and contributed greatly to the decision of his removal from power. The biography of Paolo Rinaldi, written to defend the memory of Alessandro, memorials of his officers and their correspondence indicate what was the reason for his behaviour. The general aimed to get the support of the local population, and especially of the peasants, for military operations and Italians, thanks to the stricter discipline he could impose on them, could help him in achieving his objectives, better than soldiers of other nations. Not always his hopes were realized

Quizzicalc, a web-based application for the automated management of multiple-choice testing

Tests based on multiple-choice quizzes are widely recognized as the most efficient, consistent, and objective written form of assessment of student proficiency in completing academic courses. In addition to evaluating knowledge of the treated subject per se, a carefully formulated multiple-choice question allows to probe the student’s ability to focus attention, to use logics, and to efficiently integrate information from different areas of the discipline. Creating a database of questions of appropriate size, picking items to administer in a given exam, printing out forms, collecting and scoring the responses given by the students form a non-trivial workload that clearly benefits from specialized software. Here I present Quizzicalc, a dedicated, web-based application currently available as a beta release at http://www.quizzicalc.com, aimed at automating most aspects of the process Compared to conventional software packages installed on single personal computers, web-based applications offer several distinct advantages. The program does not require installation and is platform independent, as it runs in any modern browser; any number of users can access the application at the same time, which makes it possible to collaborate and share resources among colleagues. At the core of the application is the ability to create groups of lecturers (e.g. members of a school, an institute, a department, etc.) and support staff who have access to a shared, private workspace where all activities take place. Common Quizzicalc procedures can be grouped in 3 major domains: 1) the student database, with facilities to quickly upload large lists of names, keep track of course enrollments and taken exams; 2) the multiple-choice question database, with each item composed of one question and an arbitrary number of answers, each characterized by an arbitrary score, which allows for the simplest scoring scheme (1 point for the correct answer, 0 points for any other choice) as well as for more fine-grained strategies (e.g. fractional or negative points, ranking of error severity, etc.); questions are categorized by discipline (e.g. anatomy, histology, embriology) and topic (e.g. “anatomy” might include topics “cardiovascular”, “digestive”, “nervous”, etc.); 3) the exam engine, the most complex component of the application, which allows to manually or randomly select questions, shuffle the order of questions and choices, print PDF forms to be assigned to students, and assist in the scoring of the results

On the application of a critical plane approach to the life assessment of welded joints

Abstract In the present work, the Fatemi-Socie approach is adopted in order to analyze the fatigue endurance of welded joints under multiaxial loads. This critical plane criterion has already been successfully applied to plain or notched components, however, it is not spread in the assessment of welded joints, yet. This work is focused on the practical implementation issues related to this particular application, which has not been discussed in the literature. The described procedure is adopted for the assessment of one hundred experimental tests and some preliminary results are shown. The specimen under investigation is a pipe-to-plate fillet joint made out of structural steel (S355JR). The tests were performed under both uniaxial and multiaxial, i.e. combined in-phase and out-of-phase bending and torsion, load conditions with a constant amplitude at the laboratories of the University of Pisa, Italy

The neurovascular unit: the contribution of endothelial cells and leukocytes

The conventional notion that neurons are exclusively responsible for brain signaling is increasingly challenged by the idea that brain function in fact depends on a complex interplay between neurons, glial cells, vascular endothelium, and immunerelated blood cells. But it’s only in the last years that we consider the cerebrovasculature not simply as a passive conduit, but rather as a highly dynamic multicellular structure capable of integrating and responding to both systemic and neural cues (1). We are focusing since the last decade to the role of non-neuronal players modulating the neuronal activity. We will report experimental evidences of the contribution of endothelial cells and leukocytes in the neuronal abnormal excitation. In particular, our recently obtained-data demonstrated the role of endothelial cells in the initiation of the pathological cascade induced by Quantum-dots nanoparticles, as well as the primary role of cerebral endothelial cells in the pathogenesis of temporal lobe epilepsy induced by pilocarpine. We will furthermore report data indicating the role of neurovascular unit different players in the pharmaco-resistant epilepsy