Conversazione con Paolo Fabbri: la simbologia massonica nel ciclo Cremaster

Nella corposa intervista Paolo Fabbri spiega come il polimorfismo dell’opera barneyana, l’ibridazione e la proliferazione delle forme siano strategie di senso che trovano una loro coerenza profonda nel voler rispecchiare nell’espressione quel che avviene nel contenuto, in modo semisimbolico e figurale. Bisogna infatti guardare alla strategia complessiva del lavoro di Barney per comprendere che polimorfismo e intermedialità veicolano soprattutto “un’ibridazione semantica, resa attraverso una ibridazione dei media

Conversazione con Omar Calabrese su Matthew Barney e il neobarocco

Nell’intervista Omar Calabrese riconosce in quella di Barney “un’opera tipicamente neobarocca realizzata con mezzi contemporanei” e discute delle ideologie e dei meccanismi di costruzione della star sottese al suo lavoro. Secondo Calabrese, l’operazione di Barney è quella di un “azzeramento” e di una “dissoluzione” dell’opera secondo la vecchia architettura e la vecchia concezione per riformulare, in modo sempre autoriflessivo, la storia dell’art

Microsystem Technology for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)

AbstractAAL is certainly an application area with sensor as well as actuator needs. Some of the requirements can be fulfilled by state of the art technology; some areas however still need a lot of R&D efforts for potential applications in homes. The contribution describes two areas of interest and actual development: One is the topic of robust fire detection; the other domain is fall detection. For both application areas one has to understand both the state of the art and the drawbacks of the current solutions. One can state clearly that there is a huge potential for the development of new microsystems. Still one has to keep in mind that usage in elderly homes also requires consent and cooperation of the users which is the focus of the user centered design principle

Economic consequences of investing in anti-HCV antiviral treatment from the Italian NHS perspective : a real-world-based analysis of PITER data

OBJECTIVE: We estimated the cost consequence of Italian National Health System (NHS) investment in direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy according to hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatment access policies in Italy. METHODS: A multistate, 20-year time horizon Markov model of HCV liver disease progression was developed. Fibrosis stage, age and genotype distributions were derived from the Italian Platform for the Study of Viral Hepatitis Therapies (PITER) cohort. The treatment efficacy, disease progression probabilities and direct costs in each health state were obtained from the literature. The break-even point in time (BPT) was defined as the period of time required for the cumulative costs saved to recover the Italian NHS investment in DAA treatment. Three different PITER enrolment periods, which covered the full DAA access evolution in Italy, were considered. RESULTS: The disease stages of 2657 patients who consecutively underwent DAA therapy from January 2015 to December 2017 at 30 PITER clinical centres were standardized for 1000 patients. The investment in DAAs was considered to equal €25 million, €15 million, and €9 million in 2015, 2016, and 2017, respectively. For patients treated in 2015, the BPT was not achieved, because of the disease severity of the treated patients and high DAA prices. For 2016 and 2017, the estimated BPTs were 6.6 and 6.2 years, respectively. The total cost savings after 20 years were €50.13 and €55.50 million for 1000 patients treated in 2016 and 2017, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: This study may be a useful tool for public decision makers to understand how HCV clinical and epidemiological profiles influence the economic burden of HCV

L'Italia come modello per l'Europa e per il mondo nelle politiche sanitarie per il trattamento dell'epatite cronica da HCV

The World Health Organization foresees the elimination of HCV infection by 2030. In light of this and the curre nt, nearly worldwide, restriction in direct-acting agents (DAA) accessibility due to their high price, we aimed to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of two alternative DAA treatment policies: Policy 1 (universal): treat all patients, regardless of the fibrosis stage; Policy 2 (prioritized): treat only priori tized patients and delay treatment of the remaining patients until reaching stage F3. T he model was based on patient’s data from the PITER cohort. We demonstrated that extending HC V treatment of patients in any fibrosis stage improves health outcomes and is cost-effective

Introduzione [Matthew Barney. Polimorfismo, multimodalità, neobarocco]

Lo studio multiprospettico della pratica artistica di Matthew Barney raccolto in questo volume si articola lungo tre percorsi argomentativi intersecanti. Il primo è inerente alla dimensione estetica del suo fare artistico e pone il problema del cambiamento di statuto dell’“opera” all’interno del dominio dell’arte; il secondo percorso argomentativo riguarda il "principio traduttivo" e i dispositivi di trasformazione che informano, a diversi livelli, l’opus barneyano; il terzo mira alla definizione della complessità del processo artistico messo in campo da Barney, che abbiamo sintetizzato nei termini poliespressività e polimorfismo. Gli interventi confluiti nel volume ripercorreno l'opera di Barney innestando sullo sguardo più ampio e teorico delle prime due sezioni le analisi specifiche della seconda parte del volume

Peanut Shell Activated Carbon: Adsorption Capacities for Copper(II), Zinc(II), Nickel(II) and Chromium(VI) Ions from Aqueous Solutions

The adsorption of copper(II), zinc(II), nickel(II) and chromium(VI) ions from aqueous solutions onto an activated carbon produced from peanut shell was studied as a function of the concentration of the ions and the pH value. The amounts of Cu(II), Zn(II) and Ni(II) ions adsorbed increased with increasing equilibrium pH of the solution, while the uptake of Cr(VI) ions decreased. For Cr(VI) ions, maximum uptakes were found at a pH below the point of zero charge of the adsorbent (pH pzc ). The amount of metal cation adsorbed at a given equilibrium concentration increased in the order Ni(II) < Zn(II) < Cu(II). This metal ion uptake order may be explained from a consideration of the combined effects of the electronegativity of the metal ion and the first stability constant of the corresponding metal hydroxide. The activated carbon produced from peanut shell was an effective and economic adsorbent for the removal of metal cations at pH ≥ pH pzc and anions at pH ≤ pH pzc

Fabrication and integration of a new Micro Reactor Array for fluorescence analysis

In all the biological application there is an increasing demand for low power and high resolution (spatial and temporal) acquisition systems for portable and low cost instruments. Among the many methods used for biological testing, optical detection is the most common. In particular, fluorescence lifetime imaging is an investigation tool of paramount importance in molecular biology and medicine [1-2]. In fact, any energy transfer between an excited molecule and its environment in a predictable way changes the fluorescence lifetime. Moreover, lifetime does not depend on the concentration of the chromophore. Typical examples are the mapping of cell parameters such as pH, ion concentrations or oxygen saturation by fluorescence quenching, or fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) between different chromophores in the cell. The integration of detection modules with high sensitivity and signal to noise ratio in a microfluidics system is a key feature in a lab-on-a-chip. In this work we report the realization and integration of a microfabricated Micro Reactor Array (MRA) coupled to a Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) array for fluorescence-based analysis. The MRA can provide a number of reaction sites in the same chip that can be independently functionalized and monitored, allowing for a fast and all-on chip analysis. With respects to the state of the art [3-9], our approach focused on the realization of a fully integrated MEMS-based micro-reactors and optical detector arrays with reduced cross-talk among the reaction sites. In this aim, the micro-wells module and the SPAD-based detector have been realized separately and then assembled. This was possible, at packaging level, by carefully matching the designs of the detector with the dimensions of the wells and by providing the two systems of alignment markers