ATLAS RPC offline monitoring and data quality assessment

In this work several aspects of ATLAS RPC offline monitoring and data quality assessment are illustrated with cosmics data selected by RPC trigger. These correspond to trigger selection, front-end mapping, detection efficiency and occupancy, which are studied in terms of low level quantities such as: RPC off-line hits and standalone tracks. The tools and techniques presented are also extended to the forthcoming LHC p-p beam collisions.Comment: Poster section at ICHEP08, Philadelphia, USA, July 2008. 3 pages, LaTeX, 3 eps figure

Measuring walking accessibility to public transport for the elderly: the case of Naples

Demographic ageing represents an essential challenge for local authorities and public transport providers. Decision-makers should not ignore the speci c needs of this weak segment of the population and should implement appropriate policies. This paper develops a GIS-based method to analyse public transport accessibility of elderly people to support policies and planning strategies. To test the proposed method, we propose an application to the city of Naples in Italy. We selected this study case because it represents an example of high population density, complex urban structure and low level of quality of life, especially for the elderly. The application to the city of Naples showed that the urban accessibility changes dramatically for different age segments. Results also reveal patterns of public transport coverage that are signi cantly low particularly in suburban settings. The structure of this paper is organised into four sections: in the rst section, we introduce the main topic of mobility of elderly; in the second section, we describe and discuss the GIS-based method proposed; in the third section, we report on the application to the city of Naples; in the last section, we analyse the results and discuss future research developments

Eradication of Candida albicans persister cell biofilm by the membranotropic peptide gH625

Biofilm formation poses an important clinical trouble due to resistance to antimicrobial agents; therefore, there is an urgent demand for new antibiofilm strategies that focus on the use of alternative compounds also in combination with conventional drugs. Drug-tolerant persisters are present in Candida albicans biofilms and are detected following treatment with high doses of amphotericin B. In this study, persisters were found in biofilms treated with amphotericin B of two clinical isolate strains, and were capable to form a new biofilm in situ. We investigated the possibility of eradicating persister-derived biofilms from these two Candida albicans strains, using the peptide gH625 analogue (gH625-M). Confocal microscopy studies allowed us to characterize the persister-derived biofilm and understand the mechanism of interaction of gH625-M with the biofilm. These findings confirm that persisters may be responsible for Candida biofilm survival, and prove that gH625-M was very effective in eradicating persister-derived biofilms both alone and in combination with conventional antifungals, mainly strengthening the antibiofilm activity of fluconazole and 5-flucytosine. Our strategy advances our insights into the development of effective antibiofilm therapeutic approaches

New Optimization Methods for Converging Perturbative Series with a Field Cutoff

We take advantage of the fact that in lambda phi ^4 problems a large field cutoff phi_max makes perturbative series converge toward values exponentially close to the exact values, to make optimal choices of phi_max. For perturbative series terminated at even order, it is in principle possible to adjust phi_max in order to obtain the exact result. For perturbative series terminated at odd order, the error can only be minimized. It is however possible to introduce a mass shift in order to obtain the exact result. We discuss weak and strong coupling methods to determine the unknown parameters. The numerical calculations in this article have been performed with a simple integral with one variable. We give arguments indicating that the qualitative features observed should extend to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. We found that optimization at even order is more efficient that at odd order. We compare our methods with the linear delta-expansion (LDE) (combined with the principle of minimal sensitivity) which provides an upper envelope of for the accuracy curves of various Pade and Pade-Borel approximants. Our optimization method performs better than the LDE at strong and intermediate coupling, but not at weak coupling where it appears less robust and subject to further improvements. We also show that it is possible to fix the arbitrary parameter appearing in the LDE using the strong coupling expansion, in order to get accuracies comparable to ours.Comment: 10 pages, 16 figures, uses revtex; minor typos corrected, refs. adde

Use of DHPLC for rapid screening of recombinant clones.

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