Symptoms accompanying fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is a pain syndrome frequently observed in clinical practice. The classification criteria for fibromyalgia were proposed by Wolfe et al. (1), who clearly indicated the essential clinical features of the syndrome, i.e. chronic widespread pain and muscular tender points in at least 11 out of 18 sites of localisation. It must be noted that the criteria of Wolfe et al. were proposed for epidemiological and research purposes, but are currently used as diagnostic criteria. In patients suffering from fibromyalgia, the intensity of spontaneous pain and of pain provoked by mechanical stimulation of tender points may vary in a wide range and may induce more or less suffering and disability. Therefore, the intensity of spontaneous and provoked pain must be taken into account to evaluate the severity of the syndrome in every patient..

Practical, reliable and inexpensive assay of lycopene in tomato products based on the combined use of light emitting diode (LED) and the optothermal window

Light emitting diode (LED) combined with the concept of optothermal window (OW) is proposed as a new approach (LED-OW) to detect lycopene in a wide range of tomato-based products (tomato juice, tomato ketchup, tomato passata and tomato puree). Phytonutrient lycopene is a dominant antioxidant in these products while beta-carotene is present in significantly lower quantities. Therefore for all practical reasons the interfering effect of beta-carotene at 502 nm analytical wavelength can be neglected. The LED-OW method is low-cost and simple, yet accurate and precise. The major attributes of the new method are its rapid speed of response and the fact that no preparation whatsoever of the sample is needed before the analysis. The lycopene found in tomato products studied here varies from 8 mg/100 g to 60 mg/100 g fresh product. Results obtained by LED-OW method were compared to the outcome of conventional, time consuming spectrophotometric methods and the correlation was very good (R = 0.98). Precision of the LED-OW instrumental setup ranged from 0.5 to 7.4%; the RSD achieved for lycopene-richest samples (= 40 mg/100 g) did not exceed 1.7%. Repeatability of analysis by LED-OW was found to vary between 0.7 and 7.1%

Towards Enhancing Traffic Sign Recognition through Sliding Windows

Automatic Traffic Sign Detection and Recognition (TSDR) provides drivers with critical information on traffic signs, and it constitutes an enabling condition for autonomous driving. Misclassifying even a single sign may constitute a severe hazard, which negatively impacts the environment, infrastructures, and human lives. Therefore, a reliable TSDR mechanism is essential to attain a safe circulation of road vehicles. Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) techniques that use Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have been proposed, but no agreement on a preferred ML algorithm nor perfect classification capabilities were always achieved by any existing solutions. Consequently, our study employs ML-based classifiers to build a TSR system that analyzes a sliding window of frames sampled by sensors on a vehicle. Such TSR processes the most recent frame and past frames sampled by sensors through (i) Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and (ii) Stacking Meta-Learners, which allow for efficiently combining base-learning classification episodes into a unified and improved meta-level classification. Experimental results by using publicly available datasets show that Stacking Meta-Learners dramatically reduce misclassifications of signs and achieved perfect classification on all three considered datasets. This shows the potential of our novel approach based on sliding windows to be used as an efficient solution for TSR

«Raccontare è monotono» : il ritmo della prosa in "Feria d'agosto" di Cesare Pavese

Starting with the twenty-five short stories which constitute August Holiday, the paper attempts to analyse the rhythmic and prosodic structures in pavese\u2019s prose works: the study initially tries to show the main metric structures subtended by each text (principally various length anapaestic verses, seven-syllable lines, octosyllables, decasyllables and hendecasyllables). The prosodic examination also shows a clear formal division between the first parts of the work and the third one: the number of anapaestic structures increases remarkably from the first to the last section. this stylistic evolution can be explained through a passage from The Business of Living written in 1944, where pavese states that his previous prose works lack a \uabrhythmic support\ubb. To discover the functional reason of this prosodic style, it is necessary to consider that in this period of his life the writer is searching for a type of writing able to \uabraise reality to the mythic sphere\ubb. pavese\u2019s myth is fundamentally the \u201crepetition\u201d of an element in reality. in fact, from a lexical point of view, the words \uabmonotony\ubb, \uabobsessive recurrence\ubb, \uabemphatic cadence\ubb are those he uses the most to describe the dynamics of myth. Analyzing the passages where pavese talks about his metric style, a surprising lexical correspondence can be observed: the writer describes the anapaest exactly as \uabmonotony\ubb, \uabrhythm\ubb, \uabcadence\ubb and \uabrecurrence\ubb. therefore, it is possible to sup- pose that Pavese, in the final part of August Holiday, uses the anapaestic structures as a way to operate the raising of reality to the mythic sphere

«DARE FORMA ALL'ANIMA NASCOSTA». LA RETORICA DELLA COMPARAZIONE NELL'OPERA DI CAMILLO SBARBARO

Il lavoro di tesi analizza la produzione poetica e prosastica di Camillo Sbarbaro a partire da un punto di vista retorico, focalizzando particolarmente l\u2019attenzione sui modi e sulle forme della similitudine e della metafora. Dopo aver delineato le principali tipologie strutturali utilizzate nella retorica di comparazione del poeta ligure, l\u2019analisi si sofferma sulla definizione di alcune possibili fonti dei campi analogici pi\uf9 rilevanti della lirica sbarbariana (gli occhi, le lacrime, il dolore), mettendo in rapporto l\u2019opera dello scrittore ligure con le pi\uf9 significative esperienze liriche francesi e italiane dell\u2019Ottocento e del primo Novecento (con particolare riguardo al Leopardi prosatore). Le opere prese in considerazione sono le raccolte poetiche "Resine" (1911) e "Pianissimo" (1914). Vengono poi ampliate le direttrici di ricerca, includendo nell\u2019indagine anche la prima opera di prosa lirica di Sbarbaro, "Trucioli" (1920), in modo da esaminare i mutamenti formali e funzionali dell\u2019elemento retorico nel passaggio dalla scrittura poetica a un genere di recente affermazione come quello del frammento. Lo studio si conclude con l\u2019identificazione di alcune fonti iconografiche alla base delle strutture metaforiche contenute all\u2019interno della prosa lirica "Oppi".\uabGiving shape to the hidden soul\ubb: the rhetorical comparison in the works by Camillo Sbarbaro This thesis analyzes the poetic and prose production by Camillo Sbarbaro starting from a rhetorical point of view and it particularly focuses on the use of simile and metaphor. Firstly, the analysis outlines the main typologies of structures in the rhetorical comparison of the Italian poet, and then it considers the possible sources of the most significant analogies of Sbarbaro\u2019s lyric production (eyes, tears, sorrow) comparing Sbarbaro\u2019s works with the most significant poetic experiences developing in France and Italy in the XIX century and at the beginning of the XX century (with a special attention to the prose work by Leopardi). The present analysis studies the poetry collection "Resine" (1911) and "Pianissimo" (1914). Furthermore, the research includes the study of the first lyrical prose by Sbarbaro, "Trucioli" (1920) in order to examine the formal and functional changes of the rhetoric device in the passage from the poetic writing to the more recent genre of the fragment. This study ends with the examination of some iconographic sources of the metaphors used in the lyrical prose "Oppi"

Preliminary results of the Italian neutron experimental station INES at ISIS: Archaeometric applications

The INES project was sponsored by the CNR Neutron Spectroscopy Advisory Committee, stressing the importance of realizing an Italian Neutron Experimental Station (INES) at the world most powerful pulsed neutron source (ISIS, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK) and evidencing the strategic value that such a test station would assume in the field of applied sciences like, for example, chemistry, material science, Earth science, crystallography, and last, but not least, in the field of science applied to the study of cultural-heritage artifacts

Preliminary results of the Italian neutron experimental station INES at ISIS: Archaeometric applications

The INES project was sponsored by the CNR Neutron Spectroscopy Advisory Committee, stressing the importance of realizing an Italian Neutron Experimental Station (INES) at the world most powerful pulsed neutron source (ISIS, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK) and evidencing the strategic value that such a test station would assume in the field of applied sciences like, for example, chemistry, material science, Earth science, crystallography, and last, but not least, in the field of science applied to the study of cultural-heritage artifacts

The forest lift A rugged tool to simplify pruning and fruit collection.

Extreme environments, like the steep olive groves in Liguria, Italy, cannot be reached by tractors and large-sized devices. This paper describes a small, tracked elevation platform able to lift the farmers close to the branches for harvesting or pruning. The vehicle moves thanks to tracks. The elevation platform, having no motors and no sensors, is powered by hand. A prototype of the forest lift has been tested on the field. The forest lift has a maximum elevation of 2 m with a tilting (0 ° + 30 °) and rolling mechanism (-15 ° + 15 °) compensating for steep terrains. The iron prototype weighs 400 kg and is 3,160 mm tall, 2,000 mm long and 900 mm wide