Environmental aspects of the depreciation of the culturally significant Wall of Cartagena de Indias – Colombia

Among the diverse archeological relics of the past, the Cartagena de Indias Wall is one of the greatest representations of European cultural architecture in South America. To assess the implication of contamination on the depreciation of the culturally significant Wall of Cartagena de Indias - Colombia, a detailed, multi-analytical approach was conducted on components of the wall. Accumulated ultra-fine particles (UFPs) and superficial nano-particles (NPs) containing hazardous elements (HEs) on the wall were identified in an attempt to understand whether atmospheric pollution is hastening the depreciation of the structure itself. Mortar which at one point held the stones together is now weak and has fallen away in places. Irreparable damage is being done by salt spray, acid rain and the site's tropical humid climate. Several HEs and organic compounds found within the local environment are also contributing to the gradual deterioration of the construction. In this study, advanced microscopy analyses have been applied to understand the properties of UFPs and NPs deposited onto the wall's weathered external walls through exposure to atmospheric pollution. Several materials identified by X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) can be detected using high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM) and field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM). The presence of anglesite, gypsum, hematite containing HEs, and several organic compounds modified due to moisture and contamination was found. Black crusts located on the structure could potentially serve as a source of HEs pollution and a probable hazard to not only to the ecosystem but also to human health

Refinamento de relações em tesauros: reengenharia do Thesagro.

Apresenta resultados de pesquisa que teve como objetivo estudar um modelo de reengenharia de tesauros tradicionais para transformar a sua estrutura em um sistema de conceitos formado por relações semanticamente mais refinadas. Como fundamento teórico foram utilizados conteúdos sobre sistemas de organização do conhecimento (SOCs) e seus relacionamentos semânticos em tesauros, o conceito e a definição que o delimita, a teoria da Valência Verbal e dos papéis Qualia. A modelagem foi aplicada no tesauro brasileiro THESAGRO, do domínio da Agricultura, tendo como recorte temático a subárea da Intensificação Agropecuária. A metodologia foi aplicada a partir do modelo proposto em dois artigos: Soergel et al. (2004) e Lauser et al. (2006). O modelo é composto por três etapas e sua aplicação consistiu na explicitação formal das relações de equivalência e das relações conceituais na estrutura do THESAGRO. Na implantação do modelo foram utilizados dois softwares: (1) o E-Termos, que foi o sistema colaborativo utilizado na gestão terminológica, e (2) o Extrator de Termos, que permite a comparação automática da terminologia de diferentes tesauros. Os resultados demonstraram que o modelo aplicado permitiu o refinamento semântico da estrutura conceitual do THESAGRO, demonstrando a viabilidade de seu uso na conversão de um tesauro tradicional em uma estrutura mais formalizada. Concluiu-se que esse refinamento tem papel basilar na organização do conhecimento, podendo facilitar a sua utilização pelo utilizador final, assim como é um elemento importante para obter a interoperabilidade entre os distintos tesauros e entre diferentes sistemas de recuperação de informação (SRI).Enancib 2015. Refining Thesaurus relationships: reengineering of Thesagro

Production of subject-verb agreement, tense, mood, and negation in Italian agrammatic aphasia

Impaired (morpho)syntactic production is the hallmark of agrammatic aphasia. Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for agrammatic production, which often make different predictions. The Distributed Morphology Hypothesis (DMH) (Wang et al., 2014) posits that categories involving inflectional alternations are impaired in agrammatism. The Tense Underspecification Hypothesis (TUH) (Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004, 2005) states that what is impaired (\u201cunderspecified\u201d) is tense; subject-verb agreement and mood are well-preserved. The Interpretable Features\u2019 Impairment Hypothesis (IFIH) (Fyndanis et al., 2012) predicts categories involving integration processes (e.g., tense, mood, negation) to be more impaired than categories that do not involve integration processes (e.g., agreement). The Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH) (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997) states that the syntactic tree is pruned at a specific node, usually tense, with all nodes/categories above the pruning site deleted/inaccessible and all nodes below intact. To reliably test these accounts, one should test agrammatic speakers on a wide range of (morpho)syntactic phenomena/categories. In this study, we investigate the ability of Italian-speaking agrammatic individuals to produce subject-verb agreement, tense, mood, and sentential negation. A sentence completion task (SCT) tapping agreement and tense, a SCT assessing mood, and a constituent ordering task tapping negation were administered to eight native speakers of Italian with chronic agrammatic aphasia and eight controls. Results are presented in Table 1. The control group performed better than the aphasic group on all four conditions. Both groups showed similar patterns of performance, with better performance on agreement and tense than on mood. Negation was better preserved than agreement, tense, and mood in the aphasic group, but in the control group negation was not different from any other category. At the individual level, five agrammatic participants exhibited the same pattern of performance (agreement/tense/negation>mood). At the group level, the results of the agrammatic participants are not consistent with any of the hypotheses discussed here. Contrary to the TUH, participants performed better on tense than on mood. The DMH cannot explain the observed, selective impairment of categories involving inflectional alternations (tense/agreement>mood). Results do not support the TPH, as the higher the category in the syntactic hierarchy (Neg>T(future/past)>M) (Cinque, 1999; Zanuttini, 2001), the better the performance of agrammatic participants. Lastly, results are at odds with the IFIH, because negation (+integration processes) is better preserved than agreement (-integration processes). Analogous results are observed at the individual level. None of the available hypotheses can account for the patterns of performance of all the agrammatic participants. Their results, together with the production results of other agrammatic speakers in the literature, show that all possible patterns can be observed in agrammatism, and that a unitary account of the disorder is unlikely to succeed. We suggest that subject-specific characteristics (e.g., site/type/volume of brain damage, type/severity of language impairment, education, age) and language-specific properties of functional categories (e.g., syntactic hierarchy, interpretability/involvement of integration processes, frequency) may interact in determining the way in which (morpho)syntactic impairments manifest themselves across agrammatic speakers and languages

Progress on lead-free metal halide perovskites for photovoltaic applications: a review

ABSTRACT: Metal halide perovskites have revolutionized the field of solution-processable photovoltaics. Within just a few years, the power conversion efficiencies of perovskite-based solar cells have been improved significantly to over 20%, which makes them now already comparably efficient to silicon-based photovoltaics. This breakthrough in solution-based photovoltaics, however, has the drawback that these high efficiencies can only be obtained with lead-based perovskites and this will arguably be a substantial hurdle for various applications of perovskite-based photovoltaics and their acceptance in society, even though the amounts of lead in the solar cells are low. This fact opened up a new research field on lead-free metal halide perovskites, which is currently remarkably vivid. We took this as incentive to review this emerging research field and discuss possible alternative elements to replace lead in metal halide perovskites and the properties of the corresponding perovskite materials based on recent theoretical and experimental studies. Up to now, tin-based perovskites turned out to be most promising in terms of power conversion efficiency; however, also the toxicity of these tin-based perovskites is argued. In the focus of the research community are other elements as well including germanium, copper, antimony, or bismuth, and the corresponding perovskite compounds are already showing promising properties. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT: [Image: see text

Penas y medidas de seguridad

Comparazione del sistema sanzionatori