A Global Perspective on Milestones of Care for Children with Sickle Cell Disease

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is one of the most common severe and monogenic disorders worldwide. Acute and chronic complications deeply impact the health of children with SCD. Milestones of treatment include newborn screening, comprehensive care and prevention of cerebrovascular complications

DLP Fabrication of Zirconia Scaffolds Coated with HA/β-TCP Layer: Role of Scaffold Architecture on Mechanical and Biological Properties

In order to merge high-mechanical properties and suitable bioactivity in a single scaffold, zirconia porous structures are here coated with a hydroxyapatite layer. The digital light processing (DLP) technique is used to fabricate two types of scaffolds: simple lattice structures, with different sizes between struts (750, 900 and 1050 µm), and more complex trabecular ones, these latter designed to better mimic the bone structure. Mechanical tests performed on samples sintered at 1400 °C provided a linear trend with a decrease in the compressive strength by increasing the porosity amount, achieving compressive strengths ranging between 128-177 MPa for lattice scaffolds and 34 MPa for trabecular ones. Scaffolds were successfully coated by dipping the sintered samples in a hydroxyapatite (HA) alcoholic suspension, after optimizing the HA solid loading at 20 wt%. After calcination at 1300 °C, the coating layer, composed of a mixture of HA and beta-TCP (beta-TriCalcium Phospate) adhered well to the zirconia substrate. The coated samples showed a proper bioactivity, well pronounced after 14 days of immersion into simulated body fluid (SBF), with a more homogeneous apatite layer formation into the trabecular samples compared to the lattice ones

TIL: AN INNOVATIVE TOOL FOR THE RECRUITMENT OF BACHELOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS IN ITALY

This paper summarizes the guidelines and the main results of the set-up of an access Test in Laib –TILperformed at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, during the last decade. Many reasons forced to define this proprietary tool, such as the introduction of the numerus clausus and the consequent need of an effective and robust evaluation process associated to merit, the improvement of the attractiveness at the national and international level, and the reduction of the drop-out rate. This test was able to supply several functions, useful both for the university and the potential students. It demonstrated to be a reliable and predictable tool for evaluating the competence background needed for a successful career in a technical university. In addition, it is a self-assessment test for the applicants able to contribute to a conscious individual choice

Empowering Talented Students: An Italian Experience of an Enriched Curriculum in Engineering

This paper summarizes the design, the activities performed and the main results achieved by an innovative teaching program, set-up for the talented freshmen in Engineering Bachelor's courses at an Italian technical University, the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, starting from 2013. The project structure is here detailed, year-by-year, with a focus on both the reinforcement of an Engineering standard curriculum, and to the hybrid activities, also in non-technical areas, such as soft-skills, critical thinking, humanities, and creativity. The strategies and methods for the students' selection have been discussed, and the University human resource efforts and the costs involved are justified. The results achieved during a three-year experience, based on structured survey to collect students' feedback, are then critically analysed with the purpose to suggest implementation and further development

INTRODUCING CORE-SHELL TECHNOLOGY FOR CONFORMANCE CONTROL

Reservoir heterogeneities can severely affect the effectiveness of waterflooding because displacing fluids tend to flow along high-permeability paths and prematurely breakthrough at producing wells. A Proof-of-Concept (PoC) study is presented while discussing the experimental results of a research on "core-shell" technology to improve waterflooding in heterogeneous oil reservoirs. The proposed methodology consists in injecting a water dispersion of nanocapsules after the reservoir has been extensively flushed with water. The nanocapsules are made of a "core" (either polymeric or siliceous materials), protected by a "shell" that can release its content at an appropriate time, which activates through gelation or aggregation thus plugging the high permeability paths. Additional flooding with water provides recovery of bypassed oil. The initial conceptual screening of possible materials was followed by extensive batch and column lab tests. Then, 3D dynamic simulations at reservoir scale were performed to compensate for the temporary lack of pilot tests and/or field applications

Inclusion: a new reverse perspective

Reverse inclusion has been recently proposed as a powerful tool to pursue many relevant goals at the same time, precisely to assure deserving students higher educational standards and stimuli, to strengthen the initiatives for supporting and including protégé students, to assess new pedagogical methods and teaching contents for the benefit of the whole students’ community. This paper is aimed at presenting and discussing an on-going project carried out at an Italian technical University, the Politecnico of Torino, suffering from a high student to teacher ratio. This problem is mostly imputable to the increasing enrolment of freshmen coming from many different regions and countries, who show varied cultural background and abilities. In the present project, therefore, the concept of reverse inclusion was adopted as the cornerstone of the activities conceived and performed, in order to assure the larger number of students as possible a tailored range of flanking measures. The preliminary results of this experience may represent an empirical demonstrator of the effectiveness of reverse inclusion in the field of Engineering education, as well as a sound tool for mapping the impact and the overall benefits of such approach. The project has been developed starting from the academic year 2014/15, and it was firstly aimed for talented students, that is to enrich the curricula of the top 4% freshmen, on the about 4500 enrolled each year, with hybrid activities. This was quite easy to do, since all the Engineering Bachelor’s degree programmes of our University share a first-year path equal for all the different majors, and the curriculum differentiation progressively occurs during the second year. However, keeping in mind the objective to develop the project in a real reverse inclusion perspective, the selected deserving students are asked to follow the standard lessons together with all the other students, whereas they were grouped in homogeneous classes only for specific supplementary lectures and laboratories, with the aim of deepening their scientific background, fostering critical thinking, and stimulating interdisciplinary approaches. Besides the benefits for the deserving students deriving by these talent-oriented activities, two other relevant results were achieved. The inclusion of the motivated talented students for the majority of the regular lectures and inside the standard classes ensured a driving force for the protégé students, who were involved in mixed groups for discussing and studying. This spontaneous inclusion assures them a support in improving their performances, as traceable throughout the analysis of their career. In addition, as the group of talented students alone constitutes a separate class only for additional teaching activities, innovative educational contents and pedagogical methods, as well as reviewed courses were proposed them inside the project. This was used to set up and optimize these experiences before extending them to the whole students’ audience. Preliminary positive achievements are here discussed, based on one complete cohort of students, the first ones include in the project, and partially on the second one

Quantum majority vote

Majority vote is a basic method for amplifying correct outcomes that is widely used in computer science and beyond. While it can amplify the correctness of a quantum device with classical output, the analogous procedure for quantum output is not known. We introduce quantum majority vote as the following task: given a product state $|\psi_1\rangle \otimes \dots \otimes |\psi_n\rangle$ where each qubit is in one of two orthogonal states $|\psi\rangle$ or $|\psi^\perp\rangle$, output the majority state. We show that an optimal algorithm for this problem achieves worst-case fidelity of $1/2 + \Theta(1/\sqrt{n})$. Under the promise that at least $2/3$ of the input qubits are in the majority state, the fidelity increases to $1 - \Theta(1/n)$ and approaches $1$ as $n$ increases. We also consider the more general problem of computing any symmetric and equivariant Boolean function $f: \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ in an unknown quantum basis, and show that a generalization of our quantum majority vote algorithm is optimal for this task. The optimal parameters for the generalized algorithm and its worst-case fidelity can be determined by a simple linear program of size $O(n)$. The time complexity of the algorithm is $O(n^4 \log n)$ where $n$ is the number of input qubits.Comment: 85 pages, 8 figure