Seismic amelioration of existing reinforced concrete buildings. Strategy to optimize the amount of reinforcement for joints

Most of the existing Reinforced Concrete (RC) buildings in Italy were built according to obsolete regulations that were not enough aware of issues related to seismic design so that they need to be upgraded by pursuing either amelioration or full seismic rehabilitation. In doing that, the first step is to figure out what is, based on the results of the initial analysis of the structure in its ante-operam version, the best overall dissipative mechanism that could be ob-tained by a number of suitable and economically convenient local interventions. The choice of the overall dissipative mechanism strongly affects the amount of reinforcement to be adopted for the beam-column joints. For new buildings, the current adopted capacity design philosophy pursues an overall beam-sway mechanism in which plastic hinges first form in beams and at last at the base of the columns. On the contrary,for existing ones, often very irregular and gravity-load-dominated, pursuing such overall mechanism may result either uneconomic or even extremely difficult to implement due to the amount of reinforcement to be inserted in the joints. In such cases, an overall dissipative mechanism allowing, at some extent, columns flex-ural plasticizationshould be accepted and clearly identified in advance. Anyway,such ap-proach needs to be addressed properly in order to avoid the formation of column-sways at one story only that would result very dangerous due to the excessive demand of plastic rotations on the resulting hinges. This paper presents two simple models that may help the designer in deal-ing with the operations above. The formeris a model that allows to understand if, given the existing RC building case-study, either the beam-sway or a hybrid beam-column-sway mecha-nism should be conveniently pursued during the design of the retrofitting intervention. The lat-ter isa model that allows to design a hybrid beam-column-sway overall mechanism involving a suitable number of stories such as to guarantee a uniform and reasonable demand of plastic rotations in the involved columns

Evolution of protein bound Maillard reaction end-products and free Amadori compounds in low lactose milk in presence of fructosamine oxidase I

Thermal treatments and storage influence milk quality, particularly in low lactose milk as the higher concentration of reducing sugars can lead to the increased formation of the Maillard reaction products (MRPs). The control of the Amadori products (APs) formation is the key step to mitigate the Maillard reaction (MR) in milk. The use of fructosamine oxidases, (Faox) provided promising results. In this paper, the effects of Faox I were evaluated by monitoring the concentration of free and bound MRPs in low lactose milk during shelf life. Results showed that the enzyme reduced the formation of protein-bound MRPs down to 79% after six days at 37 °C. Faox I lowered the glycation of almost all the free amino acids resulting effective on basic and polar amino acids. Data here reported corroborate previous findings on the potentiality of Faox enzymes in controlling the early stage of the MR in foods

Computational Stylometry and Machine Learning for Gender and Age Detection in Cyberbullying Texts

The aim of this paper is to show the importance of Computational Stylometry (CS) and Machine Learning (ML) support in author’s gender and age detection in cyberbullying texts. We developed a cyberbullying detection platform and we show the results of performances in terms of Precision, Recall and F-Measure for gender and age detection in cyberbullying texts we collecte

Weekly versus three weeks chemotherapy for advanced ovarian cancer. A meta-analysis

Aim: Three weeks paclitaxel and carboplatin has been considered the standard of care for primary treatment of ovarian cancer (OC). Whether weekly therapy will further improve the clinical outcomes or not is still unclear. We conducted a meta-analysis to compare the two regimens. Method: Articles were selected with a systematic approach, using PubMed databases. Trials concerning comparison between carboplatin plus weekly paclitaxel (dose-dense regimen) and carboplatin plus paclitaxel every 3 weeks were considered. Outcomes included overall survival (OS), progression free survival (PFS) and severe acute toxicity. Results: Dose-dense regimen was associated with significant improvement of PFS compared with standard schedule, with HR of 0.73 (95% CI 0.61-0.88, p = 0.001). There was no difference in OS between treatment regimens (HR 0.95, 95% CI 0.77-1.16, p=0.06), as well as in term of severe acute toxicity. Conclusion: Dose-dense regimen is superior to standard schedule in terms of PFS. Further studies are necessary to firmly confirm this evidence in advanced OC treatment

Monitoring Social Media to Identify Environmental Crimes through NLP - A Preliminary Study

This paper presents the results of research carried out on the UNIOR Eye corpus, a corpus which has been built by downloading tweets related to environmental crimes. The corpus is made up of 228,412 tweets organized into four different subsections, each one concerning a specific environmental crime. For the current study we focused on the subsection of waste crimes, composed of 86,206 tweets which were tagged according to the two labels alert and no alert. The aim is to build a model able to detect which class a tweet belongs to

Poesie di Vicenzo Monti

298 p

Unenhanced whole-body MRI versus PET-CT for the detection of prostate cancer metastases after primary treatment

The aim of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of unenhanced whole-body MRI, including whole-body Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI), used as a diagnostic modality to detect  pathologic lymph nodes and skeletal metastases in patients with prostate cancer (PCa) undergoing restaging after primary treatment