The Ecologic Production – a Prioritary Need in the Romanian Food Industry

The ecological production implies several cultural and processing practices that have as main purpose protecting the environment, maintaining and raising the soil fertility and obtaining qualitative, unpolluted food products. The control is ensured for all the production, stocking, transformation and promotion stages; all operators without exception must submit to this permanent control that is officially acknowledged and supervised by the state. The development of the ecological production is conditioned on the one hand, by a constant interest taken in these matters by farmers and by producers – the offer supplied on the market, and on the other hand by the consumers’ education – the demand on the market.ecological production, standards of species, market study

Six Sigma - a New Approach of Quality

The term six sigma was elaborated by Motorola Corp, in the early ‘80s, after a visit in Japan. The method’s application with this name has reduced the fabrication deficiencies with 99,7%, thus, in 1998, Motorola Corp. was one of the first companies to receive The Quality National Award in USA, “Malcolm Baldrige”. Then the method was used by other companies as well, which have declared that using the six sigma method, the 3,4 deficiencies per million of opportunities level may be achieved, attaining not perfection, but almost perfection.Six-Sigma method, quality

Finanziamenti privati e pubblici per i teatri d'opera

Il presente lavoro si propone di analizzare il contesto legislativo ed economico in cui le quattordici Fondazioni lirico – sinfoniche s’inseriscono e, su questa base, individuare le condizioni e le potenzialità insite nell’attività di fund raising da esse praticata al fine di raggiungere l’equilibrio cercato. Partendo dalle origini dei teatri di corte, nel primo capitolo viene affrontato il lungo e complicato excursus legislativo e normativo che, con il suo lento processo di tappa in tappa, ha portato alla nascita degli Enti lirici e successivamente alla loro obbligatoria trasformazione in Fondazioni di diritto privato; excursus che fa da sfondo alla particolare e problematica situazione in cui le quattordici Fondazioni lirico – sinfoniche italiane versano. Tale argomento verrà affrontato nel secondo capitolo che si apre proprio con i dati economici delle Fondazioni e con il Decreto Legge recante Disposizioni urgenti in materia di spettacolo e attività culturali, firmato dal Capo dello Stato, Giorgio Napolitano, il 30 aprile 2010. Si ricercano le cause principali che hanno scatenato la crisi odierna, si parla dell’importanza del marketing anche in ambito culturale e si pone grande attenzione ai finanziamenti derivanti dall’intervento del settore privato, distinti rispettivamente in interventi di tipo mecenatistico ed interventi di sponsorizzazione. Una possibilità di miglioramento viene offerta dal fund raising, che negli Stati Uniti e nei Paesi anglosassoni si è sviluppato a tal punto da divenire un elemento strategico e uno schema operativo per tutte le organizzazioni no profit. Il terzo capitolo si concentra esclusivamente sull’intero processo di raccolta fondi intrapreso (o da intraprendere) dalle realtà culturali presenti, analizzandone le varie fasi che lo compongono e descrivendone i singoli aspetti che lo caratterizzano. Il quarto capitolo si propone, infine, di analizzare brevemente la pratica del fund raising nel contesto lirico internazionale, in particolare negli Stati Uniti d’America e nella Gran Bretagna. La differente mentalità politica e sociale che tali Paesi presentano tra loro e nel confronto con l’Italia si riflette anche nell’organizzazione artistica e culturale che offrono e nella concezione dell’investimento nella cultura. La produzione lirica anglosassone e americana, finanziata quasi esclusivamente dall’apporto dei privati, si riconosce nel ruolo fondamentale che il no profit e la tradizione di volontariato e filantropica ricoprono nell’intera società. Il confronto è immediato, ma troppo differente è la situazione italiana per poterla inserire a pieno in questo modello. La totale privatizzazione dei teatri porterebbe, forse, a dimenticare il ruolo sociale, educativo e formativo che la musica, in quanto bene sociale, ha con fatica conquistato nel lungo cammino iniziato a Venezia nel 1637. I nostri emendamenti devono portare un equilibrio tra finanziamento pubblico e finanziamento privato perché la lirica italiana è sì molto costosa, ma è anche la valorizzazione della nostra lingua e uno dei pochi biglietti da visita che l’Italia possa esibire all’estero con orgoglio. Nell’ultimo capitolo si analizzano i dati che esprimono la domanda di musica lirica in Italia e il modello produttivo delle Fondazioni lirico-sinfoniche, proponendo alcune personali considerazioni. Infine le conclusioni interpretano i dati e tentano di fornire nuove prospettive per il superamento della crisi

Optical properties of apple skin and flesh in the wavelength range from 350 to 2200 nm

Optical measurement of fruit quality is challenging due to the presence of a skin around the fruit flesh and the multiple scattering by the structured tissues. To gain insight in the light-tissue interaction, the optical properties of apple skin and flesh tissue are estimated in the 350-2200nm range for three cultivars. For this purpose, single integrating sphere measurements are combined with inverse adding- doubling. The observed absorption coefficient spectra are dominated by water in the near infrared and by pigments and chlorophyll in the visible region, whose concentrations are much higher in skin tissue. The scattering coefficient spectra show the monotonic decrease with increasing wavelength typical for biological tissues with skin tissue being approximately three times more scattering than flesh tissue. Comparison to the values from time-resolved spectroscopy reported in literature showed comparable profiles for the optical properties, but overestimation of the absorption coefficient values, due to light losses

Amides and formamidines with antinociceptive activity: note II

Forty amides, formamidines and trifluoromethylsulfonylamides bearing on the nitrogen a cyclohexyl residue, eventually 2-substituted, were prepared and tested for analgesic activity against a chemical stimulus. Good activity was exhibited by amides 9, 11 and 28, by formamidine 34, as well as by triflyamide 40. Eleven additional compounds exhibited a moderate activity

Bau und Charakterisierung einer Plasma-Kapillare für Hochintensitätslaser-Plasma-Experimente

Bei der Laser-Wakefield-Beschleunigung regt ein intensiver Laserpuls eine Plasmawelle an, deren elektrische Felder die von konventionellen Teilchenbeschleunigern um vier bis fünf Größenordnungen übersteigen. Diese Felder können Elektronen innerhalb kurzer Distanzen auf Energien im MeV-Bereich beschleunigen. In dieser Arbeit wird die Verwendung einer Plasma-Kapillare bei solchen Elektronenbeschleunigungsexperimenten untersucht. Um den Wechselwirkungsbereich zu verlängern und somit die Elektronenenergie zu erhöhen, wurde die Kapillare als Plasma-Wellenleiter genutzt. Eine Erhöhung der Stabilität konnte erreicht werden, indem die Kapillare als Gaszelle benutzt wurde

Place and Object Recognition by CNN-Based COSFIRE Filters

COSFIRE filters are an effective means for detecting and localizing visual patterns. In contrast to a convolutional neural network (CNN), such a filter can be configured by presenting a single training example and it can be applied on images of any size. The main limitation of COSFIRE filters so far was the use of only Gabor and DoGs contributing filters for the configuration of a COSFIRE filter. In this paper, we propose to use a much broader class of contributing filters, namely filters defined by intermediate CNN representations. We apply our proposed method on the MNIST data set, on the butterfly data set, and on a garden data set for place recognition, obtaining accuracies of 99.49%, 96.57%, and 89.84%, respectively. Our method outperforms a CNN-baseline method in which the full CNN representation at a certain layer is used as input to an SVM classifier. It also outperforms traditional non-CNN methods for the studied applications. In the case of place recognition, our method outperforms NetVLAD when only one reference image is used per scene and the two methods perform similarly when many reference images are used

Physical activity and hypocaloric diet recovers osteoblasts homeostasis in women affected by abdominal obesity.

Obesity is a multifactorial disease linked to metabolic chronic disorders such as diabetes, and hypertension. Also, it has recently been associated with skeletal alterations and low bone mineral density. We previously demonstrated that exposure of osteoblasts to sera of sedentary subjects affected by obesity alters cell homeostasis in vitro, leading to disruption of intracellular differentiation pathways and cellular activity. Thus, the purpose of the present study has been to evaluate whether sera of sedentary obese women, subjected to physical activity and hypocaloric diet, could recover osteoblast homeostasis in vitro as compared to the sera of same patients before intervention protocol. To this aim, obese women were evaluated at time 0 and after 4, 6, and 12 months of individualized prescribed physical activity and hypocaloric diet. Dual-energy-X-ray absorptiometry measurements were performed at each time point, as well as blood was collected at the same points. Cells were incubated with sera of subjects before and after physical activity as described: obese at baseline and after for 4, 6, and 12 months of physical activity and nutritional protocol intervention. Osteoblasts exposed to sera of patients, who displayed increased lean and decreased fat mass (from 55.5 ± 6.5 to 57.1 ± 5.6% p ≤ 0.05; from 44.5 ± 1.1 to 40.9 ± 2.6% p ≤ 0.01 respectively), showed a time-dependent increase of Wnt/β-catenin signaling, versus cells exposed to sera of obese patients before intervention protocol, suggesting recovery of osteoblast homeostasis upon improvement of body composition. An increase in β-catenin nuclear accumulation and nuclear translocation was also observed, accompanied by an increase in Adiponectin receptor 1 protein expression, suggesting positive effect on cell differentiation program. Furthermore, a decrease in sclerostin amount and an increase of type 1 procollagen amino-terminal-propeptide were depicted as compared to baseline, proportionally to the time of physical activity, suggesting a recovery of bone remodeling modulation and an increase of osteoblast activity induced by improvement of body composition. In conclusion, our results show for the first time that sera of obese sedentary women who increased lean mass and decreased fat mass, by physical activity and hypocaloric diet, rescue osteoblasts differentiation and activity likely due to a reactivation of Wnt/β-catenin-pathway, suggesting that a correct life style can improve skeletal metabolic alteration induced by obesity

Virtual Reality for Pain Management in Cancer:A Comprehensive Review

Virtual Reality is a computer-simulated 3-Dimensional technology in which the user interacts via different senses: visual, auditory, tactile, and/or olfactory. In the past decades, it has been argued that Virtual Reality as a technique could be applied in the clinical environment to successfully manage pain. This article provides a systematic review of research on Virtual Reality and pain management for patients who are suffering from cancer. More specifically, this article focuses on all types of Virtual Reality technologies (Non-Immersive, Semi-Immersive, Fully-Immersive) which has been developed and released to manage the pain which evokes from the treatment of cancer. An exhaustive search identified 23 relevant studies from 2010 to 2020. Overall, the identified studies indicated that Virtual Reality can improve the experience of pain for patients who are suffering from cancer. It was also found that, if Virtual Reality is appropriately designed, the pain which is arising from cancer treatments can be reduced. Even though some positive outcomes have been reported, overall, the results are inconclusive and studies that examine specifically the treatment of pain in cancer patients are limited. Further research needs to be conducted, to articulate clearly, under what circumstances Virtual Reality is an effective tool for cancer patients, and under what factors Virtual Reality can be the solution to the pain patients are experiencing.</p