Adult lifelong learning and counselling in life transitions: Challenges for universities.

The paper aims to explore the implications of university lifelong learning on professional and personal transitions (and micro-transitions) and the role of adult counselling in supporting and facilitating them. This is a challenge for Italian Universities as national rules are being implemented in the perspective of a National Lifelong Learning System. In recent decades in Europe different research has analysed the phase betwee

System feasibility of using stimulated Brillouin scattering in self coherent detection schemes

We demonstrate the first self-coherent detection of 10 Gbit/s BPSK signals based on narrow-band amplification of the optical carrier by means of Stimulated Brillouin effect in a common fiber. We found that this technique is very effective only if it is combined with proper line coding and high-pass electrical filtering at the receiver. In this case we obtain OSNR-performance close to the ideal coherent receiver. (C) 2010 Optical Society of Americ

Wearable Robotics for Impaired Upper-Limb Assistance and Rehabilitation: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

Despite more than thirty-five years of research on wearable technologies to assist the upper-limb and a multitude of promising preliminary results, the goal of restoring pre-impairment quality of life of people with physical disabilities has not been fully reached yet. Whether it is for rehabilitation or for assistance, nowadays robotics is still only used in a few high-tech clinics and hospitals, limiting the access to a small amount of people. This work provides a description of the three major 'revolutions' occurred in the field (end-effector robots, rigid exoskeletons, and soft exosuits), reviewing forty-eight systems for the upper-limb (excluding hand-only devices) used in eighty-nine studies enrolling a clinical population before June 2022. The review critically discusses the state of the art, analyzes the different technologies, and compares the clinical outcomes, with the goal of determine new potential directions to follow

Feasibility study and design of a low-energy residential unit in Sagarmatha park for environmental impact reduction of high altitude buildings

The project presented in this paper is geographically set within Sagarmatha National Park, a wide area located on the Nepalese mountainside of Everest and declared as World Heritage Site since 1979. In recent years the park was the focus of several studies and initiatives, aimed at improving the management of its many-sided ecosystem, significantly influenced by climate change and increase of human activities and tourism, which occurred from the end of the 1970s, as well as by practices that are harmful both to human health and to our environment (e.g. burn up kerosene or animal excrements in order to obtain heat). Research work has focused on designing a residential unit that meets population needs, in terms of simplicity of realization, replicability, use of local materials, environmental compatibility and exploitation of available renewable energies. For this purpose a thorough analysis was conducted to identify the housing standard characteristic of reference context and Sherpa people, concerning indoor thermal comfort conditions, construction techniques, availability and skills of local workforce. Data necessary for the design phase were obtained through a collaboration with researchers of Ev-K2-CNR center, active at 5,050 meters a.s.l. in Nepal at the base of Mount Everest with a laboratory/observatory (known as the "Pyramid") for highaltitude meteorological studies since 1989. Climate conditions were registered by specific monitoring stations at certain times (2002-2008); during preliminary stage, these values were considered representative of the local context chosen for the project, that is Namche Bazar, a village located within the park, in a central point both from the logistic and altimetric/weather points of view. For the residential unit under investigation, two different constructive approaches were selected and compared: earthbags and straw bales. Both techniques have several advantages, in particular availability of raw material (jute bags, soil, straw), simplicity (e.g. earthbag constructions are realized using the ancient technique of pisé, combined with flexible bags or tubes), durability, insulation performance, costeffectiveness. Through a specific software for calculation of winter/summer thermal loads, different combinations of selections of structure and insulation were examined for both solutions, in order to achieve the optimum for the case study. Furthermore on the base of data monitored on site, a specific assessment was carried out to evaluate the potential of solar and wind resources. Aiming at entirely covering the heat and electric energy needs by exploiting renewable energy sources, various plant configurations were finally assumed. Every single choice was made to reduce human influence on land resources, such as timber, and to improve internal and external environmental quality

Modifying upper-limb inter-joint coordination in healthy subjects by training with a robotic exoskeleton

Background: The possibility to modify the usually pathological patterns of coordination of the upper-limb in stroke survivors remains a central issue and an open question for neurorehabilitation. Despite robot-led physical training could potentially improve the motor recovery of hemiparetic patients, most of the state-of-the-art studies addressing motor control learning, with artificial virtual force fields, only focused on the end-effector kinematic adaptation, by using planar devices. Clearly, an interesting aspect of studying 3D movements with a robotic exoskeleton, is the possibility to investigate the way the human central nervous system deals with the natural upper-limb redundancy for common activities like pointing or tracking tasks. Methods: We asked twenty healthy participants to perform 3D pointing or tracking tasks under the effect of inter-joint velocity dependant perturbing force fields, applied directly at the joint level by a 4-DOF robotic arm exoskeleton. These fields perturbed the human natural inter-joint coordination but did not constrain directly the end-effector movements and thus subjects capability to perform the tasks. As a consequence, while the participants focused on the achievement of the task, we unexplicitly modified their natural upper-limb coordination strategy. We studied the force fields direct effect on pointing movements towards 8 targets placed in the 3D peripersonal space, and we also considered potential generalizations on 4 distinct other targets. Post-effects were studied after the removal of the force fields (wash-out and follow up). These effects were quantified by a kinematic analysis of the pointing movements at both end-point and joint levels, and by a measure of the final postures. At the same time, we analysed the natural inter-joint coordination through PCA. Results: During the exposition to the perturbative fields, we observed modifications of the subjects movement kinematics at every level (joints, end-effector, and inter-joint coordination). Adaptation was evidenced by a partial decrease of the movement deviations due to the fields, during the repetitions, but it occurred only on 21% of the motions. Nonetheless post-effects were observed in 86% of cases during the wash-out and follow up periods (right after the removal of the perturbation by the fields and after 30 minutes of being detached from the exoskeleton). Important inter-individual differences were observed but with small variability within subjects. In particular, a group of subjects showed an over-shoot with respect to the original unexposed trajectories (in 30% of cases), but the most frequent consequence (in 55% of cases) was the partial persistence of the modified upper-limb coordination, adopted at the time of the perturbation. Temporal and spatial generalizations were also evidenced by the deviation of the movement trajectories, both at the end-effector and at the intermediate joints and the modification of the final pointing postures towards targets which were never exposed to any field. Conclusions: Such results are the first quantified characterization of the effects of modification of the upper-limb coordination in healthy subjects, by imposing modification through viscous force fields distributed at the joint level, and could pave the way towards opportunities to rehabilitate pathological arm synergies with robots

We make the path by walking : performative pedagogy in a recovery high school

Recovery high schools started emerging in the United States as a continuing source of care for young people in recovery from substance use at the height of the war on drugs in the 1980s. Research shows that recovery from addiction is not only a restoration of healthy social networks but also a reconnection to the physical body. This MFA thesis tracks a process of embodied performance (drama-based activities) to explore critical moments on the recovery journey. Through qualitative research methods of thematic analysis and a thematic coding process, the author examines how an embodied performative pedagogy can support conditions for belonging among youth in a recovery high school, as well as how multimodal semiotic symbol systems and meaning-making provide possibilities for youth to affect how they name the world. The document concludes with a discussion of the research findings, the limitations of the research, as well as recommendations for applied drama/theatre programs in recovery high schoolsTheatre and Danc

A quantitative approach for evaluating lava flow simulation reliability: the LavaSIM code applied to the 2001 Etna’s eruption

Many numerical codes have been developed to simulate the emplacement of lava flows for evaluating their possible evolutions and for defining, by a statistical approach, hazard maps useful for risk assessment and land planning. Although many examples of lava flow simulation can be found in literature, just a few of them attempted to quantify the correspondence between observed and simulated flows, nevertheless this is a crucial point especially if the codes are applied in real-time for risk managing. The aim of this work was to define a methodology to quantitatively evaluate the reliability of simulation codes. In particular, it applied the LavaSIM code (Hidaka et al., 2005) to simulate the main lava flow emplaced on the South flank of Mt. Etna (Italy) between 18 July and 9 August 2001 which represents an ideal test case for validating numerical codes (Coltelli et al., 2007). It is a single flow both for its geometry and its temporal evolution and, many data are available to be used as input of the simulations (lava composition, pre- and post-eruption topographies, final flow volume and thickness and temporal evolution of average volumetric flow rates) and for checking their results (2D temporal evolution). LavaSIM is the only full 3D model, thus able to account for the vertical variation of lava properties (temperature, viscosity, velocity and liquidus or solidus state). It is based on the 3D solution of the Navier-Stokes and the energy conservation equations and provides the most complete description of the lava cooling by considering radiation, conduction and convection. Its greatest peculiarity is to take into account crust formation by evaluating the enthalpy of every cell and by adopting an empiric threshold parameter (the solidification fraction of liquidity loss) to discriminate liquid and solid cells. Different values of input parameters (viscosity, solidification fraction of liquidity loss, eruptive enthalpy and lava emissivity) have been adopted for evaluating their influence on the simulated lava distribution and cooling. A simulation with constant lava discharge, averaged on the whole eruption, was also run for checking how the feeding affects the lava spreading and cooling. The results were first analyzed by comparing the planar expansions of real and simulated flows. A quantitative analysis was then carried out adopting two parameters for constraining both the lengthening and the planar expansion. For quantitatively verifying the correspondence between simulated and observed lengths, the Percent Length Ratio (PLR) was defined as the percentage ratio between simulated and observed lengths measured along the main flow direction. The second control parameter was the fitness function (e1) defined by Spataro et al. (2004) as the square root of the ratio between the intersection and the union of real and simulated areas. Since the e1 factor allows quantifying the simulated lateral spreading while PLR the flow lengthening, it is important to jointly analyze these two parameters. This work showed that by combining the fitness function of Spataro et al. (2004) with the Percent Length Ratio, here defined, it is possible to constrain both the lateral spreading (by e1) and the flow lengthening (by the PLR). The analysis here presented also demonstrated the capability of the LavaSIM simulation code to account for the vertical variation of the lava properties and to simulate the crust formation

"WDM-DPSK Detection by means of Frequency-Periodic Gaussian Filtering"

A single frequency-periodic narrow filter converts DPSK to intensity modulation in a high number of WDM channels. It also strongly enhances their tolerance to chromatic dispersion and is exploited in a 16x10 Gbit/s transmission over 240 km G.652 fibre with no chromatic dispersion compensation

Microwave broadband characterization of aging of SU-8 polymer as CPW substrate

In this paper we present the methodology and the numerical results related to the analysis of aging of the SU- 8 polymer when used as a primary layer for the realization of Coplanar Waveguide (CPW) structures. As test devices, we used a set of transmission lines with different lengths and T-shaped open stubs shunt resonators; by using these geometries, we are able to acquire the data in a broadband range, in principle between 1 GHz and 40 GHz. We conduct the analysis by comparing two different technology run: the first wafer with a deposited layer by a 12-year-old SU-8 and the second wafer, with the same photolithographed metallic geometries, with a brand-new processed SU-8 photoresist