Industrial Development Policies and Performances in Southern China: Beyond the Specialised Industrial Cluster Program

none3The paper offers an updated picture of the policies implemented by the government of the Guangdong Province (China) to foster the industrial development and the technological upgrading of its territories. Among these policies is the promotion and the institutional acknowledgement of a growing number of industrial clusters, defined as “specialized towns”, characterized by a high spatial concentration of firms producing one specific item (or a limited range of similar products). In the view of the provincial and local governments these types of industrial development programs are used to increase firms agglomerations, spatial concentration and visibility, which in turn leads to increased specialization, industrial output, innovation and economic growth. However, little specific empirical evidence has been collected to support this view and the debate, at the national and international level, on the effectiveness of such interventions seems to be still largely ideological. The paper offers a contribution in this sense by offering a detailed description of the policy tools, by suggesting synthetic indexes to quantify policy efforts and industrial performances in Guangdong territories and by providing a first statistical analysis of these indexesmixedBarbieri E.; Di Tommaso M.R.; Bonnini S.Barbieri, Elisa; DI TOMMASO, Marco Rodolfo; Bonnini, Stefan

Anomalous water and ion dynamics in hydroxyapatite mesopores

International audienc

Real-Time RGB-D Camera Pose Estimation in Novel Scenes using a Relocalisation Cascade

Camera pose estimation is an important problem in computer vision. Common techniques either match the current image against keyframes with known poses, directly regress the pose, or establish correspondences between keypoints in the image and points in the scene to estimate the pose. In recent years, regression forests have become a popular alternative to establish such correspondences. They achieve accurate results, but have traditionally needed to be trained offline on the target scene, preventing relocalisation in new environments. Recently, we showed how to circumvent this limitation by adapting a pre-trained forest to a new scene on the fly. The adapted forests achieved relocalisation performance that was on par with that of offline forests, and our approach was able to estimate the camera pose in close to real time. In this paper, we present an extension of this work that achieves significantly better relocalisation performance whilst running fully in real time. To achieve this, we make several changes to the original approach: (i) instead of accepting the camera pose hypothesis without question, we make it possible to score the final few hypotheses using a geometric approach and select the most promising; (ii) we chain several instantiations of our relocaliser together in a cascade, allowing us to try faster but less accurate relocalisation first, only falling back to slower, more accurate relocalisation as necessary; and (iii) we tune the parameters of our cascade to achieve effective overall performance. These changes allow us to significantly improve upon the performance our original state-of-the-art method was able to achieve on the well-known 7-Scenes and Stanford 4 Scenes benchmarks. As additional contributions, we present a way of visualising the internal behaviour of our forests and show how to entirely circumvent the need to pre-train a forest on a generic scene.Comment: Tommaso Cavallari, Stuart Golodetz, Nicholas Lord and Julien Valentin assert joint first authorshi

Analysis, characterization and minimization of IPMSMs cogging torque with different rotor structures

This paper presents the analysis, characterization and comparison of the cogging torque components generated by five different IPMSM rotor structures. More in detail, an IPMSM model (named IPMSM1), which is derived from a commercial geometry, is analyzed by using a Finite Element Method (FEM) approach. Then, four other IPMSM models, which are obtained by modifying the IPMSM1 rotor structure and by maintaining the same stator configuration, are proposed and analyzed. From the obtained simulation results, the cogging torque components for each structure are determined and compared. From this comparison, a significant cogging torque decrease is occurring for the modified geometries, without affecting the values of the generated torque. Furthermore, a meaningful relationship between the peak values of the cogging torque and the gradients of the flux density around the neutral area is reported and discussed. Therefore, simple structure modifications applied to the rotor geometry can bring significant improvements in terms of motor performances and cogging torque reductio

Early impairment of endothelial structure and function in young normal-weight women with polycystic ovary syndrome

The aim of this study was to evaluate the presence of early vascular damage in young normal-weight women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).Thirty young normal-weight women with PCOS, who had no additional metabolic or cardiovascular diseases, and 30 healthy women (controls) matched for age and body mass index were studied. A complete hormonal assay was performed in each subject. Serum insulin and glucose levels were measured at baseline and after the oral glucose tolerance test. Plasma endothelin-1 levels and serum lipid profile were also assessed. The endothelial function was studied by flow-mediated dilation on the brachial artery, and arterial structure was evaluated by intima-media thickness measurement using Doppler ultrasound of both common carotid arteries.A significant (P < 0.05) difference in flow-mediated dilation (14.3 +/- 1.9% vs. 18.1 +/- 2.0% for PCOS patients and controls, respectively) and in intima-media thickness (0.53 +/- 0.09 mm vs. 0.39 +/- 0.08 mm for PCOS patients and controls, respectively) was found between PCOS and control subjects. Serum endothelin-1 levels were also significantly (P < 0.05) higher in PCOS patients compared with controls (1.1 +/- 0.4 pmol/liter vs. 0.5 +/- 0.2 pmol/liter for PCOS patients and controls, respectively).In conclusion, our data show that young, normal-weight, nondyslipidemic, nonhypertensive women with PCOS have an early impairment of endothelial structure and function

Possibile origine e consistenza di un popolamento di Quercus trojana Webb subsp. trojana (Fagaceae) nel Bosco della Ficuzza (Palermo, Sicilia

Possible origin and demographic asset of a population of Quercus trojana Webb subsp. trojana (Fagaceae) in the wood of Ficuzza (Palermo, Sicily). The first record of Macedonian oak in Sicily is reported. The finding consists of 73 adult and 4 young individuals. A morphometric analysis of all of them, along with an assessment of their phytosanitary status was carried out. They all grow between 700 and 850 m a.s.l. on a 2,30 ha area, characterized by a land mosaic of shrubland and forest patches. Notwithstanding two years of researches, no ultimate proof has been found on their alien status. On this purpose, several alternative hypothesis are formulated and their strengths and weaknesses are discussed. Considering that the environmental conditions of Ficuzza fit very well the ecological requirements of Quercus trojana, even the native status of local population cannot be totally rejected. On the other hand, many data support its recent introduction. In fact, according to interviews to old forest workers, archive documents and aerial photos, most part of the trees of this area have been planted just few years after the end of the Second World War, and dendrochronological analyses have pointed out that the biggest Macedonian oaks of Sicily are no more than 50-60 years old. Whatever the origin of local Macedonian oak population is, the presence of natural renovation testifies, at least, its full naturalisation within the Sicilian territory

Type-1 (CB1) cannabinoid receptor promotes neuronal differentiation and maturation of neural stem cells .

Neural stem cells (NSCs) are self-renewing cells that can differentiate into multiple neural lineages and repopulate regions of the brain after injury. We have investigated the role of endocannabinoids (eCBs), endogenous cues that modulate neuronal functions including neurogenesis, and their receptors CB1 and CB2 in mouse NSCs. Real-time PCR and Western blot analyses indicated that CB1 is present at higher levels than CB2 in NSCs. The eCB anandamide (AEA) or the CB1-specific agonist ACEA enhanced NSC differentiation into neurons, but not astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, whereas the CB2-specific agonist JWH133 was ineffective. Conversely, the effect of AEA was inhibited by CB1, but not CB2, antagonist, corroborating the specificity of the response. CB1 activation also enhanced maturation of neurons, as indicated by morphometric analysis of neurites. CB1 stimulation caused long-term inhibition of the ERK1/2 pathway. Consistently, pharmacological inhibition of the ERK1/2 pathway recapitulated the effects exerted by CB1 activation on neuronal differentiation and maturation. Lastly, gene array profiling showed that CB1 activation augmented the expression of genes involved in neuronal differentiation while decreasing that of stemness genes. These results highlight the role of CB1 in the regulation of NSC fate and suggest that its activation may represent a pro-neuronal differentiation signal

Stochastic Turing patterns in the Brusselator model

A stochastic version of the Brusselator model is proposed and studied via the system size expansion. The mean-field equations are derived and shown to yield to organized Turing patterns within a specific parameters region. When determining the Turing condition for instability, we pay particular attention to the role of cross diffusive terms, often neglected in the heuristic derivation of reaction diffusion schemes. Stochastic fluctuations are shown to give rise to spatially ordered solutions, sharing the same quantitative characteristic of the mean-field based Turing scenario, in term of excited wavelengths. Interestingly, the region of parameter yielding to the stochastic self-organization is wider than that determined via the conventional Turing approach, suggesting that the condition for spatial order to appear can be less stringent than customarily believed.Comment: modified version submitted to Phys Rev. E. 5. 3 Figures (5 panels) adde