"...racchiudere in una immagine tutto il male del nostro tempo". Primo Levi, Indifference and the Faces of Evil

This is the final version. It was first published by Sapienza University Press at http://digilab-epub.uniroma1.it/index.php/Philologica/index

Beitrag einer termingerecht durchgeführten Kainit-Düngung zur Beikrautregulierung in Winterweizen

Due to etching effects on broad leafed weeds, fine ground kainite was used for weed control before synthetic herbicides have become common practice in conventional farming. According to the organic standards kainite can be used as potassium fertiliser. The present study investigates optimal growing stages for application in organic winter wheat and the range of effectiveness. Kainite was applied at a rate of 800 kg per hectare alternatively at EC 29 and EC 30 under the conditions of morning dew on days with high sunshine duration. At both growing stages kainite application reduced the population of hairy vetch, chamomile, cornflower, field pansy, winter rape, common chickweed and persian speedwell. Application at early growing stages led to a higher weed reduction

Bottom-up effects of a no-take zone on endangered penguin demographics

This is the author's postprint version of the article. Data used for analyses in this manuscript are available in Dryad: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t446r. Supplementary materials are available under the Creative Commons License CC-BY version 4.0 at http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roybiolett/suppl/2015/07/08/rsbl.2015.0237.DC1/rsbl20150237supp1.pdfThe definitive published version of the article is available via DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0237Marine no-take zones can have positive impacts for target species and are increasingly important management tools. However, whether they indirectly benefit higher order predators remains unclear. The endangered African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) depends on commercially exploited forage fish. We examined how chick survival responded to an experimental 3-year fishery closure around Robben Island, South Africa, controlling for variation in prey biomass and fishery catches. Chick survival increased by 18% when the closure was initiated, which alone led to a predicted 27% higher population compared with continued fishing. However, the modelled population continued to decline, probably because of high adult mortality linked to poor prey availability over larger spatial scales. Our results illustrate that small no-take zones can have bottom-up benefits for highly mobile marine predators, but are only one component of holistic, ecosystem-based management regimes.The Earthwatch InstituteThe Bristol Zoological SocietyThe Leiden Conservation FoundationThe National Research Foundation (South Africa

Timing, rates, and causes of death in a large South African tuberculosis programme.

BACKGROUND: Tuberculosis (TB) mortality remains high across sub-Saharan Africa despite integration of TB and HIV/ART programmes. To inform programme design and service delivery, we estimated mortality by time from starting TB treatment. METHODS: Routinely collected data on TB treatment, vital status, and the timing and causes of death, were linked to cardio-respiratory autopsy data, from 1995-2008, from a cohort of male platinum miners in South Africa. Records were expanded into person-months at risk (pm). RESULTS: 4162 TB episodes were registered; 3170 men were treated for the first time and 833 men underwent retreatment. Overall, 509 men died, with a case fatality of 12.2% and mortality rate of 2.0/100 pm. Mortality was highest in the first month after starting TB treatment for first (2.3/100 pm) and retreatment episodes (4.8/100 pm). When stratified by HIV status, case fatality was higher in HIV positive men not on ART (first episode 14.0%; retreatment episode 26.2%) and those on ART (12.0%; 22.0%) than men of negative or unknown HIV status (2.6%; 3.6%). Mortality was also highest in the first month for each of these groups. Mortality risk factors included older age, previous TB, HIV, pulmonary TB, and diagnostic uncertainty. The proportion of deaths attributable to TB was consistently overestimated in clinical records versus cardio-respiratory autopsy. CONCLUSIONS: Programme mortality was highest in those with HIV and during the first month of TB treatment in all groups, and many deaths were not caused by TB. Resource allocation should prioritise TB prevention and accurate earlier diagnosis, recognise the role of HIV, and ensure effective clinical care in the early stages of TB treatment

Water Contaminants Associated With Unconventional Oil and Gas Extraction Cause Immunotoxicity to Amphibian Tadpoles

Chemicals associated with unconventional oil and gas (UOG) operations have been shown to contaminate surface and ground water with a variety of endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) inducing multiple developmental alteration in mice. However, little is known about the impacts of UOG-associated contaminants on amphibian health and resistance to an emerging ranavirus infectious disease caused by viruses in the genus Ranavirus, especially at the vulnerable tadpole stage. Here we used tadpoles of the amphibian Xenopus laevis and the ranavirus Frog virus 3 (FV3) as a model relevant to aquatic environment conservation research for investigating the immunotoxic effects of exposure to a mixture of 23 UOG-associated chemicals with EDC activity. Xenopus tadpoles were exposed to an equimass mixture of 23 UOG-associated chemicals (range from 0.1 to 10 µg/l) for 3 weeks prior to infection with FV3. Our data show that exposure to the UOG chemical mixture is toxic for tadpoles at ecological doses of 5 to 10 µg/l. Lower doses significantly altered homeostatic expression of myeloid lineage genes and compromised tadpole responses to FV3 through expression of TNF-α, IL-1β, and Type I IFN genes, correlating with an increase in viral load. Exposure to a subset of 6 UOG chemicals was still sufficient to perturb the antiviral gene expression response. These findings suggest that UOG-associated water pollutants at low but environmentally relevant doses have the potential to induce acute alterations of immune function and antiviral immunity

Stability Analysis of Frame Slotted Aloha Protocol

Frame Slotted Aloha (FSA) protocol has been widely applied in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems as the de facto standard in tag identification. However, very limited work has been done on the stability of FSA despite its fundamental importance both on the theoretical characterisation of FSA performance and its effective operation in practical systems. In order to bridge this gap, we devote this paper to investigating the stability properties of FSA by focusing on two physical layer models of practical importance, the models with single packet reception and multipacket reception capabilities. Technically, we model the FSA system backlog as a Markov chain with its states being backlog size at the beginning of each frame. The objective is to analyze the ergodicity of the Markov chain and demonstrate its properties in different regions, particularly the instability region. By employing drift analysis, we obtain the closed-form conditions for the stability of FSA and show that the stability region is maximised when the frame length equals the backlog size in the single packet reception model and when the ratio of the backlog size to frame length equals in order of magnitude the maximum multipacket reception capacity in the multipacket reception model. Furthermore, to characterise system behavior in the instability region, we mathematically demonstrate the existence of transience of the backlog Markov chain.Comment: 14 pages, submitted to IEEE Transaction on Information Theor

Using schedulers to test probabilistic distributed systems

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00165-012-0244-5. Copyright © 2012, British Computer Society.Formal methods are one of the most important approaches to increasing the confidence in the correctness of software systems. A formal specification can be used as an oracle in testing since one can determine whether an observed behaviour is allowed by the specification. This is an important feature of formal testing: behaviours of the system observed in testing are compared with the specification and ideally this comparison is automated. In this paper we study a formal testing framework to deal with systems that interact with their environment at physically distributed interfaces, called ports, and where choices between different possibilities are probabilistically quantified. Building on previous work, we introduce two families of schedulers to resolve nondeterministic choices among different actions of the system. The first type of schedulers, which we call global schedulers, resolves nondeterministic choices by representing the environment as a single global scheduler. The second type, which we call localised schedulers, models the environment as a set of schedulers with there being one scheduler for each port. We formally define the application of schedulers to systems and provide and study different implementation relations in this setting

Cliophysics: Socio-political Reliability Theory, Polity Duration and African Political (In)stabilities

Quantification of historical sociological processes have recently gained attention among theoreticians in the effort of providing a solid theoretical understanding of the behaviors and regularities present in sociopolitical dynamics. Here we present a reliability theory of polity processes with emphases on individual political dynamics of African countries. We found that the structural properties of polity failure rates successfully capture the risk of political vulnerability and instabilities in which 87.50%, 75%, 71.43%, and 0% of the countries with monotonically increasing, unimodal, U-shaped and monotonically decreasing polity failure rates, respectively, have high level of state fragility indices. The quasi-U-shape relationship between average polity duration and regime types corroborates historical precedents and explains the stability of the autocracies and democracies.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

T-cell subpopulations αβ and γδ in cord blood of very preterm infants : The influence of intrauterine infection

Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are creditedPreterm infants are very susceptible to infections. Immune response mechanisms in this group of patients and factors that influence cord blood mononuclear cell populations remain poorly understood and are considered insufficient. However, competent immune functions of the cord blood mononuclear cells are also described. The aim of this work was to evaluate the T-cell population (CD3+) with its subpopulations bearing T-cell receptor (TCR) αβ or TCR γδ in the cord blood of preterm infants born before 32 weeks of gestation by mothers with or without an intrauterine infection. Being a pilot study, it also aimed at feasibility check and assessment of an expected effect size. The cord blood samples of 46 infants age were subjected to direct immunofluorescent staining with monoclonal antibodies and then analyzed by flow cytometry. The percentage of CD3+ cells in neonates born by mothers with diagnosis of intrauterine infection was significantly lower than in neonates born by mothers without infection (p = 0.005; Mann-Whitney U test). The number of cells did not differ between groups. Infection present in the mother did not have an influence on the TCR αβ or TCR γδ subpopulations. Our study contributes to a better understanding of preterm infants' immune mechanisms, and sets the stage for further investigations.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio