Effects of genetic and agronomic factors on grain composition in oats

The effects of genetic variability and agronomic practises on the chemical compounds of the grain were evaluated in a set of oat cultivars (16 naked and four husked) grown in different experiments in the years 2004–2008. In the first experiment, carried out for two years, β-glucan and Total Dietary Fibre (TDF) from eight oat cultivars, grown under three different levels of nitrogen fertilization and two seed doses, were considered. The second experiment, involving 12 cultivars for two years, explored the variation of β-glucan solubility and further characterized six cultivars for the content of TDF and arabinoxylans. In both experiments, genotype was found to exert the largest effect on the grain composition; nitrogen levels and seed doses had positive significant effects on protein and β-glucan contents, but did not affect fibre content. Among the naked cultivars, Irina, Abel, Luna, Hendon and Expression showed a good ability to accumulate the examined grain compounds. However, in general, the highest contents of protein and β-glucan were found in the groats of husked cultivars, suggesting that specific breeding programs are a crucial step to identify the suitable naked oat genotypes to produce foods of high nutritional value

i-Rheo: Measuring the materials' linear viscoelastic properties “in a step”!

A new analytical technique for determining a materials' linear viscoelastic properties from a simple step-strain measurement is reported. The technique avoids the need for idealisation of real measurements. The technique involves evaluating the Fourier transforms of raw experimental data describing both the time-dependent stress and strain functions. A comparison with conventional linear oscillatory measurements for a diverse range of complex materials is made and the technique is shown to be superior to existing linear oscillatory measurements in all cases

The corporate identity of Italian Universities on the Web: A webometrics approach

In parallel with the increasing marketisation and globalisation of higher education, Universities’ corporate websites have become institutional virtual storefronts largely contributing to reinforcing the organisations’ brand, to disseminate information on their main achievements and to communicate with both enrolled students and potential “customers” worldwide. Thus, the effectiveness of Universities’ websites to deliver value in terms of information on the organisations’ activities and to interact with actual and potential students - as well as partner institutions in education and research projects - is to be regarded as a key objective of all Universities. The level of accomplishment of this task, measured so far mostly on a case-study basis, can be more extensively surveyed by adopting a webometric approach combining the use of web analytics as indicators of efficiency with selected indicators of contents collected through web scraping techniques. This approach has been tested on the websites of Italian Universities with the aim of classifying them in terms of quality and impact of their institutional websites, as well as to develop a permanent monitoring framework