Data visualization within urban models

Models of urban environments have many uses for town planning, pre-visualization of new building work and utility service planning. Many of these models are three-dimensional, and increasingly there is a move towards real-time presentation of such large models. In this paper we present an algorithm for generating consistent 3D models from a combination of data sources, including Ordnance Survey ground plans, aerial photography and laser height data. Although there have been several demonstrations of automatic generation of building models from 2D vector map data, in this paper we present a very robust solution that generates models that are suitable for real-time presentation. We then demonstrate a novel pollution visualization that uses these models

Definig the Boundaries of an Italian Systems Librarianship: Library Managers and System Managers of an Automated Library System

Systems librarianship has become a field of interest for professional literature from the late 1980s and until current days many authors have continued to investigate the roles, competencies and related issues of the systems librarians’ position within their organisation and library environments. This branch of literature has been reviewed by the researcher1 with the main purposes to cover the topic at an international level and define the limits of the debate

Biochemical and functional characterization of the binding of Neisseria Adhesin A (NadA) with Siglec-5 and 14

Neisseria adhesin A (NadA) is a proteic recombinant antigen included in Bexsero, a vaccine against serogroup B Neisseria meningitidis (N. meningitidis). NadA belongs to the trimeric autotransporters family and is composed of a long coiled-coil with three protruding wing-like structures that create an unusual N-terminal head domain. Even though NadA has been extensively described as promoter of both adhesion to and invasion into human epithelial cells, its receptors at the interface with human cells have never been found. To identify the targeted human receptors, we used recombinant NadA (rNadA) as probe on a protein microarray including a expanded collection of surface and secreted human proteins. The screening disclosed three putative interactors, Siglec-5, Siglec-14 and FcγRIIA, expressed on cells of myeloid lineage. We first validated these interactions addressing the biochemical features of the binding, confirming Siglec-5 and -14 as high affinity NadA binding proteins, while FcγRIIA was not. Next, we assessed the membrane properties of NadA binding to Siglecs by using Escherichia coli as an heterologous system. Full-lenght Siglecs, expressed on CHO-K1 cells showed an increase of adhesion of N. meningitidis, whereas the isogenic strain knock-out NadA did not. Although recombinant Siglec-5 ectodomain was shown to bind to NadA on both capsulated and unencapsulated N. meningitidis, we could not find any relevant evidence of NadA/Siglecs interaction on primary and immortalized monocytic cell lines. In recent years, soluble forms of Siglecs were detected in human serum. In this study, the soluble Siglecs presence was confirmed in human pooled sera and in culture media of monocytes and macrophages. Interestingly, we found that during infection assays N. meningitids was able to bind monocytes-released Siglecs in NadA dependent manner. The exogenous addition of the soluble species increased the attachment of bacteria on monocytic cells surface but reduced internalization. We also demonstrated a novel interaction between Siglecs and complement component 1 (C1q), whose in vitro interaction was inhibited by recombinant NadA in a concentration dependent manner. Further, we observed a survival advantage for N. meningitidis in presence of bactericidial antibodies anti-NadA by testing sera, as source of complement, depleted of Siglec-5 and -14. In summary, this work revealed two new human interactors for the neisserial adhesin that could be encountered not only on phagocytes surfaces but also in the bloodstream. On the host side, we characterized a new proteic target for Siglecs on N. meningitidis bacterial surface. Moreover, the C1q binding to Siglec-5 and -14 was revealed for the first time, opening questions on Siglecs biology. In conclusion we found that NadA may not contribute exclusively to the crossing of the epithelial nasopharyngeal barrier but also it may help the bacterium to survive into extracellular host milieu

The tax avoidance dilemma: taxpayers and government reconciliation in Co-operative Compliance regimes

openAcademic research on taxes has historically been a primary matter of interest for many disciplines: contributions from finance, economics, law and accounting fields have provided, in the years, a multidisciplinary nature to tax research. One of the main areas of interest – especially for the accounting viewpoint – in the body of tax research literature is focused on tax issues faced by businesses: in particular, many events and trends of the last decades have contributed to give rise to worldwide important concerns regarding corporate tax avoidance behavior. In fact, tax avoidance, despite being a quite young area of research, has received increasing attention in recent times not only from academic tax researchers but also from governmental and supranational institutions and policy makers all over the world, with regard to the magnitude and relevance of tax avoidance practices as well as its determinants and consequences. The aim of the first part of this paper is, actually, to provide a clear view – by integrating the contributions from different fields of study to tax avoidance research – on the main determinants which encourage tax avoidance behavior and aggressive corporate tax planning inside organizations, with a particular focus on non-tax determinants. The second part of the paper, instead, concentrates on the opposite side of tax avoidance: tax compliance. Specifically, it investigates the main factors that influence and foster taxpayers’ compliance level towards their tax obligations, and examines the practical responses that governments and tax authorities have implemented in the past, with the aim of ensuring an adequate level of compliance to the tax system and its provisions. In this context, evidence is presented over the fact that the basic relationship – which refers to the deterrent and punitive approach historically kept by tax authorities in their relationship with (non-compliant) taxpayers – has failed to reach the aforementioned objective. Nevertheless, thanks to the prominent work of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a renewed concept of relationship between revenue bodies and taxpayers, inspired to principles of openness, transparency, trust and co-operation between the involved parties has taken shape, coined by the OECD as Co-operative Compliance, and subsequently adopted by several countries all over the world in slightly different ways. The ultimate scope of this work is, then, to test – by selecting a company participating in the Italian Co-operative Compliance program, namely Regime di Adempimento Collaborativo, as a case of study – whether the evolution of the basic relationship, and the development of this new framework of interaction between taxpayers and the tax authority, could hinder corporate tax avoidance behavior and their attitude toward aggressive tax planning, encourage voluntary compliance and disclosure of relevant tax risks, and benefit to the whole national tax system

Multimodal Deep Learning for Robust RGB-D Object Recognition

Robust object recognition is a crucial ingredient of many, if not all, real-world robotics applications. This paper leverages recent progress on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and proposes a novel RGB-D architecture for object recognition. Our architecture is composed of two separate CNN processing streams - one for each modality - which are consecutively combined with a late fusion network. We focus on learning with imperfect sensor data, a typical problem in real-world robotics tasks. For accurate learning, we introduce a multi-stage training methodology and two crucial ingredients for handling depth data with CNNs. The first, an effective encoding of depth information for CNNs that enables learning without the need for large depth datasets. The second, a data augmentation scheme for robust learning with depth images by corrupting them with realistic noise patterns. We present state-of-the-art results on the RGB-D object dataset and show recognition in challenging RGB-D real-world noisy settings.Comment: Final version submitted to IROS'2015, results unchanged, reformulation of some text passages in abstract and introductio

Consent of the governed: Term limits and American democracy

Consent of the Governed: Term Limits and American Democracy reviews the arguments and methods of proponents of term limits for members of Congress and other legislative representatives. These are contrasted to past theories and to the actual application of rotation in office in the constitutions adopted by the American states during the Revolutionary era. These early constitutions were discriminating in their use of rotation, generally reserving it for executive or administrative offices. The lessons drawn are: first, that term limits will not solve our modern political problems and may make them worse; and second, that safeguarding the process of elections and insuring that legislative bodies were truly representative of the public interest were among the major concerns of Revolutionary America. These concerns also apply to our modern politics. Campaign and other purposeful political spending has spawned a political industry and has enveloped our democratic processes. The conclusion is that we must remove the problems of money from our elective and representative politics and search for new ways and new structures that allow genuine democratic self-governing in our local communities