Performance evaluation of SPDY over high latency satellite channels

Originally developed by Google, SPDY is an open protocol for reducing download times of content rich pages, as well as for managing channels characterized by large Round Trip Times (RTTs) and high packet losses. With such features, it could be an efficient solution to cope with performance degradations of Web 2.0 services used over satellite networks. In this perspective, this paper evaluates the SPDY protocol over a wireless access also exploiting a satellite link. To this aim, we implemented an experimental set-up, composed of an SPDY proxy, a wireless link emulator, and an instrumented Web browser. Results confirm that SPDY can enhance the performances in terms of throughput, and reduce the traffic fragmentation. Moreover, owing to its connection multiplexing architecture, it can also mitigate the transport layer complexity, which is critical when in presence of middleboxes deployed to isolate satellite trunks

Design of Fault Tolerant Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems for Smart Environments

are more and more employed to implement smart environments also in safety-critical scenarios. We here propose a novel system-level design approach capable at considering two relevant aspects of such systems

Fast, bedside diagnosis of toxic epidermal necrolysis using ex vivo confocal laser scanning microscopy: A retrospective study.

Toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) is a severe life-threatening drug eruption with rapid evolution. A fast histologic differentiation between TEN and clinically similarly looking staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome is of vital importance for relevant treatment decision. The recently developed ex vivo confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) offers innovative and extremely fast histological visualization of fresh tissue specimens. To assess the diagnostic efficacy of ex vivo CLSM in comparison with standard histopathology for TEN. We performed side-by-side comparison of TEN specimens analysed with ex vivo CLSM and haematoxylin and eosin staining. Analysis focused on typical histopathological features of TEN, including epidermal cleavage in the basal layer and confluent epidermal necrosis. We retrospectively assessed the diagnostic performance of ex vivo CLSM for TEN in clinically confirmed cases. We report substantial agreement between ex vivo CLSM and classical histology for the detection of subepidermal cleavage and confluent epidermal necrosis. When considering full-thickness epidermal loss, epidermal cleavage in the basal layer showed the highest diagnostic performance, reaching 87.5% sensitivity and 100% specificity. Based on our data, ex vivo CSLM appears as a rapid, resource-optimizing, and reliable approach for morphological TEN emergency screening on fresh skin samples

Malattie dermatologiche e frequentazione di impianti natatori

un numero sempre notevole di dermatosi possono colpire gli atleti amatoriali che elite. Il medico sportivo, come pure l'allenatore e l'atleta stesso dovrebbero essere a conoscenza dei disordini pi\uf9 comuni in maniera tale che essi possano essere riconosciuti e appropriatamente trattati anche allo scopo di prevenire l'ulteriore diffusione delle malattie. Nel presente lavoro verranno esaminate solo le condizioni che pi\uf9 comunemente sono associate all'ambiente delle piscine coperte

Static index pruning in web search engines

Static index pruning techniques permanently remove a presumably redundant part of an inverted file, to reduce the file size and query processing time. These techniques differ in deciding which parts of an index can be removed safely; that is, without changing the top-ranked query results. As defined in the literature, the query view of a document is the set of query terms that access to this particular document, that is, retrieves this document among its top results. In this paper, we first propose using query views to improve the quality of the top results compared against the original results. We incorporate query views in a number of static pruning strategies, namely term-centric, document-centric, term popularity based and document access popularity based approaches, and show that the new strategies considerably outperform their counterparts especially for the higher levels of pruning and for both disjunctive and conjunctive query processing. Additionally, we combine the notions of term and document access popularity to form new pruning strategies, and further extend these strategies with the query views. The new strategies improve the result quality especially for the conjunctive query processing, which is the default and most common search mode of a search engine