ICT for Social Inclusion and Equal Opportunities: CETI-D, an e-Governance Good Practice in Brazil

In this chapter we discuss a Knowledge Economy based approach to the inclusion of persons with disabilities (PwD) that, different from the traditional \u201cassistance\u201d model, considers PwD as active and valuable members of the present Knowledge Society, to be included in the active workforce. This approach will be discussed with reference to a specific operational case study concerning the establishment of the Center of Excellence for Technology and Innovation in Favor of Persons with Disabilities (CETI-D) conceived by Fondazione Rosselli Americas and being implemented by the State of Sao Paulo in Brazil. In the first section of the chapter we discuss the problem of the inclusion of PwD as a further aspect of the digital divide phenomenon. In the second section the principles of the United Nation Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities are presented and some international best practices concerning the social inclusion of PwD are introduced. In the third section we discuss the CETI-D initiative, with the aim of showing how ICT can represent a powerful tool for social and economic inclusion. Finally, in the fourth section we discuss the conditions under which the experience of the CETI-D can be replicated in other countries, with a specific focus on less developed countries

Headache attributed to aeroplane travel: the first multicentric survey in a paediatric population affected by primary headaches

BACKGROUND: This multicentric survey investigates the prevalence and characteristics of Airplane Headache in children affected by primary headaches. METHODS: Patients with symptoms of Airplane Headache were recruited from nine Italian Pediatric Headache Centres. Each patient was handed a structured questionnaire which met the ICHD-III criteria. RESULTS: Among 320 children suffering from primary headaches who had flights during their lifetime, 15 (4.7%) had Airplane Headache, with mean age of 12.4 years. Most of the patients were females (80%). The headache was predominantly bilateral (80%) and localized to the frontal area (60%); it was mainly pulsating, and lasted less than 30 min in all cases. Accompanying symptoms were tearing, photophobia, phonophobia in most of the cases (73.3%). More than 30% of patients used medications to treat the attacks, with good results. CONCLUSION: Our study shows that Airplane Headache is not a rare disorder in children affected by primary headaches and highlights that its features in children are peculiar and differ from those described in adults. In children Airplane Headache prevails in females, is more often bilateral, has frequently accompanying symptoms and occurs at any time during the flight. Further studies are needed to confirm the actual frequency of Airplane Headache in the general pediatric population not selected from specialized Headache Centres, with and without other concomitant headache condition, and to better clarify the clinical characteristics, pathophysiology and potential therapies

Exploring the measurement of markedness and its relationship with other linguistic variables

Antonym pair members can be differentiated by each word's markedness-that distinction attributable to the presence or absence of features at morphological or semantic levels. Morphologically marked words incorporate their unmarked counterpart with additional morphs (e.g., "unlucky" vs. "lucky"); properties used to determine semantically marked words (e.g., "short" vs. "long") are less clearly defined. Despite extensive theoretical scrutiny, the lexical properties of markedness have received scant empirical study. The current paper employs an antonym sequencing approach to measure markedness: establishing markedness probabilities for individual words and evaluating their relationship with other lexical properties (e.g., length, frequency, valence). Regression analyses reveal that markedness probability is, as predicted, related to affixation and also strongly related to valence. Our results support the suggestion that antonym sequence is reflected in discourse, and further analysis demonstrates that markedness probabilities, derived from the antonym sequencing task, reflect the ordering of antonyms within natural language. In line with the Pollyanna Hypothesis, we argue that markedness is closely related to valence; language users demonstrate a tendency to present words evaluated positively ahead of those evaluated negatively if given the choice. Future research should consider the relationship of markedness and valence, and the influence of contextual information in determining which member of an antonym pair is marked or unmarked within discourse

“Looks familiar, but I do not know who she is”:The role of the anterior right temporal lobe in famous face recognition

Processing a famous face involves a cascade of steps including detecting the presence of a face, recognizing it as familiar, accessing semantic/biographical information about the person, and finally, if required, production of the proper name. Decades of neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have identified a network of occipital and temporal brain regions ostensibly comprising the 'core' system for face processing. Recent research has also begun to elucidate upon an 'extended' network, including anterior temporal and frontal regions. However, there is disagreement about which brain areas are involved in each step, as many aspects of face processing occur automatically in healthy individuals and rarely dissociate in patients. Moreover, some common phenomena are not easily induced in an experimental setting, such as having a sense of familiarity without being able to recall who the person is. Patients with the semantic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (svPPA) often recognize a famous face as familiar, even when they cannot specifically recall the proper name or biographical details. In this study, we analyzed data from a large sample of 105 patients with neurodegenerative disorders, including 43 svPPA, to identify the neuroanatomical substrates of three different steps of famous face processing. Using voxel-based morphometry, we correlated whole-brain grey matter volumes with scores on three experimental tasks that targeted familiarity judgment, semantic/biographical information retrieval, and naming. Performance in naming and semantic association significantly correlates with grey matter volume in the left anterior temporal lobe, whereas familiarity judgment with integrity of the right anterior middle temporal gyrus. These findings shed light on the neuroanatomical substrates of key components of overt face processing, addressing issues of functional lateralization, and deepening our understanding of neural substrates of semantic knowledge

Techno-economic assessment of membrane assisted fluidized bed reactors for pure H2 production with CO2 capture

This paper addresses the techno-economic assessment of two membrane-based technologies for H2 production from natural gas, fully integrated with CO2 capture. In the first configuration, a fluidized bed membrane reactor (FBMR) is integrated in the H2 plant: the natural gas reacts with steam in the catalytic bed and H2 is simultaneously separated using Pd-based membranes, and the heat of reaction is provided to the system by feeding air as reactive sweep gas in part of the membranes and by burning part of the permeated H2 (in order to avoid CO2 emissions for heat supply). In the second system, named membrane assisted chemical looping reforming (MA-CLR), natural gas is converted in the fuel rector by reaction with steam and an oxygen carrier (chemical looping reforming), and the produced H2 permeates through the membranes. The oxygen carrier is re-oxidized in a separate air reactor with air, which also provides the heat required for the endothermic reactions in the fuel reactor. The plants are optimized by varying the operating conditions of the reactors such as temperature, pressures (both at feed and permeate side), steam-to-carbon ratio and the heat recovery configuration. The plant design is carried out using Aspen Simulation, while the novel reactor concepts have been designed and their performance have been studied with a dedicated phenomenological model in Matlab. Both configurations have been designed and compared with reference technologies for H2 production based on conventional fired tubular reforming (FTR) with and without CO2 capture. The results of the analysis show that both new concepts can achieve higher H2 yields than conventional plants (12-20% higher). The high electricity consumptions of membrane-based plants are associated with the required low pressure at the retentate side. However, the low energy cost for the CO2 separation and compression makes the overall reforming efficiency from 4% to 20% higher than conventional FTR with CO2 scrubbing. FBMR and MA-CLR show better performance than FTR with CO2 capture technology in terms of costs mainly because of lower associated CAPEX. The cost of H2 production reduces from 0.28 €/NmH23 to 0.22 €/NmH23 (FBMR) and 0.19 €/NmH23 (MA-CLR)

The role of morphological markedness in the processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: an event-related potential investigation

Current morphological theory assumes that feature values, such as masculine and feminine or singular and plural, are asymmetrically represented. That is, one member of the opposition (e.g. feminine for gender, plural for number) is assumed to be marked, and the other one, unmarked. The present study examines how these asymmetries impact agreement resolution in Spanish. Agreement was manipulated between a noun acting as head of a relative clause and an adjective located inside the relative clause (e.g. catedral que parecía inmensa “cathedral that looked huge”). Half of the nouns were feminine (marked) and the other half, masculine (unmarked). Half of the nouns were used in the plural (marked) and the other half, in the singular (unmarked). Twenty-seven Spanish native speakers read 240 sentences while their brain activity was recorded with EEG and performed a grammaticality judgment. Results showed that both number and gender violations elicited a central-posterior P600, a component associated with syntactic repair, and a late anterior negativity, argued to reflect working memory costs. Only the P600 was affected by markedness. It started earlier for violations where the mismatching feature was marked. Moreover, it was larger for errors where the mismatching feature was marked, although this amplitude modulation only emerged for number, possibly due to differences in how number and gender cues were realized (i.e. both masculine and feminine showed overt inflection, but singular was uninflected relative to plural). These results suggest that the parser is sensitive to markedness asymmetries in the course of online processing

Start of SPIDER operation towards ITER neutral beams

Heating Neutral Beam (HNB) Injectors will constitute the main plasma heating and current drive tool both in ITER and JT60-SA, which are the next major experimental steps for demonstrating nuclear fusion as viable energy source. In ITER, in order to achieve the required thermonuclear fusion power gain Q=10 for short pulse operation and Q=5 for long pulse operation (up to 3600s), two HNB injectors will be needed [1], each delivering a total power of about 16.5 MW into the magnetically-confined plasma, by means of neutral hydrogen or deuterium particles having a specific energy of about 1 MeV. Since only negatively charged particles can be efficiently neutralized at such energy, the ITER HNB injectors [2] will be based on negative ions, generated by caesium-catalysed surface conversion of atoms in a radio-frequency driven plasma source. A negative deuterium ion current of more than 40 A will be extracted, accelerated and focused in a multi-aperture, multi-stage electrostatic accelerator, having 1280 apertures (~ 14 mm diam.) and 5 acceleration stages (~200 kV each) [3]. After passing through a narrow gas-cell neutralizer, the residual ions will be deflected and discarded, whereas the neutralized particles will continue their trajectory through a duct into the tokamak vessels to deliver the required heating power to the ITER plasma for a pulse duration of about 3600 s. Although the operating principles and the implementation of the most critical parts of the injector have been tested in different experiments, the ITER NBI requirements have never been simultaneously attained. In order to reduce the risks and to optimize the design and operating procedures of the HNB for ITER, a dedicated Neutral Beam Test Facility (NBTF) [4] has been promoted by the ITER Organization with the contribution of the European Union\u2019s Joint Undertaking for ITER and of the Italian Government, with the participation of the Japanese and Indian Domestic Agencies (JADA and INDA) and of several European laboratories, such as IPP-Garching, KIT-Karlsruhe, CCFE-Culham, CEA-Cadarache. The NBTF, nicknamed PRIMA, has been set up at Consorzio RFX in Padova, Italy [5]. The planned experiments will verify continuous HNB operation for one hour, under stringent requirements for beam divergence (< 7 mrad) and aiming (within 2 mrad). To study and optimise HNB performances, the NBTF includes two experiments: MITICA, full-scale NBI prototype with 1 MeV particle energy and SPIDER, with 100 keV particle energy and 40 A current, aiming at testing and optimizing the full-scale ion source. SPIDER will focus on source uniformity, negative ion current density and beam optics. In June 2018 the experimental operation of SPIDER has started

Sustainable development goals and 2030 agenda: Awareness, knowledge and attitudes in nine Italian universities, 2019

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 2030 Agenda represent global development programs. Education can widen the acknowledgement of their relevance and their applications. This survey aims to assess awareness, knowledge and attitudes towards SDGs and sustainability among first-year students in nine Italian Universities. A Likert scale-based online questionnaire of 70 items was compiled by students from March to July 2019. It examined knowledge and expectations referred to sustainable development concepts, indicators and documents/models accounting for sociodemographic variables. Statistical analyses performed were Chi-square test, Fisher\u2019s Exact test, Kendall\u2019s W correlation coefficient, univariate and multivariate analysis. The questionnaire was completed by 1676 students. A low percentage referred a good knowledge of SDGs and 2030 Agenda, most of them had never attended related educational activities previously. Better knowledge of SDGs and 2030 Agenda was observed in case of previous specific educational activities (p < 0.001). The expectation towards university guaranteeing an education on SDGs was high, both for personal wisdom and for usefulness in future professional context. A significant difference (p < 0.001) in such expectations was found, as healthcare students were less interested than colleagues of other areas. The results showed low knowledge but interest towards sustainable development. A scheduled implementation of academic initiatives should be considered

Bioactivity, biocompatibility and antimicrobial properties of a chitosan-mineral composite for periodontal tissue regeneration

A composite membrane of the polymer, chitosan, and the silver-exchanged mineral phase, tobermorite, was prepared by solvent casting and characterised by scanning electron microscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The in vitro bioactivity, cytocompatibility and antimicrobial activity of the composite were evaluated with respect to its potential application as a guided tissue regeneration (GTR) membrane. The in vitro bioactivity was verified by the formation of hydroxyapatite on the surface of the membrane in simulated body fluid and its cytocompatibility was established using MG63 human osteosarcoma cells. The presence of silver ions conferred significant antimicrobial activity against S. aureus, P. aeruginosa and E. coli. The findings of this investigation have indicated that the chitosansilver-tobermorite composite is a prospective candidate for GTR applications