On Minds' Localization

A confluence of clues from a range of academic topics suggests that minds localization in nature consists of relativistically moving microphysical particles, whose motion is physiologically modulated. Here those clues are shown to imply that the localization of the operations of observers (minds or existentialities) in nature are the actions carriers of a force field, which action carriers are slightly slowed from near-c speed motion by electroneurobiological variations in brain physiology – thus gating through relativistic time dilation the observer’s time resolution and putting her or him in operative connection or disconnection with the cerebral representation of the surrounding occurrences. In this scenario, minds as well as sensory knowledge acquire a precise definition and appear situated in a particular point of causal sequences. Summary in general terms: Why were minds selected to turn accidents into opportunities, i. e., to progress toward biological goals through appropriate steps for which the instructions are nonetheless undefinable? Minds appear situated in certain force-carrying particles whose speed sets wakefulness or sleep. Through this force, observable by its influence on the evolutionary process, minds and bodies interact. Physical actions impinging on a mind generate in it physical reactions whose causal efficiency gets exhausted, so that the reactions cannot continue their causal series. In exchange, they become sensorially known. On them the mind then takes efficient initiatives – whereby minds acquire intellectual development – generating changes. The broken causal sequence seems to be what enables minds for their biological role. Summary in technical terms: Observers’ localization in nature might be relativistically moving particles whose motion is physiologically modulated. Transdisciplinary clues imply that speed variation is imposed onto some action carriers of a force field by their coupling with intensity variations of an overlapping field. The operations of observers (minds or existentialities) in nature seem localized in such actions carriers, slightly slowed from near-c speed motion by electroneurobiological variations – which thus gate the observer’s time resolution and put her or him in operative connection or disconnection with the surroundings. Thereby minds and sensory knowledge appear in a particular point of causal sequences. ---------------- Keywords: Piaget causality mental causation evolution volition free-will pleasure/pain awareness self-consciousness evolution attention genetic epistemology gnoseology philosophical anthropology cerebral biophysics brain- mind relationships cadacualtez cadacualtic cilia ciliary cellular cognition electroneurodynamics engram epistemology memory mind-brain mind definition memoria nervous system evolution neural networks neurobiology cognitive neuroscience neuropsychiatry noergy nous-poietikos ontology consciousness paleontology person philosophy Precambrian psychopathology psychology psychism psychiatry recall special-relativity semovience sleep-biophysics shock soul time perception interval transform ultrahistory schizophrenia Turing machines vegetative artificial-lif

Monitoring thermal ablation via microwave tomography. An ex vivo experimental assessment

Thermal ablation treatments are gaining a lot of attention in the clinics thanks to their reduced invasiveness and their capability of treating non-surgical patients. The effectiveness of these treatments and their impact in the hospital's routine would significantly increase if paired with a monitoring technique able to control the evolution of the treated area in real-time. This is particularly relevant in microwave thermal ablation, wherein the capability of treating larger tumors in a shorter time needs proper monitoring. Current diagnostic imaging techniques do not provide effective solutions to this issue for a number of reasons, including economical sustainability and safety. Hence, the development of alternative modalities is of interest. Microwave tomography, which aims at imaging the electromagnetic properties of a target under test, has been recently proposed for this scope, given the significant temperature-dependent changes of the dielectric properties of human tissues induced by thermal ablation. In this paper, the outcomes of the first ex vivo experimental study, performed to assess the expected potentialities of microwave tomography, are presented. The paper describes the validation study dealing with the imaging of the changes occurring in thermal ablation treatments. The experimental test was carried out on two ex vivo bovine liver samples and the reported results show the capability of microwave tomography of imaging the transition between ablated and untreated tissue. Moreover, the discussion section provides some guidelines to follow in order to improve the achievable performances

Microwave Tomography for Food Contamination Monitoring

The security of packaged food needs to be guaranteed to safeguard customers health. A raise of complaints of physical contaminations into food products pushes for the development of additional monitoring techniques to prevent any kind of hazards, but also to protect brands from customers trust loss. In this work, a prototype working at microwave frequencies is assessed and tested in a significant environment. It exploits the dielectric contrast between contaminants and food content, and it is it is mainly focused on two classes of intrusions matters, i.e. plastic and glass fragments of few mm size, that have limited detection by the existing in-line technologies, such as X-rays systems. The measurements and the resulting 3-D image reconstructions are encouraging and allow to aim at the development of an industrial prototype, monitoring packaged food in real-time along a production line

A Simple Quantitative Inversion Approach for Microwave Imaging in Embedded Systems

In many applications of microwave imaging, there is the need of confining the device in order to shield it from environmental noise as well as to host the targets and the medium used for impedance matching purposes. For instance, in MWI for biomedical diagnostics a coupling medium is typically adopted to improve the penetration of the probing wave into the tissues. From the point of view of quantitative imaging procedures, that is aimed at retrieving the values of the complex permittivity in the domain under test, the presence of a confining structure entails an increase of complexity of the underlying modelling. This entails a further difficulty in achieving real-time imaging results, which are obviously of interest in practice. To address this challenge, we propose the application of a recently proposed inversion method that, making use of a suitable preprocessing of the data and a scenario-oriented field approximation, allows obtaining quantitative imaging results by means of quasi-real-time linear inversion, in a range of cases which is much broader than usual linearized approximations. The assessment of the method is carried out in the scalar 2D configuration and taking into account enclosures of different shapes and, to show the method’s flexibility different shapes, embedding nonweak targets

A Microwave Imaging Device for Detecting Contaminants in Water-based Food Products

Food and beverage industries are paying an increasing attention to the development of new technologies for non-invasive assessment of food products. In particular, there is a need of deploying tools to detect low-density plastic, rubber, wood and glass that are unlikely to be detected by X-Rays, currently used in the most powerful commercial systems. To this end, we propose a microwave-based device, exploiting the dielectric contrast between potential intrusions (e.g., plastic fragments) and the surrounding medium, represented by the food/beverage product. In particular, this work aims to numerically assess this principle of detection to water-based products that are, due to the medium losses, a challenging category at microwaves. An antennas array surrounds the object moving along the production line, to monitor the electromagnetic signal variations with respect to a reference case. The working frequency is chosen by selecting a proper trade-off between penetration depth and image resolution. Then, a procedure, based on the application of the distorted-Born approximation is applied to reconstruct a 3-D image of the contaminant position. Finally, the successful detection of a millimetric-sized plastic sphere is presented in the case of a common commercial bottle filled with water

Investigating the “Altera Forma Urbis”, the secret structural urban form of ancient Rome, by applying a sustainable innovative architectural design methodology for the challenges of the contemporary built environment

The enquiry is based on work by Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Lugli, architect Pier Maria Lugli and Professor Gianfranco Moneta about the “Altera Forma Urbis” of Rome as a hidden, “secret” structural urban form in the shape of a star, to reveal the interconnections with its contemporary form. Through a case study, the paper argues that applying Moneta’s Analysis-Design Interaction methodology (ADI), an historical-morphological process-based analysis to the “Altera Forma Urbis” can be an effective framework to correctly inform the sustainable evolution of the built environment, and consequently, a tool to design architecture which respects the identity of place

Seeing the sound: a new multimodal imaging device for computer vision

Audio imaging can play a fundamental role in computer vision, in particular in automated surveillance, boosting the accuracy of current systems based on standard optical cameras. We present here a new hybrid device for acousticoptic imaging, whose characteristics are tailored to automated surveillance. In particular, the device allows realtime, high frame rate generation of an acoustic map, overlaid over a standard optical image using a geometric calibration of audio and video streams. We demonstrate the potentialities of the device for target tracking on three challenging setup showing the advantages of using acoustic images against baseline algorithms on image tracking. In particular, the proposed approach is able to overcome, often dramatically, visual tracking with state-of-art algorithms, dealing efficiently with occlusions, abrupt variations in visual appearence and camouflage. These results pave the way to a widespread use of acoustic imaging in application scenarios such as in surveillance and security

Preliminary In-Line Microwave Imaging Experimental Assessment for Food Contamination Monitoring

Food producers must deal with contaminants (wood, plastic, glass) inside packaged products that could lead to customer dissatisfaction. The assessed technologies fail to detect some of these contaminants, leading to the need for new technologies with different signal qualities, such as microwave sensing. This paper presents a preliminary result of a microwave imaging system designed for industrial applications. The measurement system was designed for and works on an industrial conveyor belt where packaged products are scanned. The scanned signals are processed to obtain an accurate 3D image of the size and position of the contaminant inside the food package. In addition to the results, we describe the implemented system and some considerations on data acquisition

Non-Destructive Characterization of Magnetic Polymeric Scaffolds using Terahertz Time-of-Flight Imaging

Magnetic Scaffolds MagS are 3D composite materials, in which magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) are used to load a polymeric matrix. Due to their wide use in various medical applications, there is an increasing demand of advanced techniques for non-destructive quality assessment procedures aimed at verifying the absence of defects and, more generally, dedicated to the characterization of MagS. In this framework, the use of TeraHertz (THz) waves for the non-destructive characterization of multifunctional scaffolds represents an open challenge for the scientific community. This paper deals with an approach for the characterization of MagS by means of a THz time-domain system used in reflection mode. THz analyses are performed on poly($\epsilon$ - capprolactone) (PCL) scaffolds magnetized with iron oxide (Fe $_{3}$ O$_{4}$) MNPs through a drop-casting deposition and tuned to obtain different distributions of MNP in the biomaterial. The proposed data processing approach allows a quantitative characterization MagS, in terms of their (estimated) thickness and refractive index. Moreover, the proposed procedure allows to identify the areas of the scaffold wherein MNP are mainly concentrated and thus, it gives us information about MNP spatial distribution