Review of Marius Turda's and Aaron Gillette, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective

Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette. Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective.London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 306 pp

Review of Marius Turda's and Aaron Gillette, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective

Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette. Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective.London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 306 pp

Studies on Methylaluminoxane Catalyst Activators

The first part of this PhD was devoted to the structural characterization of methylaluminoxane (MAO). Initially the work focused upon MAO formation by studying the hydrolysis reaction of trimethylaluminium (TMA), with a greater interest in the initial reaction steps of TMA with H2O. This was attempted by using 1H VT NMR spectroscopy and by combining infrared spectroscopy with the matrix isolation technique. Low temperature NMR experiments successfully led to the identification of the AlMe3·H2O adduct as the first intermediate, followed by formation of Me2AlOH, when THF was employed as a solvent. Another approach focused on the characterization of MAO by developing a fast and reliable method for quantification of the TMA content of commercial MAO solutions via 1H-NMR spectroscopy with addition of donors. This research also showed that MAO contains a small amount of certain structures, which upon addition of THF or pyridine can lead to the formation of cationic species [AlMe2L2]+. The second part of this work was devoted to the enhancement of MAO’s catalytic efficiency by kinetic studies on 1-hexene. The primary aim was to produce MAO soluble in aliphatic hydrocarbons by addition of branched or long chain aluminium trialkyls, which proved to be effective solubilizing agents, and by modification of MAO with long chain silanols. Addition of silanols led to polymers with lower . Differences in productivity, polymer molecular weight and number of active species were shown to be primarily a linear function of the TMA concentration. An important part of this PhD was the development of a synthetic route towards ethyl-iso-butylaluminoxane (EBAO) and use in 1-hexene polymerization. This is the first study where EBAO is successfully used as a soluble component in 1-hexene polymerization in heptane and leads to comparable or even higher productivities and higher number average molecular weights compared to the MAO catalytic systems

Interaction between asthma and anxiety: a systematic review of cognitive-behavioural therapies and a qualitative exploration of young people’s experiences.

Aims: There is a well-established link between asthma and anxiety, leading to exacerbations for both conditions. National guidelines and policy documents recommend the provision of psychological interventions for this comorbidity, although evidence for their effectiveness is inconclusive. This thesis had two objectives: a) to evaluate cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) interventions for reducing anxiety in adults and/or children with asthma, given that CBT has a stronger evidence base for relevant respiratory and mental health conditions, b) to explore the lived experience of the interplay between childhood asthma and anxiety directly from the affected population in order to identify specific thinking and behaviour patterns that may maintain this comorbidity. Method: The first journal article outlined a systematic review. Three major electronic databases and manual searches were used to find relevant published and unpublished research. Trials meeting inclusion criteria, primarily utilising validated anxiety measures and employing both cognitive and behavioural techniques, were evaluated using adapted quality criteria. The second empirical article implemented interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore the mechanisms maintaining the interplay between asthma and anxiety as experienced by 11 young people (aged 11-15) living with the comorbidity. Results: Fourteen trials met the inclusion criteria for the systematic review. The reviewed trials showed reasonable preliminary support for the effectiveness of CBT for anxiety in individuals with asthma across the age range. The favourable results were largely maintained long-term. The empirical article revealed three super-ordinate themes: i) ‘the influence of asthma’ by inhibiting valued activities or developmental tasks, triggering catastrophic thinking and leading to a generalisation of asthma coping strategies to managing anxiety; ii) ‘the influence of anxiety’ by affecting appropriate medication use and triggering hyperventilation-induced asthma exacerbations; and iii) ‘the interaction between asthma and anxiety’ by forming an unhelpful positive feedback loop and triggering symptom confusion. Conclusions: The systematic review discussed the moderate overall study quality and called for more methodologically robust research, examining CBT models tailored to this population and utilising clinically representative samples. The empirical article pointed to possible maintaining mechanisms identified, which lend themselves to a cognitive-behavioural framework, potentially including mindfulness-based interventions, and may be used to tailor psychological treatments

Succinic acid production from pulp and paper industry waste - A transcriptomic approach

The utilization of renewable resources for the production of bio-based products is essential in order to develop sustainable bioprocesses and biorefineries. Xylose-rich hydrolysates produced from hemicelluloses contained in lignocellulosic resources could be used for the production of succinic acid, one of the most important platform chemicals in the bio-economy era. Exploitation of spent sulphite liquor (SSL), a xylose rich by-product from pulp and paper industry has been previously investigated for succinic acid production by Actinobacillus succinogenes, one of the most efficient natural succinic acid producers. In this study, the metabolic potential of this strain was evaluated through the RNA expression of the metabolic pathways involved in succinic acid production utilizing glucose, xylose or SSL as carbon sources. A transcriptomic approach of the key enzymes of glucose and xylose catabolism, carboxylic acid production as well as oxidative phosphorylation led to an improved understanding on the energy consuming metabolic pathways. The transcriptomic analysis was carried out in batch cultures. A cDNA library was constructed at different phases of the fermentation where major metabolic changes in extracellular metabolites or biomass production were observed. Real time PCR was used to determine the expression levels of the genes of interest throughout the fermentation. The bottlenecks of the fermentative production of succinic acid by A. succinogenes were addressed with particular focus on the effect of glucose and xylose catabolism on pathways that involve ATP consumption and NADH oxidation. All subunits of ATP synthase were highly expressed in all substrates. In particular ATP synthase F0 (ATP SYN F0) was higher expressed when glucose was the only carbon source. Phosphoenol-pyruvate carboxykinase (PEPCK) expression was delayed when xylose was present in the medium. Despite the fact that extracellular lactic acid was not detected, low expression levels of lactic acid dehydrogenase (

CONVENTIONAL OR AUTOMATED PHOTOGRAMMETRY FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE DOCUMENTATION?

During the past 15 years photogrammetric practice has experienced an unprecedented change by the influence of computer vision algorithms, which support an almost completely automated processing. It is widely acknowledged that this fact has “democratized” Photogrammetry a lot, in the sense that it has become almost everyone’s tool. However, this radical change has been met by scepticism by traditional photogrammetrists, who claim that such tools may lead to geometrically wrong and inaccurate results if not accompanied by thorough projection and error checks and evaluation of the correctness of results.In this paper, the two approaches are briefly described on the basis of the geometric documentation of a cultural heritage funerary monument situated in the archaeological site of Messini in Southern Greece. An effort is made for highlighting the obvious advantages of each approach but also indicating their disadvantages. Applications, subject to different requirements and processing procedures are identified, rationalizing that conventional photogrammetric procedures still cannot be easily replaced.</p

Outer product-based fusion of smartwatch sensor data for human activity recognition

The advent of IoT devices in combination with Human Activity Recognition (HAR) technologies can contribute to battle with sedentariness by continuously monitoring the users' daily activities. With this information, autonomous systems could detect users' physical weaknesses and plan personalized training routines to improve them. This work investigates the multimodal fusion of smartwatch sensor data for HAR. Specifically, we exploit pedometer, heart rate, and accelerometer information to train unimodal and multimodal models for the task at hand. The models are trained end-to-end, and we compare the performance of dedicated Recurrent Neural Network-based (RNN) and Convolutional Neural Network-based (CNN) architectures to extract deep learnt representations from the input modalities. To fuse the embedded representations when training the multimodal models, we investigate a concatenation-based and an outer product-based approach. This work explores the harAGE dataset, a new dataset for HAR collected using a Garmin Vivoactive 3 device with more than 17 h of data. Our best models obtain an Unweighted Average Recall (UAR) of 95.6, 69.5, and 60.8% when tackling the task as a 2-class, 7-class, and 10-class classification problem, respectively. These performances are obtained using multimodal models that fuse the embedded representations extracted with dedicated CNN-based architectures from the pedometer, heart rate, and accelerometer modalities. The concatenation-based fusion scores the highest UAR in the 2-class classification problem, while the outer product-based fusion obtains the best performances in the 7-class and the 10-class classification problems

Introduction to the Special Theme on Human-Robot Interaction

International audienceThis special issue addresses the state of the art of human-robot interaction (HRI), discussing the current challenges faced by the research community for integrating both physical and social interaction skills into current and future collaborative robots