Peer assessment and knowledge discovering in a community of learners

Thanks to the exponential growth of the Internet, Distance Education is becoming more and more strategic in many fields of daily life. Its main advantage is that students can learn through appropriate web platforms that allow them to take advantage of multimedia and interactive teaching materials, without constraints neither of time nor of space. Today, in fact, the Internet offers many platforms suitable for this purpose, such as Moodle, ATutor and others. Coursera is another example of a platform that offers different courses to thousands of enrolled students. This approach to learning is, however, posing new problems such as that of the assessment of the learning status of the learner in the case where there were thousands of students following a course, as is in Massive On-line Courses (MOOC). The Peer Assessment can therefore be a solution to this problem: evaluation takes place between peers, creating a dynamic in the community of learners that evolves autonomously. In this article, we present a first step towards this direction through a peer assessment mechanism led by the teacher who intervenes by evaluating a very small part of the students. Through a mechanism based on machine learning, and in particular on a modified form of K-NN, given the teacher’s grades, the system should converge towards an evaluation that is as similar as possible to the one that the teacher would have given. An experiment is presented with encouraging results

Innovations in Mechanization and Control Systems of Production in Olive Sector

The rapid and sweeping changes occurred in the last few years in the world have been crucial driving forces behind the evolution of olive growing practices on a global scale. These drives to change are gradually modifying the traditional olive growing scenarios thanks to the successful advent of a modern mechanized and specialized olive orchard cultivation where resource efficiency improvements and production cost reduction have become mandatory. In particular, the olive growing innovation process is based on a model referred to as “super intensive”, whose main advantage lies in highly-efficient mechanized harvesting operations performed uninterruptedly by means of the same grape harvesters long used to collect grapes. At renewal that affects models cultivation joins the growing attention paid to quality control and food safety are crucial in order to increase the competitiveness of products and improve the level of acceptance of same by consumers. "Traceability" is the key word today on the food scene, presenting as a tool of ompetitiveness and rationalization of production systems and enhancement of  uality productions. The present study is intended to explore both olive growing innovation process and its quality control systems, by a series of tests conducted in Spain and in Italy. The results obtained have shown that super intensive olive orchard cultivation presents clear advantages in terms of abatement of hours of work, which is meant to contain costs and reach appropriate levels of productivity while safeguarding olive quality. It appears also that, in response to growing demands for food security and enhancement of food production, a system of traceability can ensure accuracy and speed of transmission of  guarantee of quality

Innovations in Mechanization and Control Systems of Production in Olive Sector

The rapid and sweeping changes occurred in the last few years in the world have been crucial driving forces behind the evolution of olive growing practices on a global scale. These drives to change are gradually modifying the traditional olive growing scenarios thanks to the successful advent of a modern mechanized and specialized olive orchard cultivation where resource efficiency improvements and production cost reduction have become mandatory. In particular, the olive growing innovation process is based on a model referred to as “super intensive”, whose main advantage lies in highly-efficient mechanized harvesting operations performed uninterruptedly by means of the same grape harvesters long used to collect grapes. At renewal that affects models cultivation joins the growing attention paid to quality control and food safety are crucial in order to increase the competitiveness of products and improve the level of acceptance of same by consumers. "Traceability" is the key word today on the food scene, presenting as a tool of competitiveness and rationalization of production systems and enhancement of quality productions. The present study is intended to explore both olive growing innovation process and its quality control systems, by a series of tests conducted in Spain and in Italy. The results obtained have shown that super intensive olive orchard cultivation presents clear advantages in terms of abatement of hours of work, which is meant to contain costs and reach appropriate levels of productivity while safeguarding olive quality. It appears also that, in response to growing demands for food security and enhancement of food production, a system of traceability can ensure accuracy and speed of transmission of a guarantee of quality. Keywords: Super intensive olive growing, grape harvesters, traceability, food safety, Italy

Progressive fibrosing interstitial lung diseases: A current perspective

Interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) are a large and diverse group of rare and chronic respiratory disorders, with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) being the most common and best-studied member. Increasing interest in fibrosis as a therapeutic target and the appreciation that fibrotic mechanisms may be a treatable target of IPF prompted the development and subsequent approval of the antifibrotics, pirfenidone and nintedanib. The management of ILDs has changed considerably following an understanding that IPF and some ILDs share similar disease behavior of progressive fibrosis, termed “progressive fibrosing phenotype”. Indeed, antifibrotic treatment has shown to be beneficial in ILDs characterized by the progressive fibrosing phenotype. This narrative review summarizes current knowledge in the field of progressive fibrosing ILDs. Here, we discuss the clinical characteristics and pathogenesis of lung fibrosis and highlight relevant literature concerning the mechanisms underlying progressive fibrosing ILDs. We also summarize current diagnostic approaches and the available treatments of progressive fibrosing ILDs and address the optimization of treating progressive fibrosing ILDs with antifibrotics in clinical practice

Aromatic characterization of Moscato Giallo by GC-MS/MS and stable isotopic ratio analysis of the major volatile compounds

Among the Moscato grapes, Moscato Giallo is a winegrape variety characterized by a highcontent of free and glycosylated monoterpenoids, which gives very aromatic wines. Thearomatic bouquet of Moscato Giallo is strongly influenced by the high concentration of linalool, geraniol, linalool oxides, limonene, α-terpineol, citronellol, HO-trienol, HO-diols, 8-Hydroxylinalool, geranic acid and β-myrcene, that give citrus, rose, and peach notes. Except the quali-quantitative analysis, no investigations regarding the isotopic values of the target volatile compounds are documented in literature. Stable isotope ratio analysis represents a modern and powerful tool used by the laboratories responsible for official consumer protection, for the food quality and genuineness assessment. In this study, samples of Moscato Giallo were collected during the harvest season in 2019 from two Italian regions:Trentino – Alto Adige and Veneto, known lands for the cultivation of this aromatic variety. The flavor compounds were extracted from grapes and wines, after alcoholic fermentation of grape juice, and analysed by GC-MS/MS. The results confirmed the presence of typical terpenoids both in free and glycosylated form, responsible for the characteristic aroma of Moscato Giallo variety. The aromatic compounds were also analysed by GC-C\Py-IRMS for a preliminary investigation. The compound-specific isotope ratio analysis allowed to determine the carbon (δ13C) and hydrogen (δ2H) isotopic signatures of the major volatile compounds for the first time