A walk through the web’s video clips

Approximately 10^5 video clips are posted every day on the Web. The popularity of Web-based video databases poses a number of challenges to machine vision scientists: how do we organize, index and search such large wealth of data? Content-based video search and classification have been proposed in the literature and applied successfully to analyzing movies, TV broadcasts and lab-made videos. We explore the performance of some of these algorithms on a large data-set of approximately 3000 videos. We collected our data-set directly from the Web minimizing bias for content or quality, way so as to have a faithful representation of the statistics of this medium. We find that the algorithms that we have come to trust do not work well on video clips, because their quality is lower and their subject is more varied. We will make the data publicly available to encourage further research

Is Cold Ironing Hot Enough? An Actor Focus Perspective of On Shore Power Supply (OPS) at Copenhagen's Harbour

This thesis focuses on cold ironing for vessels while berthed at port, with the port of Copenhagen as main case study. With the use of this technique, which is considered by the International Marine Organization (IMO) as a measure to reduce air pollution and noise deriving from shipping activities in ports and coastal areas, vessels are able to shut down their auxiliary engines in order to generate power and replace it with electricity supplied by the shore. From next year, in 2014, Copenhagen will have a new cruise ship terminal and the port of Copenhagen, in conjunction with the City of Copenhagen are currently investigating the feasibility of installing cold ironing for the new quay. Existing uncertainties regarding the magnitude of the investment risk hindering the implementation of this technique and therefore there is a need for a leader that can push this shift. After a brief mapping of the key players involved, the role of the municipality of Copenhagen, because of its strong local contextual proximity, has been considered as the most suitable in facilitating this harbour's transition. The research tries to detect some of the measure that the municipality of Copenhagen could undertake to encourage the development of cold ironing for the new terminal. The findings of the study highlight the strong political dimension of this transition and identify the necessity of creating a pool of Danish and Baltic municipalities in order to exert the indispensable pressure for changing the legislative framework related to the use of cold ironing as a main priorit

Interaction between <i>Mycobacterium tuberculosis</i>, <i>Mycobacterium bovis</i>, <i>Mycobacterium avium</i> subspecies <i>paratuberculosis</i> with the enteric glia and microglial cells

Background We investigated the interaction of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis, M. bovis and M. tuberculosis and different glial cells (enteric glial and microglial cells) in order to evaluate the infecting ability of these microorganisms and the effects produced on these cells, such as the evaluation of cytokines expression. Results Our experiments demonstrated the adhesion of M. paratuberculosis to the enteroglial cells and the induction of IL-1A and IL-6 expression; M. tuberculosis and M. bovis showed a good adhesive capability to the enteric cell line with the expression of the following cytokines: IL-1A and IL-1B, TNF-α, G-CSF and GM-CSF; M. bovis induced the expression of IL-6 too. The experiment performed with the microglial cells confirmed the results obtained with the enteroglial cells after the infection with M. tuberculosis and M. bovis, whereas M. paratuberculosis stimulated the production of IL-1A and IL-1B. Conclusion Enteroglial and microglial cells, could be the target of pathogenic mycobacteria and, even if present in different locations (Enteric Nervous System and Central Nervous System), show to have similar mechanism of immunomodulation

Multiple solutions, multi-site, and parameter transfer to calibrate DHSVM hydrological model

The application of hydrologic models often needs sets of input parameters related to environmental attributes which are not always available. This leads to the necessity of calibrating the input parameters. However, due to the non-linearity of the hydrologic phenomena, there may be multiple “best” solutions for the calibration. This paper proposes a method for calibrating the DHSVM hydrologic model using the concepts of multiple solutions, multi-site, and parameter transfer among catchments. Eight watersheds were calibrated, resulting in obtaining five sets of “best” parameters (clusters) for each one. Afterward, each watershed was modeled using the parameters of the other catchments in order to verify if the transfer of the calibrated parameters could promote satisfactory modeling of the streamflows. The results show that clusters calibrated for one watershed may be suitable for other catchments. Besdes, the calibrated parameters of the smaller catchments were satisfactory to simulate the streamflow of the bigger catchments. The proposed method can be useful in calibrating and extrapolating the input parameters to regions that do not have information about them

The Site of Lesion in Hearing Loss: Advances in Otoneuroradiology

The last decade has witnessed significant advances in imaging of the middle and inner ear and the auditory pathways. High resolution computerized tomography (CT) scanners and new magnetic resonance (MR) sequences have been implemented in clinical practice as valuable supportive tools for the Audiologist in the identification of the site of lesion and for the surgical planning by the Otologist. The purpose of this chapter is to review the current advanced methods of neuroradiological evaluation of patients with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), either congenital or acquired, especially focusing on the assessment of candidates to cochlear implantation (CI), with plenty of explicative images

Epidemic of tuberculosis in a high school in Northern Sardinia

Abstract The aim of this study was to investigate the Mycobacterium tuberculosis transmission among high school student and teacher populations in a high school in Northern Sardinia. Tuberculin skin-test screening, chest-X-rays, QuantiFERON-TB Gold, microbiological examination, spoligotyping and variable numbers of tandem repeats (VNTR) analysis of M. tuberculosis isolates were performed. This study indicates the effectiveness of the epidemiological investigation

Tuberculosis in Sardinia: An investigation into the relationship between natives and immigrants

AbstractObjective/background: Tuberculosis (TB) has had a recrudescence in the last few decades in Italy as a result of many factors, among which migration from countries where TB is endemic is one of them. In Sardinia, a major island of Italy, there was no knowledge of the mechanisms of transmission of TB in the immigrant subpopulation and the impact it may have on the native subpopulation and on the community as a whole. Therefore, a molecular epidemiological study was carried out to get a clearer picture of the number and genetic features of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains isolated from immigrants and from natives in Sardinia. Methods: Two groups of clinical isolates of M. tuberculosis, one collected from immigrants and the other one from Sardinians, were analyzed in this study. The genotyping was executed through the variable number tandem repeat-mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units technique and a first-line antimycobacterial drug-susceptibility test was also carried out. Results: Thirty-six clinical isolates from immigrants and 25 from Sardinians were analyzed. Variable number tandem repeat-mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units technique showed that all of them belonged to different strains and there was a quite high allelic diversity among them. Moreover, data collected allowed the finding of, with a good approximation, the phylogenetic relations among the strains isolated and the best-known phylogenetic groups. Conclusion: The study pointed out that since every strain is different, there was no TB transmission in any of the subpopulations and between immigrants and natives. This showed that the presence of immigrants was not a risk factor for contracting TB in the community