Office Buildings Cooling Need in the Italian Climatic Context: Assessing the Performances of Typical Envelopes☆

Abstract This study assesses the cooling thermal energy need of office buildings that can represent typical cases within the Italian context, in particular defined by the envelope solutions that belong to three main construction ages, including new solutions that meet the current requirements for the envelope thermal properties. The results show that the large-glazed and lighter solutions (also newly built, consistent with the recent standards) reveal the worst behavior, while the buildings characterized by the lowest needs are the old conventional ones, even though they do not comply with the recent requirements for the envelope components. The same cooling performances are achieved by newly built insulated envelopes if they are "conventionally-glazed", but only when a strategy to loose the heat stored by the massive internal surfaces is adopted

Exploring the Fashion Visiting Experience: a Content Analysis about the “Boncompagni Ludovisi Museum”

Fashion represents a multi-disciplinary and to some extent a cross-disciplinary field of research, spanning economic and industry studies, cultural, heritage and sociological research, geographical and tourism reflections.Fashion is a hallmark of Italian exports: through the fashion products, Italy exports its outstanding sense of beauty and aesthetics, the artisanal manufacturing expertise and a certain artistic value. Furthermore, fashion characterizes the cultural and touristic image of Italy, affecting and/or enriching the tourists’ experience.The aim of the work is exploring the experience of visitors of the “Boncompagni Ludovisi Decorative Art Museum” in Rome, through a content analysis of the posts published on the Facebook Official Page and the reviews shared on TripAdvisor.More in details, after a literature review about the ‘museification’ trends in the fashion tourism, the work will deeply explore through a content analysis the several dimensions of post visiting experience, in order to understand the mutual roles of core attractions (collections and location’s architecture) and museum’s quality of welcome.Tourism management and policy’s implications will be discussed.La moda rappresenta un campo di ricerca multidisciplinare e, in una certa misura, interdisciplinare, che abbraccia studi economici e industriali, ricerche culturali, storiche e sociologiche, riflessioni geografiche e turistiche.La moda è un capitolo cruciale dell'export italiano: attraverso i prodotti della moda, l'Italia esporta il suo eccezionale senso di bellezza ed estetica, la competenza artigianale manifatturiera e un certo valore artistico. Inoltre, la moda caratterizza l'immagine culturale e turistica dell'Italia, influenzando e / o arricchendo l'esperienza turistica.L'obiettivo del lavoro è quello di esplorare l'esperienza dei visitatori del "Museo delle arti decorative Boncompagni Ludovisi" a Roma, attraverso una “analisi del contenuto” dei post pubblicati sulla Pagina ufficiale di Facebook e delle recensioni condivise su TripAdvisor.Più in dettaglio, dopo una revisione della letteratura sulle tendenze alla  “museificazione” nel settore del fashion, il lavoro esplorerà profondamente le diverse dimensioni dell'esperienza di visita, al fine di comprendere il ruolo delle principali attrazioni (collezioni e location) e la qualità dell'accoglienza del museo.Verranno inoltre discusse le principali implicazioni di gestione e policy

INNOVATION PROCESS FOR HALAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF ITALIAN FIRMS

The Halal global market is promising a rapid and sustained growth (Berry 2008; Sungkar et al., 2008). In fact, only for Halal food industry, the amount of international trade has exceeded 2.1 trillion USD in 2006 (Berry 2008; Riaz and Chaudry 2004). The reasons of the prompt growing are multiple, but mainly due to (1) the rapid spread of the Islamic faithful worldwide, (2) the increasing spending power of the Islamic people. Despite the importance this market has on the global scene, few studies are available, discussing in-depth the phenomenon from the managerial and innovation management perspectives. Inspired by this opportunity, we attempt to explore in depth the innovation process leading companies from Haram to Halal products in the food industry. A multiple case study of four Italian companies has been developed in order to explore their innovation process and to understand how it has been reviewed to fit the Islamic requirements. The specific product and process solutions adopted by the companies have been analyzed as well as the related managerial and organizational implications and innovation changes implemented. In Italy, so far, only few isolated initiatives shed a first light on the Halal theme and the landscape appears very embryonic.Halal, Islam, New Product Development.

Nucleosided derived antibiotics to fight microbial drug resistance: New utilities for an established class of drugs?

Novel antibiotics are urgently needed to combat the rise of infections due to drug-resistant microorganisms. Numerous natural nucleosides and their synthetically modified analogues have been reported to have moderate to good antibiotic activity against different bacterial and fungal strains. Nucleoside-based compounds target several crucial processes of bacterial and fungal cells such as nucleoside metabolism and cell wall, nucleic acid, and protein biosynthesis. Nucleoside analogues have also been shown to target many other bacterial and fungal cellular processes although these are not well characterized and may therefore represent opportunities to discover new drugs with unique mechanisms of action. In this Perspective, we demonstrate that nucleoside analogues, cornerstones of anticancer and antiviral treatments, also have great potential to be repurposed as antibiotics so that an old drug can learn new tricks

Host factors affecting abomasal parasites in Alpine Ibex

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Progress of near-infrared spectroscopy and topography for brain and muscle clinical applications

This review celebrates the 30th anniversary of the first in vivo near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy (NIRS) publication, which was authored by Professor Frans Jobsis. At first, NIRS was utilized to experimentally and clinically investigate cerebral oxygenation. Later it was applied to study muscle oxidative metabolism. Since 1993, the discovery that the functional activation of the human cerebral cortex can be explored by NIRS has added a new dimension to the research. To obtain simultaneous multiple and localized information, a further major step forward was achieved by introducing NIR imaging (NIRI) and tomography. This review reports on the progress of the NIRS and NIRI instrumentation for brain and muscle clinical applications 30 years after the discovery of in vivo NIRS. The review summarizes the measurable parameters in relation to the different techniques, the main characteristics of the prototypes under development, and the present commercially available NIRS and NIRI instrumentation. Moreover, it discusses strengths and limitations and gives an outlook into the "bright" future

Mega-parsec scale magnetic fields in low density regions in the SKA era: filaments connecting galaxy clusters and groups

The presence of magnetic fields in galaxy clusters has been well established in recent years, and their importance for the understanding of the physical processes at work in the Intra Cluster Medium has been recognized. Halo and relic sources have been detected in several tens clusters. A strong correlation is present between the halo and relic radio power and the X-ray luminosity. Since cluster X-Ray luminosity and mass are related, the correlation between the radio power and X-ray luminosity could derive from a physical dependence of the radio power on the cluster mass, therefore the cluster mass could be a crucial parameter in the formation of these sources. The goal of this project is to investigate the existence of non-thermal structures beyond the Mpc scale, and associated with lower density regions with respect to clusters of galaxies: galaxy filaments connecting rich clusters. We present a piece of evidence of diffuse radio emission in intergalactic filaments. Moreover, we present and discuss the detection of radio emission in galaxy groups and in faint X-Ray clusters, to analyze non-thermal properties in low density regions with physical conditions similar to galaxy filaments. We discuss how SKA1 observations will allow the investigation of this topic and the study of the presence of diffuse radio sources in low density regions. This will be a fundamental step to understand the origin and properties of cosmological magnetic fields.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures - to appear as part of 'Cosmic Magnetism' in Proceedings 'Advancing Astrophysics with the SKA (AASKA14)', PoS(AASKA14)10

What is happening in that urinary catheter bag?

An 86-year-old nursing home woman with an indwelling urinary catheter presented to our emergency department for abdominal pain, nausea, hyporexia after nine days of stubborn constipation despite the use of laxatives, on a background of IV stage Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), type 2 diabetes, hypothyroidism, and bed rest syndrome with chronic pain treated with fentanyl transdermal patch. Blood tests showed a worsening of renal function (creatinine 5.7 mg/dL, nv 0.6-1; azotemia 177 mg/dL, nv 10-50), and increased C reactive protein value (5 mg/dL, nv < 0.5). Glucose and serum electrolytes were normal. Abdomen X-ray was unremarkable, and PoCUS excluded hydronephrosis and bladder globe. The urine drainage bag was purple with smelly urine

Detecting Mental Calculation Related Frontal Cortex Oxygenation Changes for Brain Computer Interface Using Multi-Channel Functional Near Infrared Topography

Multi-channel functional near infrared topography (fNIRT) is a non-harmful, non-invasive and safe optical imaging technique that allows the simultaneous acquisition of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin concentration changes on the scalp. This study was aimed at investigating the potential use of fNIRT in association with a cognitive system, namely the working memory, for brain-computer interface (BCI). By using a 8-channel fNIRT system (NIRO-200 with multi-fiber adapter, Hamamatsu Photonics), we demonstrated in eight subjects that the mental calculation provokes over the frontal cortical region a significant increase in oxygenated hemoglobin and a concomitant smaller and delayed significant decrease in deoxygenated hemoglobin in all measurements points of both hemispheres. This result indicates that cortical regions involved in higher cognitive functions may serve as a readily self-controllable input for BCI fNIRT based applications