Some psychological aspects of colour blindness at school: A field study in Calabria and Basilicata (Southern Italy)

Red‐green colour blindness, an inherited X‐linked anomaly, was analyzed both in its biological aspects (genetic frequency) and its pedagogical and psychological implications (only the latter are the exhaustive subject of this analysis). A mass screening was carried out by means of the Ishihara test between 1998 and 2000 in Calabria and Basilicata (South of Italy). A total of 63,933 male and female schoolchildren were investigated, belonging to 351 towns and 655 secondary schools (age range 11–14 years). Then, a psychological questionnaire was administered to the entire sample, while the psychological statistical analysis was made on the answers given by two sub‐samples composed of 34,309 orthochromatic subjects of both sexes and 831 colour‐blind subjects of both sexes. Their answers strengthen the hypothesis that dyschromatopsia could affect the human relations of its recipients starting from their childhood, forcing them to manage their diversity in order to adapt to rules, tools and didactic media and, generally, that dyschromates carry a common feeling which presupposes and takes for granted the univocality of the visual experience. Additionally, 3,082 teachers of different subjects have been submitted to a pedagogical questionnaire, consisting of 13 closed‐open questions, in order to analyze the behavior of the school toward the colour‐blind subject. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 28, 216–220, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.10148     

Secondary metabolites of Olea europaea leaves as markers for the discrimination of cultivars and cultivation zones by multivariate analysis

New phenolic compounds from Olea europaea, identified by high performance liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry, are suitable markers for differentiation between different varieties of olive trees cultivated in the same geographical area (Rende, Italy). Five cultivars (Carolea, Cassanese, Coratina, Nocellara and Leccino) were considered for the discrimination. Samples of Carolea, cultivated in three different geographical zones (Rende, Mirto and Spoleto, Italy), were as well checked to evaluate possible differences. Three supervised pattern recognition procedures, linear discriminant analysis (LDA), soft independent modelling of class analogy (SIMCA) and K-nearest neighbours (KNN) were used to classify samples in five groups corresponding to the five cultivars and in three groups corresponding to the three areas of production. The results show that KNN provides a model unable to predict a proper assignment of the cultivar, at least for those olive trees considered in this work, whereas LDA and SIMCA allow the achievement of good percentage of prediction for the cultivars as well as cultivation zones.     

Mining User Preferences,Page Content and Usage to Personalize Website Navigation

The growing availability of information on the Web has raised a challenging problem: can a Web-based information system tailor itself to different user requirements with the ultimate goal of personalizing and improving the users' experience in accessing the contents of a website? This paper proposes a new approach to website personalization based on the exploitation of user browsing interests together with content and usage similarities among Web pages. The outcome is the delivery of page recommendations which are strictly related to the navigational purposes of visitors and their actual location within the cyberspace of the website. Our approach has been used effectively for developing a non-invasive system which allows Web users to navigate through potentially interesting pages without having a basic knowledge of the website structure.