Assessing heating and cooling demands of closed greenhouse systems in a cold climate

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by providing non‐fossil fuel energy sources is imminently necessary. The area of particular interest in this paper is the agricultural greenhouse industry. In these structures, significant heating demands are present, especially in cold climates, and are typically met by combusting fossil fuels. In an effort towards a sustainable energy supply, the potential of closed greenhouse systems in a cold climate is explored. In these systems, natural ventilation for cooling and dehumidification is replaced with active systems, and the thermal energy removed can be re‐used, reducing the overall heating demand. A transient greenhouse model is created using TRNSYS software and validated with natural gas usage data from a reference greenhouse. The annual heating and cooling demands, effect of varying cover materials and potential for heat recovery ventilation are explored for the most concentrated greenhouse areas in Canada. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Nonlocality threshold for entanglement under general dephasing evolutions: a case study

Determining relationships between different types of quantum correlations in open composite quantum systems is important since it enables the exploitation of a type by knowing the amount of another type. We here review, by giving a formal demonstration, a closed formula of the Bell function, witnessing nonlocality, as a function of the concurrence, quantifying entanglement, valid for a system of two noninteracting qubits initially prepared in extended Werner-like states undergoing any local pure-dephasing evolution. This formula allows for finding nonlocality thresholds for the concurrence depending only on the purity of the initial state. We then utilize these thresholds in a paradigmatic system where the two qubits are locally affected by a quantum environment with an Ohmic class spectrum. We show that steady entanglement can be achieved and provide the lower bound of initial state purity such that this stationary entanglement is above the nonlocality threshold thus guaranteeing the maintenance of nonlocal correlations.     

Socially-Aware Multimedia Dissemination in Personal Mobile Networks

Wireless Personal Communications - Mobile multimedia entertainment is pervasive on mobile devices, leading people to access, store and disseminate a diversity of multimedia contents anytime and...     

CIGI2011: A heuristic method for resource-constrained project scheduling with activity overlapping

The overlapping of activities is a common practice to accelerate the execution of engineering projects. This technique consists in executing in parallel two activities, normally executed in a sequential way, by allowing the downstream activity to start before the end of the upstream activity based on preliminary information. In this paper, we propose a constructive heuristic for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem with overlapping modes (RCPSP-OM). Given a set of activities to execute, the RCPSP-OM consists in determining the order of execution in time of a set of activities so as to minimize the total project duration, while respecting precedence relations, resource constraints and overlapping possibilities. The heuristic implies that rework tasks related to overlapping are added to downstream activities and that the consumption of the resources is constant throughout the execution of the project (including rework). The method also considers that the possible overlapping modes for every couple of activities and the duration of rework tasks associated with every mode are known in advance. Results show that, when the objective consists in minimizing the project duration, the consideration of the costs associated to activity overlapping allows to significantly reducing the cost of reworks. On the other hand, when the objective consists in maximizing the gains related to the project execution, the search for the best trade-off between acceleration and increase of project costs enables to avoid losses.     

Overview of the scientific production in the Pharmacy area in Brazil: profile and productivity of researchers granted with fellowships by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development

In Brazil, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) distributes productivity fellowships in research (RS) as a recognition to individuals with outstanding productivity levels in their areas. The aim of this study is to evaluate the scientific production of the Brazilian Pharmacy area, one division of the Health Sciences Great Area of CNPq, considering the profile and productivity levels of RS fellows. The results showed that most of the 156 active RS fellows in 2015 were female, with doctorate completed in the Southeast region (mainly in University of São Paulo) and with research activities developed in the South and Southeast regions. Most of their work was published in journals classified as B1 and B2 Qualis in Pharmacy by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), with high prevalence of publications in local journals and/or specialized on medicinal plants. Besides, they featured much dependence on advising and productivity indexes related to the category and level of RS fellowship. The evolution of such data must be continually evaluated to determine the influence of CNPq productivity fellowships on performance and stratification of researchers in the Pharmacy area in Brazil.     

Discordance Rate of HER2 Status in Primary Gastric Carcinomas and Synchronous Lymph Node Metastases: A Multicenter Retrospective Analysis

Background: The assessment of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) gene amplification is essential in order to identify those patients affected by advanced gastric cancer who may benefit from Trastuzumab targeted therapy. Materials and Methods: With the aim to investigate the concordance rate in HER2 status between primary gastric carcinoma (GC) and synchronous lymphnode metastases, we investigated HER2 status in a cohort of 108 surgical formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded specimens of GC and matched synchronous metastatic lymph nodes collected from three different units of Anatomic Pathology in southern of Italy. Fleiss-Cohen weighted k statistics were used to assess the concordance rate of HER2 status. Results: HER2 amplification was observed in 17% of primary GCs and the overall concordance rate with corresponding nodal metastases was 90.74%. Changes in HER2 status between primary GC and matched synchronous metastases were evidenced in 10 (9.26%) cases. Of these, 6 cases were HER2 amplified in the primary GC and not amplified in the metastases, while 4 were HER2 not amplified in the primary tumour and amplified in the lymph node metastases. Conclusions: Although at present the simultaneous determination of HER2 in advanced gastric cancer and corresponding metastatic lymph nodes is not mandatory, the possibility that the synchronous metastases of GC have a different HER2 status from that of the primary tumour is of remarkable significance; Indeed this may have influence on the therapeutic management and prognosis of the patients.