New crystalline complex chlorides containing transition metal chlorides or oxychlorides as components of coordination catalysts

Novel complex chlorides have been obtained by reacting TiCl₄, VOCl₃, MoOCl₄, WOCl₄, or AlCl₃, with Be, Mg, Ca, or Sr chlorides in the presence of electron donors such as POCl₃ (L) or C₆H₅POCl₂, (L′). The resulting products, obtained with good yield, show defined stoichimetry, ionic character, and crystalline structure, and may be considered reference systems for high-yield catalysts in the low-pressure polymerization of ethylene (HDPE). Complexes (TiCl₆)MgL₆, (TiCl₅L′)₂ MgL′₆, and (Ti₂Cl₁₀)MgL₆ associated with (i-C₄H₉)₃Al were found very active in HDPE synthesis, but completely unable to polymerize propylene. This result and other evidence suggest that part of the catalytic activity of these systems is displayed by soluble species. The role played by the Mg ion in high-yield catalysts is displayed by soluble species. The role played by the Mg ion in high-yield catalysts is discussed in the light of the peculiar behavior shown by the complex chlorides containing this earth-alkali metal.     

Are hospitals becoming high reliability organizations?

High Reliability Organizations (HROs) are complex systems in which many accidents and adverse events that could occur within those systems or at the interfaces with other systems are actually avoided or prevented. Many organizations in high-risk industries have successfully implemented HRO approaches. In recent years, initiatives have been undertaken aimed at transforming hospitals into HROs. Actually, despite some improvements, these initiatives have not shown the expected results. In this paper, we discuss the possible reasons for such outcomes. We will show that, when compared with traditional HROs, hospitals are undoubtedly high-risk organizations, but have specificities and experience systemic socio-organizational barriers that make them difficult to transform into HROs.     

Characterizing the pollution produced by an industrial area: chemometric methods applied to the Lagoon of Venice

The industrial area of Porto Marghera discharges every year about 1.85 10(9) m(3) of waste waters in the Lagoon of Venice through its 142 discharge points, 17 of them being constantly active. The Anti-Pollution Department of Magistrato alle Acque, the Venice Water Authority, has been controlling these discharges for many years. The huge database built up during the last years could help the authorities in making choices regarding the water quality of the Venetian environment. The application of chemometric methods to the dataset obtained from chemical analyses of industrial waste water samples (almost 250, for each of them up to 57 chemical variables having been measured) is useful to answer fundamental questions related to the pollution generated by the industrial area: i) which are the main differences among the individual discharge points? ii) is there a temporal trend in global and punctual pollution? iii) which is the discharge point having the strongest relative impact on the waters? The results of the present work allow to 1) identify two different groups of discharge points, discriminated by the level of contamination and by the presence of different contaminants; 2) detect a relevant temporal trend in one of the main outfalls (the industrial and civil waste treatment plant); 3) set up a multivariate strategy to "measure" the relative modification induced on receiving lagoon waters by a single discharge. The application of such a "3-STEP multivariate analysis" to the present and future data of water quality could represent a relevant tool for monitoring industrial activities, providing at the same time a support in management decision processes.     

Environmental and personal determinants of support perceptions: Three generalizability studies.

The extent to which perceived social support reflects characteristics of the environment, the personality of the perceiver, and their interaction is unknown. This article shows how the methods of generalizability theory can be used to address these questions. When participants rate the same targets on the targets' supportiveness, generalizability theory provides methods for determining the extent to which support judgments are determined by effects due to targets (supporters), perceivers, and their interaction. In 3 studies, each source of variance made significant contributions to support judgments, with the Perceivers?×?Supporters interaction, characteristics of supporters, and biases of perceivers making the largest contributions, respectively. The implications for theoretical models of perceived support are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

A new adaptive approach to picture coding

In this paper, we present a new approach to picture coding that integrates, in an intelligent way, some advanced techniques. The basic idea is to code by different methods the areas in a scene that are characterized by different degrees of importance. To this end, we use an understanding system that locates such areas and applies to them either vector quantization or polynomial approximation, thus fully exploiting the characteristics of methods of different generations. Results are presented for two application cases : they prove the validity of the proposed intelligent integration by showing very high performances.     

Optical near-field Raman imaging with subdiffraction resolution

We report optical near-field Raman imaging with subdiffraction resolution (approximately 120 nm) without field enhancement effects. Chemical discrimination on tetracyanoquinodimethane organic thin films showing localized salt complexes is accomplished by detailed Raman maps. Acquisition times that are much shorter than previously reported are due to the high Raman efficiency of the materials and to careful collection and detection of the optical signals in our near-field Raman spectrometer.     

Bactericidal activities of the pyrrole derivative BM212 against multidrug-resistant and intramacrophagic Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains

The pyrrole derivative BM212 [1, 5-diaryl-2-methyl-3-(4-methylpiperazin-1-yl)methyl-pyrrole] was shown to possess strong inhibitory activity against both Mycobacterium tuberculosis and some nontuberculosis mycobacteria. BM212 was inhibitory to drug-resistant mycobacteria and also exerted bactericidal activity against intracellular bacilli residing in the U937 human histiocytic lymphoma cell line.     

Interplay Between Doping,Morphology, and Lattice Thermal Conductivity in PEDOT:PSS

Organic materials for thermoelectric (TE) applications have attracted a fair amount of attention in recent years due to remarkable advances achieved in terms of their figure of merit, ZT: a value of 0.42 has been reported by for poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) films treated with dimethyl sulfoxide, while 0.25 has been obtained for PEDOT:Tosylate. In this study various PEDOT morphologies are investigated, considering both neutral and doped (bipolaronic) samples, by means of classical molecular dynamics, by taking advantage of a recently developed all-atom force field. In the case of bare PEDOT, it is found that changing the distribution of chain lengths affects the thermal conductivity of neutral and doped samples in a different way: longer chain lengths result in higher conductivities in the neutral scenario, whereas an intermediate chain length gives the highest value in the bipolaronic case. The role of PSS in the bipolaronic state, as compared to the simpler case where the counterion is Cl⁻, is discussed.