Landscape dynamics of Mediterranean montane grasslands over 60 years and implications for habitats conservation. A case study in the northern Apennines (Italy)

Widespread trends of abandonment have strongly affected Mediterranean mountains after the Second World War, triggering spontaneous recolonisation of forests. A diachronic analysis of the landscape in a Natura 2000 site (Tuscany, Italy) was carried out using digital aerial photographs (1954, 2013) and a GIS-based methodology, focusing on territories above 1300 m a.s.l. The detected variations of total areas, patch shape, patch dimensions and selected metrics showed a notable shift of the vegetation towards woody types and a drastic reduction of open grasslands, some with high conservation value, accompanied by a strong increase in patch number, surface and edge. A decrease of SDI and SEI diversity indices was also observed. Considering that fragmentation is one of the main causes threatening habitats and species, our results point out a clear necessity for a monitoring programme and suitable actions aimed at improving the status of biodiversity-rich montane grasslands.     

Corrosion behaviour of sol–gel treated and painted AA2024 aluminium alloy

Design, development and scale-up of environmentally friendly coatings are very important in order to replace chromate based coatings for aluminium alloys. Barrier properties, paint adhesion and possibly self-healing ability are relevant aspects for replacement of chromate-based pre-treatments. Sol–gel materials are candidates for use in protective coating applications, as it is possible to form highly adherent and chemically inert oxide films on metal substrates.     

Corrosion behavior of thermoelectric clathrates α- and β-Eu8Ga16−xGe30+x in air

The corrosion of thermoelectric clathrates α- and β-Eu₈Ga_16−xGe_30+x is studied under static air (DSC/TG) up to 650 °C. Oxidation product layers with thicknesses of 10.5 μm (α-Eu₈Ga_16−xGe_30+x) and 4.5 μm (β-Eu₈Ga_16−xGe_30+x) are formed. The oxidation begins at 360 and 380 °C, respectively. XRD pattern of the β-Eu₈Ga_16−xGe_30+x oxidized layer shows Ge and four Eu₂O₃ reflections; while α-Eu₈Ga_16−xGe_30+x data (sample crushed and grinded) shows α-Eu₈Ga_16−xGe_30+x reflections (majority phase), two EuGa_2±xGe_4?x strongest reflections and Ge (minority phases). These results indicate the amount of oxides is very small or they are amorphous. High temperature powder XRD measurements on α-Eu₈Ga_16−xGe_30+x under air confirm the oxidation onset temperature determined in DSC studies.     

Multi-agent quality of experience control

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - In the framework of the Future Internet, the aim of the Quality of Experience (QoE) Control functionalities is to track the personalized...     

New advances in mitigating environmental impact of pipe-type cables

Through a comprehensive and aggressive research program, the Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. (Con Edison) has designed, developed and installed several new products to address the environmental impact of leaked dielectric fluid from pipe-type cable systems. These include online leak detection, leak location, retractable flow direction indicator, full stop joints and transition joints. This paper describes the application of the aforementioned products on the Con Edison underground transmission system     

Software corrections of vocal disorders

We discuss how vocal disorders can be post-corrected via a simple nonlinear noise reduction scheme. This work is motivated by the need of a better understanding of voice dysfunctions. This would entail a 2-fold advantage for affected patients: Physicians can perform better surgical interventions and on the other hand researchers can try to build up devices that can help to improve voice quality, i.e. in a phone conversation, avoiding any surgical treatment. As a first step, a proper signal classification is performed, through the idea of geometric signal separation in a feature space. Then through the analysis of the different regions populated by the samples coming from healthy people and from patients affected by T1A glottis cancer, one is able to understand which kind of interventions are necessary in order to correct the illness, i.e. to move the corresponding feature vector from the sick region to the healthy one. We discuss such a filter and show its performance.     

Double dispatch in C++

Double dispatch is the ability to dynamically select a method not only according to the run‐time type of the receiver (single dispatch), but also according to the run‐time type of the argument. This mechanism unleashes the power of dynamic binding in object‐oriented languages, so enhancing re‐usability and separation of responsibilities. However, many mainstream languages, such as, e.g., C++ and Java, do not provide it, resorting only to single dispatch. In this paper we propose an extension of C++ (also applicable to other object‐oriented languages) that enables double dispatch as a language feature. This yields dynamic overloading and covariant specialization of methods. We define a translation from the new constructs to standard C++ and we present the preprocessor implementing this translation, called doublecpp . The translated code enjoys static type safety and implements the semantics of double dispatch by using only standard mechanisms of static overloading and dynamic binding, with minimal impact on the performance of the program. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Quantitative Assessment of a Peer-to-peer Cooperative Infrastructure Using Stochastic Well-Formed Nets

Traditional support tools for software engineers, normally based on a client-server architecture, are unsuitable to deal with the new issues emerging from the current (and future) cooperative work scenarios (where connectivity is intrinsically transient, the number of interacting partners dynamically changes, etc.). This paper presents a quantitative assessment of a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer, cooperative infrastructure. Stochastic Well-Formed Nets (SWNs) modelling the new peer-to-peer architecture, and a traditional (client-server) one, are developed and analysed: we used SWNs for their ability to directly exploit the symmetries intrinsically present in the modelled systems, thus greatly reducing the complexity of the analysis. The main goal is to compare the impact of the two alternative protocols on the collaborative work. Together with the performance figures of interest, methodological issues concerning the choice of the most appropriate model abstraction level, the adoption of a compositional modelling approach, and the management of the model complexity are also discussed.     

An asymmetric fingerprint matching algorithm for Java Card TM

We propose a light-weight fingerprint matching algorithm that can be executed inside the devices with a limited computational power. The algorithm is based on the minutiae local structures (the “neighborhoods”), that are invariant with respect to global transformations like translation and rotation. The match algorithm has been implemented inside a smartcard over the Java Card^TM platform, meeting the individual’s need for information privacy and overall authentication procedure security. The main characteristic of the algorithm is to have an asymmetric behavior, in respect to the execution time, between correct positive and negative matches. The performances in terms of authentication reliability and speed were tested on some databases from the Fingerprint Verification Competition 2002 and 2004 editions (FVC2002 and FVC2004). Moreover, our procedure showed better reliability when compared with a related algorithm on the same database. We can achieve a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0.1%, a false rejection rate of about 6%, and from 0.3 to 8 s to match most of the finger pairs during the FAR tests.     

Causality tracking in causal message-logging protocols

Casual message-logging protocols have several attractive properties: they introduce no blocking, send no additional messages over those sent by the application, and never create orphans. Causal message logging, however, does require the casual effects of the deliveries of messages to be tracked. The information concerning causality tracking is piggybacked on application messages, and the amount of such information can become large. In this paper we study the cost of tracking causality in causal message-logging protocols. One can track causality as accurately as possible, but to do so requires piggybacking a considerable amount of additional information. One can reduce the amount of piggybacked information on each message by reducing the accuracy of causality tracking. But then, causal message logging may piggyback the reduced amount of information on more messages. We specify six different methods of tracking causality, each representing a natural choice based on the specification of causal message logging. We describe how these six methods can be implemented and compare them in terms of how large of a piggyback load they impose. This load depends on the application that is using causal message logging. We characterize some applications for which a given method has the smallest piggyback load, and study using simulation the size of the piggyback load for two different models of applications. Received: July 1999 / Accepted: July 2001