Amateur football game on artificial turf: Players’ perceptions

The purpose of this study was to establish whether players’ perceptions in football competitions played on artificial turf can be influenced by the pitch under examination, the kind of infill material used, the weather conditions and by player's role in the team.A multifactorial statistical analysis was made of the results obtained from over 1600 U.E.F.A. questionnaires completed by amateur footballers.Pitch and weather factors were demonstrated to be relevant to the aspects investigated. Conversely, the players’ role and the infill material were significant for only a few aspects; for each variable, the analysis indicated the most favourable conditions. Overall, the analysis provided insight into amateur players’ favourable feelings about artificial turf, compared with its natural alternative (actually made of earth, without grass in the case of amateur players).     

A framework for the deployment of adaptable web service compositions

The basic paradigm of service-oriented architectures—publication, discovery, and use—can be interpreted in different ways. Current technologies assume a static and rigid approach: UDDI was conceived with the idea of a centralized repository for service publication and BPEL only supports design–time bindings between the orchestrated workflow and the external services. The trend, however, is towards more flexibility and dynamism. The single centralized repository is being substituted by dedicated repositories that cooperate and exchange information about stored services on demand. Design–time compositions are complemented by mechanisms to allow for the selection and binding of services at runtime. This paper presents the research results of our group in delivering a framework for the deployment of adaptable Web service compositions. The publication infrastructure integrates existing heterogeneous repositories and makes them cooperate for service discovery. The deployment infrastructure supports BPEL-like compositions that can select services dynamically, and also adjust their behavior in response to detected changes and unforeseen events. The framework also provides a monitoring-based validation of running compositions: we provide suitable probes to oversee the execution of deployed compositions. The various parts of the framework are exemplified on a common case study taken from the automotive domain. This research is partially supported by the European IST project SeCSE (Service Centric System Engineering) and the Italian FIRB project ARTDECO (Adaptive infRasTructures for DECentralized Organizations).     

Synthesis and Characterization of New Functional Polystyrenes Containing Tributyltin Carboxylate Moieties Linked to the Aromatic Ring by a Trimethylene Spacer

A novel trialkyltin carboxylate monomer, tributyltin 4-(p-styryl)-butanoate, characterized by the presence of a trimethylenic spacer linking the tin carboxylate moiety to the aromatic group, has been prepared and submitted to radical homo- and copolymerization with styrene in order to obtain the corresponding copolymers with variable contents of organometallic moiety. For the sake of comparison, tributyltin 4-(4-isopropylphenyl)-butanoate has also been synthesized as the structural model of the repeating unit of the polymers. All the products prepared have been characterized both in solution and in the solid state by spectroscopic and thermal techniques with the aim to establish the coordination state of the tin atom, a feature which is of importance for future application of these derivatives.     

Effect of high pressure homogenization on lactic acid bacteria phages and probiotic bacteria phages

To investigate the effect of high pressure homogenization on virus inactivation, phages specific for Lactobacillus delbrueckii, Lactobacillus helveticus, Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactococcus lactis, Lactobacillus paracasei and Lactobacillus plantarum were studied. The influence of pressure, number of passes, suspension medium and phage concentration were studied at 25 °C. Reductions in viability were proportional to pressure and number of passes, though the inactivation extent was phage-dependent. At 100 MPa, some bacteriophages were completely inactivated (6 log₁₀ reduction) after 3 or 5 passes, while others remained infective after 8 passes. For all phages, treatment at 60 MPa was insufficient for complete inactivation, even after 8 passes. No clear influence of suspending medium was observed. Inactivation seems to depend on phage concentration; the higher the initial load, the bigger the reduction achieved. Although these results showed that several phages studied are resistant to high-pressure homogenization, this strategy could be combined with others to control their presence in raw milk.     

Effect of ester group bulkiness of polyacrylates on miscibility with poly(vinyl acetate)

BACKGROUND: The miscibility of poly(vinyl acetate) (PVAc) with a series of polyacrylates, namely poly(methyl acrylate) (PMA), poly(ethyl acrylate) (PEA) and poly(butyl acrylate) (PBA), with ester chains of varying bulkiness was studied from both qualitative and quantitative points of view. RESULTS: The evidence from thermal (differential scanning calorimetry) and Fourier transform infrared analyses demonstrates that the miscibility of PVAc with the polyacrylates is rapidly reduced on increasing the bulkiness of their ester chains. Miscibility is quantitatively discussed in the framework of the corresponding states theory applying the approximate Patterson form. For this reason the characteristic values of volume, temperature and pressure were preliminarily evaluated both experimentally, through dilatometric measurements, and by calculations. At the same time, calorimetric measurements allowed the evaluation of the enthalpies of mixing of the components. CONCLUSION: The conclusions reached with this approach are that polar interactions are active among the repeat units of the blend components, but the intensities of these forces are progressively reduced by the shielding of the apolar groups of the polyacrylates. The steric hindrance of the hydrocarbon groups shields the interactions of the polar groups of PVAc with the COOR moieties of the acrylates, so that the miscibility progressively decreases from PMA to PEA to PBA. Copyright © 2009 Society of Chemical Industry     

A Novel Approach to Unsupervised Change Detection Based on a Semisupervised SVM and a Similarity Measure

This paper presents a novel approach to unsupervised change detection in multispectral remote-sensing images. The proposed approach aims at extracting the change information by jointly analyzing the spectral channels of multitemporal images in the original feature space without any training data. This is accomplished by using a selective Bayesian thresholding for deriving a pseudotraining set that is necessary for initializing an adequately defined binary semisupervised support vector machine classifier. Starting from these initial seeds, the performs change detection in the original multitemporal feature space by gradually considering unlabeled patterns in the definition of the decision boundary between changed and unchanged pixels according to a semisupervised learning algorithm. This algorithm models the full complexity of the change-detection problem, which is only partially represented from the seed pixels included in the pseudotraining set. The values of the classifier parameters are then defined according to a novel unsupervised model-selection technique based on a similarity measure between change-detection maps obtained with different settings. Experimental results obtained on different multispectral remote-sensing images confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Technological use of donkey milk in cheesemaking

The efficacy of donkey milk as an alternative to hen's egg white lysozyme in preventing cheese blowing during ripening of Italian Grana cheeses was tested. Indices of proteolysis and lipolysis did not differ between the different cheesemaking processes. All tested products showed good microbiological and sensorial quality.     

Vitamin D3 Enriches Ceramide Content in Exosomes Released by Embryonic Hippocampal Cells

The release of exosomes can lead to cell–cell communication. Nutrients such as vitamin D3 and sphingolipids have important roles in many cellular functions, including proliferation, differentiation, senescence, and cancer. However, the specific composition of sphingolipids in exosomes and their changes induced by vitamin D3 treatment have not been elucidated. Here, we initially observed neutral sphingomyelinase and vitamin D receptors in exosomes released from HN9.10 embryonic hippocampal cells. Using ultrafast liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, we showed that exosomes are rich in sphingomyelin species compared to whole cells. To interrogate the possible functions of vitamin D3, we established the optimal conditions of cell treatment and we analyzed exosome composition. Vitamin D3 was identified as responsible for the vitamin D receptor loss, for the increase in neutral sphingomyelinase content and sphingomyelin changes. As a consequence, the generation of ceramide upon vitamin D3 treatment was evident. Incubation of the cells with neutral sphingomyelinase, or the same concentration of ceramide produced in exosomes was necessary and sufficient to stimulate embryonic hippocampal cell differentiation, as vitamin D3. This is the first time that exosome ceramide is interrogated for mediate the effect of vitamin D3 in inducing cell differentiation.     

Effect of a pre-treatment of milk with high pressure homogenization on yield as well as on microbiological, lipolytic and proteolytic patterns of "Pecorino" cheese

The principal aim of this work was to compare Pecorino cheeses obtained from ewes' milk previously subjected to high pressure homogenization (HPH) at 100 MPa with those produced from raw and heat treated ewes' milk. The HPH milk treatment induced a significant increase of the cheese yield and caused a reduction of enterococci, lactococci and yeasts in the curds. Enterococci cell loads remained at lower levels in cheeses obtained from HPH milk over the ripening period. Analyses of free fatty acids, Sodium Dodecil Sulphate (SDS)-PAGE profiles, Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry-Solid Phase Microextraction (GC-MS-SPME) measurements of volatile compounds and sensory traits evidenced that the pressure treatment can be regarded also as a useful tool to differentiate products obtained from the same raw material. In fact such a milk treatment induced a marked lipolysis, an early proteolysis, a relevant modification of the volatile molecule profiles and sensory properties of Pecorino cheese.