Information Sharing Among Disaster Responders - An Interactive Spreadsheet-Based Collaboration Approach

Recent natural disasters have led crisis management organizations to revise their protocols so as to rely on the contribution of a wider range of actors, including simple citizens as well as expert operators, to support decision making activities. Reliable and timely information sharing among members of distributed teams of disaster responders has become paramount for the success of the overall crisis management process. In this paper we propose a crisis management system based on spreadsheet-mediated collaboration among on-site responders and decision makers. To share data a common spreadsheet artifact has been developed by using a participatory design approach which is accessed through mobile user interfaces. The evaluation results showed that the use of the spreadsheet artifact has resulted in more effective decision making relating to set of earthquake management scenarios in high-risk areas located in Italy.     

Ozonation of Drinking Water: A Design Methodology

The formation of potentially carcinogenic organic halides has been shown to result from drinking water disinfection with chlorine. xidative treatment of organic halide precursors with ozone prior to chlorination has surfaced as an attractive technique for reducing the formation of these compounds. In addition to reduction of precursor levels, preozonation has been reported to effect other beneficial results in water treatment. This paper presents design methodologies to optimize the implementation of the ozonation process for water treatment applications. Pre-design considerations common to all ozonation design processes are discussed. Subsequently, design procedures for the ozone generation and contacting systems are reviewed.     

Intrinsic Fluorescence of the Active and the Inactive Functional Forms of Human Thymidylate Synthase

The observables associated with protein intrinsic fluorescence – spectra, time decays, anisotropies – offer opportunities to monitor in real time and non-invasively a protein‘s functional form and its interchange with other forms with different functions. We employed these observables to sketch the fluorometric profiles of two functional forms of human thymidylate synthase (hTS), a homodimeric enzyme crucial for cell proliferation and thus targeted by anticancer drugs. The protein takes an active and an inactive form. Stabilization of the latter by peptides that, unlike classical hTS inhibitors, bind it at the monomer/monomer interface offers an alternative inhibition mechanism that promises to avoid the onset of drug resistance in anticancer therapy. The fluorescence features depicted herein can be used as tools to identify and quantify each of the two protein forms in solution, thus making it possible to investigate the kinetic and thermodynamic aspects of the active/inactive conformational interchange. Two examples of fluorometrically monitored interconversion kinetics are provided.     

Catalysts for the Ethoxylation of Esters

The intermediates for the production of nonionic surfactants can be derived from petrochemicals and/or from renewable raw materials. In both, the role of catalysis is fundamental. In this paper the main results reported in the literature related with the catalysis for ethoxylation of fatty esters will be reviewed. The main open challenges for these technologies will be outlined.     

Polyclonal T cell elimination by prolonged immunostimulation in an experimental model

Acute radiation and combined radiation-thermal injuries (CRTIs) were modelled in the experiments on CBA x C57B16 mice. Changes in the concentrations of endogenic and lipopolysaccharide-induced TNF-alpha in the blood serum were measured in 3 to 24 h after gamma-irradiation at a dose of 7 Gy and a combined radiation-thermal injury. The status of mature and reserve pools of the bone marrow granulocytes was determined from the reaction of leukocytes mobilization to blood in response to the administration of interleukin-1 beta (IL-1 beta) in 48 h after Irradiation and CRTI. The contents of IL-3 and IL-6 in the blood serum, the level of cytokine secretion by the bone marrow cells were determined in vitro in the peak phases of acute radiation and combined injuries. No significant changes in the reaction of the bone marrow cells and in the level of pancytopenia were revealed after acute radiation and CRTIs, which could help in understanding an increase in the death rates after CRTIs. Also, quantitative changes in the TNF and IL-6 concentrations in the blood serum were estimated along with those in the level of secretion of IL-3 by the bone marrow cells of mice exposed to radiation and CRTIs.     

A study of the liquid phase of4He using an improved shadow wave function

The shadow wavefunction is generalized by introducing a pseudopotential with an attractive part for the auxiliary variables. We report variational Monte Carlo results for the ground state of a system of ⁴ He atoms in the liquid phase. The variational energy is close to the best energy obtained with the standard Jastrow plus triplet terms at the equilibrium density, and our results improve over those at higher densities. There is a marked improvement in the radial distribution function g(r) compared with that obtained using a purely repulsive auxiliary particle pseudopotential. In addition, the attractions between the shadow particles can be made strong enough to describe a self-binding system.     

A test of the censure-deficit model and its relation to premorbidity in the performance of schizophrenics.

This investigation incorporated controls suggested by the Rodnick-Garmezy model of schizophrenic behavior with the task most frequently employed in disconfirmatory studies, in order to assess the tenability of the latter. A number of hypotheses derived from Rodnick and Garmezy, concerned with premorbid history of patients (Goods and Poors) and normals, reinforcement conditions (reward, punishment, and nonevaluation) and sex of E (parental surrogates), were tested in a 3×3×2 design with reaction time (RT) as the dependent variable. None of the hypotheses was supported. Instead, punishment led to fastest performance for all groups, and all Ss tended to perform faster for male than for female Es. This research is consistent with the results of the disconfirmatory studies rather than those of Rodnick-Garmezy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Electromagnetic scattering for oblique incidence on impedancebodies of revolution

Combined field integral equations for the surface currents induced by an obliquely incident wave on a rotationally symmetric body are considered. The relative surface impedance is independent of the azimuthal angle but may vary along the profile of the scatterer in any plane containing the axis of symmetry; the currents are conveniently expressed in terms of Fourier series of uncoupled terms in the azimuthal angle. Simple integral expressions for the far field are given and a computer code is described and tested on a variety of scatterers. Geometry of scatterer, surface impedance and Fourier harmonics of induced currents are described by splines. The results are in agreement with physical interpretation