Chromium exposure biological indices and clinical findings in chromium plating industry (author's transl)

According to the investigations carried out on workers of two chromium plating plants, the authors believe that chromium urinary excretion allows to determine the degree of its acute absorption. Moreover, the renal clearance of diffusible chromium allows the evaluation of chromium body burden and is related to the duration as well as to the severity of exposure. This interpretation is supported by the relation between the exposure biological indexes and the clinical and instrumental investigations which make possible the evaluation of lesions caused by chromium exposure, mostly concerning the respiratory system.     

Context-Aware Middleware for Anytime, Anywhere Social Networks

Anytime, anywhere social computing requires several support mechanisms and tools, including location and proximity systems, expressive representation models of physical place and user characteristics, and effective social-matching algorithms. Anytime, anywhere social-network computing also requires shared and interoperable vocabularies for modeling location and entity characteristics. Current solutions tend to address only a subset of these issues. We believe that the success of anytime, anywhere social computing depends on middleware solutions that separate social-network management concerns from application requirements. Our middleware solution, the socially aware and mobile architecture (SAMOA), integrates a set of common management facilities for personalizing location-dependent social networks, and for propagating social networks' visibility up to the application level.     

A hierarchical approach to systems with heterogeneous real-time requirements

This paper presents a family of real-time executives, designed by Telettra, for telecommunication, telecontrol, process control and supervisory applications.These applications are subjects to two different types of real-time requirements: deadlines and throughput. Rather than designing a single executive capable to face both requirements, a two level, hierarchical approach has been taken. Two executives coexist on a single processor: a low level, periodic executive for tasks with strict deadline constraints, and a higher level, multitask executive for tasks with throughput constraints, or tasks with weaker deadline constraints that can be specified and dealt with at application level with little support from the executive.Thanks to the hierarchical approach, simple mechanisms are sufficient to support communications between the two levels. Facilities are also provided to support load control in the deadline oriented environment, according to policies that are defined by the multitask level application.The presence on all computational nodes of a multitask environment is a key characteristic, since it allows a highly modular style of programming, and facilitates the construction of distributed systems.The paper shows how these ideas are applied in the design of the peripheral processor of a telephone switching system.     

Modes of Knowledge Accumulation, Entry Regimes and Patterns of Industrial Evolution

This paper explores the interplay between entry, selection andinnovative learning as determinants of industrial evolution.It proposes a model aimed at capturing some essential featuresof learning and competition as drivers of the dynamics. Usingboth analytical and numerical techniques, the paper disentanglespossible generic properties which robustly hold for a wide rangeof parameterizations. In particular, the paper identifies differentgeneric ‘evolutionary archetypes’, defined by characteristicinteractions between entry/exit regimes, learning and industrialstructures.     

A numerical approach for the analysis of the coffee roasting process

A numerical model of the coffee roasting process under operating conditions is proposed. This numerical tool is able to simulate the behaviour of all the components of a batch roaster as well as the roasting process of the coffee beans within the drum. The model evaluates the heat and mass transfer between a hot air flow and the coffee beans during the roasting process on the basis of the physical properties of the coffee and the operation of the roasting machine. Different submodels are included in the modelling in order to address particular thermo-physical processes, such as the evaporation of coffee moisture and the heat released or absorbed by the beans due to the roasting reactions.     

Context-aware middleware solutions for anytime and anywhere emergency assistance to elderly people

The growing percentage of elderly people in society calls for novel healthcare support services to enhance elders' daily life independence in indoor and outdoor environments. Ubiquitous technologies create significant opportunities not only for indoor, but also for outdoor anytime and anywhere assistance. However, outdoor emergency assistance requires that we address several challenging aspects, from elder location tracking and health condition monitoring to the formation of ad hoc assistance groups capable of assisting elders in need of help. This article focuses on the creation and management of outdoor assistance teams and proposes a group management system, AGAPE, that exploits visibility of location and group/user/device profile information as a key principle to trigger and control the team formation and team member interactions required to coordinate emergency activities.     

Telerobotic systems design based on real‐time CORBA

A new class of telerobotic applications is making its way into research laboratories, fine arts or science museums, and industrial installations. Virtual laboratories and remote equipment maintenance are examples of these applications, which are built exploiting distributed computing systems and Internet technologies. Distributed computing technologies provide several advantages to telerobotic applications, such as dynamic and multiuser access to remote resources and arbitrary user locations. Nonetheless, building these applications remains a substantial endeavor, especially when performance requirements must be met. The aim of this paper is to investigate how mainstream and advanced features of the CORBA object‐oriented middleware can be put to work to meet the requirements of novel telerobotic applications. We show that Real‐Time CORBA extensions and asynchronous method invocation of CORBA services can be relied upon to meet performance and functional requirements, thereby enabling teleoperation on local area networks. Furthermore, CORBA services for concurrency control and large‐scale data distribution enable geographic‐scale access for robot teleprogramming. Limitations in the currently available implementations of the CORBA standard are also discussed, along with their implications. The effectiveness and suitability for telerobotic applications of several CORBA mechanisms are tested first individually and then by means of a software framework exploiting CORBA services and ensuring component‐based development, software reuse, low development cost, fully portable real‐time and communication support. A comprehensive telerobotic application built based on the framework is described in the paper and evaluated on both local and wide area networks. The application includes a robot manipulator and several sensory subsystems under concurrent access by multiple competing or collaborating operators, one of which is equipped with a multimodal user interface acting as the master device. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Biochemical Screening of Potent Zika Virus Protease Inhibitors

As the Zika virus protease is an essential and well-established target for the development of antiviral agents, we biochemically screened for inhibitors using a purified recombinantly expressed form of this enzyme. As a result, we were able to identify 10 new Zika virus protease inhibitors. These compounds are natural products and showed strong inhibition in the biochemical assays. Inhibitory constants values for the compounds ranged from 5 nM to 8 μM. Among the most potent inhibitors are flavonoids like irigenol hexa-acetate (K_i=0.28 μM), katacine (K_i=0.26 μM), theaflavin gallate (K_i=0.40 μM) and hematein (K_i=0.33 μM). Inhibitors from other groups of natural products include sennoside A (K_i=0.19 μM) and gossypol (K_i=0.70 μM). Several of the obtained compounds are known for their beneficial health effects and have acceptable pharmacokinetic characteristics. Thus, they could be of interest as lead compounds for the development of important and essential Zika antiviral drugs.