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The UNESCO 2011 Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape promotes to map cultural significance of urban heritage from the perspectives of the general public in pursuit of social inclusion in heritage management. The user-generated information already available on social media platforms in the form of images, comments, and ratings can be considered a rich source for collecting data concerning the tourists’ image of destinations and their collective perception of urban cultural heritage. Considering the large amount of unstructured data, artificial intelligence (AI) can construct structured feature vectors therefrom and significantly aid the analysis and collation processes compared to the traditional manual approach for mapping public perception of cultural heritage. This paper presents an exploratory case study conducted in the area of Testaccio, Rome, showcasing the use of AI to map the perceived and narrated urban heritage images using social media data. An image-sharing platform, Flickr, is used to collect thousands of posts containing images and comments in the area, which are further analysed with pre-trained image recognition, natural language processing, and dimensionality reduction algorithms. Results as the urban heritage images are visualised, showing the most significant elements from a public perspective. Such a methodology provides an alternative perspective of viewing the urban heritage attributes as a collection of depicted and posted content. It can contribute as a tool for the documentation of collective attention for inclusive heritage management and local development planning during the designing and policy-making processes.

In this paper we present a simulator allowing to perform policy experiments relative to the air traffic management. Different SESAR solutions can be implemented in the model to see the reaction of the different stakeholders as well as other relevant metrics (delay, safety, etc). The model describes both the strategic phase associated to the planning of the flight trajectories and the tactical modifications occurring in the en-route phase. An implementation of the model is available as an open-source software and is freely accessible by any user. More specifically, different procedures related to business trajectories and free-routing are tested and we illustrate the capabilities of the model on an airspace which implements these concepts. After performing numerical simulations with the model, we show that in a free-routing scenario the controllers perform less operations but the conflicts are dispersed over a larger portion of the airspace. This can potentially increase the complexity of conflict detection and resolution for controllers. In order to investigate this specific aspect, we consider some metrics used to measure traffic complexity. We first show that in non-free-routing situations our simulator deals with complexity in a way similar to what humans would do. This allows us to be confident that the results of our numerical simulations relative to the free-routing can reasonably forecast how human controllers would behave in this new situation. Specifically, our numerical simulations show that most of the complexity metrics decrease with free-routing, while the few metrics which increase are all linked to the flight level changes. This is a non-trivial result since intuitively the complexity should increase with free-routing because of problematic geometries and more dispersed conflicts over the airspace.

This paper presents an exploratory analysis of the correlation between different network metrics and safety events. The objective is to develop analysis methods and indicators that relate the network structure with safety events. In particular by using data gathered with an automatic tool developed by EUROCONTROL and a database of traffic data, we measured the correlations between the classical metrics of the airspace network, especially the network of navigation points, and the occurrence of Short Term Conflicts Alerts (STCA). The results obtained are not univocal; correlation between STCA occurrences and classical network metrics are present but the correlation coefficient is around 0.7. This indicates that correlation between STCA occurrences and the airspace characteristics can be established but further analyses with more data are necessary to confirm this result. Moreover it could be useful to look for non-classical metrics that can better describe the relationship we are looking for.

Aim of the study is to report our preliminar experience with MCA Coupler System in mechanical microanastomoses performed in head and neck reconstructive surgery. During almost 7 months we performed 7 end-to-end venous anastomoses: 3 of them regarding the cephalic district. We had no vascular thrombosis, vascular congestion or flap loss. Mean time of execution of anastomosis with MCA Coupler System was 10 minutes. In our experence it is essential the choice of the appropriate size of the device and a good dissection of recipient vessels. In our opinion the Coupler System is an easy applicable device, and an efficient alternative to manual micro-anastomoses.

In this study we compared the pressor, renal and endocrine effects of the physiological precursor of endothelial derived nitric oxide, L-arginine, with D-glucose, a substrate inactive on nitric oxide. Ten subjects with mild to moderate primary hypertension underwent infusion with either L-arginine (5 patients) or D-glucose (5 patients). The substances were infused over 25 min at equiosmolar rates, preceded and followed by a 25-min saline infusion. Blood pressure (BP) and heart rate were monitored at 3-min intervals; hormonal and humoral variables, inulin and para-aminohippurate clearance, and electrolyte excretion were measured at the end of each period at maximum diuresis. L-arginine and D-glucose brought about comparable increases in serum osmolality and similar hemodilution as compared with control saline. During L-arginine infusion, systolic and diastolic BP dropped by 16.6% and 11% respectively and recovered during the post-infusion period. Heart rate, plasma renin activity, and plasma norepinephrine did not change significantly. The percent BP decrease induced by L-arginine was significantly greater than that caused by D-glucose. Glomerular filtration rate remained stable, and renal plasma flow increased with both substances. However, only L-arginine stimulated markedly natriuresis, kaliuresis, and chloruresis. It also seemed to induce systemic acidosis, possibly as a consequence of hydrochloric acid generated during its metabolism. Circulating insulin, atrial natriuretic peptide, growth hormone, and glucagon levels increased, and plasma aldosterone remained unchanged during L-arginine infusion. During D-glucose infusion, insulin was stimulated and the other hormones were inhibited.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

The WP-E ELSA project aims at developing an empirically grounded agent based model that describes some of the stylized facts observed in the Air Traffic Management of the European airspace. The model itself has two main parts: (i) The strategic layer, focused on the interaction between the Network Manager and the Airline Operators and (ii) the tactical layer, focused on aircraft and controllers behaviour in Air Traffic Control (ATC) sectors. The preliminary results for the strategic layer show that when we have a mixing of re-routing and shifting companies, the overall satisfaction can even increase together with the number of flights, which is an effect not observed when only one type of companies is present. The preliminary results for the tactical layer indicate that when shocks in the system are confined in small areas, the interplay between the re-routing and change of flight level strategies may even lead to trajectory modifications that give smaller average delays as long as the number of shocks increases.

This paper describes the Air Traffic Simulator produced by the ELSA project. It is partially based on interacting agents taking actions during strategic and tactical phases: air companies, network manager, pilots, and controllers. The simulator is highly modular and each part can be used independently of the others. The code is open source, ready to use and available for the research community. Some results concerning the future organization of the European Airspace (free-routing) are presented, using the full capabilities of the model. We found that the implementation of free-routing could have a positive impact on the safety event occurrences that will be reduced in number although spread over a larger area. The controllers behaviour will therefore move to a situation where they have to perform a smaller number of operations dispersed over a larger portion of the airspace. We also show that the number of operations performed by a controller quadratically depends from the number of aircraft present in the considered airspace and that such quadratic scaling law is modified when the airspace is partitioned in air traffic sectors with capacity constraints.

The pharmacokinetics of clofoctol was investigated in rat plasma and tissues after both oral and rectal treatment at a single dose of 300 mg/kg. After oral administration the plasmatic peak was 2.12 +/- 0.92 microgram/ml, occurring at the 90th min, with T/2 of 121.45 +/- 23.41 min. After rectal administration a plasmatic peak of 1.97 +/- 0.61 microgram/ml was reached at the 20th min with T/2 of 41.07 +/- 12.30 min. The kinetic profile of the drug in tissues exhibited a pattern similar to that in the plasma, since the maximal peak of clofoctol in tissues following rectal administration occurred before that obtained after oral administration. Tissue concentrations significantly higher than plasmatic ones were obtained through both administration routes. The present results indicate that clofoctol is well absorbed after both oral and rectal administration; however rectal treatment produces more rapid absorption and elimination compared with oral treatment.