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The paper deals with the attempt to build a legal planner expert system, NORM, for the building-application inspection branch of a local city planning agency, within an ill-organized administrative structure. The authors report the first stage of the research, mainly concerned with knowledge acquisition (by means of a method of shared observation, which directly focuses on the expert's real problem-solving behavior), knowledge representation, and implementation of a rough prototype. The first results of the research have shown that heuristics have a strong role in the human expert's cognitive-inferential model, human experts resorting to memory packages, stories, and analogies to streamline their problem-solving, and that many reasoning schemes in the procedure are largely unmanageable by expert systems. Another interesting finding has been the need which emerged from the research for a better understanding of problem-solving routines in the field of planning, ranging from taxonomies to behavioral (especially community-based) patterns m planning.

Nervous and immune systems are connected by several mutual links, thus constituting a diffuse functional network in the body. In particular, neurohormones, neuropeptides, and cytokines represent the major mediators of the so-called psychoneuroendocrinoimmune axis. In this review, special emphasis is placed on certain pathologies characterized by a disconnection of the existing bridges between nervous and immune systems. For instance, spinal cord injury (SCI) is a clinical condition in which loss of neurons and very poor axon growth represent the main features. The role played by infiltrating and resident immunocompetent cells is still debated in SCI. However, to enhance axon growth in SCI, current therapeutic attempts are based on the stimulation of the immune response within the central nervous system, thus triggering either cell-mediated or humoral immune responsiveness.

Nowadays, calprotectin, a cytoplasmatic protein, released by activated neutrophilic polymorphonuclear cells (PMN) and/or monocytes-macrophages (MØ), is considered a good indicator of inflammation in several diseases. Accordingly, fecal calprotectin represents a good predictor of clinical relapse in ulcerative colitis (UC) patients, whereas conflicting results have been reported in Crohn's disease (CD) patients. In our study, in 76 IBD patients (29 CD and 47 UC) fecal calprotectin has been evaluated by a commercial ELISA kit. Results demonstrate that levels of this protein in the stool are significantly more elevated in active CD and UC patients than in normal volunteers. In quiescent CD and UC a trend to higher levels of calprotectin than in the normal counterpart is, however, evident. These data suggest that a low-grade inflammation of the intestinal wall is always present in CD and UC patients, which may predict a clinical relapse risk. In the same group of patients calprotectin levels also were analyzed according to sex and age. A trend to higher values of calprotectin was present in male patients with active or quiescent CD than in their female counterparts. Only in UC patients in remission a trend to calprotectin increase was more marked in the male group than in the female counterpart. When CD and UC patients were divided up according to age, calprotectin positivity peaked between 30-39 years in active CD patients, while in quiescent CD maximum positivity was between 40 and 49 years. However, in both active and quiescent UC patients, calprotectin positivity increased with age. The more precocious detectability of fecal calprotectin in CD patients, as a marker of intestinal mucosa inflammation, may be related to the different histopathology of the two diseases (CD versus UC). However, reduced PMN and/or MØ trafficking from peripheral blood to intestinal mucosa with age by effects of chronic treatment should not be ignored in CD patients.

Since the extension of concepts like carrying capacity, non-market resources, sustainability has taken a wide place in the scientific debate among scholars of planning, of estimating and of environmental economics, the practices on equity planning and evaluation have assumed a new importance; at the same time, the interest in their operational issues is increasing.

Any ES research, in particular planner ES research, shows that knowledge acquisition is a bottleneck when building up the ES prototypes. From this viewpoint, the possibility of automatically acquiring knowledge for ES, at least with reference to special themes and problems, may be seen as constituting an interesting line of research.

Una sperimentazione progettuale all'incrocio tra urbanistica, progettazione architettonica e design sul caso del Lungomare Augusto di Bari. Dall'esigenza di dare forma e decoro a pratiche tradizionali di produzione e consumo di cibo da strada una riflessione sul tema della dilatazione dello spazio pubblico