Archivio della ricerca - Fondazione Bruno Kessler
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Psychometric properties of the Italian Beliefs About Losing Control Inventory (BALCI-IT) and its associations with related constructs
No full textThe present study aimed to validate the Beliefs About Losing Control Inventory (BALCI) in an Italian convenience sample and investigated the role of this construct among relevant symptomatologies. The Beliefs About Losing Control Inventory (BALCI) was translated from English to Italian using established guidelines to guarantee both linguistic and cultural equivalence. The sample consisted of 416 participants, aged between 18 and 65 years old, mainly women (87.02%). The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) supported the original three factor structure that demonstrated a good fit to the data (χ2 = 593.08, df = 186, CFI = .982, TLI = .979, RMSEA = .072). The CFA findings confirmed the anticipated components and variable loadings in the Italian population, demonstrating that BALCI-IT effectively captures aspects of the obsessive-compulsive thought-behavior-emotion axis. Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s Omega indicated great internal consistency (.95) and test-retest correlation (.91). The Italian version of the inventory showed good convergent validity and good correlations with relevant symptomatologies like obsessive-compulsive, panic and social anxiety (-0.66 < r < 0.74; p-value < .001). Whereas correlations with eating disorders symptomatologies were not significant. Overall, the results indicate that BALCI-IT can be used as a measure of beliefs about losing control for Italian adults
Method for hydrogen production by methane cracking using vacuum plasma
No full textMethane cracking is highly attractive as it can produce hydrogen gas and carbon-based materials without directly generating carbon dioxide. However, most methane reforming processes require high temperatures (over 600 °C) while catalyst materials are integrated. To address this challenge, in this work, the
cracking using a low-pressure RF plasma system is studied to analyze the produced molecular hydrogen and carbon-based products. Mass Spectrometry (MS) and Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) were used to identify the key species such as hydrogen (
), CH radicals, and
hydrocarbons. Additionally, X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) is used to examine carbon deposits within the RF plasma reactor. Moreover, the OES spectra revealed distinct emission peaks for
,
, CH radicals, and
Swan bands, while quadrupole mass spectroscopy confirmed the production of hydrogen molecules. The results obtained show that the effective methane dissociation occurs alongside solid carbon formation within the plasma deposition system. Besides, using the XPS technique, the deposited carbon was identified as hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C: H), containing both sp2 and sp3 hybridized carbon atoms. Furthermore, it was observed that higher RF input power significantly enhances plasma density, electron temperature, and
conversion efficiency, with a peak performance at 300 W before reaching a saturation situation. These saturation effects are due to the space charge phenomena and energy distribution towards other processes such as dissociation and ionization
Design and Analysis of Dual Metal Control Gate Charge Plasma Tunnel Field-Effect Transistor (TFET) with Gate Engineering to Enhance Radio Frequency (RF) Performance and Linearity
No full textThe paper presents the design of dual material controlled gate charge-plasma-based tunneling Field-effect transistor (DMCG-CPTFET) for enhancement of radio frequency (RF) parameters, and linearity performance parameters are analyzed to overcome the difficulty and reduce the cost of nanoscale devices. This proposed device eliminates issues related to doping control, simplifying the fabrication process. In DMCG-CPTFET, the p + type source and n + type drain areas are formed by depositing platinum with work function = 5.93 eV and hafnium with work function = 3.9 eV materials on the silicon substrate, respectively. Auxiliary gate (M3), control gate (M2), and tunneling gate (M1), which have the work functions as φ1, φ2, and φ3, respectively, are the three gate segments in the DMCG-CPTFET. In this paper, we have looked into three alternative work function pairings to accomplish improved radio frequency (RF) and linearity performance metrics and compared the proposed device with the conventional device for better drain current and I on values
Reliable fabrication of buried microchannels via polymer trench passivation
No full textThe goal of lowering the material budget in microfluidics is often reached by fabrication of buried microchannels, typically achieved by deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) to create trenches, followed by sidewall passivation, and finally formation of hollow microchannels with isotropic etching. To avoid high temperatures, mask material or cleanroom restrictions, trench sidewalls can be passivated in the same DRIE tool with a fluorocarbon polymer layer using C4F8 as the source gas. Since the entire process is conducted within a DRIE tool, it significantly reduces fabrication time and complexity compared to conventional SiO2/Si3N4 passivation methods. Silicon microfabrication advancements often prioritize developing smaller or more precise features, while reliability and repeatability—crucial for large-scale production—are frequently overlooked. This study confirmed the development of a reliable, reproducible process for buried microchannel fabrication via polymer trench passivation, addressing key process instabilities and proposing functional solutions. Our optimized method employs a novel two-cycle approach of trench passivation by alternating the polymer deposition and anisotropic etching, enhancing uniformity and conformity of the passivation layer. This enables reliable fabrication of deep buried microchannels with a hydraulic diameter up to 40 μm at a depth of approximately 40 μm. In addition, the increased opening at the top of the trenches allows a significant reduction of time (above 20%) required for the subsequent isotropic etching which forms the final shape of the buried microchannels. The process demonstrates high reliability and uniformity on the entire wafer and can be adapted for different structures with minor parameter adjustments
After Parmenides. Studies on Language and Metaphysics in Early Greek Philosophy. By Alexander P.D. Mourelatos. Edited by Massimo Pulpito
No full textLong-Term Monitoring of Small Displacements of Infrastructures with a Low-Cost GNSS Device
No full textThe monitoring of large infrastructures such as bridges, dams, and Tailings Storage Facilities (TSFs) is critical for ensuring structural safety and preventing catastrophic failures. Traditional geodetic monitoring approaches, while accurate, are often labour-intensive, expensive, and impractical for large-scale or remote deployments. This study evaluates the capability of dual-frequency low-cost GNSS receivers (ublox ZED-F9R) integrated with a minicomputer to measure millimeter-scale movements over extended monitoring periods. Two measurement campaigns are conducted: a 16-hour short-term test and a 60-day long-term deployment. A rigid aluminium beam with photogrammetrically measured baseline served as ground truth for assessing positioning accuracy. Short-term experiments demonstrated sub-millimeter accuracy while the 60-day campaign achieved 3D baseline measurement accuracy and precision below 2 mm despite significant environmental variations. The results confirm that low-cost dual-frequency GNSS systems can reliably detect centimeter/year-level deformations, making them suitable for monitoring slow-moving processes in critical infrastructure. The collected data, including raw GNSS observations, processed coordinates, and meteorological data, is publicly available for research purposes at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17378723
Bottlenecks in advancing and applying multiomic data integration—common data resources as rate-limiting drivers—the high-impact use case of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease
No full textDespite striking successes in identifying novel biomarkers for improved patient stratification and predicting disease progression, numerous challenges remain in the effective integration and exploitation of multiomic data in biomedical applications beyond cancer, for which most bioinformatics strategies are developed and validated. That focus on cancer severely limits the effective development and advancement of algorithms in machine learning and artificial intelligence that do not suffer degraded out-of-domain performance. Generalizability and interpretability of models, however, are also required for robust insights that may translate into clinical practice. Work across different independent datasets is critical for establishing models robust towards unwanted variation in assays, protocols, and cohort populations. Disease-specific context like ethnicity, socioeconomic background, sex, lifestyle, disease phase, and tissue type also strongly affect molecular profiles. We here discuss atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) as a high-impact non-cancer use case for the challenges remaining in the development and application of the latest bioinformatics approaches to multiomics data integration. ASCVD remains the leading cause of death globally. Disease aetiology, progression, and therapy outcome depend on a complex interplay of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors. Integrating these diverse data types effectively remains a challenge but holds transformative potential for personalized medicine. Discovery and access to data of sufficient diversity and extent form key bottlenecks. We here compile a first comprehensive overview of key data sets in ASCVD to complement the established cancer-focused resources as a foundation for future effective development and application of state-of-the-art bioinformatics tools for multiomic data integration
Multilingual vs Crosslingual Retrieval of Fact-Checked Claims: A Tale of Two Approaches
Get PDFRetrieval of previously fact-checked claims is a well-established task, whose automation can assist professional fact-checkers in the initial steps of information verification. Previous works have mostly tackled the task monolingually, i.e., having both the input and the retrieved claims in the same language. However, especially for languages with a limited availability of fact-checks and in case of global narratives, such as pandemics, wars, or international politics, it is crucial to be able to retrieve claims across languages. In this work, we examine strategies to improve the multilingual and crosslingual performance, namely selection of negative examples (in the supervised) and re-ranking (in the unsupervised setting). We evaluate all approaches on a dataset containing posts and claims in 47 languages (283 language combinations). We observe that the best results are obtained by using LLM-based re-ranking, followed by fine-tuning with negative examples sampled using a sentence similarity-based strategy. Most importantly, we show that crosslinguality is a setup with its own unique characteristics compared to the multilingual setup