177,391 research outputs found
Genetic improvement strategies in buffalo.
No full textBreeding and official selection activity in any country depends on the economic importance of the considered livestock, therefore of the products that can be obtained from it. The first step in the breeding and selection activity with regard to any dairy livestock is the milk recording of the productivity of each yielding animal. The results, when appropriately merged with the genealogy data, allow a definition of the milk genetic merit of each animal, in particular of the bull, for which we have no other milk record except the production of his progeny. The importance of animal recording for the activity of selection is well recognized all over the world and is demonstrated by the fact that in most countries such activity is at least partially financed by governments, which consider it an important means for the improvement of animal production. An international non governmental organization, the International Committee for Animal Recording (ICAR) has been active for over thirty years in the field of promotion and standardization of animal recording. The highest proportion of milk recorded buffaloes, in fact, is found in Italy (27.8%), in Iran is 4.5 %, while in other countries the recorded buffaloes are about 1% of total dairy females (Turkey, Egypt) or less. We have high percents of recorded buffaloes in Bulgaria, Syria and Greece, where the buffalo population is disappearing. The productivity in other countries is lower than in Italy, considering that only in Italy there was a very long work of recording, selection and genetic improvement, health, feeding and livestock system rising. Also milk composition was improved in Italy in few years, with mean protein percentage from 4.4 to 4.8 and fat percentage from 7.3 to 8.1 without any selection of this character. Moreover the possibilities of genetic improvement for milk quantity and quality will be higher, if the selection pressing will be increased reducing the number of bred females. So, just now there are in Italy many females producing more than 5,000 kg milk for lactation (270 days). Therefore the selection will be directed for the improvement of the yield of mozzarella cheese, not simply for milk production, because the farm income actually is resulting first from mozzarella cheese, alter from the selling of pregnant heifers, at the last from beef (Borghese, 2004). A consistent number of recorded buffaloes is obviously found in countries with the highest presence of buffaloes (India, Pakistan and Egypt) which signifies that these countries have also taken steps towards implementing an organized milk improvement activity, on a solid scientific and technical basis
A new and reliable Poisson noise estimator for radiographic images
No full textDigital images in general, and radiographies in particular, are mainly affected by photon counting noise. In this paper, we provide a method to estimate the gain of the imaging sensor and the variance of the photon counting noise associated to each image grey level. This is useful to multiple scopes, like reverse engineering and denoising
“El Sistema” in Italia: studio di casi multipli dell’adattamento del progetto venezuelano delle orchestre giovanili in quattro ‘nuclei’ italiani
No full textIl lavoro di ricerca sul progetto venezuelano d’El Sistema con approccio quali-quantitativo affronta un fenomeno poco conosciuto, che arriva e si adatta anche in Italia, su quasi tutto il territorio nazionale, a partire dal 2010, e punta alla costruzione di una rete di orchestre giovanili e alla diffusione, ad ampio raggio, dell’educazione musicale gratuita. Esso rappresenta una novità anche in Italia, soprattutto per il numero di bambini coinvolti e per l’idea di ‘rete’ da creare tra le diverse realtà locali. Ad oggi in Venezuela il dispositivo in esame coinvolge 400.000 soggetti, in Italia esistono 49 Nuclei che coinvolgono individui di età compresa tra i 3 e i 25 anni, raggiungendo diverse centinaia di soggetti.
Lo studio di dottorato, dopo una dettagliata presentazione storico-politica del dispositivo, riflette criticamente sulle sue dimensioni pedagogiche: il collettivo-orchestrale come ‘nuova condizione’ di apprendimento ed esperienza in senso lato, le sue implicazioni, caratteristiche ed organizzazione; la dimensione spirituale della musica e sua forza coesiva; la sperimentazione didattica unita alle più grandi tradizioni metodologiche occidentali, e al dialogo ‘implicito’ che con esse si instaura, in particolare col metodo Suzuki; alcuni degli aspetti che fanno d’ES un progetto efficace; le criticità e i dissensi che sono nati in merito al modello originario e al suo adattamento e alla sua diffusione nel mondo.
La ricerca di tipo esplorativo-conoscitivo si sviluppa con un disegno a due fasi. La prima, di ‘ricerca descrittiva’, è finalizzata a ‘mappare’ El Sistema in Italia: una ricognizione della ‘popolazione’ (distribuzione e caratteristiche dei Nuclei) capace di ‘fotografare’ la situazione italiana, di conoscerne l’organizzazione e le dinamiche. Le domande di ricerca, infatti, riguardano l’organizzazione nazionale e sono finalizzate alla conoscenza del processo che ha portato alla nascita e allo sviluppo del progetto venezuelano in Italia: chi sono, cioè, gli enti propulsori; quale il modo con cui viene gestito e da chi; quali le caratteristiche dei Nuclei.
La seconda fase, di ‘studio di casi multipli’, prevede lo studio e il monitoraggio, in chiave longitudinale, di quattro gruppi orchestrali, scelti secondo una serie di requisiti definiti in fase di studio dei dati ottenuti dalla prima fase della ricerca. In particolare, questa seconda fase si propone un versante descrittivo di ciascun Nucleo, dal punto di vista logistico, organizzativo, didattico.
Un ulteriore livello di ricerca sviluppa un disegno ‘quasi sperimentale’, a due gruppi, per verificare l’impatto d’El Sistema nel creare e mantenere ‘senso di comunità in un contesto di apprendimento’.
Il piano longitudinale di analisi ha comportato due somministrazioni (pre/post): la seconda, a distanza di un anno dalla prima, per verificare il cambiamento nei ragazzi dopo un anno di attività in orchestra. Il costrutto di ‘senso di comunità in un contesto di apprendimento’ è stato identificato in due dimensioni: - la ‘connessione’ tra i ragazzi (scambio e reciprocità); - l’interazione all’interno della comunità finalizzata alla comprensione e la misura in cui gli obiettivi dell’apprendimento vengono soddisfatti all’interno del contesto classe. Lo strumento utilizzato per verificare la suddetta ipotesi è la Classroom Community Scale (2002) di Alfred P. Rovai
Forme dell'abitare. Un'analisi sociologica dello spazio borghese
No full textLo studio sulle Forme dell’abitare parte dal presupposto che tra il corpo e lo spazio vi sia una relazione di coappartenenza e si attivi una comunicazione che diviene fortemente significativa nella casa, luogo dell’identità e della memoria, dell’esperienza personale e intersoggettiva. L’autrice analizza i modelli abitativi che accompagnano la borghesia in ascesa dell’Ottocento e quella avanzata del Novecento; essi, infatti, restituiscono fedelmente e processualmente il “volto” dell’individuo e della classe sociale di appartenenza. Nella casa del borghese si collocano e si cristallizzano i valori in cui egli si identifica e che caratterizzano la sua vita privata e pubblica: razionalità, ordine, solidità familiare, relazione con Alter, definizione dei ruoli e condivisione dello status. Quello della casa è un bisogno individuale e collettivo che mobilita e contiene dinamiche fisiche, psichiche, antropologiche, sociali e culturali: l’abitazione garantisce – a livello simbolico e materiale – la “fissità” necessaria ad allontanare il senso di spaesamento e sradicamento che caratterizza l’individuo-flâneur contemporaneo
ELITE: A Goal Oriented Vision System for Moving Objects Detection
No full textA specially designed system for movement monitoring is here presented. The system has a two level architecture. At the first level, a hardware processor analyses in real-time the images provided by a set of standard TV cameras and, using a technique based on the convolution operator, recognizes in each frame objects that have a specific shape. The coordinates of these objects are fed to a computer, the second level of the system, that analyses the movement of these objects with the aid of a set of rules representing the knowledge of the context. The system was extensively tested on the field and the main results are reported.
The whole system can work as a controlling device in robotics or as a general real-time image processor as well as an automatic movement analyser in biomechanics, orthopedic and neurological medicine
Ai vivi, ai morti, agli dei. Risorse alimentari e aspetti rituali di una comunità eneolitica a Pantano Borghese (Montecompatri, RM).
No full textstudio multidisciplinare di Pantano Borghese (RM
Mesh construction with fast soft vector quantization
No full textIn this paper a method to accelerate Soft Vector Quantisation (VQ), making it a quasi-real time procedure, is described. Through the local analysis of the data density a criterion to set a reasonable value of the parameters and to initialise the position of the Reference Vectors (Hyper-Box preprocessing), allows to cut about 75% of the iterations and to make the computational cost of each iteration, constant, independent of the number of sampled points.
Moreover, it makes Soft VQ of possible implementation on parallel machines. Overall the processing time with Hyper-Box pre-processing can be brought down to 3%. This method, in conjunction with Delaunay tessellation, has been extensively applied to the construction of 3D triangular meshes from dense noisy data. Results on the reconstruction of 3D models of Human faces are reported and discussed
Exploiting Inaccurate A Priori Knowledge in Robot Exploration
No full textExploration is a task in which autonomous mobile robots incrementally discover features of interest in initially unknown environments. Usually, robots follow exploration strategies to select the next best locations to reach in partially explored environments. Most of the current exploration strategies ignore prior knowledge about the enviroments to explore that, in some practical cases, could be available. In this paper, we present a method that includes a priori knowledge in an exploration strategy for a mobile robot. In particular, our exploration strategy selects the next best locations the robot should reach by exploiting the knowledge of the floor plan of the indoor environment that is being explored. Although the floor plan can be inaccurate (e.g., it typically does not include furniture and could represent a topology that does not fully match with that of the actual environment), we experimentally show, both in simulation and with real robots, that knowing the floor plan improves the exploration performance under a wide range of conditions
“U.V.-broadband light scattering measurements during metallic particle formation in combustion-like environment”
No full textThe thermal evolution of aqueous solution droplets of lead and nickel nitrate was studied experimentally in a drop-tube furnace operated up to 1300 K. Dimensions and physico-chemical properties of the droplets/particles were obtained by coupling the analysis of the spectra of ultraviolet light scattered by the produced aerosol with scanning electron microscopy and numerical simulation of the scattering spectra by Mie theory. Lead nitrate forms solid hollow particles with sizes of the order of the original droplets during the drying process, whereas at higher temperature it decomposes, forming spherical micrometer-sized particles of lead oxide and even submicrometer-sized particles of pure lead. Nickel nitrate never forms solid particles owing to its high solubility in water but precipitates as nickel hydroxide particles in the temperature range where this intermediate decomposition product is formed. At higher temperatures the decomposition of nickel hydroxide and the formation of oxide particles in the micrometer size range is observed. The mutual interaction of the salt properties were analyzed by studying the behavior of a lead-nickel nitrate mixture in the drop-tube reactor. The main peculiarity of the mixture evolution is the formation of composite particles of lead nitrate in a nickel hydroxide shell. The combined use of in situ ultraviolet spectral scattering and ex-situ scanning electron microscopy, along with the simulations of the scattering spectra by Mie theory, allows us to compile a database of scattering spectra attributed to specific droplets or particles of given chemical properties and size which may be useful for the continuous detection and speciation of metallic aerosols at the exit of real plants
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