4,803 research outputs found
Novel devices and strategies to investigate and counteract pain: an engineer’s point of view on pain and how to fight against it
No full textPain is a gift; it is a fundamental adaptive mechanism to protect ourselves from injuries and illnesses. While usually pain is perceived as debilitating and intolerable and researchers are focusing on how to suppress it, its presence has a great survival value, which becomes evident in its absence. Contrary to the common belief, insensitivity to pain is a curse, which sometimes is an ill-fated consequence of some conditions, such as alcoholism, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and leprosy. Pain warns us of dangers, impeding us to continue adding insult to an injury causing more serious issues; it forces us to rest and protect the affected body part until the latter has recovered completely. As
such, pain represents an "unpleasant sensory and emotional experience" but "associated with actual or potential tissue damage", thus necessary to avoid further repercussions. When a high-intensity stimulus that can damage tissues is applied onto the human skin, it activates pain receptors, called nociceptors; information reaches the brain through myelinated A and un-myelinated C nerve fibers and the pain is experienced. If pain is certainly a gift, complications arise when its natural mechanisms do not perform correctly and the unpleasant painful sensations become incessant, interfering drastically with the person’s quality of life. This is not a rare event: as an example,
more than 100 million adults in the United States only are affected by chronic pain.
In such cases, pain loses its role as a warning against more critical injuries and simply becomes a medical problem, requiring medical treatment. Costs of these treatments are not negligible: they range from 635 billion of US dollars per year, combining the health care cost and the productivity estimates. Therefore pain has to be investigated, to be better understood and counteracted, if necessary. Easy? Not at all: pain is difficult to ascertain, is primarily assessed by means of self-report and experiments on pain suffer from a lack of reproducibility and accuracy.
The result is that many relevant neuro-physiological aspects on pain still remain unclear.
Here is where the engineer work becomes essential: medicine needs engineering to design, develop and implement reliable and precise devices whose features help pain research. Furthermore, when possible, the engineer should propose solutions that are inexpensive, portable, easy-to-assemble and customizable to suit diverse experimental requirements, ready to be employed into different researches. A complex challenge, without a doubt, but fundamental: the reader will find throughout this thesis, final report of my PhD in Electronic Engineering, a dissertation on the development of brand new devices and strategies to study and counteract the feeling of pain. Particularly, this thesis is made of two distinct engineering projects, devoted to these two aspects respectively.
Part I - Pain Counteraction: PROVIRT PLP project has the aim to improve the rehabilitation of upper limb amputees who suffer from Phantom Limb Pain syndrome, a chronic pain condition, with a technology based on pattern recognition and virtual reality. A promising discover made by Ramachandran showed how restoring the visual feedback of the amputated limb may have a primary importance in the pain counteraction, thus I implemented a device to maximise such illusion. PROVIRT PLP is able to read surface electromyographic signals from the amputee’s stump and coherently convert them into the movement of an avatar in a virtual reality environment. This part describes the project requisites, the design and implementation of the electronics, the observation regarding the classifiers and the pattern recognition stage and the software application that commands the virtual reality module. The system is then further improved by the means
of three experimental in-vivo tests, namely Test A - Optimization of EMG-based hand gesture recognition: Supervised vs. unsupervised data preprocessing on healthy subjects and transradial amputees, Test B - Evaluating the influence of subject-related variables on EMG-based hand gesture classification and Test C - Tuning parameters and performance evaluation. The project has been funded by INAIL (Italian government agency for the insurance against work-related injuries) and can be considered a successful compromise between gesture/intention of movement classification accuracy and ease of use for both health professionals and amputees. To date, Test D - Therapy
effectiveness that will eventually shed some light on PROVIRT PLP suitability for PLP counteraction is ongoing, with promising partial results.
Part II - Pain Investigation: PUSH project has the aim to define objective measures
of pain, by means of robust and consistent patterns of noxious stimuli and innocuous
touch. The project wants to develop a device, able to allow for reliable non-invasive
investigation of the peripheral and central mechanisms related to the sense of pain, towards
the definition of biomarkers for its quantitative assessment. Since fMRI is the standard
tool in advanced brain research, PUSH is developed to be completely MR-compatible.
This part describes the idea of a pneumatic-driven system to elicit pain, the design and
implementation of the electronics, the characterization of the system and a fMRI in-vivo
experiment on an adult volunteer to validate it. The project can be considered as a
brand new interesting prototype for any kind of fMRI- and EEG-based work on painful
mechanical stimulation, and a technical paper that describes its details
Francesco Scorza Barcellona o della passione agiografica
No full textL'autrice traccia, sul filo dei ricordi, il profilo scientifico ed umano di Francesco Scorza Barcellona ed introduce gli studi raccolti nel volume.The author traces, on the thread of memories, the scientific and human profile of Francesco Scorza Barcelona and introduces the studies collected in the book
Delle lodi di don Francesco Medici de' principi di Toscana : orazione /
No full textEngraved t.p. vignette of Medici arms. On recto of 2nd leaf is Callot's full-page engraved port. of Francesco de' Medici, son of Grand Duke Ferdinand I. It is in Lieure's 1st state. The port. also appeared the same year in Alessandro Adimari's Esequie dell' ill.mo & ecc.mo principe don Francesco Medici (Florence : Gio. Donato & Bernardino Giunti); see Lieure. Large woodcut Giunti device on p. [31].Lieure, J. Jacques Callot,Mode of access: Internet.At head of front pastedown is bookplate of Francesco Riccardi de Vernaccia (Florence, ca. 1780; see Gelli, p. 387). Below it is the label of Horatius (Orazio) Landau, with stamped shelfmark 53021. At foot is the bookplate of U. Manganelli, signed with the initials SER. A dedicatory inscription at foot of t.p. has been scratched out.Binding: modern marbled paper, backed in green vellum. Date, author & title writte on spine.Port. trimmed into the image at right margin and foot
Frankenstein
No full text@inproceedings{orsini2015graph,
title={Graph invariant kernels},
author={Orsini, Francesco and Frasconi, Paolo and De Raedt, Luc},
booktitle={IJCAI Proceedings-International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. IJCAI},
year={2015}
Didattica e ricerca. L’esperienza del Laboratorio aragonese e sforzesco
No full textIn the workshop on Diplomatic correspondences in the Italian Renaissance, directed in January-May 2018 by Francesco Storti and Francesco Senatore in the Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici of Naples, 12 undergraduate and graduate students learned to read and trascribe italian diplomatic dispatches of the 15th cent., producing a specimen of scientific edition. In the opinion of the author, such activities and similar ones are very useful for future school teachers and scholars and they could be introduced in the university and pHD courses of history. Students of humanistic sciences should have concrete contacts with the historical research on primary sources. On the other hand, editing of historical sources could become a marginal activity because it is not enough appreciated in the current research evaluation processes.
Keywords: Didattica, edizione documentaria, diplomazia rinascimentale; education, documentary edition, renaissance diplomac
LA MADONNA ESTERHAZY DI RAFFAELLO
No full textLA MADONNA ESTERHÁZY DI RAFFAELLO A PALAZZO MARINO, di Francesco Murano,
Fotografie di Sergio Oriani
Il curatore della mostra, Stefano Zuffi, ha voluto inquadrare criticamente l’opera di Raffaello
proveniente dal Museo di Budapest, ponendola tra la Vergine delle Rocce di Francesco Melzi,
proveniente dall’Istituto delle Suore Orsoline di Milano e la Madonna della Rosa di Giovanni
Antonio Boltraffio, proveniente dal Museo Poldi Pezzoli della stessa città. L’architetto Corrado
Anselmi ha progettato un affascinante allestimento, concependolo come un percorso che si
sviluppa attraverso tre soste utili all’ammirazione delle opere. L’autore Francesco Murano,
spiega con ricchezza di particolari i vincoli del progetto illuminotecnico e le scelte luministiche.Once again, for the Christmas season, the Municipally of Milan decided to display an important work in the frame of the Palazzo Marino’s Alessi Hall. For this year 2014, the choice has been to propose the Estheràzy Madonna by Raphael, from the Museum of Budapest.
The exhibition curator, Stefano Zuffi, wanted to critically frame to work of Raphael by placing it between the Vegine delle Rocce (Virgin of the Rocks) by Francesco Melzi, coming from the Milan’s Istituto delle Suore Orsoline, and the Madonna della Rosa by Giovanni Boltraffio, from the Milanese Museo Poldi Pezzoli.
The Architect Corrado Anselmi designed a fascinating display, convinced as a path that develops through three stops that are useful for the enjoyment of the works.
The author Francesco Murano, explains with many details the lighting design project
Phantasy, Multiverse and Protopia: Ran Slavin's Israeli Futurism
No full textThe essay discusses Israeli artist Ran Slavin's transmedia production, since the 1990s, as a key example of Israeli Futurism. The essay contextualizes Slavin's films, multimedia installations, photography, soundscapes, CGI imagery, and tech-based output as a way to process the conflictual dynamics at the basis of the foundation of Israel, the mythologies of Judaism and the ongoing metamorphosis of Jewish identity. The author of this essay, Francesco Spampinato, is also the editor of this major retrospective monograph on Slavin's work
A paraconsistent and substructural conditional logic
No full textA logic is called 'paraconsistent' if it rejects the rule called 'ex contradictione quodlibet', according to which any conclusion follows from inconsistent premises. While logicians have proposed many technically developed paraconsistent logical systems and contemporary philosophers like Graham Priest have advanced the view that some contradictions can be true, and advocated a paraconsistent logic to deal with them, until recent times these systems have been little understood by philosophers. This book presents a comprehensive overview on paraconsistent logical systems to change this situation. The book includes almost every major author currently working in the field. The papers are on the cutting edge of the literature some of which discuss current debates and others present important new ideas. The editors have avoided papers about technical details of paraconsistent logic, but instead concentrated upon works that discuss more "big picture" ideas. Different treatments of paradoxes takes centre stage in many of the papers, but also there are several papers on how to interpret paraconistent logic and some on how it can be applied to philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and metaphysics
Comprendiendo el pensamiento de Francesco Tonucci… con Francesco Tonucci
No full textThis work analyzes the educational proposal of Francesco Tonucci with the author himself, based on a documentary review of his work and the content analysis of an interview- colloquium that was held in May 2024 at the Faculty of Education of the University of Santiago de Compostela, on the occasion of his appointment as Doctor Honoris Causa. An approach is made to her career and her thinking, organizing it around three topics: school, childhood free time and the City of Girls and Boys Project, her best-known pedagogical proposal.Este trabajo analiza la propuesta educativa de Francesco Tonucci con el propio autor, a partir de una revisión documental de su obra y del análisis de contenido de una entrevista-coloquio que se celebró en mayo de 2024 en la Facultad de Educación de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, con motivo de su nombramiento como Doctor Honoris Causa. Se realiza una aproximación a su trayectoria y a su pensamiento, organizándola en tono a tres tópicos: la escuela, el tiempo libre de la infancia y el Proyecto La Ciudad de las niñas y los niños, su propuesta pedagógica más conocida.Este trabajo analiza la propuesta educativa de Francesco Tonucci con el propio autor, a partir de una revisión documental de su obra y del análisis de contenido de una entrevista-coloquio que se celebró en mayo de 2024 en la Facultad de Educación de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, con motivo de su nombramiento como Doctor Honoris Causa.
Se realiza una aproximación a su trayectoria y a su pensamiento, organizándola en tono a tres tópicos: la escuela, el tiempo libre de la infancia y el Proyecto La Ciudad de las niñas y los niños, su propuesta pedagógica más conocida
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