37 research outputs found
Esmail Khois Rueckkehr nach Borgio Verezzi. [Esmail Khois' Return to Borgio Verezzi]
No full textEsmail Khoi’s poem Return to Borgio Verezzi (written in March 1983 and first published in 1984) belongs to the key texts of post-revolution Persian exile literature. Esmail Khoi is one of the leading voices of Persian poetry in the second half of the 20th century. His literary works since the beginning of his exile in London in 1982 include more than 20 books of poetry, translations of classical Persian literature (particularly the 14th century satirical poet Obey-e Zakani of Shiraz) into English and numerous articles and contributions to Iranian press in exile. Khoi was a founding member of the Iranian Writers’ Association and the Iranian PEN Center in exile. In 1989, after the annoncement of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa (death sentence) against the British author Salman Rushdie, Khoi was among the founding members of the international committee for the defence of Salman Rushdie. Return to Borgio Verezzi is a long narrative poem which reflects many key aspects and features of Khoi’s work and personality as a modern poet with strong ties to the tradition of classical Persian poetry and as a politically and socially engaged exile. My paper consists of an introductory essay about the poem. Initially it uses the methodology of “explication de texte” with a text immanent approach. In the further development of the essay the historical and intertextual references to the poetry of Hafis, Forugh Farrokhzad and Nasser-e Khosro are also discussed. The essay is followed by my translation of the poem into German. The booklet is accompanied by an audio CD with an original recoding of Esmail Khoi reading his poem in Persian. Literary critics generally consider Esmail Khoi as one of the best voices to recite poetry by himself and also by other classical and modern Persian poets
La Grotta Mandurea a Borgio Verezzi (SV) tra ricerca e tutela
No full textThe Mandurea Cave at Borgio Verezzi (SV) between research and protection. Mandurea is a small cave located in the immediate inland of the town of Borgio, in Western Liguria. Discovered by chance at the beginning of the last century, the site was investigated in the 1930s by P. Barocelli and A. Mochi. During these surveys, human remains and some prehistoric potsherds were collected on the surface of the cave floor. In 1964, the excavation of a trench revealed that the archaeological deposit was still preserved in a large part of the cave. This excavation also unearthed artefacts related to major cultural horizons of the Neolithic of Liguria. More recently, after more than fifty years from the latest investigations
in the site, Mandurea has once again attracted the attention of the archaeologists. In 2018, the Superintendence indeed issued a specific act for the preservation of the site. At the same time, a systematic revision of the stratigraphic context and the bioarchaeological materials from the past excavations has been carried out. This revision especially focused on the
study of the techno-typological aspects of pottery, the analysis of human remains, and radiocarbon dating of human bones. The results of these studies contributed to specify the chrono-cultural framework and the nature of the different phases of occupation of the site. They also confirmed the remarkable potential of the cave deposit for the understanding of peopling dynamics, techno-economic systems and forms of land management in western Liguria during prehistoric times
A multiprocessor self-reconfigurable jpeg2000 encoder
No full textThis paper presents a multiprocessor architecture prototype on a field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) with support for hardware and software multithreading. Thanks to partial dynamic reconfiguration, this system can, at run time, spawn both software and hardware threads, sharing not only the general purpose soft-cores present in the architecture but also area on the FPGA. While on a standard single processor architecture the partial dynamic reconfiguration requires the processor to stop working to instantiate the hardware threads, the proposed solution hides most of the reconfiguration latency through the parallel execution of software threads. We validate our framework on a JPEG 2000 encoder, showing how threads are spawned, executed and joined independently of their hardware or software nature. We also show results confirming that, by using the proposed approach, we are able to hide the reconfiguration time
Hardware DWT accelerator for MultiProcessor System On-Chip on FPGA
No full textHigh performance multimedia applications are typical targets of today embedded systems. These applications, complex both in terms of execution flow and amount of elaborated data, can be well addressed by multiprocessor systems on-chip (MPSoCs). MPSoCs are composed of simple processors and memories tightly interconnected with fast communication channels and customized IP cores for the most demanding functions can be implemented and attached to these systems to enhance performance even more. Reconfigurable devices like FPGA, can act as a target, even programmed at runtime, for the custom IP cores, or as a prototyping platform for the whole system. Image compression like JPEG2000, can benefit very much from this approach and this type of architectures. This paper shows how the most demanding task of the JPEG2000 compression algorithm, the two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform, can be hardware accelerated and implemented in a multiprocessor system-on-chip prototyping platform on field programmable gate array (FPGA), CerberO. Architectures with different number of processors and hardware accelerators, shared among the processors or dedicated, have been implemented. To validate the approach, we show some experimental results on the platform with the hardware and the software implementation of the transformatio
Evaluation of vascular grafts based on polyvinyl alcohol cryogels
No full textThe present study designed and developed blood vessel substitutes (BVSs) composed of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) cryogels. The in vitro results demonstrated that the coating of the polymer with lyophilized decellularized vascular matrix (DVM) greatly enhanced the adhesion of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). However, when PVA̸DVM BVSs were implanted into the abdominal aorta of Sprague‐Dawley rats, DVM was identified as a highly thrombogenic surface resulting in the mortality of all animals 3‐4 days after surgery. By contrast, all rats implanted with PVA survived and were sacrificed after 12 months. The luminal surface of the explanted grafts was completely covered by endothelial cells and the inner diameter was similar to that of the original vessel. In conclusion, the present study indicated that PVA may be considered as a promising biomaterial for the fabrication of artificial vessels
An evaluation of the composition and production processes of Chinese "Robin's Egg" glazes
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Exopolysaccharide production by Bacillus subtilis NCIM 2063, Pseudomonas aeruginosa NCIM 2862 and Streptococcus mutans MTCC 1943 using batch culture in different media
No full textThree bacterial strains, Bacillus subtilis NCIM 2063, Pseudomonas aeruginosa NCIM 2862 and Streptococcus mutans MTCC 1943 were examined for their exopolysaccharide (EPS) producing ability at the laboratory level. Basal salts solution (BSS), minimal salts medium (MSM), nitrogen free medium (NFM), chemically defined medium (CDM), milk medium (MLM) and sewage from different areas were used as nutrient source individually to assess EPS production by the above mentioned bacterial strains. Nitrogen free medium favoured more EPS production (Mean: 217.13, minimum: 206.000 and Maximum: 226.000). The highest EPS production was recorded in P. aeruginosa (226 ìg ml-1) grown in nitrogen free medium followed by S. mutans and B. subtilis (220 and 206 ìg ml-1 respectively) in nitrogen free medium after 7 days of incubation at 37°C. Analysis of carbon source in sewage samples indicated the presence of reducing monosaccharides. The purified EPS was soluble only in water and was free from protein contaminants
Partially oxidized polyvinyl alcohol as a promising material for tissue engineering.
No full textThe desired clinical outcome after implantation of engineered tissue substitutes depends strictly on the development of biodegradable scaffolds. In this study we fabricated 1% and 2% oxidized polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) hydrogels, which were considered for the first time for tissue-engineering applications. The final aim was to promote the protein release capacity and biodegradation rate of the resulting scaffolds in comparison with neat PVA. After physical crosslinking, characterization of specific properties of 1% and 2% oxidized PVA was performed. We demonstrated that mechanical properties, hydrodynamic radius of molecules, thermal characteristics and degree of crystallinity were inversely proportional to the PVA oxidation rate. On the other hand, swelling behaviour and protein release were enhanced, confirming the potential of oxidized PVA as a protein delivery system, besides being highly biodegradable. Twelve weeks after in vivo implantation in mice, the modified hydrogels did not elicit severe inflammatory reactions, showing them to be biocompatible and to degrade faster as the degree of oxidation increased. According to our results, oxidized PVA stands out as a novel biomaterial for tissue engineering that can be used to realize scaffolds with customizable mechanical behaviour, protein-loading ability and biodegradability
Antibacterial activity of Rhynocoris marginatus (Fab.) and Catamirus brevipennis (Servile) (Hemiptera: reduviidae) venomS against human pathogens
No full textThe reduviid predators Rhynocoris marginatus (Fab.) and Catamirus brevipennis (Servile) use their venoms to paralyze their preys. We detected the antibacterial activity of R. marginatus and C. brevipennis venoms against seven Gram-negative and four Gram-positive bacteria by using the disc diffusion method. Rhynocoris marginatus venom exhibited antibacterial activity against four Gram-negative bacteria (Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Proteus vulgaris, Salmonella typhimurium) and one Gram-positive (Streptococcus pyogenes). Catamirus brevipennis venom showed antibacterial activity against six Gram-negative (Escherichia coli, Proteus mirabilis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Proteus vulgaris, and Salmonella typhimurium) and three Gram-positive (Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus aureus, and Bacillus sphaericus) bacteria. Both C. brevipennis (90.91%) and R. marginatus (45.45%) venoms were more effective against Gram-negative bacteria (80% and 70% for R. marginatus and C. brevipennis, respectively). The venoms of both reduviid predators are composed of low molecular weight proteins (7-33 kD)
