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Introduction:Brazil has 200 million descendants of African, Portuguese, Indigenous, German, Italian, and other peoples who have built their identities. The Federal Constitution was rewritten in 1988 to include a Social Protection System. Between 2000 and 2016, the federal government was governed by the Workers’ Party. This party invested in the creation of inclusive public policies and affirmative actions built through collective processes of citizenship that guaranteed better living conditions for the population. In one decade, it went from being underdeveloped to developing. In 2016, the elected president of the Workers’ Party was withdrawn from power through impeachment. In the next election, right-wing conservatives excluded speech, attacked minorities (e.g. LGBT population), and defended the traditional family.Aim:To understand the retreat of Brazilian public policies in a country that set public social policies, compensatory policies, and affirmative actions guaranteeing citizenship of men and women.Methods:Qualitative research with analysis and reflection on the regression of universalist public policies and affirmative policies with the creation of quotas.Results:The creation of affirmative actions was guaranteed. Vacancies in public tenders for the black population led to the establishment of 50% quotas for blacks in universities, and the creation of a universal health system, or universal expanded health indicators. The federal government created a group of SUS analysis by reducing actions.Discussion:Social inequality in Brazil is one of the worst in the world. 16 million people live below the poverty line (OXFAM, 2017). In recent decades, the population that was expanding and strengthening access to services, health, education, and social assistance network has seen a reduction of public policies. The importance of research that points to this reduction of rights is fundamental for documenting what has already been achieved.

In the healthcare environment, nowadays, only a few among the available evaluation systems pay enough attention to certain social sustainability aspects. Among these, humanization plays a key role in an environment, like hospitals, where the mental and physical well-being of patients and healthcare operators is crucial. Our research project, known as 'SustHealth', is focused on the deficiencies of the evaluation methodology and aims at developing an assessment system related to a questionnaire-based investigation capable of revealing the most influential conditions and dynamics in people's hospital experience, while also recommending areas in hospitals where efforts can be made to sustain improvement strategies.The humanization of healthcare structures began with a significant investigation to assess all the major evaluation tools in both hospitals - to better understand the physical and emotional interactions in the structure-user ratio - and other areas. This helped understand the strengths and criticalities of the systems that were examined. This first step also allowed to shed light on the most important aspects to keep in mind when developing an evaluation system. During the operational steps an all-new LpCp - tool (Listening to people to Cure people) was created, which includes a questionnaire-based investigation and processing software, and its application for beta-testing in a 600-bed hospital in Milan.The LpCp - tool proved to be effective and capable of finding the deficiencies and potential in the examined hospital. Considering different themes through alternative viewpoints (staff, patients/visitors, technicians, etc.), the tool has allowed underlining different perceptions of the same place and also provided sound information to guide healthcare management in taking informed decisions about specific problems or users. Former interesting results show an inadequate appraisal about e.g. on-site facilities or recreational activities and a lack of perception on existing services by users (e.g. translation, P.R.).The LpCp - tool was presented to other healthcare centres in Milan for wider-scale testing. Therefore, the LpCp - tool will hopefully increase healthcare companies' responsiveness towards improving comfort and humanization levels in hospitals. Sometimes all that is needed are small and inexpensive actions that often improve a hospital user's experience, and often important services are not used due to a lack of communication and information.

The physics case and an experimental overview of the MOLLER (Measurement Of a Lepton Lepton Electroweak Reaction) experiment at the 12 GeV upgraded Jefferson Lab are presented. A highlight of the Fundamental Symmetries subfield of the 2007 NSAC Long Range Plan was the SLAC E158 measurement of the parity-violating asymmetry $A_{PV}$ in polarized electron-electron (M��ller) scattering. The proposed MOLLER experiment will improve on this result by a factor of five, yielding the most precise measurement of the weak mixing angle at low or high energy anticipated over the next decade. This new result would be sensitive to the interference of the electromagnetic amplitude with new neutral current amplitudes as weak as $\sim 10^{-3}\cdot G_F$ from as yet undiscovered dynamics beyond the Standard Model. The resulting discovery reach is unmatched by any proposed experiment measuring a flavor- and CP-conserving process over the next decade, and yields a unique window to new physics at MeV and multi-TeV scales, complementary to direct searches at high energy colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The experiment takes advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the upgraded electron beam energy, luminosity, and stability at Jefferson Laboratory and the extensive experience accumulated in the community after a round of recent successfully completed parity-violating electron scattering experiments

The content of mannitol and malate was assayed enzimatically during spring, summer and autumn, in leaves of two species of ash traditionally cultivated in Sicily for the extraction of manna. The results suggest that in these species, under the local field conditions, mannitol has a more relevant role than malate in the response to summer drought.

Si riferisce su una ricerca biennale condotta in un actinidieto della Campania per conoscere l'effettivo ruolo delle api nella impollinazione dei fiori delle cultivar Bruno e Hayward. Dalle prove è emersa una limitatissima presenza di pronubi, comprese le api, per tutto il periodo dell'antesi. È stato inoltre messo in evidenza che, malgrado la pratica della guida delle api all'impollinazione, l'apporto del loro intervento sulla fruttificazione delle piante è stato piuttosto scarso.

Astroparticle physics is undergoing a profound transformation, due to a series of extraordinary new results, such as the discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos with IceCube, the direct detection of gravitational waves with LIGO and Virgo, and many others. This white paper is the result of a collaborative effort that involved hundreds of theoretical astroparticle physicists and cosmologists, under the coordination of the European Consortium for Astroparticle Theory (EuCAPT). Addressed to the whole astroparticle physics community, it explores upcoming theoretical opportunities and challenges for our field of research, with particular emphasis on the possible synergies among different subfields, and the prospects for solving the most fundamental open questions with multi-messenger observations., Comment: White paper of the European Consortium for Astroparticle Theory (EuCAPT). 135 authors, 400 endorsers, 133 pages, 1382 references

Conventional breeding of fruit trees is a slow process due to their long generation time as well as high degree of heterozygosis of these species. Biotechnology techniques and in vitro tissue culture, which includes genetic transformation, are considered promising for the improvement of these species. An efficient protocol for regeneration of whole plants is a prerequisite for the development of an efficient Agrobacterium-mediated transformation system. The objective of this paper was to develop a protocol for plant regeneration of Diospyros kaki Thunb. cv. ‘Rojo Brillante’ via organogenesis from leaf explants. Combined phytohormones and dosage were evaluated for regeneration. The best regeneration efficiencies (29.2%) were obtained with 9 mg/L zeatin in combination with 0.1 mg/L naphtalenacetic acid. The cultures were maintained in the dark for 20 days followed by incubation under photoperiod conditions. Shoots were micrografted in vitro onto seedling rootstocks. The rootstocks came from Diospyros virginiana L. seedlings; they were micrografted after 6 to 8 days after germination.

SUMMARYWithin the chromatin, distal elements interact with promoters to regulate specific transcriptional programs. Histone acetylation, interfering with the net charges of the nucleosomes, is a key player in this regulation. Here, we report that the onco-protein SET is a critical determinant for the levels of histone acetylation within enhancers. We disclose that conditions in which SET is accumulated, including the severe Schinzel-Giedion Syndrome (SGS), are characterized by a failure in the usage of the distal regulatory regions typically employed during fate commitment. This is accompanied by the usage of alternative enhancers leading to a massive rewiring of the distal control of the gene transcription. This represents a (mal)adaptive mechanism that, on one side, allows to achieve a certain degree of differentiation, while on the other affects the fine and corrected maturation of the cells. Thus, we propose the differential in cis-regulation as a contributing factor to the pathological basis of the SET-related disorders in humans, including SGS, neurodevelopmental disorders, myeloproliferative diseases, and cancer.

Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), like Blockchain, are characterized by features such as transparency, traceability, and security by design. These features make the adoption of Blockchain attractive to enhance information security, privacy, and trustworthiness in very different contexts. This paper provides a comprehensive survey and aims at analyzing and assessing the use of Blockchain in the context of Distributed Trust and Reputation Management Systems (DTRMS). The analysis includes academic research as well as initiatives undertaken in the business domain. The paper defines two taxonomies for both Blockchain and DTRMS and applies a Formal Concept Analysis. Such an approach allowed us to identify the most recurrent and stable features in the current scientific landscape and several important implications among the two taxonomies. The results of the analysis have revealed significant trends and emerging practices in the current implementations that have been distilled into recommendations to guide Blockchain's adoption in DTRMS systems.

As explainability seems to be the driver for a wiser adoption of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare and in critical applications, in general, a comprehensive study of this field is far from being completed. On one hand, a final definition and theoretical measurements of explainability have not been assessed, yet, on the other hand, some tools and frameworks for the practical evaluation of this feature are now present. This paper aims to present a concrete experience in using some of these explainability-related techniques in the problem of predicting the size of amino acids in real-world protein structures. In particular, the feature importance calculation embedded in Random Forest (RF) training is compared with the results of the Eli-5 tool applied to the Neural Network (NN) model. Both the predictors are trained on the same dataset, which is extracted from Protein Data Bank (PDB), considering 446 myoglobins structures and process it with several tools to implement a geometrical model and perform analyses on it. The comparison between the two models draws different conclusions about the residues’ geometry and their biological properties.

There is a general lack of trust in existing Services’ descriptions and directories, and public repositories and aggregators of such Services are currently missing. Frequent variations in exposed interfaces and lack of proper descriptions hinder interoperability and portability of applications. The present work aims at entrusting the current Cloud Service domain designing a semantic aware-Marketplace relying on the Blockchain to support the secure composition of different Services.

This work aims at investigating and quantifying the Urban Transport System (UTS) resilience enhancement enabled by the adoption of emerging technology such as Internet of Everything (IoE) and the new trend of the Connected Community (CC). A conceptual extension of Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) and its formalization have been proposed and used to model UTS complexity. The scope is to identify the system functions and their interdependencies with a particular focus on those that have a relation and impact on people and communities. Network analysis techniques have been applied to the FRAM model to identify and estimate the most critical community-related functions. The notion of Variability Rate (VR) has been defined as the amount of output variability generated by an upstream function that can be tolerated/absorbed by a downstream function, without significantly increasing of its subsequent output variability. A fuzzy-based quantification of the VR based on expert judgment has been developed when quantitative data are not available. Our approach has been applied to a critical scenario as flash flooding considering two cases: when UTS has CC and IoE implemented or not. However, the method can be applied in different scenarios and critical infrastructures. The results show a remarkable VR enhancement if CC and IoE are deployed.

The growing availability of data over the last decades has given rise to a number of successful technologies, ranging from data collection and storage infrastructures to hardware and software tools for efficient computation of analytics. This context, in principle, places a great demand on data quality. As a matter of fact, experience has shown that the open Web and other platforms hosting user-generated content or real-time data can provide little quality control at content production time. To address these challenges, our aim is to provide a general and configurable model for assessing data quality supporting task composition. In particular, we introduce a model characterized along the notion of matching, illustrating the issues that can be addressed by this approach with a concrete case study. We also identify and discuss challenges to be addressed in future research to strengthen this idea.

The article proposes a new vision for the smart city operation center combining blockchain and virtual reality. The objective is to achieve high synchronization among the different operators, an enhanced operator performance and the creation of a trustworthy communication layer to record all the decisions taken in the virtual environment and to share data among the operators securely.

In the present work, we investigated the response to Cd in Leptodictyum riparium, a cosmopolitan moss (Bryophyta) that can accumulate higher amounts of metals than other plants, even angiosperms, with absence or slight apparent damage. High-performance liquid chromatography followed by electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry of extracts from L. riparium gametophytes, exposed to 0, 36 and 360 &micro, M Cd for 7 days, revealed the presence of &gamma, glutamylcysteine (&gamma, EC), reduced glutathione (GSH), and traces of phytochelatins. The increase in Cd concentrations progressively augmented reactive oxygen species levels, with activation of both antioxidant (catalase and superoxide dismutase) and detoxifying (glutathione-S-transferase) enzymes. After Cd treatment, cytosolic and vacuolar localization of thiol peptides was performed by means of the fluorescent dye monochlorobimane and subsequent observation with confocal laser scanning microscopy. The cytosolic fluorescence observed with the highest Cd concentrations was also consistent with the formation of &gamma, EC-bimane in the cytosol, possibly catalyzed by the peptidase activity of the L. riparium phytochelatin synthase. On the whole, activation of phytochelatin synthase and glutathione-S-transferase, but minimally phytochelatin synthesis, play a role to counteract Cd toxicity in L. riparium, in this manner minimizing the cellular damage caused by the metal. This study strengthens previous investigations on the L. riparium ability to efficiently hinder metal pollution, hinting at a potential use for biomonitoring and phytoremediation purposes.

We present a self-organised method for quickly obtaining the epidemic threshold of infective processes on networks. Starting from simple percolation models, we introduce the possibility that the effective infection probability is affected by the perception of the risk of being infected, given by the fraction of infected neighbours. We then extend the model to multiplex networks considering that agents (computer) can be infected by contacts on the physical network, while the information about the infection level may come from a partially different network. Finally, we consider more complex infection processes, with non-linear interactions among agents.

The capability to be resilient in the face of crises and disasters is a topic of highest political concern in Europe especially as far as critical infrastructures and urban environments are concerned. Critical infrastructures are systems or part of systems essential for the maintenance of vital societal functions, the disruption or destruction of which would have a significant impact on the well-being of people. Examples of them are transportation services, energy infrastructures, water and wastewater systems, health and emergency services, financial services, communication infrastructures, etc. The symposium focuses on the experience of four different projects funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme: DARWIN, RESILIENS, RESOLUTE, SMR. The projects are all dealing with the application of resilience engineering, community resilience and urban resilience concepts to concrete examples of crises and situations of emergency. Such principles are translated into guidelines covering different resilience abilities that the organizations managing critical infrastructure should possess.

Generic standards on risk management and functional safety (e.g. ISO 31000 and IEC 61508) and similar frameworks proved to be surprisingly efficient to trigger and consolidate a widely accepted and ever more effective best practice frontier for risk control. In particular, this includes fundamental and applied research activities to improve processes and to provide more advanced, interlinked and effective methods for risk control. However, this also included the identification of yet unresolved challenges and lacks of completeness. The present work goes beyond these frameworks to address the need for a joint approach to frame resilience management and quantification for system development and improvement. It is understood as extending classical risk control to creeping or sudden disruptive, unexpected (unexampled) events, as strongly focusing on technical systems and organizational capabilities to bounce back (better) and as providing generic (technical) resilience capabilities for such resilience response performance. To this end, the article presents general resilience requirements, a resilience management process, which systematically refers to a resilience method taxonomy, resilience levels as well as an applicability table of methods to different resilience management steps for each resilience level. Three case studies elucidate the approach: (i) disruption effect simulation for the Swiss energy grid, (ii) data-driven resilience of the urban transport system of Florence, and (iii) Ontario provincial resilience model in Canada. The approach comprises representative existing resilience concepts, definitions, quantifications as well as resilience generation and development processes. It supports the development of further refined resilience management and quantification processes and related improved methods in particular to cover jointly safety and security needs as well as their practical application to a wide range of socio-technical cyber-physical hybrid systems. This will foster credible certification of the resilience of critical infrastructure, of safety and security critical systems and devices.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a remarkable data producer and these data may be used to prevent or detect security vulnerabilities and increase productivity by the adoption of statistical and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. However, these desirable benefits are gained if data from IoT networks are dependable&mdash, this is where blockchain comes into play. In fact, through blockchain, critical IoT data may be trusted, i.e., considered valid for any subsequent processing. A simple formal model named &ldquo, the Mirror Model&rdquo, is proposed to connect IoT data organized in traditional models to assets of trust in a blockchain. The Mirror Model sets some formal conditions to produce trusted data that remain trusted over time. A possible practical implementation of an application programming interface (API) is proposed, which keeps the data and the trust model in synch. Finally, it is noted that the Mirror Model enforces a top-down approach from reality to implementation instead of going the opposite way as it is now the practice when referring to blockchain and the IoT.

In the recent past years, interest in the environmental impact of organotin(IV) compounds has risen markedly. Considering that most data in the scientific literature refers to the animal kingdom and not to higher plants cells, we tested the effects of organotin compounds on vascular plant cells, by studying the interaction of tributyltin chloride (TBTCl) with Allium cepa, Solanun tuberosum and Solanum melongena, vascular plants that are directly involved in the human food chain. The TBTCl effects on mitotic metaphase plates, on pollen grains and on both microtubers and adult tuber parenchymatic cells were investigated and the concentrations of TBTCl inside the treated parenchymatic cells were determined through ICP-mass spectrometry. Oxygen and chlorophyll productions were also determined. The obtained results showed that TBTCl influenced not only morphology, but also the physiology of the vegetable cells since, despite the low concentrations used, the stress the cells were submitted to was experimentally confirmed. Moreover, the increase in the tin concentration in the cells, with increasing incubation time, showed that TBTCl possesses a very high capacity to be bioaccumulated and, as a consequence, it is able to enter the food chain. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Increasing resilience to critical events is a topic of highest political concern in the EU. Regarding the case of transport systems, operations have developed a prominent safety and business critical nature, in view of which current practices have shown evidence of important limitations in terms of resilience management. Enhancing resilience in transport systems is considered imperative for two main reasons: such systems provide critical support to every socio-economic activity and are currently themselves one of the most important economic sectors and secondly, the paths that convey people, goods and information, are the same through which risks are propagated.

In this paper, we propose a semantic web based solution to implement the Interoperability Framework (IF) for Persistent Identifiers (PI) developed within the context of APARSEN EU project. The IF provides a comprehensive, semantics-aware solution for interoperability of heterogeneous Persistent Identifier systems. Such a solution aims to provide added-value services built on an Interoperability Knowledge Base. The IF ontology refinement and the related prototype specifics have been designed adopting a bottom-up approach that starts from a) the analysis of metadata provided by Content Providers and b) the collection of functional and semantic requirements of Persistent Identifier Domains (PID to fostering ontology-based metadata translation among different bodies. Conclusions and intended future work close the paper.