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The contemporary cultural scenario is called upon to face challenges deriving from the intersection between social and technological variables, and to develop new strategic trajectories capable of stimulating the interest and involvement of a new audience of digital natives. If assisted with effective marketing strategies, metaverse and virtual platforms can become a fundamental strategic tool for cultural players to build a lasting and solid relationship with their reference stakeholders and with a new target audience. This chapter analyses the role that digital and immersive technologies can have in increasing participation and engagement of young adult customers.

Discute-se, há muito, a necessidade de uma alteração substancial no Sistema Tributário Nacional. Dentre as propostas de reforma, destaca-se a instituição de um imposto único sobre o consumo nos moldes de um imposto sobre o valor agregado (IVA), à qual parte da doutrina resiste, em virtude da crença de que tal medida violaria o pacto federativo ao promover uma concentração da competência tributária, o que reduziria a autonomia dos entes da Federação. Neste artigo, pretende-se demonstrar que, ao contrário, a adoção de um IVA, a depender do desenho a ele conferido pelo legislador, pode fortalecer a autonomia financeira dos entes federativos, tendo em vista o cenário atual de práticas excessivas de renúncia fiscal, oportunizado pelo amplo poder de não tributar. Emprega-se uma metodologia crítico-dialética, com amparo em pesquisas de ordem qualitativa e quantitativa, com consulta a material bibliográfico e a dados disponibilizados online por instituições públicas. Among the proposals for a reform of the national tax, those that aim to establish a single tax with the features of a value-added tax (VAT), in substitution of the various taxes on consumption, are noteworthy. Part of the doctrine understands that such a measure would be incompatible with fiscal federalism, since it would reduce the tax jurisdiction of the States, Federal District and Municipalities. This paper aims to demonstrate that, on the contrary, the adoption of a VAT, depending on its shape given by the lawmaker, could strengthen the financial autonomy of the federative entities, given the current scenario of excessive tax breaks, made possible by the large power to not tax. It is employed a critical-dialectic methodology, based on the results of qualitative and quantitative research, with reference to bibliographic materials and data made available online by public institutions.

Despite the commercial success of high pressure processing (HPP) in the juice industry, some regulatory agencies still require process validation. However, there is a lack of consensus on various aspects regarding validation protocols, including the selection of representative strains to be used in challenge tests. This study characterized the variable response of Escherichia coli O157:H7 (34 strains), Listeria monocytogenes (44 strains) and Salmonella enterica (45 strains) to HPP, and identified potential candidates to use in process validation. Stationary phase cells were submitted to 500 MPa for 1 min at 10 °C in model solutions consisting of tryptic soy broth + 0.6% yeast extract (TSBYE) adjusted to pH 4.5 and 6.0 with citric acid. At pH 6.0, pressure resistance widely varied between species and within strains of the same species. E. coli O157:H7 and L. monocytogenes were the most pressure resistant and showed high variability at strain level, as the total count range given by minimum and maximum counts spread between 2.0 and 6.5 log10 CFU/ml. S. enterica was the least resistant pathogen with more than 82% of the isolates displaying non-detectable counts after HPP. Recovery through storage at 12 °C was also variable for all pathogens, but eventually most strains recovered with median counts on day 14 between 8.3 and 8.9 log10 CFU/ml. For pH 4.5 solutions, 26 E. coli O157:H7 strains displayed survivors after HPP but did not adapt, registering non-detectable counts in the next sampling dates. None of the L. monocytogenes and S. enterica strains survived HPP or incubation at pH 4.5 (

Background There are approximately 1,000,000 pregnant women at high risk for obstetric complications per year, more than half of whom require hospitalization. Objective The aim of this study was to determine the relation between online health information seeking and anxiety levels in a sample of hospitalized woman with pregnancy-related complications. Methods A sample of 105 pregnant women hospitalized in northern Italy, all with an obstetric complication diagnosis, completed different questionnaires: Use of Internet Health-information (UIH) questionnaire about use of the internet, EuroQOL 5 dimensions (EQ-5D) questionnaire on quality of life, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) questionnaire measuring general anxiety levels, and a questionnaire about critical events occurring during hospitalization. Results Overall, 98/105 (93.3%) of the women used the internet at home to obtain nonspecific information about health in general and 95/105 (90.5%) of the women used the internet to specifically search for information related to their obstetric disease. Online health information-seeking behavior substantially decreased the self-reported anxiety levels (P=.008). Conclusions Web browsing for health information was associated with anxiety reduction, suggesting that the internet can be a useful instrument in supporting professional intervention to control and possibly reduce discomfort and anxiety for women during complicated pregnancies.

BACKGROUND There are approximately 1,000,000 pregnant women at high risk for obstetric complications per year, more than half of whom require hospitalization. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine the relation between online health information seeking and anxiety levels in a sample of hospitalized woman with pregnancy-related complications. METHODS A sample of 105 pregnant women hospitalized in northern Italy, all with an obstetric complication diagnosis, completed different questionnaires: Use of Internet Health-information (UIH) questionnaire about use of the internet, EuroQOL 5 dimensions (EQ-5D) questionnaire on quality of life, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) questionnaire measuring general anxiety levels, and a questionnaire about critical events occurring during hospitalization. RESULTS Overall, 98/105 (93.3%) of the women used the internet at home to obtain nonspecific information about health in general and 95/105 (90.5%) of the women used the internet to specifically search for information related to their obstetric disease. Online health information-seeking behavior substantially decreased the self-reported anxiety levels (P=.008). CONCLUSIONS Web browsing for health information was associated with anxiety reduction, suggesting that the internet can be a useful instrument in supporting professional intervention to control and possibly reduce discomfort and anxiety for women during complicated pregnancies.

This paper aims to expose the reasons why private acquisition of artworks should be considered duty-free in relation to the import duty, which is a non-fiscal tax. In fact, its main goal is to promote the balance between inner and external markets. Given the definition of art as a sui generis merchandise, it is pointed that no artwork can be similar to another; therefore, the charge of import duty is improper in this case, once foreign art objects do not compete with any other national product. Moreover, its cultural value would require the promotion of its entrance in the country, even though it is due to a private purchase, considering that it is able to stimulate enrichment of the national artistic patrimony and foments a higher development of the Brazilian artwork market. It was employed a critical-dialectical methodology, with the using of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, by the analysis of national and foreign legislations and the assessment of data and concepts extracted from bibliographic materials. Este trabalho objetiva expor as razões para a concessão de isenção total do imposto sobre a importação de obras de arte adquiridas por particulares. O mencionado tributo possui caráter eminentemente extrafiscal, sendo sua função precípua a promoção do equilíbrio entre os mercados interno e externo. A partir da definição de arte como mercadoria sui generis, evidencia-se a inexistência de similaridade entre objetos artísticos, pelo que se demonstra a impropriedade da cobrança do referido imposto aduaneiro sobre a entrada definitiva de obras de arte, as quais não competem com qualquer outro produto nacional. Ademais, o valor cultural dessa espécie de mercadoria exigiria o fomento ao seu ingresso no Brasil, ainda que ele se dê pela aquisição privada, com o intuito de enriquecer o patrimônio artístico nacional e promover o aquecimento do mercado nacional de arte. A metodologia adotada é crítico-dialética, com abordagens quantitativa e qualitativa, por meio da análise das legislações pátria e alienígena e do exame de dados e conceitos extraídos de material bibliográfico.

This paper extends a previous work done by the same authors [1] having the aim of improving the predictions coming from a matrix factorization based on latent factor models through an ensemble with the predictions obtained by an Opinion Mining methodology based on a linguistic approach. The experimental analysis was carried out on the Yelp business dataset, limited to the Restaurant category. An hypothesis of influence of the restaurant average rating on the number of stars given by the users is tested. An analysis of the meaning of some of the latent factors is shown.

An integration of an Opinion Mining approach with a Collaborative Filtering algorithm has been applied to the Yelp dataset to improve the predictions through the information provided by the user-generated textual reviews. The research, still in progress, based the Opinion Mining approach on the syntactic analysis of textual reviews and on a beginning polarity evaluation of the sentences. The predictions produced in this way was blended with the predictions coming from a Biased Matrix Factorization algorithm obtaining interesting results in terms of Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), with potential enhancements. We intend to improve these results in a further phase of activity by including in the Opinion Mining approach the semantic disambiguation and by using better criteria of evaluation of the reviews taking into account a set of 12 business aspects. The Opinion Mining approach will be evaluated comparing the output in terms of predictions with the values manually assigned by a small group of people to a sample of the same reviews.

In this work we present an overview of NotreDAM, an open source Digital Asset Management platform targeted to the mid-market segment. NotreDAM provides a web-based multi-user application environment for uploading, annotating, cataloguing, sharing, searching and retrieving digital resources such as videos, audios, images and documents. NotreDAM main advantages are: XMP metadata support, user-defined workspaces and catalogs, scalable processing of resources, a scripting engine extendible through plugins and a REST API for integration with third party applications. The demo will showcase the capabilities of the platform through a typical user session.

Recommender systems usually propose items to single users. However, in some domains like Mobile IPTV or Satellite Systems it might be impossible to generate a program schedule for each user, because of bandwidth limitations. A few approaches were proposed to generate group recommendations. However, these approaches take into account that groups of users already exist and no recommender system is able to detect intrinsic users communities. This paper describes an algorithm that detects groups of users whose preferences are similar and predicts recommendations for such groups. Groups of different granularities are generated through a modularity-based Community Detection algorithm, making it possible for a content provider to explore the trade off between the level of personalization of the recommendations and the number of channels. Experimental results show that the quality of group recommendations increases linearly with the number of groups created.

A research analysis on item-based algorithms for collaborative filtering is presented. The aim of the presented activity was to find a configuration of an item-based algorithm capable of providing good results but also independent from the data set. Four data sets were used for the algorithm validation: Netflix, MovieLens, BookCrossing, and Jester. The experimentation involved the following aspects: similarity computation, size of the neighbourhood, prediction computation, minimum number of co-rated items. Results were evaluated in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE). The result of the activity is an independent domain configuration for an item-based algorithm which produced satisfactory results with most of the above mentioned data sets.