We present a novel application of the Lattice Boltzmann Method to the study of pulsed reactive flows in transitional Knudsen number regimes, namely 0.1 < Kn < 1. We characterize the conversion efficiency of catalytic particles for different geometries and configurations, including single catalytic particle and nanoporous gold (npAu) spheres, within pulsed-flow reactors.

Interleukin-6 (IL-6) has been recently shown to play a central role in glucose homeostasis, since it stimulates the production and secretion of Glucagon-like Peptide-1 (GLP-1) from intestinal L-cells and pancreas, leading to an enhanced insulin response. In resting conditions, IL-6 is mainly produced by the adipose tissue whereas, during exercise, skeletal muscle contractions stimulate a marked IL-6 secretion as well. Available mathematical models describing the effects of exercise on glucose homeostasis, however, do not account for this IL-6 contribution.

Fever plays a role in activating innate immunity while its relevance in activating adaptive immunity is less clear. Even brief exposure to elevated temperatures significantly impacts on the immunostimulatory capacity of dendritic cells (DCs), but the consequences on immune response remain unclear. To address this issue, we analyzed the gene expression profiles of normal human monocyte-derived DCs from nine healthy adults subjected either to fever-like thermal conditions (39 degrees C) or to normal temperature (37 degrees C) for 180 minutes.

The present investigation focuses on the effects of the stern appendages and the propulsion system on the hydro-loads generated by the propeller during off-design conditions, with particular emphasis on the in-plane components. Recent experimental investigations carried out by free running model tests [7,8] and CFD analysis [5] for a modern twin screw model, highlighted that maneuvers at small drift angles and yaw rates might be as critical as the tighter ones due to complex propeller-wake interactions.

The self and cross diffusion action on the dynamic of the nonlinear continu- ous duopoly model introduced in [22], is investigated. Under Robin boundary conditions the longtime behavior and the linear and nonlinear stability of the steady states, are studied. The self and cross diffusion parameters guaran- teeing the spreading of the firms outputs, are characterized.

The paper presents a method for color quantization (CQ) which uses visual contrast for determining an image-dependent color palette. The proposed method selects image regions in a hierarchical way, according to the visual importance of their colors with respect to the whole image. The method is automatic, image dependent and requires a moderate computational effort. Preliminary results show that the quality of quantized images, measured in terms of Mean Square Error, Color Loss and SSIM, is competitive with some existing CQ approaches.

This paper focuses on an entropy based formalism to speed up the evaluation of the Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) index in images affected by a global distortion. Looking at images as information sources, a visual distortion typical set can be defined for SSIM. This typical set consists of just a subset of information belonging to the original image and the corresponding one in the distorted version. As side effect, some general theoretical criteria for the computation of any full reference quality assessment measure can be given in order to maximize its computational efficiency.

The large amount of work on community detection and its applications leaves unaddressed one important question: the statistical validation of the results. A methodology is presented that is able to clearly detect if the community structure found by some algorithms is statistically significant or is a result of chance, merely due to edge positions in the network. Given a community detection method and a network of interest, the proposal examines the stability of the partition recovered against random perturbations of the original graph structure.

This paper aims at increasing the visual quality of a blurred image according to the contrast sensitivity of a human observer. The main idea is to enhance those image details which can be perceived by a human observer without introducing annoying visible artifacts. To this aim, an adaptive wavelet decomposition is applied to the original blurry image. This decomposition splits the frequency axis into subbands whose central frequency and amplitude width are built according to the contrast sensitivity.

The paper proposes a decision support system (DSS) for the supply chain of packaged fresh and highly perishable products. The DSS combines a unique tool for sales forecasting with order planning which includes an individual model selection system equipped with ARIMA, ARIMAX and transfer function forecasting model families, the latter two accounting for the impact of prices. Forecasting model parameters are chosen via two alternative tuning algorithms: a two-step statistical analysis, and a sequential parameter optimisation framework for automatic parameter tuning.