Making available scientific information in the third millennium: perspectives for the neuroscientific community

The rules governing the globalised process of sharing scientific information in the research community are rapidly changing. From the 1950s, commercial publishers started owning a large number of scientific journals and consequently the marketable value of a submitted manuscript has become an increasingly important factor in publishing decisions. Recently some publishers have developed the Open Access (OA), a business scheme which may help stopping such tendency. Indeed, in the case of an open-access publication, the marketable value of a manuscript may be not the primary consideration, since access to the research is not being sold. This may push scientists to re-consider the purpose of peer reviewing. However, costs remain a key point in managing scientific journals because OA method does not eliminate peer review process. Thus, OA may not solve the problem of the market pressures on publishing strategies. Furthermore, the OA has another strong point: everyone can read OA papers, including scientist living in poor countries. But, will OA method create new discriminations on who can publish on OA journals? Will it be possible to really exclude or strongly limit the influences of the market from scientific publishing? The example of the non-profit e-print arXiv (http://arXiv.org/), a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers with no peer review will be discussed. For neuroscientists, the possibility to make available scientific data, even in the case of negative results (usually, very difficult to publish) is an important step to avoid purposeless repetition of costly experiments involving animal subjects. The possibility to arrange internationally or locally peer reviewed papers in institutional repositories (IR) is a necessity. However, access to IR should be regulated, e.g. banning or limiting profit organizations and exploiting internet systems, professional organizations or network groups

Adding Value to Statistics in the Data Revolution Age

As many statistical offices in accordance with the European Statistical System commitment to Vision 2020, since the second half of 2014 Istat has implemented its internal standardisation and industrialisation process within the framework of a common Business Architecture. Istat modernisation programme aims at building services and infrastructures within a plug-and-play framework to foster innovation, promote reuse and move towards full integration and interoperability of statistical process, consistent with a service-oriented architecture. This is expected to lead to higher effectiveness and productivity by improving the quality of statistical information and reducing the response burden. This paper addresses the strategy adopted by Istat which is focused on exploiting administrative data and new data sources in order to achieve its key goals enhancing value to users. The strategy is based on some priorities that consider services centred on users and stakeholders as well as Linked Open Data, to allow Machine-to-Machine data and metadata integration through definition of common statistical ontologies and semantics

Is organic diet really necessary for children?

The presentation focuse on the impact of pesticides on growing organisms, such as infants and young childre

Feeding behaviour of larval European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax L.) in relation to temperature and prey density

The feeding behaviour of larval European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax, L.) was analysed in relation to temperature and prey density under controlled laboratory conditions with the aim to assess the ability of larval fish to change the feeding tactic as a response to environmental changes. Larvae were acclimated for 20 days at three different temperatures (19, 22 and 26°C), and their feeding behaviour was then video-recorded in experimental trials, at two prey densities, consisting of swarms of 400/l and 1440/l Artemia nauplii. Results showed that there was a significant effect of the interaction between temperature and prey density on the proportion of swimming activity that was reduced at the high temperature-high prey density combination. This suggested a switching in the larval feeding behaviour from an active to an ambush tactic, when the temperature reached 26°C and the prey density was 1440 /l Artemia nauplii. These results are consistent with the current literature on fish larval behaviour in showing that the foraging tactic can be modulated by the interaction of different abiotic and biotic factors characterising the rearing environment

Increase in environmental temperature affects exploratory behaviour, anxiety and social preference in Danio rerio

The aim of this work is to investigate the effect of a temperature increase on the behaviour of adult zebrafish (Danio rerio) maintained for 21 days at 34 °C (treatment) and 26 °C (control). The temperatures chosen are within the vital range of zebrafish and correspond to temperatures that this species encounters in the natural environment. Previous results showed that the same treatment affects the brain proteome and the behaviour of adult zebrafish by producing alterations in the proteins involved in neurotransmitter release and synaptic function and impairing fish exploratory behaviour. In this study, we have investigated the performance of treated and control zebrafish during environmental exploration by using four behavioural tests (novel tank diving, light and dark preference, social preference and mirror biting) that are paradigms for assessing the state of anxiety, boldness, social preference and aggressive behaviour, respectively. The results showed that heat treatment reduces anxiety and increases the boldness of zebrafish, which spent more time in potentially dangerous areas of the tank such as the top and the uncovered bright area and at a distance from the social group, thus decreasing protection for the zebrafish. These data suggest that the increase in ambient temperature may compromise zebrafish survival rate in the natural environment

The Microsoft 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System

We describe the 2017 version of Microsoft's conversational speech recognition system, in which we update our 2016 system with recent developments in neural-network-based acoustic and language modeling to further advance the state of the art on the Switchboard speech recognition task. The system adds a CNN-BLSTM acoustic model to the set of model architectures we combined previously, and includes character-based and dialog session aware LSTM language models in rescoring. For system combination we adopt a two-stage approach, whereby subsets of acoustic models are first combined at the senone/frame level, followed by a word-level voting via confusion networks. We also added a confusion network rescoring step after system combination. The resulting system yields a 5.1\% word error rate on the 2000 Switchboard evaluation set

A stochastic estimated version of the Italian dynamic General Equilibrium Model (IGEM)

We estimate with Bayesian techniques the Italian dynamic General Equilibrium Model (IGEM), which has been developed at the Italian Treasury Department, Ministry of Economy and Finance, to assess the effects of alter-native policy interventions. We analyze and discuss the estimated effects of various shocks on the Italian economy. Compared to the calibrated version used for policy analysis, we find a lower wage rigidity and higher adjustment costs. The degree of prices and wages indexation to past inflation is much smaller than the indexation level assumed in the calibrated model. No substantial difference is found in the estimated monetary parameters. Estimated fiscal multipliers are slightly smaller than those obtained from the calibrated version of the model

Unexplained cardiac arrest after near drowning in a young experienced swimmer: insight from cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (cMRI) is a well-established noninvasive imaging modality in clinical cardiology. Its ability to provide tissue characterization make it well suited for the study of patients with cardiac diseases. We describe a multi-modality imaging evaluation of a 45-year-old man who experienced a near drowning event during swimming. We underline the unique capability of tissue characterization provided by cMRI, which allowed detection of subtle, clinically unrecognizable myocardial damage for understanding the causes of sudden cardiac arrest and also showed the small damages caused by cardiopulmonary resuscitation