Energy Efficiency in the ICT - Profiling Power Consumption in Desktop Computer Systems

Energy awareness in the ICT has become an important issue. Focusing on software, recent work suggested the existence of a relationship between power consumption, software configuration and usage patterns in computer systems. The aim of this work was collecting and analysing power consumption data of general-purpose computer systems, simulating common usage scenarios, in order to extract a power consumption profile for each scenario. We selected two desktop systems of different generations as test machines. Meanwhile, we developed 11 usage scenarios, and conducted several test runs of them, collecting power consumption data by means of a power meter. Our analysis resulted in an estimation of a power consumption value for each scenario and software application used, obtaining that each single scenario introduced an overhead from 2 to 11 Watts, which corresponds to a percentage increase that can reach up to 20% on recent and more powerful systems. We determined that software and its usage patterns impact consistently on the power consumption of computer systems. Further work will be devoted to evaluate how power consumption is affected by the usage of specific system resource

Le linee guida ed il loro valore nel contesto medico legale

Negli ultimi decenni, vi è stata una crescente ricerca di interventi efficaci per migliorare la prognosi dello stroke e numerose linee guida sono state prodotte in tal senso. Ciò ha comportato ultimamente, rispetto al passato, un incremento della sopravvivenza del 10% ed un aumento di soggetti che ha superato la malattia senza riportare gravi disabilità permanenti (paralisi, perdita della parola, della visione, della memoria, ecc.) con una percentuale all’incirca identica. E’ da sottolineare che, a differenza di quanto avviene per altre malattie, dove l’attenzione per migliorare la qualità delle cure è rivolta a promuovere l’uso di singoli farmaci o interventi terapeutici, nell’ictus gli sforzi sono stati essenzialmente concentrati sugli aspetti organizzativi e di gestione multidisciplinare dell’assistenza (stroke care), cioè sul management complessivo del paziente relativamente alla gestione clinica della fase acuta, alla prevenzione delle complicanze più frequenti ed alla riabilitazione, sia in fase precoce, sia in fase post-acuta

Four-Dimensional Sustainable E-Services

E-services are not sustainable, unless we specifically design for sustainability along four dimensions (4D): economical, technical, environmental, and social. Economic sustainability to ensure that e-services create economic value; technical sustainability so that their technical assets actually enable the e-services to cope with changes; environmental sustainability to avoid that e-services harm the environment they operate in, and social sustainability to ensure e-services provide fair exchange of information between parties. Designing 4D-sustainable e-services is very complex. So far, service-engineering research has left dealing with such complexity unassisted—mainly due to the many initial technical challenges that needed to be overcome. Our goal is to fill this gap, by modeling the fundamentals of 4D-sustainable e-services. We propose a conceptual approach for representing 4D-sustainability. Our goal is to enhance the shared understanding amongst sustainability stakeholders, and to ease sustainability assessment and negotiation. Our approach offers a number of interrelated core elements (common among the four sustainability dimensions) as well as dimension-specific elements, variable elements. By focusing on 4D core elements, we enable describing the essence of sustainable e-services in a unified manner. We illustrate the value of the conceptual model using a real-life case study featuring an airport baggage handling syste

Component-resolved diagnosis of hazelnut allergy in children

Hazelnuts commonly elicit allergic reactions starting from childhood and adolescence, with a rare resolution over time. The definite diagnosis of a hazelnut allergy relies on an oral food challenge. The role of component resolved diagnostics in reducing the need for oral food challenges in the diagnosis of hazelnut allergies is still debated. Therefore, three electronic databases were systematically searched for studies on the diagnostic accuracy of specific-IgE (sIgE) on hazelnut proteins for identifying children with a hazelnut allergy. Studies regarding IgE testing on at least one hazelnut allergen component in children whose final diagnosis was determined by oral food challenges or a suggestive history of serious symptoms due to a hazelnut allergy were included. Study quality was assessed by the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies-2 tool. Eight studies enrolling 757 children, were identified. Overall, sensitivity, specificity, area under the curve and diagnostic odd ratio of Cor a 1 sIgE were lower than those of Cor a 9 and Cor a 14 sIge. When the test results were positive, the post-test probability of a hazelnut allergy was 34% for Cor a 1 sIgE, 60% for Cor a9 sIgE and 73% for Cor a 14 sIgE. When the test results were negative, the post-test probability of a hazelnut allergy was 55% for Cor a 1 sIgE, 16% for Cor a9 sIgE and 14% for Cor a 14 sIgE. Measurement of IgE levels to Cor a 9 and Cor a 14 might have the potential to improve specificity in detecting clinically tolerant children among hazelnut-sensitized ones, reducing the need to perform oral food challenges

Definition, implementation and validation of energy code smells: an exploratory study on an embedded system

Optimizing software in terms of energy efficiency is one of the challenges that both research and industry will have to face in the next few years.We consider energy efficiency as a software product quality characteristic, to be improved through the refactoring of appropriate code pattern: the aim of this work is identifying those code patterns, hereby defined as Energy Code Smells, that might increase the impact of software over power consumption. For our purposes, we perform an experiment consisting in the execution of several code patterns on an embedded system. These code patterns are executed in two versions: the first one contains a code issue that could negatively impact power consumption, the other one is refactored removing the issue. We measure the power consumption of the embedded device during the execution of each code pattern. We also track the execution time to investigate whether Energy Code Smells are also Performance Smells. Our results show that some Energy Code Smells actually have an impact over power consumption in the magnitude order of micro Watts. Moreover, those Smells did not introduce a performance decrease

Profiling Power Consumption on Mobile Devices

The proliferation of mobile devices, and the migration of the information access paradigm to mobile platforms, motivate studies of power consumption behaviors with the purpose of increasing the device battery life. The aim of this work is to profile the power consumption of a Samsung Galaxy I7500 and a Samsung Nexus S, in order to understand how such feature has evolved over the years. We performed two experiments: the first one measures consumption for a set of usage scenarios, which represent common daily user activities, while the second one analyzes a context-aware application with a known source code. The first experiment shows that the most recent device in terms of OS and hardware components shows significantly lower consumption than the least recent one. The second experiment shows that the impact of different configurations of the same application causes a different power consumption behavior on both smartphones. Our results show that hardware improvements and energy-aware software applications greatly impact the energy efficiency of mobile devices

First case of typhoid fever due to extensively drug-resistant Salmonella enterica serovar typhi in Italy

Typhoid fever is a potentially severe and occasionally life-threatening bacteraemic illness caused by Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (S. Typhi). In Pakistan, an outbreak of extensively drug-resistant (XDR) S. Typhi cases began in November 2016. We report on a five-year-old boy who contracted enteric fever while travelling in Pakistan and was diagnosed after returning to Italy in September 2019. Blood culture isolated Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi that was XDR to all first-line antibiotics, including ceftriaxone and fluoroquinolones. Empiric therapy was switched to meropenem, and the patient recovered completely. Whole-genome sequencing showed that this isolate was of haplotype H58. The XDR S. Typhi clone encoded a chromosomally located resistance region and harbored a plasmid encoding additional resistance elements, including the blaCTX-M-15 extended-spectrum β-lactamase and the qnrS fluoroquinolone resistance gene. This is the first case of typhoid fever due to XDR S. Typhi detected in Italy and one of the first paediatric cases reported outside Pakistan, highlighting the need to be vigilant for future cases. While new vaccines against typhoid are in development, clinicians should consider adapting their empiric approach for patients returning from regions at risk of XDR S. Typhi outbreak with typhoid symptoms