Technical and social performances of an arsenic-removal technology--the sono arsenic filter--in rural areas of Bangladesh were investigated. Results of arsenic field-test showed that filtered water met the Bangladesh standard (< 50 microg/L) after two years of continuous use. A questionnaire was administrated among 198 sono arsenic filter-user and 230 non-user families. Seventy-two percent of f...

L’analisi frequentistica delle occorrenze, tipica dei modelli di ranking di information retrieval, può essere integrata con l’analisi della spaziatura fra le occorrenze di una singola parola, mutuata dallo studio dei livelli di energia dei sistemi statistici di quanti disordinati. Queste due aree di ricerca sono fortemente interrelate, perché entrambe hanno l’obiettivo di assegnare dei pesi di ...

I numeri primi sono spesso considerati enti “astratti” di interesse esclusivamente matematico. Scopo di questo saggio è la discussione di alcune proprietà dei numeri primi che hanno trovato importantissime applicazioni pratiche con l’avvento della crittografia a chiave pubblica negli anni ’70 e con la diffusione di Internet e del commercio elettronico di questi ultimi anni. Ci occuperemo di alc...

This study investigates the microbiological conditions of large game animal carcasses following evisceration. Carcasses of animals (N=291) hunted in the Upper Susa Valley (Italian Alps) were analysed for pH, Aerobic Viable Count (AVC), Enterobacteriaceae, Yersinia spp., Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella spp. After shooting, evisceration occurred within 60 min in 90.7% of animals and samplin...

The H.264/AVC video encoding standard has many advanced features that can be tailored to suit a wide range of applications. In order to obtain optimal coding performance in video sensor networks (VSNs), it is essential to find the right setting parameters for the encoder. There is a trade-off between required energy for encoding and transmission of video content in VSNs that can be exploited to...

The newly ratified video compression standard H.264/AVC provides tools and solutions for coding improvements of at least 2 dB, in terms of PSNR, and at least 40% in bit rate saving, as compared with the previous standards. The development of video transcoding, which is one of the critical components for multimedia adaptation and Universal Multimedia Access, can gain benefits by using the tools ...

H.264/AVC is adopted as a next generation moving picture compression standard. Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) is the major entropy coding algorithm employed in H.264/AVC. Although the performance gain of H.264/AVC is mostly resulted from CABAC, it is difficult to implement a high-throughput decoder due to its decoding complexity. Although CABAC excludes a multiplication...

Compared with previous video coding standards, H.264/AVC employs a division-free quantization scheme. The relation between quantization parameter and quantization step changes from general linear to exponential as well. In this paper, we first analyze the relation between rate and quantization step-size and derive a new rate-distortion (R-D) model. An efficient rate control scheme is then devel...