In the last years many solutions have been presented as the silver bullet to enhance the IT Information Technology of the financial institutions. This thesis is an investigation of the possible applications of web services to generate value in the financial industry, trying to segregate the business reality from the hype surrounding them. The work analyzes the potential benefits and the challen...

Frogs in the family Dendrobatidae are well known for their conspicuous colors and variable alkaloid-based chemical defenses. The aposematic coloration in dendrobatid frogs appears to deter predators with color vision, but relatively little is known about how these frogs are protected and their defenses are perceived by non-color vision dominated predators. The neotropical bullet ant Paraponera ...

The National Automotive Sampling System/Crashworthiness Database System (NASS/CDS) is a well-known digital repository containing statistics on hundreds of thousands of vehicle crashes that occurred over the past 30 years. Many of the NASS crashes contain estimates of Delta-v calculated using WinSMASH, a common software reconstruction package. Recent work indicates that WinSMASH typically undere...

Trans-nasal sphenoid sinus foreign body is a rare condition. We report a case of trans-nasal gun bullet within the sphenoid sinus with breach of the floor of the sella turcica. A 42-year-old soldier presented a few weeks after a gun battle with a history of headache. The skull x-ray demonstrated a foreign body in the region of sphenoid sinus and sella. Multidetector-row CT with multiplanar refo...

Shot from a revolver from a close range, a bullet pierced the chest of a policeman and entered through the open mouth of a young male person standing behind. The entry wound was found in the cheek mucosa adjacent to the left lower third molar. After hitting and fracturing the body and the ramus of the mandible, the bullet was deflected and was finally lodged in the parapharyngeal space and skul...

A 30 year old man was referred to this department with an intractable obstruction in one nasal cavity and catarrh of indeterminate duration. Inspection of his nose showed that one nasal cavity was normal; the other, however, was filled by a large polyp and mucopus. An x ray film of the paranasal sinuses showed a metallic radio-opaque area in the nasal cavity resembling a bullet (figure). The ma...

hole immediately below the xiphoid cartilage, the skin around being much blackened by the discharge. On opening the chest the bullet was found to have passed slightly upwards through the pericardium to the spine. The right side of the heart was torn to rags, two vertebroe were completely disintegrated, and three ribs on either side broken close to their vertebral attachment. The spine was cut q...

A 61-year-old man was referred to us for massive left haemothorax (Fig. 1) following a penetrating thoracic gunshot wound. The entrance wound was between the scapula and the spine; no exit wound was evident. Left coxofemoral X-ray demonstrated the presence of the retained bullet in the left femoral region (Fig. 2). An emergency left thoracotomy was performed and a small regular round laceration...

Live oak (Quercus virginiana Mill.) trees are hosts to a complex of gall making arthropods. However, the bullet galls produced by the asexual generation of the cynipid Disholcaspis quercuscirens (Ashmead) can esthetically and physically damage nursery and street trees, and thus reduce tree value. We sought to describe the unknown sexual generation of D. quercusvirens, describe the development o...