3,629 research outputs found
Sodandaggi geognostici per la prospezione geoarcheologica del territorio di Aquileia: il Progetto SARA
No full textCost-benefit analysis and investment risk assessment. threshold values according to the alarp logic
No full textFor investments in the civil sector, the paper proposes a risk assessment model that introduces risk acceptability and tolerability thresholds according to the As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP) logic. The idea is to use the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) because it is able to associate return limit values, and therefore risk, to the project. The joint use of the CAPM and statistical survey tools leads to the estimation of investment risk thresholds on objective data, depending on both the production sector and the reference territory. An application to the building construction sector in Campania Region (Italy) verifies the effectiveness of the model
Prophylactic or therapeutic doses of heparins for COVID-19 infection? A retrospective study
No full textBackground: Coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) is a global outbreak. COVID-19 patients seem to have relevant coagulative abnormalities, even if they are not typical of disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (DIC) of the kind seen in septicaemia. Therefore, anticoagulant therapy with heparins is increasing in interest for a clinical approach to these patients, particularly if older. Studies comparing if prophylactic doses are more effective than therapeutic ones are still missing. Methods: Data were collected in the Geriatric Section of the Dolo Hospital, ULSS 3 “Serenissima”, Venice from 31st March to 01st May 2020. Heparins (calciparin, fondaparinux, enoxaparine) were divided into prophylactic or therapeutic doses. People previously treated with oral anticoagulants were removed. Vital status was assessed using administrative data. Cox’s regression analysis, adjusted for potential confounders, was used for assessing the strength of the association between heparins and mortality. The data were reported as hazard ratio (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results: 81 older people (mean age 84.1 years; females = 61.9%) were included. No significant differences in terms of demographic and clinical characteristics emerged between people treated with prophylactic or therapeutic doses, including age, gender, X-rays findings or severity of disease. Therapeutic doses were not associated to a better survival rate (HR 1.06; 95% CI 0.47–2.60; p = 0.89), even after adjusting for 15 confounders related to mortality (HR 0.89; 95% CI 0.30–2.71; p = 0.84). Conclusions: Our paper indicates that in older people affected by COVID-19 there is no justification for using therapeutic doses instead of prophylactic ones, having a similar impact on mortality risk. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Estimation of Mediterranean forest attributes by the application of k-nn classifiers to multitemporal Landsat ETM+ images
No full textA multicriteria approach to identify the Highest and Best Use for historical buildings
No full textThe cultural heritage conservation is essential to preserve the memory of monuments, places and territories and to ensure their transmission to the future. This can be pursued through continuous and careful maintenance, which, however, is lost when a place loses its function and becomes prey of neglect and decay. It is easy to understand how fundamental is to assign compatible intended use to safeguard the historical goods. From this perspective, the research proposes an innovative and economic evaluation model in order to identify the Highest and the Best Use (HBU) for the historical buildings that would take into account both their social, cultural and economic identity and the preservation of their integrity and original image. The choice of HBU requires a rational study approach that can employ the Multicriteria Decisional Methods (MCDM). These Methods could allow us to consider not only the financial performance of the restoration and enhancement intervention, but also the wide variety of the effects that it will generate on the territory, by involving the community in the new functions, the employment opportunities and the project's aptitude to encourage the cultural growth, by respecting the historical and architectural values. According to this framework, the research outlines an economic evaluation protocol that implements the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a hierarchical multicriteria technique consisting in breaking down the complex decision issues into fundamental constituent elements based on multiple criteria and sub-criteria. The protocol consists in a sequence of logical and operational steps that starts from the preliminary selection of possible functional destinations among those technically feasible, urbanistically permissible, economically viable and historical-architecturally compatible; the next definition of evaluation criteria and sub-criteria; the assignment of the weights to the criteria and the scores to the use options; then the implementation of hierarchical analysis algorithms, which return the final ranking of alternatives and thus outline the Highest and the Best Use for the building. Novelty elements concern the rationalization of the phases, the selection of the criteria evaluation according to the international references for the disciplines of the conservation of cultural heritage and the economic evaluation of projects, and finally the formalization of calculation schemes. The model is validated on a real case study: the monumental Palazzo Genovese in Salerno (Italy). Here the goal of researching HBU meets the need to remove the historic building from the current state of abandonment or underuse and to give it back to the citizens, by ensuring the use and the constant care and maintenance. The application demonstrates the practical usefulness of the protocol in decision-making processes for the re-use of architecture in order to maximize the economic benefits and, at the same time, to safeguard its historical and architectural values
Phenotypic diversity of traditional cherry accessions present in the Tuscan region
No full textThirty-four traditional accessions belonging to sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.), which were collected from different sites located in Tuscany (Italy), were characterized using a set of 47 agro-morphological traits established by the UPOV and IBPGR. The evaluation was carried out over a period of two years in a plantation situated in northeastern Tuscany. Univariate and multivariate analysis were used to investigate the diversity present among the accessions in the collection. The results showed statistically significant differences between these accessions.
PCA analysis shows high discrimination capabilities of variables measured. Most of these variables were characteristics linked to fruit and leaf size. PCA also evaluated the compactness and the peculiarity of each cultivar, thus providing information on the mixing level among the cultivars within the space of their morphological traits. An appropriate sampling strategy was an important prerequisite for reducing the level of overlap between the accessions. Cluster analysis grouped the said accessions according to their place of cultivation and phenotypical fruit data.
The results of this study provide information that may be useful for determining the biodiversity of autochthonous cultivars, for the purposes of obtaining guidelines in determining in situ and ex situ germplasm characterization
Spatial distribution modelling of forest attribute coupling remotely sensed imagery and GIS techniques
No full textA Hessian-based decomposition characterizes how performance in complex motor skills depends on individual strategy and variability
No full textIn complex real-life motor skills such as unconstrained throwing, performance depends on how accurate is on average the outcome of noisy, high-dimensional, and redundant actions. What characteristics of the action distribution relate to performance and how different individuals select specific action distributions are key questions in motor control. Previous computational approaches have highlighted that variability along the directions of first order derivatives of the action-to-outcome mapping affects performance the most, that different mean actions may be associated to regions of the actions space with different sensitivity to noise, and that action covariation in addition to noise magnitude matters. However, a method to relate individual high-dimensional action distribution and performance is still missing. Here we introduce a decomposition of performance into a small set of indicators that compactly and directly characterize the key performance-related features of the distribution of high-dimensional redundant actions. Central to the method is the observation that, if performance is quantified as a mean score, the Hessian (second order derivatives) of the action-to-score function determines how the noise of the action distribution affects performance. We can then approximate the mean score as the sum of the score of the mean action and a tolerance-variability index which depends on both Hessian and action covariance. Such index can be expressed as the product of three terms capturing noise magnitude, noise sensitivity, and alignment of the most variable and most noise sensitive directions. We apply this method to the analysis of unconstrained throwing actions by nonexpert participants and show that, consistently across four different throwing targets, each participant shows a specific selection of mean action score and tolerance-variability index as well as specific selection of noise magnitude and alignment indicators. Thus, participants with different strategies may display the same performance because they can trade off suboptimal mean action for better tolerance-variability and higher action variability for better alignment with more tolerant directions in action space
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