1,721,137 research outputs found
Using business process management simulation to support continuous improvements in higher education management system
No full textQuality assurance has become an increasing importance topic in
higher-education institutions. The countries that have signed the Bologna
Declaration are agree to develop a quality-assurance process and governing
body to ensure standard qualifications and quality throughout participating
countries. The process approach is one of the crucial issues of the quality
assurance models with description of responsibility, authority, procedures,
plans and available resources. This research aims to support the decision about
the organisation (resources allocation, process sequence, etc.) to improve the
performance level. The main importance regards the simulation analysis
instead of the only process description proposed in literature. The method
proposed concerns the process modelling, defining the main influences for the
performance and the simulation models for the numerical analysis. A case
study in an Italian university based on the proposed method is developed
improving the organisation with higher performance
Esophageal cancer presenting as a brain metastasis: A case report
No full textCarcinoma of unknown primary origin (CUP) is defined as the histological diagnosis of metastasis without the detection of a primary tumor. The incidence of CUP in all patients with a malignant disease has been reported to be between 3 and 15%. Esophageal cancer is the third most common type of cancer of the digestive tract and the seventh most common cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. The overall incidence of the disease is highest in males >50 years old. Brain metastases have been reported in only 1.7-3.6% of all patients with different types of esophageal cancer. Brain metastasis as the presenting form of esophageal carcinoma is highly uncommon. The present study reports the case of a patient with an unknown primary tumor who presented with a cerebral metastasis, without extra-neurological symptoms. The CUP was subsequently diagnosed as an esophageal carcinoma
Three-dimensional CFD modelling of urban flood forces on buildings: A case study
No full textItaly is among the countries most likely to be exposed to high hydrogeological risk. The recent 2018 Hydrogeological Disruption Report by ISPRA (Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) states that about 90% of Italian municipalities fall within areas with hydrogeological risk, that is where the probability of floods/landslides is high (level P3) or very high (P4) or the hydraulic hazard is of medium level. Floods are the most severe and frequent phenomena affecting landscapes, mainly if they occur in urban contexts. Urban development, if nature-based solutions are not taken into account, determines an increase in the impermeable surface, with the effect of reducing the infiltration and water evaporation, and consequently with an increase in runoff peaks and decrease of the concentration times. In this framework, the work here presented numerically analyses the effect of floods in an urban basin, in term of their three-dimensional interaction with buildings. The site under study is Cervinara, a municipality in the Campania region, Italy, hit by severe floods in 1999. Flow peaks were calculated using the VAPI procedure, a regional methodology based on two-component extreme value (TCEV) distribution. The results show that the level of exposure of the buildings, evaluated by calculating the thrust of the interacting water on the exterior walls, is influenced by the local three-dimensional kinematics
“The ‘good American’: Henry James, U.S. American studies and the frontiers of national identity”
No full textThis essay is a substantial expansion of the paper delivered at an International Seminar on Henry James organized by Donatella Izzo at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in 2007.
John Carlos Rowe argued in 2006 that the recovery of Henry James (a Modernist cosmopolitan author) and other literary expatriates into the U.S. canon because they are more American for their rebellion, well reflects the new American Exceptionalism and the international ambitions of a neo-nationalistic turn in U.S. American studies. Dismissing an either/or approach, the essay tries to demonstrate that the discourse of nation had instead a problematic and still neglected weight in James’s life, writings, and critical history, and that it is not reducible to an oppositional paradigm. In line with the “conscious and cultivated credulity” in fictional reality advocated in the 1908 preface to “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), James’s U.S. identity can be defined, with a similar oxymoron, as a distanced belonging to ‘America.’ Far from being the denationalized author of New Critical forging, James contributed to a problematic redefinition of U.S. identity at the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth century. His transformation into a writer representative of the best national values and in possession of an ‘international’ range started immediately after his death and went on, notwithstanding the influence of the New Critical Master, through the 1930s, reaching a peak in the ’50s. Such a metamorphosis – based on the older issue of James’s difficult and intense relation with the motherland – was central to the developing of the early phases of American studies and complicates the facile exceptionalism of the official discipline, institutionalized during the Cold War. While a cosmopolitan James is today a necessary critical response to the neo-nationalism of a substantial part of U.S. American Studies, such a post-national imperative runs the risk of bringing back a subtler, de-territorialized form of nationalism that acknowledges neither James’s contradictory belief in the fiction of U.S. identity, nor the still conspicuous power of nation states, national identity, and identifications. James created his connections to the United States through distance and the capable tool of an ideal U.S. identity, transforming “America”’s Manifest Destiny into the “complex fate” of the “good American” in “Europe.” Redefining U.S. identity as a powerful but dangerous frontier whose counterpart is a centre – a continuously shifting “domestic” anchorage (New York, Paris, Rome, London, Rye) – James believed in its potentialities and feared the main reason of its power: as an undefined form constantly in progress, U.S. identity is in fact condemned to perform a double destiny, to possess or be possessed, to expand or to contract, into a finite variety of roles. In such a theatrical role-playing disclosing the fictional reality of ‘nation,’ the shift between English and American identity is complicated by an undervalued and significant presence, both in life and fiction, a third dark party, ‘Italy.’ As the only dark hue admitted in James’s world, ‘Italy’ disrupts a binary, white Anglo-American contrast and reveals the national limit of the international theme. The Master’s aesthetic initiation, the origin of his chiaroscuro, contrasting art – his fastidious sense of discrimination – are inextricably linked to the reluctant abolitionism of his family and to the racist construction of whiteness and blackness in pre-Civil War New York minstrelsy and blackface. Black, as a racial color, is almost absent in James, and when it passes the color line, it does so only if purified through a significant ethnic or racial shifting: Italians are the only “dark race” in James but they bear the great responsibility of throwing a shadow on the Rooseveltian ideal of white, heterosexual and jingoistic U.S. masculinity
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Problematiche di sicurezza nei grandi cantieri: una metodologia di allocazione delle risorse condivise e di riduzione dei rischi mediante l’utilizzo di agenti autonomi
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La gestione della conoscenza nei sistemi di imprese nel settore delle costruzioni. Un’applicazione al problema dell’allocazione delle risorse
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