Making the most of spatial information in health: A tutorial in Bayesian disease mapping for areal data

Disease maps are effective tools for explaining and predicting patterns of disease outcomes across geographical space, identifying areas of potentially elevated risk, and formulating and validating aetiological hypotheses for a disease. Bayesian models have become a standard approach to disease mapping in recent decades. This article aims to provide a basic understanding of the key concepts involved in Bayesian disease mapping methods for areal data. It is anticipated that this will help in interpretation of published maps, and provide a useful starting point for anyone interested in running disease mapping methods for areal data. The article provides detailed motivation and descriptions on disease mapping methods by explaining the concepts, defining the technical terms, and illustrating the utility of disease mapping for epidemiological research by demonstrating various ways of visualising model outputs using a case study. The target audience includes spatial scientists in health and other fields, policy or decision makers, health geographers, spatial analysts, public health professionals, and epidemiologists.

11. La homonimia de Carici sylvaticae-Fagetum

El nombre Carici sylvaticae-Fagetum (sylvaticae) (Rivas-Martínez 1965) C. Navarro 1982 [Contribución al estudio de la flora y la vegetación del Duranguesado y la Busturia (Vizcaya): 81-82. Ed. Univ. Complutense, Madrid] fue propuesto para designar los hayedos basófilos de territorios orocantábricos y cántabro-euskaldunes, en sustitución del ilegítimo (Art. 34) Melico (uniflorae)-Fagetum cantabricum Rivas-Martínez 1965 [Anales Inst. Bot. Cavanilles 22: 383].

Blogs as virtual environments for teaching and learning in Higher Education

The transformation of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into knowledge and learning technologies is increasingly becoming a matter of concern. Teaching settings associated with the use of blogs in Higher Education are presented in this paper, proceeding from an innovative learning experience of projects carried out by a group of professors between 2009 and 2013. Both, teachers and students who took part in the subjects that implemented the blog, considered it as helpful resource to create a virtual and learning-teaching environment due to the multiple potentialities it offers. Among some of these potentialities, some stand out: it makes easier the access to knowledge, promotes a more active and reflective learning, expands the social experience of learning, provides evidence about the students’ progress which helps to reorient the teaching-learning process, and encourages the critical judgment. Nevertheless, several problems related with the students’ participation and the teacher’s blog management have been identified.

Shape Memory Alloy Features for Seismic Retrofitting of External RC Beam-Column Joint

Shape memory alloys (SMAs) have the ability to undergo large deformations with minimum residual strain and also the extraordinary ability to undergo reversible hysteretic shape change known as the shape memory effect. The shape memory effect of these alloys can be utilised to develop a convenient way of actively confining concrete sections to improve their shear strength, flexural ductility and ultimate strain capacity. Most of the previous work on active confinement of concrete using SMA has been carried out on circular sections. In this study retrofitting strategies for active confinement of non-circular sections have been proposed. The proposed schemes presented in this paper are conceived with an aim to seismically retrofit a beam-column joint in non-seismically designed reinforced concrete buildings.

The complex material behaviour of SMAs depends on number of parameters. Depending upon the alloying elements, SMAs exhibit different behaviour in different conditions and are highly sensitive to variation in temperature, phase in which it is used, loading pattern, strain rate and pre-strain conditions. Therefore, a detailed discussion on the behaviour of SMAs under different thermo-mechanical conditions is presented first in this paper.

Evaluating the potential for urban consolidation centres

This paper focuses upon the potential for Urban Consolidation Centres (UCCs) to alleviate local environmental and traffic problems within urban areas. An international literature review was undertaken, interviews were held with a range of relevant parties, and an evaluation framework was developed. In previous work a narrow focus has typically been adopted and no examples of thorough scheme evaluation were found. A particular concern discussed in the paper is the identification and subsequent allocation of the costs and benefits of implementing and operating a UCC. Lessons learned from existing and attempted UCCs are then presented, and a number of themes and location types that point to successful implementation are identified. The likelihood of a UCC being successful depends considerably upon the legal and planning frameworks in the locality or country involved.

The river solofrana bicycle network: a project of green mobility

The article presents the “LungoSolofrana” project, carried out during the course “Urban and Mobility” in the academic year 2009/2010, held during the bachelor in Environmental Engineering at the University of Naples “Federico II”. The work has also been chosen as a finalist at the “UrbanPromo 2010” contest, the urban and territorial marketing event sponsored by the National Institute of Urban Planning and Urbit which was held in Venice in 2010. The project consists in a green mobility proposal, developed with an approach based on the integration of the environmental redevelopment of a portion of river Solofrana, located in the Salerno Province, and of the renewal of seven local stations of the railway line Mercato San Severino – Nocera Inferiore, including the realization of a cycle-path network for the natural environment fruition. Furthermore the work drew attention to the local and regional administration. The main intent of the project is to integrate sustainable mobility themes with the environment recovery in a territory affected by high environmental troubles. The area includes the municipalities of Nocera Inferiore, Nocera Superiore, Mercato San Severino, Castel San Giorgio and Roccapiemonte, situated in Salerno’s province, with a total population about 114.000 (font Demo ISTAT 2010). The area extension is about 84,30 sqkm and it is crossed by river Solofrana that is the central point of the project idea. The intervention strategy is defined in two kinds of actions: internal and external rail station interventions. The external rail station interventions regard the construction of pedestrian-cycle paths with the scope of increasing the spaces dedicated to cyclists and to pedestrians along the river Solofrana sides and to connect the urban areas with the railway station. In this way, it’s also possible to achieve an urban requalification of the interested area. On the other side, the interventions inside the station , according to Transit Oriented Development principles, aim at redeveloping common spaces with the insertion of new activities and at realizing new automatic cycle parks covered by photovoltaic panels. The project proposal consists of the urban regeneration of small railway stations along the route-Nocera-Codola Mercato San Severino in the province of Salerno, through interventions aimed at improving pedestrian accessibility. The project involves in particular the construction of pedestrian paths protected access to the station and connecting with neighboring towns and installation of innovative bike parking stations in elevation, covering surfaces coated with solar panels and spaces information. The project is aimed to propose a new model of sustainable transport for small and medium shifts as an alternative to private transportation

La intervenció vers el menor en situació de necessitat : el cas d'Emilia Romagna. 'La intervención hacia el menor en situación de necesidad : el caso de Emilia Romagna'.

Profundizar en la lógica del proceso de cambios de la intervención social hacia el menor con problemas, desde el momento en que el internamiento y el tratamiento del caso eran las formas privilegiadas, hasta la difusión del sistema de servicios que ve en el medio abierto y en las instituciones del contexto su mejor objeto de intervención. Departamento di Science dell'Educazione dell'Universita Degli Studi di Bologna, Servicios Sociales, Administración de la región Emilia Romagna (Italia). Desarrolla algunos conceptos que servirán como instrumentos de análisis en la exposición de los temas sucesivos. Explica cómo ha sido, a lo largo de la historia, la asistencia al menor en Italia. Analiza los servicios que se prestan al menor. Elabora una síntesis de la región de Emilia Romagna y Bolonia. Presenta las líneas de intervención, estructuras residenciales, recursos de la VSL-29. Bibliografía (libros, revistas, documentos del Ayuntamiento de Bolonia, etc.). La superación de la segregación y del aislamiento del menor es la condición mínima e irrenunciable para el trabajo reeducativo. La territorialización del menor sin espacios de encuentro y adultos dispuestos a una relación sin roles prefijados puede aumentar, en lugar de disminuir, la independiencia del menor hacia procesos de control y la administración burócrata de la vida.

Entrevista a Francisco Matte Bon.

Entrevista a Francisco Matte Bon, catedrático de Lengua española y traducción en la Facultad de traducción e interpretación de la Libera Università degli Studi LUSPIO de Roma. Responde a preguntas acerca de: la didáctica de las lenguas; el enfoque dado a la enseñanza de la gramática y su papel en la adquisición de la competencia comunicativa; la situación de la investigación lingüística aplicada a ELE; la integración de las TIC en la parte docente; el estado y unidad del español en la actualidad y del papel que desempeñan las variaciones diatópicas en sus clases.

Yeísmo para no yeístas : '¿lluvia o yuvia?' : la duda del estudiante italiano.

Título del congreso: 'Una lengua, muchas culturas'

Unpalatability of Hyla semilineata tadpoles (Anura) to captive and free-ranging vertebrate predators

This study examines the unpalatability of Hyla semilineata tadpoles, relating this possible defence mechanism to their black, presumably aposematic, colouration. Bullfrog tadpoles (Rana catesbeiana), similar in size to the H. semilineata larvae, were used as controls in the experiments. The palatability of H. semilineata tadpoles was tested by offering the tadpoles to Fish (Hoplias malabaricus), free-ranging passerine birds (Pitangus sulphuratus) and hawks (Buteo magnirostris), and domestic chickens (Gallus domesticus). All predators showed a significant preference towards the control R. catesbeiana tadpoles. However, in experiments with fish, this preference was not significant for tadpole capture, only for their ingestion, suggesting that the fish could not distinguish between the two species before tasting them. Although great kiskadees (P. sulphuratus) preferred the control R. catesbeiana tadpoles, they promptly ingested more than half of the test H. semilineata tadpoles when these were offered alone. The chickens, used as naive predators, clearly learned to avoid the black H. semilineata tadpoles after a few trials. The conspicuous colouration and unpalatability of H. semilineata tadpoles may benefit the individual as well as the group, depending on the predator involved.

Water quality and health in a Sahelian semi-arid urban context: an integrated geographical approach in Nouakchott, Mauritania

Access to sufficient quantities of safe drinking water is a human right. Moreover, access to clean water is of public health relevance, particularly in semi-arid and Sahelian cities due to the risks of water contamination and transmission of water-borne diseases. We conducted a study in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, to deepen the understanding of diarrhoeal incidence in space and time. We used an integrated geographical approach, combining socio-environmental, microbiological and epidemiological data from various sources, including spatially explicit surveys, laboratory analysis of water samples and reported diarrhoeal episodes. A geospatial technique was applied to determine the environmental and microbiological risk factors that govern diarrhoeal transmission. Statistical and cartographic analyses revealed concentration of unimproved sources of drinking water in the most densely populated areas of the city, coupled with a daily water allocation below the recommended standard of 20 l per person. Bacteriological analysis indicated that 93% of the non-piped water sources supplied at water points were contaminated with 10-80 coliform bacteria per 100 ml. Diarrhoea was the second most important disease reported at health centres, accounting for 12.8% of health care service consultations on average. Diarrhoeal episodes were concentrated in municipalities with the largest number of contaminated water sources. Environmental factors (e.g. lack of improved water sources) and bacteriological aspects (e.g. water contamination with coliform bacteria) are the main drivers explaining the spatio-temporal distribution of diarrhoea. We conclude that integrating environmental, microbiological and epidemiological variables with statistical regression models facilitates risk profiling of diarrhoeal diseases. Modes of water supply and water contamination were the main drivers of diarrhoea in this semi-arid urban context of Nouakchott, and hence require a strategy to improve water quality at the various levels of the supply chain.

Estimating population and livestock density of mobile pastoralists and sedentary settlements in the southeastern Lake Chad area

Mobile pastoralists provide major contributions to the gross domestic product in Chad, but little information is available regarding their demography. The Lake Chad area population is increasing, resulting in competition for scarce land and water resources. For the first time, the density of people and animals from mobile and sedentary populations was assessed using randomly defined sampling areas. Four sampling rounds were conducted over two years in the same areas to show population density dynamics. We identified 42 villages of sedentary communities in the sampling zones; 11 (in 2010) and 16 (in 2011) mobile pastoralist camps at the beginning of the dry season and 34 (in 2011) and 30 (in 2012) camps at the end of the dry season. A mean of 64.0 people per km2 (95% confidence interval, 20.3-107.8) were estimated to live in sedentary villages. In the mobile communities, we found 5.9 people per km2 at the beginning and 17.5 people per km2 at the end of the dry season. We recorded per km2 on average 21.0 cattle and 31.6 small ruminants in the sedentary villages and 66.1 cattle and 102.5 small ruminants in the mobile communities, which amounts to a mean of 86.6 tropical livestock units during the dry season. These numbers exceed, by up to five times, the published carrying capacities for similar Sahelian zones. Our results underline the need for a new institutional framework. Improved land use management must equally consider the needs of mobile communities and sedentary populations.

Debris flow magnitudes: a global catalog

The episodic occurrence of debris flow events in response to stochastic precipitation and wildfire events makes hazard prediction challenging. Previous work has shown that frequency-magnitude distributions of non-fire-related debris flows follow a power law, but less is known about the distribution of post-fire debris flows. As a first step in parameterizing hazard models, we use frequency-magnitude distributions and cumulative distribution functions to compare volumes of post-fire debris flows to non-fire-related debris flows. Due to the large number of events required to parameterize frequency-magnitude distributions, and the relatively small number of post-fire event magnitudes recorded in the literature, we collected data on 73 recent post-fire events in the field. The resulting catalog of 988 debris flow events is presented as an appendix to this article. We found that the empirical cumulative distribution function of post-fire debris flow volumes is composed of smaller events than that of non-fire-related debris flows. In addition, the slope of the frequency-magnitude distribution of post-fire debris flows is steeper than that of non-fire-related debris flows, evidence that differences in the post-fire environment tend to produce a higher proportion of small events. We propose two possible explanations: 1) post-fire events occur on shorter return intervals than debris flows in similar basins that do not experience fire, causing their distribution to shift toward smaller events due to limitations in sediment supply, or 2) fire causes changes in resisting and driving forces on a package of sediment, such that a smaller perturbation of the system is required in order for a debris flow to occur, resulting in smaller event volumes.

New multivalent calixarene-based ligands for protein recognition and inhibition

One of the challenges that concerns chemistry is the design of molecules able to modulate protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions, since these are involved in many physiological and pathological processes. The interactions occurring between proteins and their natural counterparts can take place through reciprocal recognition of rather large surface areas, through recognition of single contact points and single residues, through inclusion of the substrates in specific, more or less deep binding sites. In many cases, the design of synthetic molecules able to interfere with the processes involving proteins can benefit from the possibility of exploiting the multivalent effect. Multivalency, widely spread in Nature, consists in the simultaneous formation between two entities (cell-cell, cell-protein, protein-protein) of multiple equivalent ligand-recognition site complexes. In this way the whole interaction results particularly strong and specific. Calixarenes furnish a very interesting scaffold for the preparation of multivalent ligands and in the last years calixarene-based ligands demonstrated their remarkable capability to recognize and inhibit or restore the activity of different proteins, with a high efficiency and selectivity in several recognition phenomena. The relevance and versatility of these ligands is due to the different exposition geometries of the binding units that can be explored exploiting the conformational properties of these macrocycles, the wide variety of functionalities that can be linked to their structure at different distances from the aromatic units and to their intrinsic multivalent nature. With the aim of creating new multivalent systems for protein targeting, the work reported in this thesis regards the synthesis and properties of glycocalix[n]arenes and guanidino calix[4]arenes for different purposes. Firstly, a new bolaamphiphile glycocalix[4]arene in 1,3-alternate geometry, bearing cellobiose, was synthesized for the preparation of targeted drug delivery systems based on liposomes. The formed stable mixed liposomes obtained by mixing the macrocycle with DOPC were shown to be able of exploiting the sugar units emerging from the lipid bilayer to agglutinate Concanavalin A, a lectin specific for glucose. Moreover, always thanks to the presence of the glycocalixarene in the layer, the same liposomes demonstrated through preliminary experiments to be uptaken by cancer cells overexpressing glucose receptors on their exterior surface more efficiently respect to simple DOPC liposomes lacking glucose units in their structure. Then a small library of glycocalix[n]arenes having different valency and geometry was prepared, for the creation of potentially active immunostimulants against Streptococcus pneumoniae, particularly the 19F serotype, one of the most virulent. These synthesized glycocalixarenes bearing β-N-acetylmannosamine as antigenic unit were compared with the natural polysaccharide on the binding to the specific anti-19F human polyclonal antibody, to verify their inhibition potency. Among all, the glycocalixarene based on the conformationally mobile calix[4]arene resulted the more efficient ligand, probably due its major possibility to explore the antibody surface and dispose the antigenic units in a proper arrangement for the interaction process. These results pointed out the importance of how the different multivalent presentation in space of the glycosyl units can influence the recognition phenomena. At last, NMR studies, using particularly 1H-15N HSQC experiments, were performed on selected glycocalix[6]arenes and guanidino calix[4]arenes blocked in the cone geometry, in order to better understand protein-ligand interactions. The glycosylated compounds were studied with Ralstonia solanacearum lectin, in order to better understand the nature of the carbohydrate‐lectin interactions in solution. The series of cationic calixarene was employed with three different acidic proteins: GB1, Fld and alpha synuclein. Particularly GB1 and Fld were observed to interact with all five cationic calix[4]arenes but showing different behaviours and affinities.