Impact of communicative and informative strategies on influenza vaccination adherence and absenteeism from work of health care professionals working at the university hospital of palermo, Italy: A quasi-experimental field trial on twelve influenza seasons

Every year, about 20% of health care workers (HCWs) acquire influenza, continuing to work and encouraging virus spreading. Influenza vaccination coverage rates and absenteeism from work among HCWs of the University Hospital (UH) of Palermo were analyzed before and after the implementation of several initiatives in order to increase HCWs’ awareness about influenza vaccination. Vaccines administration within hospital units, dedicated web pages on social media and on the UH of Palermo institutional web site, and mandatory compilation of a dissent form for those HCWs who refused vaccination were carried out during the last four influenza seasons. After the introduction of these strategies, influenza vaccination coverage went up from 5.2% (2014/2015 season) to 37.2% (2018/2019 season) (p<0.001), and mean age of vaccinated HCWs significantly decreased from 48.1 years (95% CI: 45.7–50.5) to 35.9 years (95% CI: 35.0–36.8). A reduction of working days lost due to acute sickness among HCWs of the UH of Palermo was observed. Fear of adverse reactions and not considering themselves as a high-risk group for contracting influenza were the main reasons reported by HCWs that refused vaccination. Strategies undertaken at the UH of Palermo allowed a significant increase in vaccination adherence and a significant reduction of absenteeism from work

Topographical reconstruction of ancient Palermo: a note on its buildings for public spectacles and their relation with the Roman-period civic planning

Topographical studies in the last decades have greatly improved our knowledge of Roman Panormus (modern day Palermo) but many aspects of its urban planning still remain obscure. It is very hard work to clearly understand a city that has been continuously inhabited from at least the Iron Age to the present. This long standing existence implies countless transformations of its urban aspect. In particular the Arab domination, in the Middle Ages, erased even the memory of the ancient place names, so the toponomastic source that is often a fundamental tool for the ancient topographer is almost useless. Using the typical sources of ancient topography and landscape archaeology and its multidisciplinary approach can be exceedingly useful in understanding the ancient aspect of a living city. We found an important lack of information about ancient Palermo: the location of buildings designed for public spectacles. The epigraphic sources prove that in Palermo there was a theatre and an amphitheatre; from a Late-Antique source we can assume that there was also a circus. This paper’s aim is to suggest concrete hypotheses to identify the locations of all three of these buildings, discuss their position and their relation to the civic plan of Panormus. These results are important in understanding this city in a more complete way but also for the protection of its archaeological heritage: these three areas lie outside the ancient walls of Palermo and have hitherto been considered “low-risk areas” for archaeology. manifestations

Architectural perspectives in the cathedral of Palermo : image-based modeling for cultural heritage understanding and enhancement

Palermo off ers a repertoire of both artistic and architectural solid perspective of great beauty and in large quantity. This paper addresses the problem of the 3D survey of these works and their related study through the use of image-based modelling (IBM) techniques. We propose, as case studies, the use of IBM techniques inside the Cathedral of Palermo. Indeed, the church houses a huge and rich sculptural repertoire, dating back to 16th century, which constitutes a valid field of IBM techniques application. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the e ffectiveness and potentiality of these techniques for geometric analysis of sculptured works. Indeed, usually the survey of these artworks is very diffi cult due the geometric complexity, typical of sculptured elements. In this study, we analysed cylindrical and planar geometries as well as carrying out an application of perspective return.peer-reviewe

On the reconstruction of diagonal elements of density matrix of quantum optical states by on/off detectors

We discuss a scheme for reconstructing experimentally the diagonal elements of the density matrix of quantum optical states. Applications to PDC heralded photons, multi-thermal and attenuated coherent states are illustrated and discussed in some details.Comment: 10 pages, presented at Palermo "TQMFA2005" Conference. To appear on "Open Systems & Information Dynamics" (2006

Neutrinos: The Big Question and Physics Opportunities

This article summarises a talk given at the 2014 Palermo workshop on Astrophysics. It covers a short review on the neutrino physics status and the potential physics opportunities of future experiments. During the last year our knowledge on the neutrino oscillation parameter $\sin^2\theta_{13}$ improved dramatically, and the large value opened the way to oscillation experiments sensitive to possible CP-violation. The first high-energetic neutrinos in the TeV range were detected in the IceCube experiment, while the Planck collaboration set further limits on the number of active neutrinos from cosmological constraints. Over the next years the Katrin will investigate the beta decay of Tritium to study the absolute neutrino mass scale, while new experiments will investigate the potential sterile neutrino scenario which could explain the event excess of the MiniBooNE and LSND experiment.Comment: Proceedings from the Frontier Research in Astrophysics, Palermo 2014, to be published in Proceedings of Scienc

Introducing Formalism in Economics: The Growth Model of John von Neumann

The objective is to interpret John von Neumann's growth model as a decisive step of the forthcoming formalist revolution of the 1950s in economics. This model gave rise to an impressive variety of comments about its classical or neoclassical underpinnings. We go beyond this traditional criterion and interpret rather this model as the manifestation of von Neumann's involvement in the formalist programme of mathematician David Hilbert. We discuss the impact of Kurt Gödel’s discoveries on this programme. We show that the growth model reflects the pragmatic turn of the formalist programme after Gödel and proposes the extension of modern axiomatisation to economics..Von Neumann, Growth model, Formalist revolution, Mathematical formalism, Axiomatics

A faster pseudo-primality test

We propose a pseudo-primality test using cyclic extensions of $\mathbb Z/n \mathbb Z$. For every positive integer $k \leq \log n$, this test achieves the security of $k$ Miller-Rabin tests at the cost of $k^{1/2+o(1)}$ Miller-Rabin tests.Comment: Published in Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo Journal, Springe