46 research outputs found
The Role of ICTs in Supporting Collaborative Networks in the Agro-Food Sector: Two Case Studies from South West England
Over recent years, in a wide range of countries, grassroots initiatives have emerged aimed at overcoming the limits of the mainstream agro-business system. These initiatives aim at improving farmers’ access to local and regional markets and consumers’ access to fresh local produce. Among these initiatives, Food Hubs have emerged as a promising way to improve local food supply systems. They represent collaborative networks of producers and consumers that aggregate, distribute, and market local food products. ICTs enable these collaborative networks by allowing information exchange among their actors and by providing collaborative tools that allow quick co-ordination between members of the network. The paper aims to analyse how the adoption of ICTs have fostered the development of new, initiatives oriented at establishing local food networks and to reconnect producers and consumers. The study will present results from the analysis of two food-hub initiatives based in South West England, which are adopting informative systems to support their activities and to implement novel business models: Stroudco Food Hub and Dean Forest Food Hub
Sustainable Development for Rural Areas: A Survey on the Agritourism Rural Networks
The topic of sustainable growth is becoming central in the debate over the rural development policies. Rural communities can completely fulfil the new challenges in the area of sustainability only with the implementation of innovative forms of collaborations among their business networks. In this work, we consider a particular form of business collaboration arising within rural communities, namely Agritourism Rural Network (ARN). In an ARN, a farm, providing agritourism activities, represents a touchpoint between a network of business and organizations in a rural area and tourists interested in enjoying the local territory. With the aim to deeper the extend of the agritourism phenomenon in a rural region and the potential of the related ARNs in being means of sustainable development, we report main results of an empirical survey carried out in 2016 on a sample of 105 agritourism farms all belonging to the same region (Calabria, Italy). Results confirm our intuitions about the importance at farm level of setting agritourism activities and their impact for the ARN related to the farm and for the sustainable development of a local community as a whole
Tourism Destination Management: A Collaborative Approach
Collaboration is a key factor of sustainable growth across territories and industrial sectors. Tourism, one of the largest industries in the world, has been subject to strongest innovation in the last years. Main reasons of this reside both in the availability of new ICTs - Information and Communication Technologies - and organizational models, which directly connect tourists among them and with service providers, and in the always more personalized supply of tourism experience. Tourism destinations can benefit of such innovations if they are able to reorganize the territorial tourism offer around different pattern of collaboration in order to give 2.0 tourists opportunities to live an augmented tourism experience. This paper deals with the possible forms of collaborative networks that can rise within a destination with a focus on relationships between services delivered by the Tourism Destination and the requests of services at the different phases of the tourist 2.0 lifecycle
Superhydrophobic lab-on-chip measures secretome protonation state and provides a personalized risk assessment of sporadic tumour
Secretome of primary cultures is an accessible source of biological markers compared to more complex and less decipherable
mixtures such as serum or plasma. The protonation state (PS) of secretome reflects the metabolism of cells and can be used for
cancer early detection. Here, we demonstrate a superhydrophobic organic electrochemical device that measures PS in a drop of
secretome derived from liquid biopsies. Using data from the sensor and principal component analysis (PCA), we developed
algorithms able to efficiently discriminate tumour patients from non-tumour patients. We then validated the results using mass
spectrometry and biochemical analysis of samples. For the 36 patients across three independent cohorts, the method identified
tumour patients with high sensitivity and identification as high as 100% (no false positives) with declared subjects at-risk, for
sporadic cancer onset, by intermediate values of PS. This assay could impact on cancer risk management, individual’s diagnosis
and/or help clarify risk in healthy populations
Smart Tourism Destinations: Can the Destination Management Organizations Exploit Benefits of the ICTs? Evidences from a Multiple Case Study
Recent developments of ICTs enable new ways to experience tourism and conducted to the concept of smart tourism. The adoption of cutting-edge technologies and its combination with innovative organizational models fosters cooperation, knowledge sharing, and open innovation among service providers in tourism destination. Moreover, it offers innovative services to visitors. In few words, they become smart tourism destinations. In this paper, we report first results of the SMARTCAL project aimed at conceiving a digital platform assisting Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) in providing smart tourism services. A DMO is the organization charged with managing the tourism offer of a collaborative network, made up of service providers acting in a destination. In this paper, we adopted a multiple case studies approach to analyze five Italian DMOs. Our aims were to investigate (1) if, and how, successful DMOs were able to offer smart tourism services to visitors; (2) if the ICTs adoption level was related to the collaboration level among DMO partners. First results highlighted that use of smart technologies was still in an embryonic stage of development, and it did not depend from collaboration levels
Understanding interactions in face-to-face and remote undergraduate science laboratories
This paper reviews the ways in which interactions have been studied, and the findings of such studies, in science
education in both face-to-face and remote laboratories. Guided by a systematic selection process, 27 directly
relevant articles were analysed based on three categories: the instruments used for measuring interactions, the
research findings on student interactions, and the theoretical frameworks used in the studies of student
interactions. In face-to-face laboratories, instruments for measuring interactions and the characterisation of the
nature of interactions were prominent. For remote laboratories, the analysis of direct interactions was found to be
lacking. Instead, studies of remote laboratories were mainly concerned with their practical scope. In addition, it is
found that only a limited number of theoretical frameworks have been developed and applied in the research
design. Existent theories are summarised and possible theoretical frameworks that may be implemented in studies
of interactions in undergraduate laboratories are proposed. Finally, future directions for research on the interrelationship between student interactions and laboratory learning are suggested
Non-invasive real-time biopsy of intracranial lesions using short time expanded circulating tumor cells on glass slide: report of two cases
Equi-assignments and explicit solutions of a particular discrete optimization problem
AbstractA concept of equi-assignment is introduced and characterized by means of a property based on the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor. Then a set of optimal solutions of a particular discrete optimization problem is found by determining a suitable equi-assignment
Neurosurgical treatment of neurogenic bladder dysfunction
Neuromodulation is an appealing technique that can be applied to pediatric neurogenic bladder dysfunction. In this chapter we review pathophysiology, clinics, radiological and neurophysiologycal work-up together with surgical techniques of neuromodulation applied to pediatric neurogenic bladder dysfunction