A model of natural image edge co-occurrence in the rototranslation group

In this paper, we propose to model the edge information contained in natural scenes as points in the 3D space of positions and orientations. This space is equipped with a strong geometrical structure and it is identified as the rototranslation group. In this space, we compute a histogram of co-occurrence of edges from a database of natural images and show that it can be interpreted as a probability density function, expressed by the fundamental solution of a suitable Fokker Planck equation defined in the 3D structured space. Both estimated statistics and model predictions are reconsidered and compared with the partial gestalt association fields proposed by D. J. Field, A. Hayes, and R. F. Hess (1993). Finally, parametric identification allows to estimate the variance of the co-occurrence random process in natural images

Democracy, technocracy and economic growth: evidence from 20 century Spain

Este artículo investiga qué tipo de cambios institucionales tienen un mayor impacto en el crecimiento económico de largo plazo: las reformas de carácter tecnocrático orientadas a la economía o la democratización. Con este objetivo, para el caso de España, examinamos el Plan de Estabilización de 1959 y la Transición a la democracia (en torno a 1979) como fuentes de variación para las 50 provincias españolas en el período 1950-2016. Nuestro enfoque consiste en estudiar los impactos mediante la estimación de los escenarios contrafactuales utilizando el método de control sintético. Nuestros resultados muestran que las dos estrategias tienen un impacto positivo sobre el crecimiento económico subnacional. Una comparación directa entre ambas apunta a que el efecto del Plan de Estabilización pudo ser cuatro veces mayor que el de la Transición. El efecto medio del Plan sobre el crecimiento es aproximadamente un 40 % mayor que en el escenario contrafactual y parece ser permanente. Los efectos estimados se mantienen frente a diferentes pruebas de placebo y otros contrastes adicionales de robustez. En cuanto al análisis de las medidas específicas del Plan de 1959, parece que las políticas de carácter interno generaron un impacto más positivo y de mayor alcance que las externas, dependientes del acceso al FMI.We examine the contribution of economic and institutional transitions as two potential sources of subnational economic growth in Spain. To this end, we exploit the economic reforms of the 1959 Stabilization Plan (as an example of technocratic, economy-oriented reform) and the democratic transition in 1979 in Spain as the sources of variation for a sample of 50 Spanish provinces in the period 1950-2016. Our approach is to examine the impacts by estimating the missing counterfactual scenarios using the synthetic control method. Our results unveil a positive effect for both economic and institutional transitions on subnational economic growth. A direct comparison of both transitions suggests that the effect of economic liberalization is four-fold higher than the effect of political liberalization. The average growth effect of the economic liberalization is around 40% higher relative to the counterfactual scenario and it appears to be permanent. The estimated effects are robust to the variety of placebo tests and additional robustness checks. This article also deepens the analysis of the effects of the 1959 plan and finds that the policies that generated the most positive impact were those of an “internal” nature, compared to the external ones, dependent on access to the IMF (also positive, but of lesser impact)

VALICO-UD: Treebanking an Italian Learner Corpus in Universal Dependencies

This article describes an ongoing project for the development of a novel Italian treebank in Universal Dependencies format: VALICO-UD. It consists of texts written by Italian L2 learners of different mother tongues (German, French, Spanish and English) drawn from VALICO, an Italian learner corpus elicited by comic strips. Aiming at building a parallel treebank currently missing for Italian L2, comparable with those exploited in Natural Language Processing tasks, we associated each learner sentence with a target hypothesis (i.e. a corrected version of the learner sentence written by an Italian native speaker), which is in turn annotated in Universal Dependencies. The treebank VALICO-UD is composed of 237 texts written by non-native speakers of Italian (2,234 sentences) and the related target hypotheses, all automatically annotated using UDPipe. A portion of this resource (36 texts corresponding to 398 learner sentences and related target hypotheses)—firstly released on May 2021 in the Universal Dependencies repository—is associated with error annotation and the automatic output is fully manually checked. In this article, we focus especially on the challenges addressed in treebanking a resource composed of learner texts. In addition, we report on a preliminary data exploration that makes use of three quantitative measures for assessing the quality of the data and for better understanding the role that this resource can play in tasks lying at the intersection of Computational Linguistics and learner corpus studies

Primary breast lymphoma: case reports and review of the literature

As the prevalence of breast cancer has increased over recent years many cases with unusual presentation are emerging. This revue attempts to identify different types of primary malignancies that can affect the breast. A five years review was undertaken at the Breast Unit of Azienda Ospedaliera “Santa Maria”, Terni (Italy). All cases of breast malignancy admitted to the Breast Unit between 2001 and 2005 were reviewed: 750 patients were diagnosed with malignant breast disease. Primary breast lymphoma (was found only in two cases accounting for an incidence of 0,26%. The pre-operative diagnosis was infiltrating carcinoma in both cases and the patients were treated with surgery and systemic chemotherapy; currently they are disease-free