Spatially correlated mixed-effects models for the analysis of soil water retention.

The knowledge of hydraulic properties of soil is necessary in many environmental applications and land planning. These properties, however, are difficult to determine and often they demand high labour costs, for which the tendency is to estimate them on the base of other more easily measurable or already available soil data. The level of detail reached using this method is not always satisfactory for some applications to basin scale, where variables to measure the morphologic property of the landscape are required. This study is proposed to characterize the spatial distribution of the water retention of a soil on wide scale using data relative to the physical, topographical and chemical characteristics of the soil within a model based approach.Linear Mixed Models, Spatial Continuous Autoregressive Correlation Structure, Soil Water Retention.

I modelli geo-additivi per l'analisi del grado di salinita' di un suolo

: In questo studio un modello geo-additivo e' stato utilizzato per analizzare la distribuzione spaziale del tasso di assorbimento del sodio nella zona costiera di Muravera-Villaputzu (CA) per individuare le cause che ne hanno determinato leccessivo grado di salinita', dannoso per le colture agrumicole praticate nella zona. I modelli geo-additivi rappresentano unevoluzione del kriging universale e consentono di considerare esplicitamente i legami non lineari tra la risposta e le covariate e la correlazione spaziale descritta mediante una funzione di autocorrelazione.

Consumers perception of traditional sustainable food: an exploratory study on pasta made from native ancient durum wheat varieties

Governments and policy play an important role in prompting the public and private interest for local and traditional food, in order to increase the variety of food choice for consumers (Guerrero et al., 2012) and to foster local economies and rural regions development (Feldmann et al., 2015). Our study may provide useful indication to food companies and producers to invest in innovative products based on traditional regional raw materials tailoring marketing actions and investments. But how consumers perceive the quality of products made from native crops varieties? Recent review on consumers perception and preferences for local and traditional food emphasizes that, unlike organic food, local ones are not perceived as expensive but consumers would be willing to pay a premium price to access them (Feldmann et al., 2015). Does this conclusion still hold in case of durum wheat pasta obtained from traditional wheat varieties? Answer to the latter question is one of the aims of the paper. Moreover in order to maintain and even increase the traditional food products’ market share they need to be improved by introducing innovations that fulfil the European consumers’ demand for better traditional food product from different perspectives, including for example health, safety, taste and convenience characteristics (Cayot, 2007). Indeed, other studies investigating how consumers perceive the meaning of terms such as ‘traditional’ and ‘Innovation’, found a noticeable incompatibility between the two concepts (Guerrero et al., 2012). However, assuming a positive feeling and attitude of consumers towards those products, the main aim of the article is to address consumers preferences towards different attributes of pasta. Conjoint analysis will be developed to assess consumer perception towards pasta made from native durum wheat varieties. On purpose more then 258 habitual consumers of pasta from Apulia region were interviewed using internet based tools

Cytauxzoon europaeus infections in domestic cats in Switzerland and in European wildcats in France: a tale that started more than two decades ago

BACKGROUND: Cytauxzoon spp. infection is believed to be a newly emerging tick-borne disease in felids in Europe, with three species of the haemoparasite having recently been differentiated in wild felids. In Switzerland, rare infections have been documented in domestic cats in the west and northwest of the country, the first of which was in 2014. The aims of the present study were: (i) to characterize a Cytauxzoon spp. hotspot in domestic cats in central Switzerland; (ii) to elucidate the geographic distribution of Cytauxzoon spp. in domestic cats in Switzerland; (iii) to assess suspected high-risk populations, such as stray and anaemic cats; and (iv) to investigate the newly emerging nature of the infection. Cytauxzoon spp. were further differentiated using mitochondrial gene sequencing. METHODS: The overall study included samples from 13 cats from two households in central Switzerland (study A), 881 cats from all regions of Switzerland (study B), 91 stray cats from a hotspot region in the northwest of Switzerland and 501 anaemic cats from across Switzerland (study C), and 65 Swiss domestic cats sampled in 2003 and 34 European wildcats from eastern France sampled in the period 1995-1996 (study D). The samples were analysed for Cytauxzoon spp. using real-time TaqMan quantitative PCR, and positive samples were subjected to 18S rRNA, cytochrome b (CytB) and cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene sequencing. RESULTS: In study A, six of 13 cats from two neighbouring households in central Switzerland tested postive for Cytauxzoon spp.; two of the six infected cats died from bacterial infections. In studies B and C, only one of the 881 cats (0.1%; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0-0.3%) in the countrywide survey and one of the 501 anaemic cats (0.2%; 95% CI: 0-0.6%) tested postive for Cytauxzoon spp. while eight of the 91 stray cats in the northwest of Switzerland tested positive (8.8%; 95% CI: 3.0-14.6%). In study D, Cytauxzoon spp. was detected in one of the 65 domestic cat samples from 2003 (1.5%; 95% CI: 0-4.5%) and in ten of the 34 European wildcat samples from 1995 to 1996 (29%; 95% CI: 14.2-44.7%). The isolates showed ≥ 98.6% sequence identities among the 18S rRNA, CytB and COI genes, respectively, and fell in the subclade Cytauxzoon europaeus based on CytB and COI gene phylogenetic analyses. CONCLUSIONS: The study challenges the newly emerging nature of Cytauxzoon spp. in central Europe and confirms that isolates from domestic cats in Switzerland and European wild felids belong to the same species

Framing automatic grading techniques for open-ended questionnaires responses. A short survey

The assessment of students' performances is one of the essential components of teaching activities, and it poses different challenges to teachers and instructors, especially when considering the grading of responses to open-ended questions (i.e., short-answers or essays). Open-ended tasks allow a more in-depth assessment of students' learning levels, but their evaluation and grading are time-consuming and prone to subjective bias. For these reasons, automatic grading techniques have been studied for a long time, focusing mainly on short-answers rather than long essays. Given the growing popularity of Massive Online Open Courses and the shifting from physical to virtual classrooms environments due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the adoption of questionnaires for evaluating learning performances has rapidly increased. Hence, it is of particular interest to analyze the recent effort of researchers in the development of techniques designed to grade students' responses to open-ended questions. In our work, we consider a systematic literature review focusing on automatic grading of open-ended written assignments. The study encompasses 488 articles published from 1984 to 2021 and aims at understanding the research trends and the techniques to tackle essay automatic grading. Lastly, inferences and recommendations are given for future works in the Learning Analytics field

Spatial Data Methods for Environmental and Ecological Processes - 2nd Edition

Proceedings of Spatial Data Methods for Environmental and Ecological Processes – 2nd Edition, the 2011 European Regional Conference of The International Environmetrics Society and satellite of the 58th World Statistics Congress of the International Statistical Institute (ISI)