The construction of the meanings of #coronavirus on Twitter: An analysis of the initial reactions of the Italian people

The first months of 2020 saw the coronavirus pandemic explode. Moving from China, it arrived in Europe and hit Italy. The place where the debate around it exploded was the media ecosystem. In a short time, it was an explosion of tweets related to the hashtag #coronavirus on Twitter. With the aim of reconstructing the meanings of the hashtag and the content, in terms of sentiment and opinions, of the reactions of the Italians, we collected in a large size corpus, the hundred thousand Italian tweets containing the #coronavirus produced during the media hype period from the Twitter repository (February 24th - 28th, 2020). Media hype period was discovered by digging in the online articles of ‘la Repubblica', based on the presence of the words: coronavirus and Italy. The media hype is February 26th. The corpus underwent Emotional Text Mining (ETM), an unsupervised methodology, which allows social profiling based on communication. The study of the word chosen to talk about a topic and their co-occurrence allows the understanding of people’s symbolizations, representations, and sentiment, about the coronavirus. In a retrospective logic, this mechanism allows us to reconstruct the sensemaking and nuances of meaning attributed by users to the coronavirus hashtag

Energy dissipation of rockfalls by coppice structures

Abstract. The objective of this work is to develop elements to improve understanding of the behaviour of a coppice in relation to the phenomenon of falling boulders. The first section proposes an amendment to the equation for calculating the index which describes the probability of impact between a rock and plants in managed coppice forests. A study was carried out, using models to calculate the kinetic energy of a falling boulder along a slope considering the kinetic energy dissipated during the impact with the structure of forest plants managed by coppice. The output of the simulation models were then compared with the real dynamics of falling boulders in field tests using digital video. It emerged from an analysis of the results of this comparison that a modification to the 1989 Gsteiger equation was required, in order to calculate the "Average Distance between Contacts" (ADC). To this purpose, the concept of "Structure of Interception", proposed in this paper, was developed, valid as a first approach for describing the differences in the spatial distribution of stems between coppice and forest. This study also aims to provide suggestions for forestry management, in order to maintain or increase the protective capacity of a coppice managed with conventional techniques for the area studied, modifying the dendrometric characteristics

Impact of COVID-19 Outbreak on Healthcare Workers in Italy: Results from a National E-Survey

Italy has been the first-hit European country to face the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Aim of this survey was to assess in depth the impact of the outbreak on healthcare workers (HCW). A 40-item online survey was disseminated via social media inviting Italian HCW, with questions exploring demographics, health status and work environment of respondents. A total of 527 were invited to take part in March 2020, of whom 74% (n = 388) responded to the survey. Of these, 235 (61%) were women. HCW were mostly physicians (74%), from high-prevalence regions (52%). 25% experienced typical symptoms during the last 14 days prior to survey completion, with only 45% of them being tested for COVID-19. Among the tested population, 18 (18%) resulted positive for COVID-19, with 33% being asymptomatic. Only 22% of HCW considered personal protective equipment adequate for quality and quantity. Females and respondents working in high-risk sectors were more likely to rate psychological support as useful (OR, 1.78 [CI 95% 1.14–2.78] P = 0.012, and 2.02 [1.12–3.65] P = 0.020, respectively) and workload as increased (mean increase, 0.38 [0.06–0.69] P = 0.018; and 0.54 [0.16–0.92] P = 0.005, respectively). The insights from this survey may help authorities in countries where COVID-19 epidemic has not yet broken out. Management strategies should be promptly undertaken in order to enhance safety and optimise resource allocation

Front-end Electronics Test for the LHCb Muon Wire Chambers

This document describes the apparatus and procedures implemented to test Multi Wire Proportional Chambers (MWPC) after front-end assembly for the LHCb Muon Detector. Results of measurements of key noise parameters are also described. Given a fully equipped chamber, this system is able to diagnose every channel performing an analysis of front-end output drivers’ response and noise rate versus threshold. Besides, it allows to assess if the noise rate at the experiment threshold region is within appropriate limits. Aiming at an automatic, fast and user-friendly system for mass production tests of MWPC, the project has foreseen as well electronic identification of every chamber and front-end board, and data archiving in such a way to make it available to the Experiment Control System (ECS) while in operation

Single-incision laparoscopic adnexectomy in an obese patient with previous laparotomies

No case of single-incision laparoscopic surgery in obese patients who had previously undergone multiple midline vertical laparotomies has been described in the literature to date. Hence we report the first case of single-port laparoscopic salpingo-oophorectomy in an obese patient who was affected by a left adnexal mass and who had previously undergone 3 midline vertical laparotomies

An Approach to Model Resources Rationalisation in Hybrid Clouds through Users Activity Characterisation

In recent years, some strategies (e.g., server consolidation by means of virtualisation techniques) helped the managers of large Information Technology (IT) infrastructures to limit, when possible, the use of hardware resources in order to provide reliable services and to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of such infrastructures. Moreover, with the advent of Cloud computing, a resource usage rationalisation can be pursued also for the users applications, if this is compatible with the Quality of Service (QoS) which must be guaranteed. In this perspective, modern datacenters are “elastic”, i.e., able to shrink or enlarge the number of local physical or virtual resources from private/public Clouds. Moreover, many of large computing environments are integrated in distributed computing environment as the grid and cloud infrastructures. In this document, we report some advances in the realisation of a utility, we named Adaptive Scheduling Controller (ASC) which, interacting with the datacenter resource manager, allows an effective and efficient usage of resources, also by means of users jobs classification. Here, we focus both on some data mining algorithms which allows to classify the users activity and on the mathematical formalisation of the functional used by ASC to find the most suitable configuration for the datacenter’s resource manager. The presented case study concerns the SCoPE infrastructure, which has a twofold role: local computing resources provider for the University of Naples Federico II and remote resources provider for both the Italian Grid Infrastructure (IGI) and the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) Federated Cloud

Artificial Intelligence in the Water–Energy–Food Model: A Holistic Approach towards Sustainable Development Goals

This study aims to analyze the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the Water–Energy–Food (WEF) nexus under the lens of institutional, stakeholder, and innovation theories. Specifically, this study focuses on AI as the technology adopted by companies to promote Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A structured literature review has been conducted on 94 articles published from 1990 to 2021 in ISI Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. This study develops an in-depth review of the literature on the main articles arguing about these issues. The findings highlight the increasing relevance of AI in the water, energy, and food industries individually considered, but the study of AI as a connector between water, energy, and food to achieve SDGs is still under investigation. Research on AI for WEF nexus management has adopted mostly a technical perspective, neglecting the relevance of management tools and the business model concept. Most of the articles did not adopt a specific theoretical lens, but scholars recognize the need to adopt a multi-stakeholder approach and the important role played by AI and other digital technologies to address the WEF nexus challenge. This study proposes an integrated approach for managing the nexus through AI technologies to meet sustainable and responsible business models. The gap between research and policy making could be filled by combining scientific data and policy needs with inclusive tools that are technically viable for sustainable resource utilization

Neural representations underlying mental imagery as unveiled by representation similarity analysis

It is commonly acknowledged that visual imagery and perception rely on the same content-dependent brain areas in the high-level visual cortex (HVC). However, the way in which our brain processes and organizes previous acquired knowledge to allow the generation of mental images is still a matter of debate. Here, we performed a representation similarity analysis of three previous fMRI experiments conducted in our laboratory to characterize the neural representation underlying imagery and perception of objects, buildings and faces and to disclose possible dissimilarities in the neural structure of such representations. To this aim, we built representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) by computing multivariate distances between the activity patterns associated with each pair of stimuli in the content-dependent areas of the HVC and HC. We found that spatial information is widely coded in the HVC during perception (i.e. RSC, PPA and OPA) and imagery (OPA and PPA). Also, visual information seems to be coded in both preferred and non-preferred regions of the HVC, supporting a distributed view of encoding. Overall, the present results shed light upon the spatial coding of imagined and perceived exemplars in the HVC

A multicenter study on the appropriateness of hospitalization in obstetric wards: application of Obstetric Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol (Obstetric AEP)

The cross-sectional study has been based on the implementation of the Obstetric Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol (OAEP) in seven hospitals to determine inappropriate hospital admissions and days of stay. The outcomes were: inappropriateness of admission and "percentage of inappropriateness" for one hospitalization. A total number of 2196 clinical records were reviewed. The mean percentage of inappropriateness for hospitalization was 22%. The percentage of inappropriateness for the first 10 d of hospitalization peaked in correspondence of the fourth (42%). The logistic regression model on inappropriated admission reported that emergency admission was a protective factor (OR = 0.4) and to be hospitalized in wards with 6530 beds risk factor (OR = 5.12). The second linear model on "percentage of inappropriateness" showed that inappropriated admission and wards with 6530 beds increased the percentage (p < 0.001); whereas the admission in Teaching Hospitals was inversely associated (p < 0.001). The present study suggests that the percentage of inappropriate admission depends especially on the inappropriate admission and the large number of beds in obstetric wards. This probably indicates that management of big hospitals, which is very complex, needs improving the processes of support and coordination of health professionals. The OAEP tool seems to be an useful instrument for the decision-makers to monitor and manage the obstetric wards. \ua9 2014 Informa UK Ltd. All rights reserved