VALUE-BASED EVIDENCES TO FACE THE NEW CHALLENGES OF HEALTH PROMOTION IN A SUSTAINABLE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

Thirty years ago, starting from a new awareness of the limits of biomedical power and healthcare services to solve all population\u201f health problems, the Ottawa Conference coined a New Public Health by defining Health Promotion (HP) as \u201cthe process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health and well-being\u201d. Since then and over the next 30 years, several programs have been developed all over the world to translate HP concepts into practical actions and many health successes have been achieved as well. Nowadays, even if the global health context has strongly changed, the original principles of HP still provide a solid ground for action, being the community engagement and empowerment of women and men still at the heart of any health strategy, in a shared responsibility of all society\u201fs sectors approach. However, since now HP promotion efforts have been directed toward priority health problems in a issue- settings-based approach, but in a sustainable and ethical prospective this will be not enough now: a deeper attention on effectiveness is request and an evidence- and value-based HP approach is needed to support the Public Health community and the policy-making, including the new challenges related to Public Health Genomics

A liquidity risk index as a regulatory tool for systemically important banks? An empirical assessment across two financial crises

We provide an assessment of the IMF suggestion, based on Severo (2012), to use an index of systemic liquidity risk (SLRI) that could help to estimate a Pigouvian tax on large banks for the externality on the international banking system out of their risk exposure. To this end we compute a parsimonious and fully documented SLRI and investigate its statistical significance in explaining level and variability of stock returns for a group of large international banks during the subprime financial and the Eurozone sovereign debt crises. The empirical investigation consistently fails to detect, within and across the two crises, a core group among the systemically important banks listed by the Financial Stability Board and thus supports a sceptical assessment of the proposal

The impact of boron hybridisation on photocatalytic processes

Recently the fruitful merger of organoboron chemistry and photocatalysis has come to the forefront of organic synthesis resulting in the development of new technologies to access complex (non)borylated frameworks. Central to the success of this combination is control of boron hybridisation. Contingent on the photoactivation mode, boron as its neutral planar form or tetrahedral boronate can be used to regulate reactivity. This minireview highlights the current state of the art in photocatalytic processes utilising organoboron compounds paying particular attention to the role of boron hybridisation for the target transformation

Atmospheric Pressure Non-thermal Plasma for Air Purification: Ions and Ionic Reactions Induced by dc+ Corona Discharges in Air Contaminated with Acetone and Methanol

Atmospheric pressure mass spectrometry (APCI-MS) was used to investigate the positive ions in air containing acetone (A), methanol (M) and mixtures thereof (A + M), subjected to +dc corona discharges. The results of experiments with isotopically labelled analogues, perdeuterated acetone Adeu and methanol Mdeu, and relevant thermochemical data found in the literature allowed us to identify the main ionic reactions occurring in single component systems (A or M) and in binary mixtures (A + M). It is concluded that, thanks to its significantly higher proton affinity, A is very efficient in quenching M-derived ions at atmospheric pressure. These conclusions provide a rationale for interpreting the results of a parallel investigation on the reciprocal effects of M and A when treated together in air at atmospheric pressure with +dc corona in a non-thermal plasma reactor developed previously in our laboratory. Specifically, we observed a marked drop in the degradation efficiency of methanol when it was treated in the presence of an equivalent amount of acetone. This effect is attributed to acetone interfering with ion-initiated degradation processes of methanol, and supports the conclusion\ua0that ions and ionic reactions are important in dc+ corona induced oxidation of volatile organic pollutants in air

T-Dualities and Courant Algebroid Relations

We develop a new approach to T-duality based on Courant algebroid relations which subsumes the usual T-duality as well as its various generalisations. Starting from a relational description for the reduction of exact Courant algebroids over foliated manifolds, we introduce a weakened notion of generalised isometries that captures the generalised geometry counterpart of Riemannian submersions when applied to transverse generalised metrics. This is used to construct T-dual backgrounds as generalised metrics on reduced Courant algebroids which are related by a generalised isometry. We prove an existence and uniqueness result for generalised isometric exact Courant algebroids coming from reductions. We demonstrate that our construction reproduces standard T-duality relations based on correspondence spaces. We also describe how it applies to generalised T-duality transformations of almost para-Hermitian manifolds.Comment: 68 page

Tourism, natural protected areas and open source geospatial technologies.

The Covid-19 outbreak has greatly impacted society behaviours fostering proximity tourism and valorising the social role of peri-urban natural protected areas as key locations for outdoor activities. FOSS and FOSS4G can play a critical role to support the value creation for these sites. This work evaluates its application in the context of two different protected areas for the creation of 3D digital products, the monitoring of touristic fluxes and the conduction of parks management activities. To this aim three solutions that copes with the mentioned aspects are presented and gaps, weakness and limitations evaluated. The investigated solutions consists in: the data workflow from survey to 3D rendering using Blender and GIS plugin; the touristic fluxes monitoring system based on a machine learning algorithm for image recognition from captured video data streams and istSOS; and finally the park assets management system which is based on PostGIS and OpenLayers

Correlations between Activity and Blood Pressure in African American Women and Girls

Is the level of physical activity recommended by the Surgeon General enough to elicit the beneficial effects of exercise on blood pressure in African American women and girls? This study investigated self-reported physical activity level and its relationship to blood pressure in a population of African American women (N=25) between the ages of 21 and 53 years and girls (N=52) between the ages of 5 and 17 years, in Dayton, Ohio, USA. Physical activity levels were estimated by an interviewer-administered questionnaire, which determined the average hours per week over the past year spent in occupational and leisure activities. Blood pressure was also measured. 56% of the women had average physical activity levels of 3.7 MET-hours per week, and 73% of the girls had average physical activity levels of 3.9 MET-hours per week compared to the Surgeon General’s recommendation of 7.5-15 MET-hours per week. Inverse correlations between self-reported physical activity level and systolic and diastolic blood pressures were statistically significant in some but not all of the groups. These data suggest that increasing physical activity levels should be considered as part of an intervention program for African American women to control systolic and diastolic blood pressures

Efficiency, products and mechanisms of ethyl acetate oxidative degradation in air non-thermal plasma

Ethyl acetate (EA) is a popular solvent and diluent in many products and one of the most ubiquitous organic pollutants of indoor air. Although EA's ascertained toxicity is classified as low, exposure to its vapors at concentrations 400 ppm causes serious problems in humans. EA is thus a frequent target in testing novel technologies for air purification. We report here an investigation of EA oxidative degradation in air at room temperature and atmospheric pressure induced by corona discharges. Three corona regimes, dc-, dc+ and pulsed +, were tested in the same reactor under various experimental conditions with regard to EA initial concentration (C 0) and the presence of humidity in the system. The EA degradation process was monitored by gas chromatography (GC)-flame ionization detection, GC-mass spectrometry and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy analysis of the treated gas. These analyses yielded the concentration of residual EA (C) and those of its major products of oxidation (CO2, CO) and revealed a few organic reaction intermediates formed along the oxidation chain. The process energy efficiency was determined as energy constant, k E (kJ-1 l) and as energy yield, EY (g kW-1 h-1). The efficiency depends on the type of corona (pulsed + >dc- >dc+), on the presence of humidity in the air (improvement in the case of dc-, little or no effect for dc+) and on C 0 (k E increases linearly with 1/C 0). CO2 and CO were the major carbon containing products, confirming the strong oxidizing power of air non-thermal plasma. Acetic acid and acetaldehyde were detected in very small amounts as reaction intermediates. The experimental results obtained in this work support the conclusion that different reactive species are involved in the initial step of EA oxidation in the case of dc- and dc+ corona air non-thermal plasma

A general interpolation scheme for thermal fluctuations in superconductors

We present a general interpolation theory for the phenomenological effects of thermal fluctuations in superconductors. Fluctuations are described by a simple gauge invariant extension of the gaussian effective potential for the Ginzburg-Landau static model. The approach is shown to be a genuine variational method, and to be stationary for infinitesimal gauge variations around the Landau gauge. Correlation and penetration lengths are shown to depart from the mean field behaviour in a more or less wide range of temperature below the critical regime, depending on the class of material considered. The method is quite general and yields a very good interpolation of the experimental data for very different materials.Comment: some misprints have been corrected in Eq.(15),(19); more references and comments have been adde

Comment on "water-Soluble Fluorescent Probe with Dual Mitochondria/Lysosome Targetability for Selective Superoxide Detection in Live Cells and in Zebrafish Embryos"

Recently, a new water-soluble, fluorescein-based probe for the detection of superoxide radical anion in aqueous media was developed by Lu et al. (ACS Sens. 2018, 3, 59-64). The probe was proven to be selective for superoxide and was used successfully also in cells and zebrafish embryos. To characterize the response of the probe to superoxide, Lu et al. used KO2 dissolved in deionized water as a surrogate. In testing this probe in different applications, we repeated some of these experiments and came to realize that the fluorescence signal observed by the Authors in their experiments with KO2 was incorrectly attributed to the reaction of the probe with superoxide and is due instead to its reactions with HO- and HO2-. We show that indeed under the conditions used in these assays KO2 undergoes very fast reaction with water to form HO- and HO2-. On the other hand, by using a proper surrogate, namely, KO2 dissolved in DMSO, and spin trapping experiments, we confirmed the ability of the probe to detect superoxide