Prosthetic joint infection. A relevant public health issue.

Prosthetic joint infection (PJI) is a common complication of the knee and hip arthroplasty and represents a huge challenge for physicians. PJI raises serious social, economic and clinical concerns in the public health that need a comprehensive approach to better focus on proven strategies for disease prevention and treatment. History and clinical signs on joint site are useful means for suspecting PJI that need to be confirmed through major and minor diagnostic criteria. The pathogen isolation and the resulting antibiogram are crucial to guide the correct antibiotic strategy and together with surgical treatment (prosthesis revision and spacer implantation) represent the cornerstones to eradicate the infection before attempting a new arthroplasty. External fixator with removal of the spacer may be an option before performing a new arthroplasty when the infection does not heal. Arthrodesis may also be considered if the arthroplasty is contraindicated. Limb amputation is the last chance when pathogen eradication failed and might lead to life-threatening situations

A note on new measures of agglomeration and specialization

Most measures and indexes of industrial agglomeration, concentration and specialization are variations of the Gini's index and may be limited in scope and structure. Rarely, if ever, they include any reference to territorial dimensions and tend to be measures of volumes adjusted for the task at end. They do not embody any information relative to the industrial density and size of the analyzed regions. Alternatively some authors use just density as a measure of agglomeration ignoring the related dimensionalities of volume and territorial size. These shortcomings may bring about both di¢ culties in interpreting results and distorted pictures about the actual industrial regional structure of an area. Regional dimensionality is particularly relevant for researchers focusing on analytical aspects connected with agglomeration and concentration. The present paper introduces measures of agglomeration, concentration and specialization encompassing information about volume, den- sity and region dimensionality. Such an index is built on simple heuristic notion of industrial mass and would provide a more reliable, accurate and fexible instrument than previous measures. JEL Classifcation: C22, C32, C50, E24, E32, J63

Female Labour Supply with Time Constraints

The Italian labour market seems unable to allocate a significant fraction of the working age population efficiently. The gap between the employment rate in Italy and in the other developed economies is foremost attributable to the low employment rates of youth, seniors and women. The low employment rates of these three groups are due to several factors limiting both labour demand and labour supply. For women in particular, constraints on the allocation of time play a crucial role in determining labour supply behaviour. In this thesis we try to understand how non-standard time constraints may affect the behaviour of women, and their labour supply in particular. In the first chapter we study how the constraints on work-schedules affect the time allocation of workers in Italy. For a large fraction of employed individuals the work schedule is very rigid, as a consequence of outdated industrial relations. In order to understand whether constraints on the work-schedule produce significant effects on the allocation of time of wage/salary workers in Italy, we exploit the intrinsic differences between them and self employed workers. In fact, one of the main features of self-employment is the greater control over the days worked and daily hours of work. We use the last wave of the Italian time use survey (2008-2009) to provide evidence that the distribution of hours of work of self-employed workers is much more dispersed than that of wage/salary workers and that average standard deviation of their daily minutes of work within a week is significantly larger. Then we show that self-employed workers respond more to shocks affecting the value of leisure. We show that on sunny days the increase of leisure and the reduction of work are significantly larger for self-employed workers. We address whether unobservable characteristics, such as preferences for leisure and for outdoor activities in particular, determine this differential response and find no evidence for this. We interpret the differential response to weather shocks as a consequence of the time constraints on work-schedules. This evidence is relevant for female labour force participation since in Italy a large fraction of women choose not to work because they would otherwise not be able to reconcile family and work responsibilities. In the second chapter we study the Added Worker Effect (AWE). The retrospective questions provided by the new labour force survey allow identification of transitions between labour market states in a 12 month time-window. Since we are able to identify the reason for the husband’s job loss, we distinguish between transitions associated with low or high income losses. We find that both the wife’s probability of joining the labour force and that of finding a job increase when the husband is dismissed or he is forced to quit his job for health reasons, two cases of usually high income losses. Moreover, we estimate the wife’s full transition matrix between labour market states and we find that the loss of a job by a husband increases the probability that his wife will enter the iv labour force. Finally, we provide some descriptive evidence that time constraints can also impact the magnitude of the AWE. Focusing on mothers with young children, we show that the estimated AWE is positively correlated with the regional provision of child care services. The third chapter is based on the time use files of the Canadian General Social Survey. We study how Sunday shopping deregulation changed the time allocation of women, with a particular focus on those with children. The empirical analysis relies on the provincial variation in the time of the policy change. Our results suggest that women with children, who usually face stringent time constraints, respond to the policy change by substituting weekday shopping with Sunday shopping. The amount of time these women save from doing shopping on weekdays allows them to increase their minutes of work. On Sunday, shopping increases at the expense of leisure. The main result of this chapter is that the labour supply of mothers may change even when non-obvious constraints on the allocation of time change

Andreev reflection in Si-engineered Al/InGaAs hybrid junctions

Andreev-reflection dominated transport is demonstrated in Al/n-In0.38Ga0.62As superconductor-semiconductor junctions grown by molecular beam epitaxy on GaAs(001). High junction transparency was achieved in low-doped devices by exploiting Si interface bilayers to suppress the native Schottky barrier. It is argued that this technique is ideally suited for the fabrication of ballistic transport hybrid microstructures.Comment: 9 REVTEX pages + 3 postscript figures, to be published in APL 73, (28dec98

Age-Related Epigenetic Derangement upon Reprogramming and Differentiation of Cells from the Elderly

Aging is a complex multi-layered phenomenon. The study of aging in humans is based on the use of biological material from hard-to-gather tissues and highly specific cohorts. The introduction of cell reprogramming techniques posed promising features for medical practice and basic research. Recently, a growing number of studies have been describing the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from old or centenarian biologic material. Nonetheless, Reprogramming techniques determine a profound remodelling on cell epigenetic architecture whose extent is still largely debated. Given that cell epigenetic profile changes with age, the study of cell-fate manipulation approaches on cells deriving from old donors or centenarians may provide new insights not only on regenerative features and physiology of these cells, but also on reprogramming-associated and age-related epigenetic derangement

Predicting human motion intention for pHRI assistive control

This work addresses human intention identification during physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) tasks to include this information in an assistive controller. To this purpose, human intention is defined as the desired trajectory that the human wants to follow over a finite rolling prediction horizon so that the robot can assist in pursuing it. This work investigates a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), specifically, Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) cascaded with a Fully Connected layer. In particular, we propose an iterative training procedure to adapt the model. Such an iterative procedure is powerful in reducing the prediction error. Still, it has the drawback that it is time-consuming and does not generalize to different users or different co-manipulated objects. To overcome this issue, Transfer Learning (TL) adapts the pre-trained model to new trajectories, users, and co-manipulated objects by freezing the LSTM layer and fine-tuning the last FC layer, which makes the procedure faster. Experiments show that the iterative procedure adapts the model and reduces prediction error. Experiments also show that TL adapts to different users and to the co-manipulation of a large object. Finally, to check the utility of adopting the proposed method, we compare the proposed controller enhanced by the intention prediction with the other two standard controllers of pHRI