Urbanities

Following a consolidated tradition since the first number of the journal, the 16th of Archi-DOCT is the result of a call for contribution focused on one single word “Urbanities”. When we were discussing the direction that we wanted to give to this issue, we concluded that we aimed to focus its critical slant - through a specific call to action to the schools of architectures and their students - towards a new interest concerning the multiple scales and resolutions of the so-called urban dimension. During the last decades, centralized planning - as a result of the Modernist heritage - fostered the implementation of top-down hierarchic processes that despite the political and ideological background led the city to be suffering phenomena such as sprawling, undefined expansions, and the emergence of the alleged “urban voids” (that aroused a new matrix of problems and issues to be tackled. Whether we refer to Rome, Tirana, Valencia, Athens, or any contemporary metropolis, these criticalities are far from being solved and, even less, we are close to defining a methodological approach that could suggest effective strategies to proactively remedy this condition. For this, we have been interested in collecting inputs from our authors in order to set the scene so that everyone could tell a specific story and personally question the keyword we choose

Dorotea, the city, can be different: urban projects in Rome based on the seminal role of infrastructures

This paper offers a semiotic perspective of the city as an enunciation of different signs in which contemporary projects (the alleged urbanities) play a fundamental role in resemantizing the urban environment. Such design outcomes allow us to understand the city as a hypotactic complex system, not created then only by the simple juxtaposition of elements, but intended as the results of multiple primary and secondary intertwined narrations. The work adopts a structuralist-based approach to the topic where the examples presented act on two combinatory levels: a first one, where each of them maintains its autonomy and functions as an independent predicate, and a second one where the importance relies on the structural system in a dyachronic perspective. What we argue for is the possibility for architects to promote a bottom-up incremental design strategy in the urban enviroment to trigger sustainable urban transformation processes. Moreover, through the specific experience of the authors in the Tevere Cavo project, the papers aims to demonstrate the importance of multitasking interactive spaces and new generation infrastructures for the revitalization and re-activation of the abandoned urban spaces using the city of Rome as object of such investigation

Correction to: Spino-pelvic balance and surgical treatment of L5–S1 isthmic spondylolisthesis

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Parameter estimation in continuous stochastic volatility models

Continuous-time di usion processes are often used in literature to model dynamics of nancial markets. In such kinds of models a rel- evant role is played by the variance of the process. So assumptions on the functional form of such variance have to be made in order to analyse the distribution of the resulting process and to make inference on the model. In this paper the variance is also modelled by means of a di usion process. This comes out as continuous time approximation of a GARCH(1; 1) process. Inference on the parameters and properties of the involved estimators are discussed under di erent choices of the frequency data. Simulations on the model are also performed

Mycobacterium sherrisii visceral disseminated infection in an African HIV-infected adolescent.

SummaryA case of visceral disseminated infection by Mycobacterium sherrisii in an African HIV-infected adolescent with multiple abdominal abscesses is reported. Despite multiple drug resistance to first-line antibiotics in vitro, long-term treatment with clarithromycin, moxifloxacin, and clindamycin, together with appropriate antiretroviral treatment, resulted in clinical and radiological cure after 19 months of therapy and follow-up

Spontaneous vertebral aspergillosis, the state of art: a systematic literature review

Objective: Vertebral aspergillosis are quite rare conditions, often misdiagnosed, that requires long-term antibiotic therapy and, sometimes, surgical treatments. The present investigations was aimed to investigate epidemiology, clinical-radiological aspects, treatment protocols, and outcomes of Aspergillus-mediated vertebral osteomyelitis. Methods: A systematic review of the pertinent English Literature according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines was performed. The research was conducted on Cochrane library, MEDLINE, PubMed and Scopus using as search-terms “Aspergillus”, “vertebral osteomyelitis”, “spondylodiscitis”, “spine infection”. A case of vertebral apsergillosis conservatively managed was also reported. Results: Eighty-nine articles were included in our systematic review. Including the reported case, our analysis covered 112 cases of vertebral aspergillosis. Aspergillus fumigatus was isolated in 68 cases (61.2%), Aspergillus flavus in 14 (12.6%), Aspergillus terreus in 4 (3.6%), Aspergillus nidulans in 2 (1.8%). Seventy-three patients (65.7%) completely recovered at last follow-up evaluation; in 7 (6.3%) patients radiological signs of chronic infection were reported, whereas 32 (28.8%) patients died during the follow-up. Conclusion: This systematic review summarized the state of the art on vertebral aspergillosis, retrieving data on clinical features, diagnostic criteria and current limitations, treatment alternatives and their outcomes