Medication management ability in older patients: Time for a reappraisal

Background. Adhering to drug regimens is a complex and multidimensional task. Elderly patients usually take an average of seven drugs but most fail to adhere to the prescribed regimen. Several performance-based instruments have been developed to assess a patient\u2019s capacity to manage drugs but with inconsistent results. Aims. The aim of the study was to assess the prevalence of impaired medical management capacity in a sample of the oldest old hospitalized elderly patients and the main clinical factors associated with potential unintentional non-adherence. Methods. Forty-six consecutive patients were enrolled in the geriatric transitional care unit of Ospedale Policlinico San Martino, Genoa, Italy. All patients received an abbreviated comprehensive geriatric assessment and a hand grip assessment for sarcopenia. Patients\u2019 medication management ability was assessed by administering the DRUGS tool 48-74 hours before hospital discharge. Results. The results showed a negative correlation between age and total medication management score. A positive correlation was detected between functional status, cognitive status, and medication management score. Hand grip strength < 9 kg correlated with a significant worsening of medical management capacity. In contrast, multiple morbidities and the mean number of drugs were not associated with the medical management score. Conclusions. This preliminary study indicated that drug management capacity mainly relies on frailty markers, such as functional status, sarcopenia, and cognitive performance. Further studies are warranted to identify a subset of medical parameters that can accurately predict impaired medical management ability early, particularly for highly vulnerable elderly patients

An International Comparison of Equity in Accessibility to Jobs: London, São Paulo, and the Randstad

We analyze the impact of different accessibility measures on the interpretation of associated equity analysis using the Gini coefficient and the (pseudo) Palma ratio, and the impact of the method of assigning zonal accessibility on Gini estimation results using four different alternatives. Two types of potential accessibility measures (zonal and person-based) and two ratios of potential jobs to potential population (intra-modal and multi-modal) are estimated for car and transit in the Netherlands' Randstad region, Greater London, and São Paulo relying on network data, schedule-based data, and speed profiles. Gini results are heavily influenced by the accessibility indicator and the method of assignment. The Palma ratio is also influenced by the choice of accessibility indicator, with the person-based potential accessibility measure tending to show greater inequity

Magnetic Helicity Generation from the Cosmic Axion Field

The coupling between a primordial magnetic field and the cosmic axion field generates a helical component of the magnetic field around the time in which the axion starts to oscillate. If the energy density of the seed magnetic field is comparable to the energy density of the universe at that time, then the resulting magnetic helicity is about |H_B| \simeq (10^{-20} G)^2 kpc and remains constant after its generation. As a corollary, we find that the standard properties of the oscillating axion remain unchanged even in the presence of very strong magnetic fields.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D. Minor revisions and new references adde

Application of MCFCs for active CO2 capture within natural gas combined cycles

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A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness

We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. We discuss the ingredients of a science and a technology necessary to build the PNS upon the three mentioned pillars, beyond the limitations of their respective state-of-art. Social sensing is aimed at developing better methods for harvesting the big data from the techno-social ecosystem and make them available for mining, learning and analysis at a properly high abstraction level. Social mining is the problem of discovering patterns and models of human behaviour from the sensed data across the various social dimensions by data mining, machine learning and social network analysis. Trusted networks and privacy-aware social mining is aimed at creating a new deal around the questions of privacy and data ownership empowering individual persons with full awareness and control on own personal data, so that users may allow access and use of their data for their own good and the common good. The PNS will provide a goal-oriented knowledge discovery framework, made of technology and people, able to configure itself to the aim of answering questions about the pulse of global society. Given an analytical request, the PNS activates a process composed by a variety of interconnected tasks exploiting the social sensing and mining methods within the transparent ecosystem provided by the trusted network. The PNS we foresee is the key tool for individual and collective awareness for the knowledge society. We need such a tool for everyone to become fully aware of how powerful is the knowledge of our society we can achieve by leveraging our wisdom as a crowd, and how important is that everybody participates both as a consumer and as a producer of the social knowledge, for it to become a trustable, accessible, safe and useful public good. Graphical abstrac

A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness

We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. We discuss the ingredients of a science and a technology necessary to build the PNS upon the three mentioned pillars, beyond the limitations of their respective state-of-art. Social sensing is aimed at developing better methods for harvesting the big data from the techno-social ecosystem and make them available for mining, learning and analysis at a properly high abstraction level. Social mining is the problem of discovering patterns and models of human behaviour from the sensed data across the various social dimensions by data mining, machine learning and social network analysis. Trusted networks and privacy-aware social mining is aimed at creating a new deal around the questions of privacy and data ownership empowering individual persons with full awareness and control on own personal data, so that users may allow access and use of their data for their own good and the common good. The PNS will provide a goal-oriented knowledge discovery framework, made of technology and people, able to configure itself to the aim of answering questions about the pulse of global society. Given an analytical request, the PNS activates a process composed by a variety of interconnected tasks exploiting the social sensing and mining methods within the transparent ecosystem provided by the trusted network. The PNS we foresee is the key tool for individual and collective awareness for the knowledge society. We need such a tool for everyone to become fully aware of how powerful is the knowledge of our society we can achieve by leveraging our wisdom as a crowd, and how important is that everybody participates both as a consumer and as a producer of the social knowledge, for it to become a trustable, accessible, safe and useful public good.Seventh Framework Programme (European Commission) (grant agreement No. 284709

Production of Axions by Cosmic Magnetic Helicity

We investigate the effects of an external magnetic helicity production on the evolution of the cosmic axion field. It is shown that a helicity larger than (few \times 10^{-15} G)^2 Mpc, if produced at temperatures above a few GeV, is in contradiction with the existence of the axion, since it would produce too much of an axion relic abundance.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, major changes in the first part of the paper, reference added, to be published in Phys. Rev. Let

A Note on the Cosmic Evolution of the Axion in a Strong Magnetic Field

It has been pointed out in the literature that in the presence of an external magnetic field the axion mass receives an electromagnetic contribution. We show that if a magnetic field with energy density larger than ~10^{-8} times the energy density of the Universe existed at temperatures of a few GeV, that contribution would be dominant and consequently the cosmic evolution of the axion field would change substantially. In particular, the expected axion relic abundance would be lowered, allowing a small relaxation of the present cosmological bound on the Peccei-Quinn constant.Comment: 2 pages, no figures. Minor changes. References added. Accepted for publication in JCA

The response of primordial abundances to a general modification of GNG_{\rm N} and/or of the early universe expansion rate

We discuss the effects of a possible time variation of the Newton constant $G_{\rm N}$ on light elements production in Big Bang Nucleosyntesis (BBN). We provide analytical estimates for the dependence of primordial abundances on the value of the Newton constant during BBN. The accuracy of these estimates is then tested by numerical methods. % Moreover, we determine numerically the response of each element to an arbitrary time-dependent modification of the early universe expansion rate. Finally, we determine the bounds on possible variations of $G_{\rm N}$ which can be obtained from the comparison of theoretical predictions and observational data.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure