1,525 research outputs found
The transition from school to university in mathematics education research: new trends and ideas from a systematic literature review
Investigating the transition between educational levels is one of the main themes for the future of mathematics education. In particular, the transition from secondary school to STEM degrees is problematic for the widespread students' difficulties and significant for the implications that it has on students' futures. Knowing and understanding the past is key to imagine the future of a research field. For this reason, this paper reports a systematic review of the literature on the secondary-tertiary transition in Mathematics Education from 2008 to 2021. We constructed two corpuses: one from the proceedings of three international conferences in mathematics education (PME, ICME, and INDRUM) and the other from peer reviewed research papers and book chapters returned by the databases ERIC and Google Scholar. A clear evolution in perspectives since 2008 emerges from the analysis of the two corpuses: the research focus changed from a purely cognitive to a more holistic one, including socio-cultural and - to a lesser extent - affective issues. To this end, a variety of research methods were used, and specific theoretical models were developed in the considered papers. The analysis also highlights a worrisome trend of underrepresentation: very little research comes from large geographical areas such as South America or Africa. We argue that this gap in representation is problematic as research on secondary tertiary transition concerns also consideration of socio-cultural and contextual factors
The frustrated Brownian motion of nonlocal solitary waves
We investigate the evolution of solitary waves in a nonlocal medium in the
presence of disorder. By using a perturbational approach, we show that an
increasing degree of nonlocality may largely hamper the Brownian motion of
self-trapped wave-packets. The result is valid for any kind of nonlocality and
in the presence of non-paraxial effects. Analytical predictions are compared
with numerical simulations based on stochastic partial differential equationComment: 4 pages, 3 figures
POS0631â COMPARATIVE EFFICACY OF COMBINATION THERAPY WITH BIOLOGIC OR TARGET SYNTHETIC DRUGS FOR RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS: A BAYESIAN NETWORK META-ANALYSIS
Background:Biologic agents and small molecules have shown long term benefit when added in patients with active RA non-responders to conventional DMARDs treatment (1). In head-to-head trials only adalimumab was compared to other drugs in combination with methotrexate, with some evidence of superiority but no data on multiple comparisons have been reported (2). The availability of biosimilar agents led in clinical practice to prefer mainly the cheaper one, so the choice of the most effective treatment remains a clinical unmet need (3).Objectives:To assess the relative efficacy of different therapeutic strategies for achieving ACR50 response at 24 weeks of treatment in patients with active RA, based on direct and indirect evidence.Methods:We performed systematic reviews of MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane Library databases, searching for all published phase 3 Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) comparing adalimumab originator to its biosimilars, abatacept, baricitinib, certolizumab pegol, tofacitinib or upadacitinib, combined to MTX, in patients with active RA inadequate responders to previous conventional DMARDs. American College of Rheumatology (ACR) 50% response at 24 weeks of treatment had to be evaluated both in adalimumab branch and in examined drug branch. Bayesian fixed-effect network meta-analysis was performed to combine the direct and indirect evidence using the WinBUGS 1.4 software (MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge, UK).Results:Eleven RCTs evaluating 6'004 patients were included in the analysis, namely originator (1) and biosimilars (2) adalimumab, abatacept (3), baricitinib (4), certolizumab pegol (5), tofacitinib (6) and upadacitinib (7). Convergence was reached at n.100'000 iterations. Upadacitinib seems to be more effective than both originator and biosimilar adalimumab in achieving ACR 50 (OR 1.65 95% CI 1.25-2.14 and OR 1.22 95%CI 1.10-2.18; see Figure 1). Similarly, tofacitinib was more effective of originator adalimumab (OR 1.25 95%CI 1.01-155). Upadacitinib was ranked first among treatments with a probability of being the agent more likely to induce ACR 50 response of 86.3%. In this regard tofacitinib had a probability of 4.8%, hence it was ranked second among treatments.Figure 1.Caterpillar plot OR for ACR50 at 24 weeks (originator [1] and biosimilars [2] adalimumab; abatacept [3]; baricitinib [4]; certolizumab pegol [5]; tofacitinib [6]; upadacitinib [7]).Conclusion:Although patients with active RA and inadequate response to MTX have different therapeutic combination of biologics or small molecules options, the best relative efficacy in terms of ACR50 response after 24 weeks of treatment is for upadacitinib 15âmg/day.References:[1]Smolen JS, et al. Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 2020;79:685-699.[2]Combe B, Lukas C. Joint Bone Spine, 2020,105004.[3]Caporali R, et al. Biomed Res Int. 2018 Sep 9;2018:3878953.Disclosure of Interests:Fabio Cacciapaglia Speakers bureau: Roche, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, MSD, UCB, BMS, Abbvie, Vincenzo Venerito: None declared, Stefano Stano: None declared, Marco Fornaro: None declared, Giuseppe Lopalco Speakers bureau: Celgene, BMS, Abbvie, Novartis, Florenzo Iannone Speakers bureau: Roche, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, MSD, UCB, BMS, Abbvie, Novartis, Celgen
Evaluation of flow dependent external costs in freight logistics networks
In this paper we face a distribution problem arising in a freight logistics context. More precisely, we are involved with the containerized flow originating from maritime terminals and going to inland destinations using the road transportation network. The goal is the minimization of the total shipping costs, given by the travelled distance, vehicles and external cost components. In particular, we consider accidental and polluting costs as external negative costs. Note that the proposed externality costs depend on the amount of flow through the selected arcs in the route and their capacity; therefore, a novel stepwise function is proposed and analyzed. A deep analysis is performed for evaluating the impact of environmental externalities on the choice of the route in terms of costs and distances depending on the density of the traffic. Results of an extensive computational experimentation performed with randomly generated instances of different size and capacity values of the arcs are reported. A real case instance related to the logistics network connecting the main ports of the Liguria County (Italy) to the main inland destinations is finally proposed and analyzed
Coexistence of coarsening and mean field relaxation in the long-range Ising chain
We study the kinetics after a low temperature quench of the one-dimensional Ising model with long range interactions between spins at distance r decaying as r-α. For α = 0, i.e. mean field, all spins evolve coherently quickly driving the system towards a magnetised state. In the weak long range regime with α > 1 there is a coarsening behaviour with competing domains of opposite sign without development of magnetisation. For strong long range, i.e. 0 < α < 1, we show that the system shows both features, with probability Pα(N) of having the latter one, with the different limiting behaviours limNââ Pα(N) = 0 (at fixed α < 1) and limαâ1 Pα(N) = 1 (at fixed finite N). We discuss how this behaviour is a manifestation of an underlying dynamical scaling symmetry due to the presence of a single characteristic time Ïα(N) ⌠Nα
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