Digital Education, Geography and Multidisciplinarity: Themes, Methods and Critical Issues

In the last few years education has been strongly marked by the digital paradigm: captivating resources, new teaching tools, methodologies and unprecedented interactions between teachers and students have become part of the scientific debate on new teaching/learning processes. This has had positive effects on teachers leading them to new stimuli and new ways of boosting creativity in their didactic approach. The pandemic period has acted as a catalyst of this digital progress in the education field and has also provided the foundation for a scientific reflection on this matter as can be seen in many international congresses and research programs. The visual nature of Geography, both in terms of study and research of the landscape and with reference to cartographic production and analysis, seems to be more involved in this change. Moreover, the propensity of Geography to multidisciplinarity – subject which can be seen as a synthesis of various disciplines including social sciences – implies an in-depth reflection on several levels. This is why when analyzing digital education in reference to Geography it is necessary to take into account themes, methods and critical issues that are at the heart of an ongoing teaching/learning process. In this Special Issue we intend to explore links between the teaching/learning of Geography (at any school/university level) and the digital world, even in a multidisciplinary perspective, including both the critical issues and the advantages in terms of sustainability and greater awareness of geographical phenomena also in relation with cultural dynamics (e.g. migrations, urban transformations, development, geopolitics, tourism)

Sustainability and risk perception: multidisciplinary approaches

Editorial to the special issue "Sustainability and risk perception: multidisciplinary approaches

Special Issue: Sustainability and risk perception: multidisciplinary approaches

Leonardo Mercatanti and Gaetano Sabato were guest editors of a special issue of the peer-​reviewed journal AIMS Geoscience "Sustainability and risk perception: multidisciplinary approaches". Within the scientific discourse of Geography and Social Sciences, the concepts of “sustainability” and “risk perception” often represent two complementary issues of the same dynamic. One mutually implies the other in different and complex ways and yet they are often dealt as two separate matters. Approaching the latter together as part of the same dialectical process, however allows us to gain a better insight on their interaction. For example, if we consider that risk perception implies forms of power and social relationships then the perception of volcanic risk could suggest sustainable security policies. Or, again, how risk perception could be connected to sustainable habits i.e. in the case of waste management, the real danger of unsustainability can positively affect more responsible behaviours and even encourage recycling. And once more, how some consumers’ behaviours are caused by specific risk perceptions i.e. the fear of pauperizing private and public resources leads to group purchases trends. This Special Issue of AIMS Geosciences aims to focus on some issues related to the topic of Sustainability and Risk perception. We think that a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach is really useful to try answering questions such as: how do these two poles interact? How do they influence (and/or affect) each other reciprocally? What kind of correlation exists between them? For this purpose, we encourage scholars of different disciplines and/or various fields of study to contribute with theoretical reflections, experiences and case studies

Energy chirp measurements by means of an RF deflector: a case study the gamma beam source LINAC at ELI-NP

RF Deflector (RFD) based measurements are widely used in high–brightness electron LINAC around the world in order to measure the ultra–short electron bunch length. The RFD provides a vertical kick to the particles of the electron bunch according to their longitudinal positions. In this paper, a measurement technique for the bunch length and other bunch proprieties, based on the usage of an RFD, is proposed. The basic idea is to obtain information about the bunch length, energy chirp, and energy spread from vertical spot size measurements varying the RFD phase, because they add contributions on this quantity. The case study is the Gamma Beam System (GBS), the Compton Source being built in the Extreme Light Infrastructure–Nuclear Physics (ELI–NP) facility. The ELEctron Generation ANd Tracking (ELEGANT) code is used for tracking the particles from RFD to the measurement screen

Indicatori di sostenibilità: la dimensione ‘ambiente’ dello sviluppo sostenibile

Prendendo le mosse dai precedenti studi e progetti di ricerca in tema di indici aggregati di sostenibilità, il presente lavoro ha come obiettivo quello di costruire un indice composito della dimensione ‘Ambiente’ dello sviluppo sostenibile per le regioni italiane, che parte da indicatori elementari di natura ambientale, appropriatamente raggruppati in temi. Una volta definiti gli indicatori elementari, questi vengono normalizzati, ponderati e raggruppati secondo tre livelli di aggregazione: indicatori elementari, indici tematici, indice sintetico di sostenibilità ambientale, EnvIndex. Tale indice è calcolato per le regioni italiane, laddove la maggior parte degli indicatori di sostenibilità sviluppati in letteratura si riferiscono ad un livello di aggregazione territoriale nazionale. La metodologia seguita per la sua costruzione è quella dell’Indice di performance ambientale, che permette di valutare i risultati delle politiche ambientali in termini di percentuale di conseguimento degli obiettivi prefissati, attraverso il metodo della “vicinanza al target”. L’EnvIndex aggrega 23 indicatori elementari, articolati in 4 temi: ‘Qualità dell’ambiente urbano’, ‘Tutela ambientale’, ‘Qualità del suolo’, ‘Qualità dell’acqua’. Ai fini del raggruppamento degli indicatori elementari nei 4 temi e dell’individuazione dei pesi da attribuire a ciascun indicatore nella costruzione degli indici tematici, è stata utilizzata l’analisi delle componenti principali, mentre l’indice sintetico EnvIndex è stato calcolato come somma ponderata dei 4 indici tematici con attribuzione di pesi uguali. Il vincolo costituito dalla difficoltà nel recuperare dati regionali su alcuni aspetti di tali tematiche ha inevitabilmente portato a trascurare elementi rilevanti ai fini della misurazione della sostenibilità ambientale e ciò deve essere tenuto in considerazione nella lettura dei risultati da noi ottenuti. Per questo motivo il presente lavoro si propone principalmente di offrire alcuni strumenti metodologici in tema di costruzione di indicatori sintetici di sostenibilità

Maximum a Posteriori Adaptation of Network Parameters in Deep Models

We present a Bayesian approach to adapting parameters of a well-trained context-dependent, deep-neural-network, hidden Markov model (CD-DNN-HMM) to improve automatic speech recognition performance. Given an abundance of DNN parameters but with only a limited amount of data, the effectiveness of the adapted DNN model can often be compromised. We formulate maximum a posteriori (MAP) adaptation of parameters of a specially designed CD-DNN-HMM with an augmented linear hidden networks connected to the output tied states, or senones, and compare it to feature space MAP linear regression previously proposed. Experimental evidences on the 20,000-word open vocabulary Wall Street Journal task demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework. In supervised adaptation, the proposed MAP adaptation approach provides more than 10% relative error reduction and consistently outperforms the conventional transformation based methods. Furthermore, we present an initial attempt to generate hierarchical priors to improve adaptation efficiency and effectiveness with limited adaptation data by exploiting similarities among senones

Psychosocial Morbidity and its Correlates in Cancer Patients of the Mediterranean Area: Findings from the Southern European Psycho-Oncology Study

BACKGROUND: A few and partial data are available on psychosocial morbidity among cancer patients in Mediterranean countries. As a part of a more general investigation (Southern European Psycho-Oncology Study-SEPOS), the rate of psychosocial morbidity and its correlation with clinical and cultural variables were examined in cancer patients in Italy, Portugal and Spain. METHODS: A convenience sample of cancer outpatients with good performance status and no cognitive impairment were approached. The Hospital Anxiety-Depression scale (HAD-S), the Mini-Mental Adjustment to Cancer scale (Mini-MAC), and the Cancer Worries Inventory (CWI) were used to measure psychological morbidity, coping strategies and concerns about illness. RESULTS: Of 277 patients, 34% had pathological scores ("borderline cases" plus "true cases") on HAD-S Anxiety and 24.9% on HAD-S Depression. Total psychiatric "caseness" was 28.5% and 16.6%, according to different HAD cut-offs (14 and 19, respectively). Significant relationships of HAD-S Anxiety, HAD-S Depression, HAD-S Total score, with Mini-MAC Hopeless and Anxious Preoccupation, and CWI score were found. No differences emerged between countries on psychosocial morbidity, while some differences emerged between the countries on coping mechanisms. Furthermore, Fatalism, Avoidance and marginally Hopeless were higher compared to studies carried out in English-speaking countries. LIMITATIONS: The relatively small sample size and the good performance status prevent us to generalize data on patients with different cancer sites and advanced phase of illness. CONCLUSIONS: One-third of the patients presented anxiety and depressive morbidity, with significant differences in characteristics of coping in Mediterranean countries in comparison with English-speaking countries

Tumor Formation in Response to Loss of Chromatin Remodeler Chd5 in Zebrafish

Chromodomain helicase DNA binding protein 5 (CHD5) has been identified as a tumor suppressor in humans. Deletion or mutation of CHD5 has been observed in numerous cancers, including neuroblastoma and melanoma. We hypothesize that chd5 is also a tumor suppressor in zebrafish, a powerful model system to study tumorigenesis. Many genes involved in tumorigenesis are conserved in zebrafish, and they develop fully penetrant tumor phenotypes. We have created chd5 knock-out zebrafish using CRISPR/Cas9 and are monitoring them for tumor development. In addition to the chd5 knock-outs, we are undertaking a double-mutant approach by coupling loss of chd5 with other genes known to be important for tumor formation. Specifically, we are using a mutant form of the oncogene BRAF-V600E and a mutant version of the tumor suppressor tp53. BRAF-V600E is a kinase that promotes cell division. Tp53 is tumor suppressor gene that initiates apoptosis when severe DNA damage occurs. Expression of gain-of-function BRAF-V600E gene creates nevi in zebrafish, similar to the production of moles in humans, but is not sufficient to promote melanoma formation. Tp53 when mutated results in nerve sheath tumors in zebrafish at 8.5 months. When BRAF-V600E mutant is combined with mutant tp53, the fish develop melanomas beginning at 4 months. We have crossed our chd5 knock-out alleles with BRAF-V600E and tp53 to create various mutant lines, and we are examining the resulting progeny for tumor development, specifically melanoma. Establishment of a chd5-dependent tumor model using zebrafish will enable novel studies of the function of CHD5 in human cancers

Sonic hedgehog medulloblastoma cancer stem cells mirnome and transcriptome highlight novel functional networks

Molecular classification has improved the knowledge of medulloblastoma (MB), the most common malignant brain tumour in children, however current treatments cause severe side effects in patients. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) have been described in MB and represent a sub population characterised by self-renewal and the ability to generate tumour cells, thus representing the reservoir of the tumour. To investigate molecular pathways that characterise this sub population, we isolated CSCs from Sonic Hedgehog Medulloblastoma (SHH MB) arisen in Patched 1 (Ptch1) heterozygous mice, and performed miRNA-and mRNA-sequencing. Comparison of the miRNA-sequencing of SHH MB CSCs with that obtained from cerebellar Neural Stem Cells (NSCs), allowed us to obtain a SHH MB CSC miRNA differential signature. Pathway enrichment analysis in SHH MB CSCs mirnome and transcriptome was performed and revealed a series of enriched pathways. We focused on the putative targets of the SHH MB CSC miRNAs that were involved in the enriched pathways of interest, namely pathways in cancer, PI3k-Akt pathway and protein processing in endoplasmic reticulum pathway. In silico analysis was performed in SHH MB patients and identified several genes, whose expression was associated with worse overall survival of SHH MB patients. This study provides novel candidates whose functional role should be further investigated in SHH MB

Gabapentin and pregabalin for the acute post-operative pain management. A systematic-narrative review of the recent clinical evidences

Background: Gabapentin and pregabalin inhibit Ca2+ currents via high-voltage-activated channels containing the α2δ-1 subunit, reducing neurotransmitter release and attenuating the postsynaptic excitability. They are antiepileptic drugs successfully used also for the chronic pain treatment. A large number of clinical trials indicate that gabapentin and pregabalin could be effective as postoperative analgesics. This systematic-narrative review aims to analyse the most recent evidences regarding the effect of gabapentinoids on postoperative pain treatment. Methods: Medline, The Cochrane Library, EMBASE and CINHAL were searched for recent (2006-2009) randomized clinical trials (RCTs) of gabapentin-pregabalin for postoperative pain relief in adults. Quality of RCTs was evaluated according to Jadad method. Visual analogue scale (VAS), opioid consumption and side-effects (nausea, vomiting, dizziness and sedation) were considered the most important outcomes. Results: An overall of 22 gabapentin (1640 patients), 8 pregabalin (707 patients) RCTs and seven meta-analysis were involved in this review. Gabapentin provided better post-operative analgesia and rescue analgesics sparing than placebo in 6 of the 10 RCTs that administered only pre-emptive analgesia. Fourteen RCTs suggested that gabapentin did not reduce PONV when compared with placebo, clonidine or lornoxicam. Pregabalin provided better post-operative analgesia and rescue analgesics sparing than placebo in two of the three RCTs that evaluated the effects of pregabalin alone vs placebo. Four studies reported no pregabalin effects on preventing the PONV. Conclusion: Gabapentin and pregabalin reduce pain and opioid consumption after surgery in confront with placebo, but comparisons with other standard post-operative regimens are not sufficient. Gabapentin and pregabalin seem not to have any influence on the prevention of PONV