Low-grade fibromyxoid sarcoma of the parapharyngeal space: A case report and review of the literature

This paper reports a rare case of Low-grade fibromyxoid sarcoma (LGFMS) that occurred primarily in the parapharyngeal space, in a 57-year-old woman. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case of LGFMS arising from the parapharingeal space reported in the literature. Primary sarcomas of the head and neck region are very rare, accounting for approximately 1% of malignancies in this region. LGFMS is a distinctive type of soft-tissue sarcoma that was first described by Evans in 1987. LGFMS may be included in the differential diagnosis of tumors of the parapharyngeal space, and especially among the bland-looking spindle cell lesions. Despite its bland-looking morphology, this sarcoma should be recognized to avoid confusion with other bland-looking benign spindle cell lesions. Radical surgical resection with clear margins, is the treatment of choice of LGFMS. Despite its bland-looking histologic appearance, it is characterized by a malignant behavior with high rates of local recurrence and metastatic spread. For these reasones, all patients with LGFMS are recommended for long-term follow-up

Sustainability assessment of transport infrastructure projects: a review of existing tools and methods

Attempts to integrate sustainability in the decision-making process for transport infrastructure projects continue to gain momentum. A number of tools and methodological frameworks are available — such as rating systems, traditional decision-making techniques, checklists, and different evaluation frameworks and models. While these tools are highly valuable, some practical issues remain unsolved. There is also a need for more standardized tools to appraise the sustainability of transport projects. This paper is a presentation of a review on the current assessment tools of sustainability applied to transport infrastructure projects. The preliminary part of the paper is an explanatory and comparative analysis of the tools and methods in terms of their effectiveness to appraise sustainability. The analysis is a critical evaluation of the current state of the art to identify the limitations of existing approaches, point out new areas of research, and propose a sustainability appraisal agenda for the future

Helping decision-makers select the most adequate road infrastructure design from the point of view of sustainability: a practical approach

In recent years, a number of tools have been developed aimed at assessing the socio-economic and environmental feasibility of roadway projects. However, there is still no standardised or commonly accepted methodology to assure the most sustainable design in the appraisal and evaluation of roads over their life-cycle. The introduction of the multidimensional perspectives of sustainability in the appraisal of road projects is still an unresolved aspect. This research identifies strengths and weaknesses of sustainability assessment tools ?including ratings systems, traditional decision-making techniques (e.g. cost benefit analysis, multicriteria decision analysis, among others), checklists and different evaluation frameworks and models for roadways; describes to what extent they integrate sustainability as a whole; and summarizes valuable lessons to learn from them. On the basis of this analysis, it points out a number of methodological issues that need to be addressed before valid road sustainability assessments can be conducted. To response to these issues, this research develops a composite decision support model based on combining cost-benefit analysis (CBA) with multi- criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to accurately appraise sustainability of road projects. This methodology is applied to a case study dealing with the construction of a new roadway in the northwest of Spain. The outcome demonstrates that the approach is a valuable sustainability assessment tool

Seeking factors to increase the public’s acceptability of road-pricing schemes: case study of Spain

User acceptability has become a critical issue for the successful implementation of transport pricing measures and policies. Although several studies have addressed the public acceptability of road pricing, little evidence can be found of the effects of pricing strategies. The acceptability of alternative schemes for a toll network already in operation is an issue to be tackled. This paper contributes to the limited literature in this field by exploring perceptions toward road-pricing schemes among toll road users. On the basis of a nationwide survey of toll road users in Spain, the study developed several binomial logit models to analyze user acceptability of three approaches: express toll lanes, a time-based pricing approach, and a flat fee (vignette) system. The results show notable differences in user acceptability by the type of charging scheme proposed. Express toll lanes were more acceptable by travelers who perceived greater benefits from saving travel time. The acceptability of time-based approaches (peak versus off-peak) decreased for users who felt forced to use the toll road, whereas this was not an aspect that significantly influenced users’ support for flat fee schemes. In addition, a flat fee strategy was more acceptable for long-distance trips and truck drivers who regularly used the toll facilities. The results from this analysis can inform policy makers and planners for the promotion of more efficient, socially inclusive, and publicly acceptable road-pricing schemes

Do Subsidies Provided to Public Transport in Madrid Favor Vertical Equity?

Despite the widespread implementation of subsidy policies for urban transport in many cities, the equity evaluation of these policies still remains limited. There is scarce quantitative assessment of the distributional incidence of transport subsidy policies. This paper contributes to fill this research gap by developing a practical approach to evaluate the impact of fare subsidization on vertical equity. In the paper we implement a two-step methodology. First, we develop two main indicators to measure the social impacts of the ?travel pass?, which is a highly subsidized fare in order to examine the policy for its effectiveness in reaching the poor. Second, by using the latest disaggregated data from Madrid?s Transportation Survey, we fitted a multiple regression model which found out that the use of the travel pass depends fundamentally on income level and accessibility to public transport. Since the quality of accessibility in the city is quite homogeneous, the subsidy policy associated with the travel pass is shown to be progressive because it is well targeted towards economically disadvantaged groups. Consequently, there seems to be evidence that subsidies provided to public transport in Madrid tend to favor vertical equity

El balance (trade-off) entre los impactos sociales, económicos y ambientales en la evaluación ex–ante de los proyectos de transporte

[ES] A pesar de la existencia de diferentes herramientas, en la actualidad no existe una metodología estandarizada para la evaluación ex–ante de la sostenibilidad en proyectos de infraestructura durante su ciclo de vida. Aunque las técnicas tradicionalmente aceptadas ofrecen un valioso apoyo en la evaluación de los proyectos, abordan muy someramente los tres componentes de sostenibilidad de manera holística. Esta investigación se centra en uno de los métodos más comunes de evaluación y toma de decisiones sobre proyectos de transporte: El análisis de decisión multicriterio (MCDA). A pesar de que este método puede tratar de manera explícita los diferentes componentes de sostenibilidad, aún persisten algunas dificultades fundamentales. Uno de los principales problemas es establecer con precisión los pesos de importancia relativa a los diferentes criterios definidos. Con el objeto de encontrar el balance (trade-off) entre los impactos sociales, económicos y ambientales en la evaluación ex–ante de los proyectos de transporte, esta investigación desarrolla una adaptación al procedimiento clásico de estimación de las prioridades o pesos dentro de un enfoque multicriterio. Para ello, se ha diseñado un modelo de ponderación compuesto que permite la incorporación de juicios y preferencias basadas en el consenso de expertos (utilizando los métodos REMBRANDT y Delphi), junto con la influencia del contexto geográfico y social del proyecto. Esta nueva metodología se aplica con éxito a un caso de estudio real en España. El resultado demuestra que el modelo es significativo y puede ser aplicado como una herramienta útil en un proceso de evaluación multicriterio.Bueno Cadena, P.; Vassallo Magro, J. (2016). El balance (trade-off) entre los impactos sociales, económicos y ambientales en la evaluación ex–ante de los proyectos de transporte. En XII Congreso de ingeniería del transporte. 7, 8 y 9 de Junio, Valencia (España). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 233-245. https://doi.org/10.4995/CIT2016.2015.3478OCS23324

GO! geographical ontology

GO! (Geographical Ontology) ontology has been developed by Claudia Corcione, Paola De Caro and Silvia naro, with the collaboration of Diego Magro, Timothy Tambassi and Maurizio Lana for the research project \u201cGeolat \u2013 geography for Latin literature\u201d. It describes the geographical locations, with a particular attention to the description of the Ancient World, especially to give the opportunity of having a link between the places mentioned in the texts, especially ancient, and their identification and correspondence with contemporary ones. For classical scholars this correspondence of ancient / contemporary modelling is of undisputed interest, both for the study of the habits of the most ancient peoples, and for the most various themes of literary interest. Through ontologies you can build maps of the ancient world and compare them to contemporary ones, annotate historical, geographical, cultural details connected to the place, indicate in which ancient text the place is mentioned and as which author discloses the details. These are just some ideas for research that can be developed, but the scenario that opens through these connections will be much larger. The GO! modules contain numerous classes and relations and differ in the specific entities defined in them, and are connected by a Top Level ontology - GO TOP ( http://purl.org/geolit/GO-TOP ): \u2022 an ontology that describes the physical and natural places ( http://purl.org/geolit/GO-PHY ) \u2022 an anthropic ontology, in which are specified all administrative bodies and artifacts created by human activity ( http://purl.org/geolit/GO-HUM )an \u2022 an ontology for the ancient world, which describes the specific aspects ( http://purl.org/geolit/GO-FAR ), where FAR means For Ancient Resources. The GO! ontology serves as an information base for the platform of the project GeoLat. The GO! modelling choices took into account the needs which the ontology must meet, allowing to add a range of additional information about the geographical place, through the inclusion of ad hoc relationships, in particular it is possible to express: \u2022 the correspondence with the places listed by Pleiades (historical online gazetteer http://pleiades.stoa.org/) \u2022 the physical and cultural characteristics shown in the Barrington Atlas \u2022 the source where the ancient place is mentioned (with philological reference) \u2022 the geographical coordinates of corresponding contemporary sites \u2022 a description of historical events (wars, defeats ...) \u2022 the changes of the place (e.g. a village which becomes a city) \u2022 the hypotesized location of imaginary places (such as Hades) \u2022 the physical and geopolitical description of the place These are only some of the potentialities of the GO! ontology, which incorporates some standard ontologies (for example GeoSPARQL), so as to be more easily shared and reused, because the quality of the ontology and the project in its entirety resides in its widespread use, in order to become a benchmark for the projects that link to the geographical description

Social and Distributional Effects of Public Transport Fares and Subsidy Policies: Case of Madrid

Despite the widespread implementation of urban transport subsidies in many cities, there are still only a limited evaluation of the equity of these policies and scarce quantitative assessment of their distributional incidence. This research contributes to filling this gap by developing a practical approach to evaluate the impact of fare subsidization on vertical equity. This paper implements a two-step methodology. First, two main indicators were developed to measure the social impact of the travel pass, a highly subsidized fare, to determine the effectiveness of the policy in reaching lower-income citizens. Second, by using the latest disaggregated data from a transportation survey, in Madrid, Spain, a multiple regression model revealed that travel pass usage (TPU) depended mainly on income level and accessibility to public transport. The results show that the accessibility level has a positive effect on the TPU indicator, whereas income level has a negative influence. Because income level is shown to play the most significant role in influencing public transport use, the subsidy policy associated with the travel pass in the city can be considered progressive, since it effectively targets economically disadvantaged groups. This fact suggests that subsidies for public transport in Madrid tend to favor vertical equity

N-cadherin has a protective role in stable human atherosclerotic plaques: a morphological and immunohistochemical study

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Complicated enterocele: timely resolution with bowel resection via a vaginal approach: case report

Background: Enterocele is an uncommon, serious condition that requires accurate and early diagnosis to prevent complications such as intestinal obstruction, incarceration, and strangulation, with consequent intestinal ischemia, necrosis, and evisceration. We report a rare case of a patient with a voluminous enterocele and initial signs of intestinal ischemia who underwent urgent vaginal surgery. Case description: An 80-year-old woman presented with a voluminous mass protruding from the vagina, associated abdominopelvic pain, a 10-day history of bowel sub-occlusion, and numerous episodes of profuse vaginal bleeding. She was diagnosed with an enterocele with early signs of complications. Owing to her advanced clinical condition and comorbidities, we opted for an urgent vaginal procedure. Intestinal loops with initial signs of ischemia were resected via a transvaginal approach, leading to good clinical outcomes. She was discharged on postoperative day 5. Conclusions: This rare case highlights a surgical emergency that was managed with transvaginal resection of the intestine. Early identification of the initial signs of complications allowed for this less invasive approach, resulting in reduced morbidity and length of hospital stay