Bronchiolitis – It Is Time for a Unique Definition

Bronchiolitis is the most common lower respiratory tract infections in infants. It is time to reach a unique clinical definition, encompassing the acute onset of respiratory distress with cough, tachypnoea, retraction and diffuse crackles on auscultation in infants aged less than 12 months

Optimal Transportation Theory with Repulsive Costs

This paper intents to present the state of art and recent developments of the optimal transportation theory with many marginals for a class of repulsive cost functions. We introduce some aspects of the Density Functional Theory (DFT) from a mathematical point of view, and revisit the theory of optimal transport from its perspective. Moreover, in the last three sections, we describe some recent and new theoretical and numerical results obtained for the Coulomb cost, the repulsive harmonic cost and the determinant cost.Comment: Survey for the special volume for RICAM (Special Semester on New Trends in Calculus of Variations

Th17, intestinal microbiota and the abnormal immune response in the pathogenesis of celiac disease

Celiac disease (CD) is an autoimmune enteropathy induced by the ingestion of gluten in genetically predisposed individuals who carry the HLA-DQ2 or -DQ8 alleles. The immune response is abnormal in celiac disease with small intestinal epithelial damage via CD8+CD4- intraepithelial lymphocytes. The etiology is multifactorial involving genetic and environmental factors, an abnormal immune response, and intestinal dysbiosis. The innate and acquired T-cell mediated immunity play important roles in the pathogenesis of this disease, particularly CD4+ Th17 cells, which have been shown to have critical functions in host defense against bacterial pathogens and in the inflammatory responses to deamidated gluten peptides. We review what is known about the interaction between immune system and intestinal microbiota in the pathogenesis of celiac disease

A Numerical Method to solve Optimal Transport Problems with Coulomb Cost

In this paper, we present a numerical method, based on iterative Bregman projections, to solve the optimal transport problem with Coulomb cost. This is related to the strong interaction limit of Density Functional Theory. The first idea is to introduce an entropic regularization of the Kantorovich formulation of the Optimal Transport problem. The regularized problem then corresponds to the projection of a vector on the intersection of the constraints with respect to the Kullback-Leibler distance. Iterative Bregman projections on each marginal constraint are explicit which enables us to approximate the optimal transport plan. We validate the numerical method against analytical test cases

Generalized incompressible flows, multi-marginal transport and Sinkhorn algorithm

Starting from Brenier's relaxed formulation of the incompressible Euler equation in terms of geodesics in the group of measure-preserving diffeomorphisms, we propose a numerical method based on Sinkhorn's algorithm for the entropic regularization of optimal transport. We also make a detailed comparison of this entropic regularization with the so-called Bredinger entropic interpolation problem. Numerical results in dimension one and two illustrate the feasibility of the method

Vähähiilistä elämää suomalaisessa maaseutukunnassa : esteitä ja mahdollistajia

Hiili-intensiivisistä elämäntavoista luopumisella on tärkeä rooli nykyisen ilmastokriisin torjuntatyössä. Erityinen merkitys sillä on Suomen kaltaisissa varakkaissa valtioissa, joissa kansalaisten hiilijalanjäljet ovat suuria. Elämäntapojen muuttaminen voi kuitenkin olla hankalaa, sillä monet tekijät vaikeuttavat uusien vähähiilisten tapojen omaksumista. Toisaalta myös tapojen muutosta edistäviä tekijöitä voi olla hankala tunnistaa. Näiden, usein esteiksi ja mahdollistajiksi, kutsuttujen tekijöiden merkitys ja valikoima voivat vaihdella erilaisten paikkojen välillä johtuen paikkojen uniikeista konteksteista. Esteiden ja mahdollistajien tutkiminen erilaisissa paikoissa auttaa tekemään päätöksiä siitä, miten vähähiilisten elämäntapojen omaksumista voitaisiin edistää näissä konteksteissa. Tässä tutkielmassa esteitä ja mahdollistajia tutkitaan Suomen maaseudun kontekstissa. Suomen maaseutuun usein liitettäviä piirteitä ovat muun muassa pitkät etäisyydet, palveluiden vähäisyys, konservatiivisuus ja yhteisöllisyys. Tämän tutkielman tavoite oli tarkastella, minkälaisia vähähiilisten elämäntapojen esteitä ja mahdollistajia maaseudulla asuvat suomalaiset kokevat, ja mitkä näistä esteistä ja mahdollistajista ovat erityisen linkittyneitä maaseudun kontekstiin. Tutkielmaa varten haastateltiin kahdeksaa Kauhajoen kaupungin asukasta. Litteroitu haastatteluaineisto analysoitiin laadullisella sisällönanalyysillä. Aineistosta koodattiin esteitä ja mahdollistajia, ja muodostettiin 14 este- ja 13 mahdollistajakategoriaa. Este- ja mahdollistajakategorioiden teemat vastasivat sisällöltään hyvin toisiaan. Esteet saivat enemmän mainintoja. Sekä esteet että mahdollistajat liittyivät muun muassa infrastruktuuriin, palvelujen ja tuotteiden saatavuuteen, aikaan, rahaan, tietoon, terveyteen, sosiaaliseen ympäristöön, tapojen muodostumiseen, elämäntilanteeseen, tunteisiin sekä käsityksiin helppoudesta tai vaikeudesta. Ne kumpusivat osallistujien psykologisista prosesseista ja henkilökohtaisista elämistä, heidän omaamistaan resursseista sekä heitä ympäröivästä fyysisestä ja sosiaalisesta ympäristöstä. Maaseudun kontekstiin linkittyvät esteet ja mahdollistajat koskivat etenkin infrastruktuuria ja saatavuutta. Tulosten perusteella maaseudun asukkaat elävät monimutkaisessa esteiden ja mahdollistajien muodostamassa vastakohtaisuuksien ympäristössä. Koska esteitä näytetään tunnistavan helpommin, on tärkeää, että mahdollistajia pyrittäisiin korostamaan. Vaikka maaseudulla fyysiseen ympäristöön liittyvät esteet ja mahdollistajat ovat helpoiten havaittavissa, huomiota tulisi kiinnittää niihin kaikkiin, jotta muutospotentiaalia ei tuhlattaisi. Tutkielman tulokset auttavat tunnistamaan sekä vähähiilistä elämäntapamuutosta häiritseviä esteitä että sitä eteenpäin auttavia mahdollistajia Suomen maaseudulla.Abandoning carbon intensive lifestyles plays an integral role in mitigating the current climate crisis, especially in wealthy countries such as Finland where citizens’ carbon footprints are large. Mitigative lifestyle change can however be hard as many factors hinder the adoption of low-carbon practices. It can also be hard to recognize factors that could push lifestyle change forward. The significance and range of these factors, often called barriers and enablers, can vary between different places as each place constitutes its unique context. Studying barriers and enablers in different places can help us decide how to best advance the adoption of low-carbon practices in these contexts. In this thesis barriers and enablers are examined in the context of rural Finland. Characteristics that are often connected to rural Finland include long distances, scarcer services, conservativeness, and communality. The aim of this study was to examine what kinds of barriers to and enablers of low-carbon lifestyle change people dwelling in rural Finland experience, and which of these barriers and enablers have special links to the rural context. Eight citizens of Kauhajoki municipality were interviewed. The transcribed interview data was analysed with qualitative content analysis. Barriers and enablers were coded from the data, and 14 barrier and 13 enabler categories were formed. The themes of the barrier and enabler categories coincided well in terms of their content. Barriers were mentioned more often. Both barriers and enablers included factors related to infrastructure, availability of services and products, time, money, knowledge, health, social environment, habit formation, life situation, feelings, and perceptions of difficulty or easiness. They stemmed from the participants’ psychological processes and personal lives, the resources they had, and the physical and social aspects of their environment. Barriers and enablers with links to the rural context were most abundantly connected to infrastructure and availability. Based on the results, rural citizens live in a complicated push-pull environment of different barriers and enablers. Given that barriers appear to be more easily identified, it is important to start highlighting enablers. Even though in rural areas barriers and enablers related to the physical environment are most visible, attention should be paid to all factors to ensure that no potential for change is wasted. The results of this thesis help recognize both hurdles and helpers of low-carbon lifestyle change in rural Finland

Les dues cares de l'educació argentina

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Are Italy's public finances sustainable? The role of demographics, productivity, and labour markets.

In light of the uncertainty of the effects of population ageing on growth and fiscal variables, it is sensible to ask whether Italy's public finances can achieve sustainability under the spending pressure exerted by future demographic and macroeconomic developments. The paper addresses this question by assessing long-term fiscal sustainability, following the commonlyagreed European methodology, under alternative scenarios considering a variety of issues that may have a bearing on Italy's public finance conditions, namely, immigration, life expectancy, female labour participation, and productivity growth. Despite the different hypotheses captured by the alternative scenarios, the paper finds that projected debt-to-GDP ratios decrease over time, as long as fiscal consolidation is achieved in the near future. It also shows a one-shot debt-reduction strategy is not a credible substitute for a budgetary-adjustment strategy. The paper concludes Italy's public finances are sustainable and can deal with future spending pressures resulting from the ageing population.Fiscal Sustainability, Fiscal Policy

Convergence rate of entropy-regularized multi-marginal optimal transport costs

We investigate the convergence rate of multi-marginal optimal transport costs that are regularized with the Boltzmann-Shannon entropy, as the noise parameter $\varepsilon$ tends to $0$. We establish lower and upper bounds on the difference with the unregularized cost of the form $C\varepsilon\log(1/\varepsilon)+O(\varepsilon)$ for some explicit dimensional constants $C$ depending on the marginals and on the ground cost, but not on the optimal transport plans themselves. Upper bounds are obtained for Lipschitz costs or locally semi-concave costs for a finer estimate, and lower bounds for $\mathcal{C}^2$ costs satisfying some signature condition on the mixed second derivatives that may include degenerate costs, thus generalizing results previously in the two marginals case and for non-degenerate costs. We obtain in particular matching bounds in some typical situations where the optimal plan is deterministic