Cognitive fluctuations in connection to disgraphia a comparison of Alzheimer's disease with dementia Lewy bodies

Background: The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between cognitive impairment and the performance of handwritten scripts presented as “letter-writing” to a close relative by patients with dementia Lewy bodies (DLB), as fluctuations of the symptoms phase, and in a matched group of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The degree of writing disability and personal, spatial, and temporal orientation was compared in these two groups. Design and methods: Fourteen simple questions, designed in a form that could be utilized by any general practitioner in order to document the level of cognitive functioning of each patient, were presented to 30 AD patients and 26 DLB patients. The initial cognition test was designated PQ1. The patients were examined on tests of letter-writing ability. Directly after the letter-writing, the list of 14 questions presented in PQ1 was presented again in a repeated procedure that was designated PQ2. The difference between these two measures (PQ1 – PQ2) was designated D∆. This test of letter-writing ability and cognitive performance was administered over 19 days. Results: Several markedly strong relationships between dysgraphia and several measures of cognitive performance in AD patients and DLB patients were observed, but the deterioration of performance from PQ1 to PQ2 over all test days were markedly significant in AD patients and not significant in DLB patients. It is possible that in graphic expression even by patients diagnosed with moderate to relatively severe AD and DLB there remains some residual capacity for understanding and intention that may be expressed. Furthermore, the deterioration in performance and the differences noted in AD and DLB patients may be due to the different speed at which the process of the protein degradation occurs for functional modification of synapses. Conclusion: Our method can be used as part of neuropsychological tests to differentiate the diagnosis between AD and DL

Documenti di scena:Assemblare una ricerca di metafisica empirica

Un progetto collaborativo diretto da Bruno Latour costruisce un repertorio multimediale per la ricerca scientifica e filosofica, nel segno di una nuova simbiosi tra database e narrazion

Documenti di scena: Assemblare una ricerca di metafisica empirica

Un progetto collaborativo diretto da Bruno Latour costruisce un repertoriomultimediale per la ricerca scientifica e filosofica, nel segno di una nuova simbiositra database e narrazion

Repurposing Digital Methods for Human-Centered Design:Distilling Data-Driven Personas from Twitter Discussions: The case of Urban Nature in Paris

From logs and information left in online spaces to data points self-generated by connected devices, digital traces have become more diffused over the past years, prompting an expansion of Human-Centered Design methods. Along with some bigdata approaches, Digital Methods of research – treating the actual content of digital users’ manifestation on-line (i.e. tweets, Instagram pictures, comments) – offer the opportunity to better understand users through their online activities. This paper investigates how Digital Methods can be repurposed as a full-fledged approach for Human-Centered Design. Grafting on the NATURPRADI project – a research aimed at describing the debate raised by the re-vegetation of the city of Paris by analysing Twitter posts – in the paper we will explain how we have identified and described a set of personas characterized by different approaches towards the evolution of the urban nature issue. The final objective of the paper is to provide a first methodological tool created at the intersection of Digital Methods and Human-Centered Design discussing its opportunities and criticalities: Data-driven Personas

Digital Methods for Service Design:Experimenting with data-driven frameworks

From logs and information left in online spaces to data points self-generated by connected devices, digital traces have become more and more diffused over the past years. Along with some big-data approaches, Digital Methods of research - treating the actual content of users’ manifestation online (i.e. tweets, Instagram pictures, comments) - offer the opportunity to better understand people and behaviors through their online activities. This paper investigates how Digital Methods can be repurposed as a full-fledged approach for the Service Design practice, by offering a method to outline service design frameworks from a corpus of web data. This quantitative methods, in combination with the traditional qualitative approaches, leverage the continuous exchange of information that is happening in the digital space and suggest the possibility to automate parts of the data collection and analysis processes in support of service design activities. Grafting on several case studies - we will explain how Digital Methods could be used to identify and describe a set of personas by extracting and interpreting data from their online activities, and we will inquire into the application of the same methodological approach to map other frameworks - such as experience journeys or system maps - that are critical to Service Design

Designing Controversies and their Publics

Controversy mapping is a teaching and research method derived from the Science and Technology Studies and meant to explore and represent modern sociotechnical issues. Striving to make the intricacy of scientific debate readable for a larger public, controversy mapping is trapped in a classic simplicity/complexity trade-?‐off: how to respect the richness of controversies without designing maps too complicated to be useful? Having worked on the question for almost two years in a project bringing together social scientists and designers (emapsproject.com1), we can now propose a way out of this contradiction and suggest three ways of moving through the simplicity/complexity continuum. The first movement -?‐by multiplying the number of maps and by taking into account users before the beginning and after the end of the design process-?‐ allows to bypass the simplicity/complexity trade-?‐off. The second movement bind together narration and exploration and allows the publics to venture in the maze of controversies unraveling the story that will guide them out. The third movement allows to involve the publics through all the phases of a cartographic campaign and to engage it again and again

Post vaccinal temporary sensorineural hearing loss

In our systematic research we identified four studies concerning the onset of neurological adverse events following vaccination and two excluding this association. A 33-year-old Italian man, belonging to the Italian Army was hospitalized because he suffered from vertigo, nausea and sudden right hearing loss not classified (NDD), that set in 24 h after the administration of tetanus-diphtheria and meningococcal vaccines. Some neurological events arising after vaccination are very difficult to treat. In our case, the functional recovery on low and medium frequencies was possible about 6 months after the morbid event

A dictionary of visual analogies

This paper discusses a theoretical framework for a research aimed to produce a dictionary of visual analogies used for the explanation of scientific theories, collected both from historical and contemporary sources. The artifacts will be indexed through a set of criteria and tags that will allow to navigate the contents and map correlations across time, scientific domains and types of publication. The archive will grow as an open-ended accumulation of examples, adapting the methodology for the selection and organisation of the analogies based on the new entries. A set of visualisations will be used in order to navigate the archive and make emerging patterns legible. The initial method of classification will be based on the faceted system envisioned by Luca Rosati (Rosati, 2015), in which artifacts are tagged and tags are organised according to a faceted classification. Tags will not be mutually exclusive, but they’ll act like attributes: each entry may have multiple tags, the number of which can grow without any limit or predetermined direction

Articuler les temps et les présences de la nature urbaine : une méthode contemporaine

Le terme « nature urbaine » a constitue pendant longtemps un oxymore dont !'opposition s'est au fur et a mesure attenuee. La nature urbaine est desormais pen;ue comme l'entremelement d'objets aussi bien biolo-giques, chimiques, geologiques, sociaux que technologiques, liant tout a la fois humains et non-humains, espaces urbains et non-urbains. Au sein de ce systeme, un vaste champ d'experimentations s'est developpe et devoile le plus souvent a travers des imaginaires verts : la nature est par exemple souvent utilisee comme une strategie esthetique, donnant !'impression que la ville l'integre (et s'y integre) garantissant ainsi les meilleures conditions de vie, ou encore.comme une solution technique qui diminue l'effet des « ilots de chaleur ». Au-dela de ces premiers objectifs, la nature urbaine a egalement ete utilisee pour masquer une urbanisation capitaliste entrainant des inegalites sociales dues a une « gentrification verte » ou encore, elle a servi a propulser des entreprises technocratiques dans le cas des villes dites intelligentes. Dans ces imaginaires verts -favorisant les discours generaux a propos de l'urbanisme vert developpe aujourd'hui-la nature demeure toujours au-dehors, dans un etat idealise, prete a etre consommee. Et ces imaginaires eclipsent d'autres instances possibles, d'autres dynamiques et d'autres formes de participation publique. La nature est utilisee pour paci-fier, pour « mettre d'accord », car elle represente une valeur consensuelle, meme si en realite ce contexte urbain regorge de natures contestees qui appellent a la participation et a !'engagement du public

Efficient District Heating in a Decarbonisation Perspective: A Case Study in Italy

The European and national regulations in the decarbonisation path towards 2050 promote district heating in achieving the goals of efficiency, energy sustainability, use of renewables, and reduction of fossil fuel use. Improved management and optimisation, use of RES, and waste heat/cold sources decrease the overall demand for primary energy, a condition that is further supported by building renovations and new construction of under (almost) zero energy buildings, with a foreseeable decrease in the temperature of domestic heating systems. Models for the simulation of efficient thermal networks were implemented and described in this paper, together with results from a real case study in Italy, i.e., University Campus of Parma. Activities include the creation and validation of calculation codes and specific models in the Modelica language (Dymola software), aimed at investigating stationary regimes and dynamic behaviour as well. An indirect heat exchange substation was coupled with a resistive-capacitive model, which describes the building behaviour and the thermal exchanges by the use of thermos-physical parameters. To optimise indoor comfort conditions and minimise consumption, dynamic simulations were carried out for different operating sets: modulating the supply temperature in the plant depending on external conditions (Scenario 4) decreases the supplied thermal energy (-2.34%) and heat losses (-8.91%), even if a lower temperature level results in higher electricity consumption for pumping (+12.96%), the total energy consumption is reduced by 1.41%. A simulation of the entire heating season was performed for the optimised scenario, combining benefits from turning off the supply in the case of no thermal demand (Scenario 3) and from the modulation of the supply temperature (Scenario 4), resulting in lower energy consumption (the thermal energy supplied by the power plant -3.54%, pumping +7.76%), operating costs (-2.40), and emissions (-3.02%). The energy balance ex-ante and ex-post deep renovation in a single user was then assessed, showing how lowering the network operating temperature at 55 degrees C decreases the supplied thermal energy (-22.38%) and heat losses (-22.11%) with a slightly higher pumping consumption (+3.28%), while maintaining good comfort conditions. These promising results are useful for evaluating the application of low-temperature operations to the existing district heating networks, especially for large interventions of building renovation, and confirm their potential contribution to the energy efficiency targets