Corrigendum to "Spatial moments of catchment rainfall: rainfall spatial organisation, basin morphology, and flood response" published in Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 15, 3767–3783, 2011

No abstract available

Spatial moments of catchment rainfall: rainfall spatial organisation, basin morphology, and flood response

Abstract. This paper describes a set of spatial rainfall statistics (termed "spatial moments of catchment rainfall") quantifying the dependence existing between spatial rainfall organisation, basin morphology and runoff response. These statistics describe the spatial rainfall organisation in terms of concentration and dispersion statistics as a function of the distance measured along the flow routing coordinate. The introduction of these statistics permits derivation of a simple relationship for the quantification of catchment-scale storm velocity. The concept of the catchment-scale storm velocity takes into account the role of relative catchment orientation and morphology with respect to storm motion and kinematics. The paper illustrates the derivation of the statistics from an analytical framework recently proposed in literature and explains the conceptual meaning of the statistics by applying them to five extreme flash floods occurred in various European regions in the period 2002–2007. High resolution radar rainfall fields and a distributed hydrologic model are employed to examine how effective are these statistics in describing the degree of spatial rainfall organisation which is important for runoff modelling. This is obtained by quantifying the effects of neglecting the spatial rainfall variability on flood modelling, with a focus on runoff timing. The size of the study catchments ranges between 36 to 982 km2. The analysis reported here shows that the spatial moments of catchment rainfall can be effectively employed to isolate and describe the features of rainfall spatial organization which have significant impact on runoff simulation. These statistics provide useful information on what space-time scales rainfall has to be monitored, given certain catchment and flood characteristics, and what are the effects of space-time aggregation on flood response modeling

Organisational strategies and practices to improve care using patient experience data in acute NHS hospital trusts: an ethnographic study

The NHS collects a lot of information about patients’ experiences of care; however, it is not clear how this information is used to achieve quality improvements. This study had two main aims: one was to explore how this information, also called patient experience data, translates into quality improvements in NHS hospitals, and the other was to understand the role of nurses in collecting, making sense of and using these data for improving care. The study had two phases. In phase 1, we observed practices in five NHS hospitals in England and interviewed key participants (including NHS staff and patient/carer representatives) to study what happened to patient experience data, especially in the areas of cancer and dementia care. In phase 2, we held a series of workshops (the first with participants from all five trusts and policy-makers, and then one workshop at each trust) to discuss how the early findings from our research may be relevant to NHS trusts. We found that (1) each type of data, for example a survey, goes through several transformations – from a paper questionnaire, to an electronic database, to a report – which can lead to care improvements at different stages of this transformation process; (2) when data are part of interactions – either with members of staff or with certain processes in the organisation – characterised by authority and autonomy, and context-awareness, it often leads to care improvements; (3) nurses are largely responsible for how data are collected, made sense of and used to improve care, but other roles – including those of clerical staff and other clinicians – are also important and may need more attention; (4) official quality improvement work may not take into account the less documented ‘everyday quality improvement’ work that happens in the organisation; and (5) holding workshops with participants can help organisational learning

On the Hawking radiation as tunneling for a class of dynamical black holes

The instability against emission of massless particles by the trapping horizon of an evolving black hole is analyzed with the use of the Hamilton-Jacobi method. The method automatically selects one special expression for the surface gravity of a changing horizon. Indeed, the strength of the horizon singularity turns out to be governed by the surface gravity as was defined a decade ago by Hayward using Kodama's theory of spherically symmetric gravitational fields. The theory also applies to point masses embedded in an expanding universe, were the surface gravity is still related to Kodama-Hayward theory. As a bonus of the tunneling method, we gain the insight that the surface gravity still defines a temperature parameter as long as the evolution is sufficiently slow that the black hole pass through a sequence of quasi-equilibrium states.Comment: added references for section 1, corrected typos, some improvement in notatio

Fermions Tunnelling from Black Holes

We investigate the tunnelling of spin 1/2 particles through event horizons. We first apply the tunnelling method to Rindler spacetime and obtain the Unruh temperature. We then apply fermion tunnelling to a general non-rotating black hole metric and show that the Hawking temperature is recovered.Comment: 22 pages, v2: added references, v3: fixed minor typos, v4: added a new section applying fermion tunnelling method to Kruskal-Szekers coordinates, fixed minor typo, and added references, v5: modified introduction and conclusion, fixed typo

Allergenic Lipid Transfer Proteins from Plant-Derived Foods Do Not Immunologically and Clinically Behave Homogeneously: The Kiwifruit LTP as a Model

BACKGROUND: Food allergy is increasingly common worldwide. Tools for allergy diagnosis measuring IgE improved much since allergenic molecules and microarrays started to be used. IgE response toward allergens belonging to the same group of molecules has not been comprehensively explored using such approach yet. OBJECTIVE: Using the model of lipid transfer proteins (LTPs) from plants as allergens, including two new structures, we sought to define how heterogeneous is the behavior of homologous proteins. METHODS: Two new allergenic LTPs, Act d 10 and Act c 10, have been identified in green (Actinidia deliciosa) and gold (Actinidia chinensis) kiwifruit (KF), respectively, using clinically characterized allergic patients, and their biochemical features comparatively evaluated by means of amino acid sequence alignments. Along with other five LTPs from peach, mulberry, hazelnut, peanut, mugwort, KF LTPs, preliminary tested positive for IgE, have been immobilized on a microarray, used for IgE testing 1,003 allergic subjects. Comparative analysis has been carried out. RESULTS: Alignment of Act d 10 primary structure with the other allergenic LTPs shows amino acid identities to be in a narrow range between 40 and 55%, with a number of substitutions making the sequences quite different from each other. Although peach LTP dominates the IgE immune response in terms of prevalence, epitope recognition driven by sequence heterogeneity has been recorded to be distributed in a wide range of behaviors. KF LTPs IgE positive results were obtained in a patient subset IgE positive for the peach LTP. Anyhow, the negative results on homologous molecules allowed us to reintroduce KF in patients' diet. CONCLUSION: The biochemical nature of allergenic molecule belonging to a group of homologous ones should not be taken as proof of immunological recognition as well. The availability of panels of homologous molecules to be tested using microarrays is valuable to address the therapeutic intervention

A multi-element psychosocial intervention for early psychosis (GET UP PIANO TRIAL) conducted in a catchment area of 10 million inhabitants: study protocol for a pragmatic cluster randomized controlled trial

Multi-element interventions for first-episode psychosis (FEP) are promising, but have mostly been conducted in non-epidemiologically representative samples, thereby raising the risk of underestimating the complexities involved in treating FEP in 'real-world' services

One-sptep purification of nearly all the proteins from wine by electroendosmotic preparative electrophoresis

The availability of single proteins in highly purified form is a major step for their characterisation. In the case of wine proteins, many procedures have been used, allowing to purify specific components, to be used for biochemical studies or for antibodies production. The methods described to date, however, seem to be rather time-consuming, cumbersome, and do not allow to obtain the simultaneous purification of more than one or few components. Here we describe an electrophoretic preparative procedure which allows the simultaneous and complete purification of most of the protein bands present in wine in only one step. In this system, the proteins of the sample, after being electrophoretically separated in a cylindrical gel, are eluted from its bottom trough a capillary in which the electroendosmotic buffer flow generated during electrophoresis is channelled. The proteins are then collected as single components as they elute from the capillary. Two different separation systems were used for the purification of wine proteins: one in native (non-denaturing) conditions and the other in the presence of Na-dodecyl sulphate (SDS). In both cases, several fractions containing only one electrophoretic band were obtained, indicating the effectiveness of the system in the purification of nearly all the wine proteins within a single experiment. The degree of purity and the amounts of the protein components obtainable in this way warrant the possibility of their fine (bio)chemical characterisation and also to produce antibodies with high specificity. In conclusion, the results here presented represent a major methodological improvement for the study of wine proteins in connection with their effects in winemaking