A linguistic and gender approach to 1841 Tuscany population Census

The Census of 1841 in Tuscany was first official data registry which tried to describe Tuscan population as a whole on granducal basis. With the use of special ad hoc created forms all demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of families and single persons in ?Granducato di Toscana? were described. These data of Census, now kept by the State Archive of Florence , supply a precious source for studies of all different aspects of the population and include following information: name, surname, age, gender, marital status, employment, religion, schoolarity, ?social status?. In the registrers for each community and parish a full account is given of homes, resident families, and composition of families including family servants. Each of those entities had a proper incremental code number. [Registers were generated and updated by priests, who at that time were only surely scholarised officers widespread on territory, that is why they are divided by parish, which is an administrative unit typical of canonic right, instead of quarters or ?rioni? or ?contrade? which instead had been long practiced in civil right. ] During early 80:s the research group of prof. Biagioli of Department of Modern History of Pisa University, charged the computational linguistic Institute of CNR with digitalization and the electronic processing of these data as well as of data from ?Catasto? [public registry of buildings and land ownership] to enable statistical, demographical, historical, sociological and economic analysis . In this work the authors have used the only partially usable subset of data left of that work, concerning four communities in the province of Pisa i.e actual Bi?ntina, C?scina, Pontedera and San Giuliano Terme (at that time named ?Baths of San Giuliano?) and is more concerned with terminological and lexical issues a gender related analysis of work and craftmanships. Each of the four communities has its own peculiar profile. Work is developed in 5 points: a) Informatics retrieval of linguistic information from Tuscany of 1800 focused by the arts and craftmanships more in use in families of that time, b) gender division of works and craftmanships, c) observation of lexical disparity in the four communities and terminological curiosities of that historical period, d) actually no longer existing craftmanships, e) diacronic analysis of communities, where possible. In this scenery the authors will introduce the methodology they employed for data analysis. Tables and graphs will be used to better focus different moments and results of work. The authors give the English translation of the terms extracted from the Corpus (see Appendix Glossary)

Grey Literature in European Commission Projects

The latest recommendations issued by the European Commission go towards the revision of their policy on dissemination and preservation of scientific information: the aim is to promote access to the results of the community-funded research by especially implementing the open access policy within \u27Horizon 2020\u27, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020). The growth of "fast" documentation - which is not long-term preserved or not available in stable URLs and repositories - pushed the European Commission to produce a set of guidelines for the management of documentation at-large and of specialized documentation produced within funded projects in particular. Those guidelines try to conciliate the visibility of the project activities in two directions: "a) better quality and user-friendliness of project websites, triggering higher popolarity b) better visibility for the projects and the European Commission due to a more standardized format". The EC guidelines proved to be a very useful tool for optimizing and handling information on the dedicated portals of the community-funded projects: the general recommendations, for example, focus the attention on the importance of using social media as well as webmaster tools and virtual meeting facilities (as web streaming) and of adopting an "eu" domain. Moreover, specific directives are given not only for the structure of the project homepage but often for the web site framework as well: homepage, project overview, consortium, management structure, scientific methodology and expected documentation. Given this scenario, the web sites of these projects represent an essential vehicle for both the acquisition and the diffusion of grey literature and could also become an important resource within an European infrastructure able to overcome the disconnected and scattered nature of their content in order to optimise their riutilization. Although the term "grey literature" (GL) has never been explicitly mentioned in the Commission guidelines, it is widely known that a good amount of documentation produced within the EC projects is made up of deliverables, e-newsletters, brochures, posters, flyers, videos, project factsheets, photographs. Starting from this condition, this paper analyses the GL production available on European Projects dedicated web sites, using a sample of projects selected from EU-CORDIS. The aim of the survey is then to identify, measure, evaluate the usability and availability of grey literature provided by the European Commission projects web sites in order to verify whether this type of literature is compliant with EU recommendations. It is also important to assess to which extent grey literature is reusable for "nourishing" the European platform infrastructures devoted to the storage, dissemination and conservation of such research product

From medical language processing to BioNLP domain

This paper presents the results of a terminological work on a reference corpus in the domain of Biomedicine. In particular, the research tends to analyse the use of certain terms in Biomedicine in order to verify their change over the time with the aim of retrieving from the net the very essence of documentation. The terminological sample contains words used in BioNLP and biomedicine and identifies which terms are passing from scientific publications to the daily press and which are rather reserved to scientific production. The final scope of this work is to determine how scientific dissemination to an ever larger part of the society enables a public of common citizens to approach communication on biomedical research and development; and its main source is a reference corpus made up of three main repositories from which information related to BioNLP and Biomedicine is extracted. The paper is divided in three sections: 1) an introduction dedicated to data extracted from scientific documentation; 2) the second section devoted to methodology and data description; 3) the third part containing a statistical representation of terms extracted from the archive: indexes and concordances allow to reflect on the use of certain terms in this field and give possible keys for having access to the extraction of knowledge in the digital era

I sistemi informativi della Biblioteca dell\u27Area della Ricerca di Pisa

Description of the CNR Library, (Pisa, Italy) and its services.Presentazione della Biblioteca e Centro di Documentazione Scientifica dell\u27Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa e dei suoi servizi

A Terminological Survey on the Titles of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)

This paper focuses on the automatic extraction of domain-specific knowledge from the European Commission projects of the 7th Framework Programme, hereinafter referred as FP7. The study is divided in three parts: the first part introduces the work starting from the building up of a corpus containing the titles of European Projects of the whole FP7 in order to obtain a relevant terminological sample for the different domains; the second describes software and methods while the third part focuses on the evaluation of results. Finally, we conclude by suggesting possible directions for further development of a comparison between terminological extraction from FP7 and FP5/FP6

Role of angiotensin-converting enzyme and vitamin D receptor gene polymorphisms in cancer anorexia-cachexia syndrome

The ubiquitin-proteasome pathway is a crucial connection between aberrant immune system activation, systemic inflammation and Cancer Anorexia-Cachexia Syndrome (CACS), a syndrome that culminates in hyper-activation of the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. Angiotensin directly up-regulates this pathway, while vitamin D down-regulates it indirectly through the insulin-like growth factor-1 pathway. We investigated the genetic predisposition towards CACS in a cancer population, examining Insertion/Deletion (I/D) polymorphism of angiotensin-converting enzyme gene and FokI and BsmI polymorphisms of vitamin D receptor gene. Sixty-two cancer patients were recruited and divided into three groups: primary cachectic (C1, n = 14; dysmetabolic body weight loss ≥5% in 6 months); secondary cachectic (C2, n = 34; similar weight loss, mechanic or iatrogenic origin); and non-cachectic (NC, n = 16). C2+NC were merged in the control group. The three groups showed significant differences in average prognostic inflammatory nutritional index (C1: 26.4±23.4; C2: 5.4±5.6; NC: 0.37±0.5), C-reactive protein serum levels (C1: 6.6±2.1; C2: 2.4±2.2; NC: 1.0±2.0 mg/dL), albumin serum levels (C1: 3.1±0.6; C2: 3.5±0.4; NC 3.7±0.6 g/dL), weight loss (C1: 22±8; C2: 15±6.7; NC 5±6%) and life expectancy (C1: 6.4±3.3; C2: 25±28; NC: 45±25 months). However, none of the chosen polymorphisms showed any statistically significant correlation with CACS. The complexity of the changes of the immune system in the chronic inflammation state associated with CACS is far greater than expected and further studies are required to identify genetic independent markers of progression toward CACS.

Association between vitamin D receptor gene polymorphisms and iron indices in HIV-negative patients with malnutrition-inflammation-cachexia syndrome

Malnutrition-inflammation-cachexia syndrome (MICS) is a frequent complication of end-stage AIDS. Malnutrition, with its associated adverse effects on immunocompetence contributes to the progression of AIDS independently of HIV. Iron indices are considered reliable prognostic factors because of their association with inflammation and malnutrition. Since the active form of vitamin D has immunomodulatory effects, and considering that allelic variants of the vitamin D receptor (VDR) are associated with the rates of progression to AIDS in HIV-positive patients (J Steroid Biochem Mol Biol. 2004 89-90:199-207), here we evaluated the association between VDR polymorphisms and iron indices in HIV-negative patients with MICS. 38 HIV-negative patients treated at the Unit of Clinical and Artificial Nutrition, Misericordia e Dolce Hospital, Prato (Italy) for at least 12 months were studied. The mean age of the patients (22 men and 16 women) included in this study was 65 ± 10 years. Genomic DNA was extracted from peripheral blood leucocytes and amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). PCR products were digested with the respective restriction enzymes in order to identify VDR polymorphisms. Absence or presence of the BsmI, ApaI, TaqI, and FokI restriction sites were denominated B and b, A and a, T and t, F and f respectively. Serum transferrin levels showed significant association with BsmI, ApaI and TaqI polymorphisms, i.e. those polymorphisms that are located in a regulatory site at the 3’ end of the VDR gene and are in linkage disequilibrium. Patients harbouring the BB, AA and tt genotypes showed significantly higher levels of serum transferrin compared with bb, Aa, aa, TT and Tt respectively. These results are consistent with those previously obtained in HIV-positive patients (J Steroid Biochem Mol Biol. 2004 89-90:199-207; J Infect Dis. 2008 197:405-10) and highlight an inverse correlation between vitamin D signalling and AIDS progression to MISC. These results also provide a link between VDR alleles and nutritional markers which are highly predictive variables of MICS. Since MICS is one of the leading causes of mortality in AIDS patients, the determination of VDR polymorphisms could help identifying those AIDS patients with a greater risk of developing MICS, a syndrome that appears to be independent of HIV serostatus or viral load

A Large Family with p.Arg554His Mutation in ABCD1: Clinical Features and Genotype/Phenotype Correlation in Female Carriers

X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (X-ALD, OMIM #300100) is the most common peroxisomal disorder clinically characterized by two main phenotypes: adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN) and the cerebral demyelinating form of X-ALD (cerebral ALD). The disease is caused by defects in the gene for the adenosine triphosphate (ATP)-binding cassette protein, subfamily D (ABCD1) that encodes the peroxisomal transporter of very-long-chain fatty acids (VLCFAs). The defective function of ABCD1 protein prevents β-oxidation of VLCFAs, which thus accumulate in tissues and plasma, to represent the hallmark of the disease. As in many X-linked diseases, it has been routinely expected that female carriers are asymptomatic. Nonetheless, recent findings indicate that most ABCD1 female carriers become symptomatic, with a motor disability that typically appears between the fourth and fifth decade. In this paper, we report a large family in which affected males died during the first decade, while affected females develop, during the fourth decade, progressive lower limb weakness with spastic or ataxic-spastic gait, tetra-hyperreflexia with sensory alterations. Clinical and genetic evaluations were performed in nine subjects, eight females (five affected and three healthy) and one healthy male. All affected females were carriers of the c.1661G>A (p.Arg554His, rs201568579) mutation. This study strengthens the relevance of clinical symptoms in female carriers of ABCD1 mutations, which leads to a better understanding of the role of the genetic background and the genotype-phenotype correlation. This indicates the relevance to include ABCD1 genes in genetic panels for gait disturbance in women

Mecme Digital Library (Mediterranean Coastal Marine Environment Digital Library)

This paper describes the Mecme Digital Library (Mediterranean Coastal Marine Environment DL) construction and its aims, its uniqueness and innovative purposes. Only another DL in Italy covers up the fields of oceanography and marine biology. It is LV DL -Laguna di Venezia DL

Providing access to the inaccessible: a new thematic digital library for the Venice Lagoon

This paper is a description of an innovative project: the creation of a digital thematic library known as the Laguna di Venezia Digital Library (LVDL). It will collect published and unpublished scientific documentation about the Venice Lagoon. LVDL is a personalised extension of the ETRDL (ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library) system, which is based on the Dienst protocol. Thanks to varying levels of document search and semantic descriptors, LVDL will satisfy many kinds of users working in a wide range of topics. As organised, this digital library has the potential to become a key thematic library for multidisciplinary documentation on the Venice Lagoon