Search results for " Patterns"

Atlas of Variations in Medical Practice in Spain: The Spanish National Health Service under scrutiny

2012

Early in the 2000s, a countrywide health services research initiative was launched under the acronym of Atlas VPM: Atlas of Variations in Medical Practice in the Spanish National Health System. This initiative aimed at describing systematic and unwarranted variations in medical practice at geographic level-building upon the seminal experience of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. The paper aims at explaining the Spanish Atlas experience, built upon the pioneer Dartmouth inspiration. A few selected examples will be used along the following sections to illustrate the outlined conceptual framework, the different factors that may affect variation, and some methodological challenges.

Healthcare trajectory mining by combining multidimensional component and itemsets

2012

Sequential pattern mining is aimed at extracting correlations among temporal data. Many different methods were proposed to either enumerate sequences of set valued data (i.e., itemsets) or sequences containing multidimensional items. However, in real-world scenarios, data sequences are described as events of both multidimensional items and set valued information. These rich heterogeneous descriptions cannot be exploited by traditional approaches. For example, in healthcare domain, hospitalizations are defined as sequences of multi-dimensional attributes (e.g. Hospital or Diagnosis) associated with two sets, set of medical procedures (e.g. $ \lbrace $ Radiography, Appendectomy $\rbrace$) and…

Lost in space? Using geo-narratives to interpret land use changes in a rural landscape of inner Sicily

2021

Intercropping landscapes characterised by the presence of certain plant features (i.e. old-century olive trees) are usually considered traditional landscapes, extremely important for their biocultural heritage. Olive agroforestry systems were widespread in the past throughout Sicily. Recent evolution processes involving intensification have switched to olive grove monocultures. Here we present ongoing work on the application of geo-narratives to interpret transformation dynamics of land use practices in a rural landscape of inner Sicily. Based on the assumption that spatial patterns are the expression of transformation processes, where the spatial variation of human activities is a signific…

Downy oak woods of Italy: phytogeographical remarks on a controversial taxonomic and ecological issue

2011

The importance of downy oak as an integral component of the "submediterranean" woods has been underscored in many studies. Nevertheless, terms like "submediterranean" and "downy oak" are some of the most faintly understood concepts in the European phytogeographical and taxonomical research. Downy oak is well known to be a problematic taxon: the name "Quercus pubescens" (= Q. humilis) piles together populations characterized by an increasing phenotypic and genomic polymorphism along north-south gradients, which is commonly explained as the result of a "founder effect" given by a relatively fast post-glacial re-colonization of the northern stands through rare long-distance dispersal events. O…

Effects of temperatures on the spatial arrangement in Mediterranean annual dry grasslands

2009

Some preliminary results of diachronic researches on the spatial arrangement and species richness in Mediterranean annual dry grasslands belonging to the class Tuberarietea guttatae are presented. Our results are based on 12 permanent plots, set in three places at different heights in Southern and Central Sardinia. Sites were chosen to have annual species richness and plant density not significantly different. The relationship between patchiness and temporal stability was investigated at the scale of the square plots. We used the mean abundance divided by the SD in abundance (S = xm/r), as the measure of temporal stability of populations (Tilman 1999) and the Shannon-Wiener index to evaluat…

Drinking pattern matters: effects on maternal care and offspring vulnerability to alcohol in rats

2015

Alcohol drinking during pregnancy and post-partum period is a major concern because of the persistent neurobehavioral deficits in the offspring, which include increased vulnerability to substance abuse (1). The intermittent pattern of alcohol consumption induces higher drinking levels and deeper neurobiological changes in addiction-related brain regions, with respect to traditional free-access paradigms in male rats (2, 3). Nevertheless, no studies investigated on the effects of the drinking pattern on female subjects during pregnancy and perinatal time. To this aim, this study explored the consequences of continuous vs. intermittent drinking pattern on maternal behaviour and on offspring v…

Role of the Colored Noise in Spatio-Temporal Behavior of Two Competing Species

2005

We study the spatial distributions of two randomly interacting species, in the presence of an external multiplicative colored noise. The dynamics of the ecosystem is described by a coupled map lattice model. We find a nonmonotonic behavior in the formation of large scale spatial correlations as a function of the multiplicative colored noise intensity. This behavior is shifted towards higher values of the noise intensity for increasing correlation time of the noise.

Extinction of selected micromammal taxa during the Middle Pleistocene of Europe.

2014

The Impact of Climate, Resource Availability, Natural Disturbances and Human Subsistence Strategies on Sicilian Landscape Dynamics During the Holocene

2022

This paper presents a multidisciplinary summary of the most recent discoveries and hypotheses concerning factors driving the human subsistence economy and landscape shaping in Sicily during the Holocene. A number of scientific papers have recently pointed out the key role played by paleogeography, resource (water, food) availability and natural disturbances (volcanic eruptions, tsunamis) in local human activities. Modern anthropology and archaeology increasingly use biological remains (e.g. soils, bones, wood, plant macroremains, pollen) to better understand how human communities managed to survive and spread. Likewise, refined reconstructions of past human demographic fluxes and socio-econ…

The Cuneiform Brick

2022

The study presents some results of an experimental research on brick wall cladding, proposing methodological approaches for the creation of new geometric-compositional configurations. Citing innovative case studies of historical and contemporary architecture, the research has allowed to determine a different geometric shape of the brick, which takes its cue from the traditional wedge-shaped brick in majolica brick, widespread in Sicily since the sixteenth century for the realization of cusps and domes. Through the definition of procedural parametric algorithms for the analysis and geometric-spatial control, it is described the path that led to the digital prototype of a modular component of…