Search results for "Nature"
showing 10 items of 1564 documents
A Survey on Nature-Inspired Medical Image Analysis: A Step Further in Biomedical Data Integration
2019
Natural phenomena and mechanisms have always intrigued humans, inspiring the design of effective solutions for real-world problems. Indeed, fascinating processes occur in nature, giving rise to an ever-increasing scientific interest. In everyday life, the amount of heterogeneous biomedical data is increasing more and more thanks to the advances in image acquisition modalities and high-throughput technologies. The automated analysis of these large-scale datasets creates new compelling challenges for data-driven and model-based computational methods. The application of intelligent algorithms, which mimic natural phenomena, is emerging as an effective paradigm for tackling complex problems, by…
‘How this holiday makes a difference’: The language of environment and the environment of nature in a cross-cultural study of ecotourism
2010
Partendo dal presupposto che le differenze culturali spesso costituiscono una fonte potenziale di problematiche traduttive, questo contributo mira a evidenziare le differenze che emergono sul piano linguistico, a livello lessicale, ma soprattutto fraseologico, in seguito a variegati orientamenti culturali che agiscono come filtri. Il linguaggio specialistico analizzato riguarda una nicchia particolare del mercato del turismo, ossia l’ecoturismo, che sta conquistando un terreno sempre più vasto in seguito ad una maggiore attenzione rivolta nei confronti di tematiche attuali, come quelle di impatto ambientale. Abbracciando una prospettiva interculturale, il lavoro indaga il diverso approccio …
The ‘killer shrimp’Dikerogammarus villosus(Crustacea, Amphipoda) invading Alpine lakes: overland transport by recreational boats and scuba-diving gea…
2013
The alien freshwater amphipod of Ponto-Caspian origin, Dikerogammarus villosus, also known as the killer shrimp, is recognized as being one of the worst invasive alien species in Europe, representing a major conservation problem. Recently, the species has been reported to invade lakes in the Alps in putative association with overland transport linked with recreational activities. This study provided a method to assess risk associated with this overland transport and an opportunity to set up a rationale for effective preventive conservation management. A field survey of 60 lakes encompassing all the Alpine area has revealed the presence of killer shrimp in 12 lakes. Subsequent multivariate d…
L'uomo e il suo ambiente. Al di là dell'opposizione natura/cultura
2021
Curatela del volume che contiene la traduzione italiana del libro di Claude Calame, L'uomo e il suo ambiente. Al di là dell'opposizione natura/cultura. Il volume è corredato di due saggi, uno di Andrea Cozzo sulle dimensioni umane del pensiero ecologico nella Grecia antica, e uno del curatore del volume sul rapporto tra uomo e ambiente in vista della caratterizzazione tecnica dell'essere umano tra il trattato ippocratico Arie acque luoghi e il dramma Prometeo Incatenato. Editor of the volume that contains the Italian translation of Claude Calame's book, Man and his environment. Beyond the nature / culture opposition. The volume is accompanied by two essays, one by Andrea Cozzo on the human …
La Terra reinventata. Etica dell’ambiente e Antropocene
2018
Reinventing Earth. Environmental Ethics and Anthropocene This article considers two issues concerning Anthropocene – first, Anthropocene as a puzzling notion, second, the possibilty of an environmental ethics of the Anthropocene. Definitions, narratives of, and reactions to Anthropocene are presented in paragraph 2. A view of the value of hybrid nature in Anthropocene is sketched in paragraph 3.
Place and Positionality – Anthropo(topo)logical Thinking with Helmuth Plessner
2018
This paper explores a possible anthropological dimension of place by providing an interpretation of Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical approach which proposes to understand it as a twofold “implacement” of man – discussing both the place of man in the natural world and man’s specific relation to place that makes him take his place in the natural world. The interpretation follows Plessner’s idea of a natural set of stages, developed in his major work Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, leading from inanimate objects to plants, animals, and humans. According to Plessner, each stage differs from the other by virtue of its respective spatial delineation toward, and its position in, the wor…
The effects of forest management on wood-inhabiting fungi occupying dead wood of different diameter fractions
2014
Forest management has caused severe ecological degradation throughout the Globe. One of its most prominent consequences is the drastic change in dead wood profile and consequently in the dead wood dependent biota. Wood-inhabiting fungi are, considering ecosystem functions, the most important species group utilizing dead wood, because they take care of majority of the decaying process. The earlier research focusing on the effects of forest management on wood-inhabiting fungi has strongly focused on large dead wood pieces (i.e. coarse woody debris, CWD), even though it has been shown that a major part of fungal diversity utilizes (also) small dead wood pieces (i.e. [very] fine woody debris, […
Identification of multiplicatively acting modulatory mutational signatures in cancer
2022
Abstract Background A deep understanding of carcinogenesis at the DNA level underpins many advances in cancer prevention and treatment. Mutational signatures provide a breakthrough conceptualisation, as well as an analysis framework, that can be used to build such understanding. They capture somatic mutation patterns and at best identify their causes. Most studies in this context have focused on an inherently additive analysis, e.g. by non-negative matrix factorization, where the mutations within a cancer sample are explained by a linear combination of independent mutational signatures. However, other recent studies show that the mutational signatures exhibit non-additive interactions. Resu…
Langage et Apprentissage en Interaction pour des Assistants Numériques Autonomes - Une Approche Développementale
2021
The rapid development of digital assistants (DA) opens the way to new modes of interaction. Some DA allows users to personalise the way they respond to queries, in particular by teaching them new procedures. This work proposes to use machine learning methods to enrich the linguistic and procedural generalisation capabilities of these systems. The challenge is to reconcile rapid learning skills, necessary for a smooth user experience, with a sufficiently large generalisation capacity. Though this is a natural human ability, it remains out-of-reach for artificial systems and this leads us to approach these issues from the perspective of developmental Artificial Intelligence. This work is thus…
Reducing Mortality of Shrews in Rodent Live Trapping — a Method Increasing Live-Trap Selectivity with Shrew Exits
2013
Shrews have very high metabolic rates and are often unintentionally starved in rodent live-traps during capture-mark-recapture (CMR) studies. Here, we suggest a shrew exit as a modification to rodent traps. To test whether this modification is (1) saving shrews and (2) not jeopardizing results of rodent captures, we compared captures in Ugglan traps with and without shrew exits, studying bank voles (Myodes glareolus) in a spruce forest in central Finland. Numbers of captured bank voles and body size of smallest juvenile bank voles were not affected by the shrew exit, while the number of captured common shrews (Sorex araneus) was reduced from 31 to 0 individuals per 100 trap nights. However,…