Search results for "TOPS"

Ranking World Tourism Competitiveness: A Comparison of Two Composite Indicators

2021

Assessing travel and tourism competitiveness (T&TC) is becoming an issue of paramount importance for stakeholders, mainly policymakers and practitioners. The availability of new databases such as the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) has boosted this interest. This chapter contributes to the current literature in this field with an assessment of the T&TC of 136 world tourist destinations. In doing so, two well-known approaches are employed: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with endogenous common weights, and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solutions (TOPSIS). World tourist destinations are ranked using these approaches,…

Soil organic carbon stocks assessment in Mediterranean natural areas: A comparison of entire soil profiles and soil control sections

2015

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is an important part of the global carbon (C) cycle. In addition, SOC is a soil property subject to changes and highly variable in space and time. Over time, some researches have analyzed entire soil profile (ESP) by pedogenetic horizons and other researches have analyzed soil control sections (SCS) to different thickness. However, very few studies compare both methods (ESP versus SCS). This research sought to analyze the SOC stock (SOCS) variability using both methods (ESP and SCS) in The Despeñaperros Natural Park, a nature reserve that consists of a 76.8 km(2) forested area in southern Spain. Thirty-four sampling points were selected in the study zone. Each samp…

Ultrastructural study of the retina in late infantile metachromatic leukodystrophy.

1992

The autopsy of a 2-year-old girl revealed a clinically unrecognized metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) due to an aryl-sulfatase A deficiency, characteristically affecting the central and peripheral nervous system by demyelination and by accumulation of metachromatic material. The retina though reported clinically as normal, showed the same demyelinating process in the optic nerve including the papilla but an additional intraneuronal storage of MLD-typical lysosomal residual bodies in ganglion cell perikarya of the retina. Cells of the bipolar and photoreceptor layers as well as pigment epithelial cells were not affected by MLD-specific lysosomal storage. Thus, sulfatides seem to play a part…

APPLICAZIONI DELLA TC SPIRALE MULTIDETECTORE ALLO STUDIO DI REPERTI SCHELETRICI E DI CORPI MUMMIFICATI

2009

The analysis of SUDEP forensic autopsies leading to preventable events

2023

Introduction: The diagnosis of unexpected death by excluding non-natural causes, particularly in subjects with epilepsy, is a topic of interest and it is difficult to identify in the forensic field. Health professionals sometimes are faced with cases of sudden death, generally in young adults with a long history of epilepsy that require, for judicial purposes, an explanation in terms of cause and means to determine the death. SUDEP is an entity diagnosed by the exclusion of other causes that may have led to death, and then for forensic purposes, it requires particular attention and knowledge, and there is difficulty in identifying it. Our contribution aims to illustrate the scientific commu…

The FTOPSIS method to support FMECA analyses

2016

This paper proposes an approach based on multi-criteria decisional methods to manage the results derived from reliability analyses. In detail, this paper proposes ranking the failure modes of a system when analyzed with failure modes, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) using the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solutions (TOPSIS). To better manage the uncertainty of evaluations made under the differing criteria, the TOPSIS method is applied in its fuzzy version (FTOPSIS). When the method is applied to a case study, the results highlight the main possible critical faults and supply fundamental information to take into account during the scheduling of maintenance ac…

The use of constructed wetlands for the treatment and reuse of urban wastewater for the irrigation of two warm-season turfgrass species under Mediter…

2017

Constructed wetlands (CWs) represent low-cost technology for the treatment and reuse of wastewater in urban areas. This study aimed to evaluate the pollutant removal efficiency of a CW system and to assess the effects of irrigation using treated urban wastewater on soil and on two warm-season turf species. The research was carried out in Sicily (Italy) on a pilot-scale horizontal subsurface flow system which was fed with treated urban wastewater following secondary treatment from an activated-sludge wastewater treatment plant. The pilot system was located in an open urban park and comprised two separate parallel planted units. Experimental fields of Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers. and Paspalum …

DINESERV along with fuzzy hierarchical TOPSIS to support the best practices observation and service quality improvement in the restaurant context

2019

Abstract The present work proposes a new Multi-Criteria-Decision-Analysis (MCDA)-based approach integrating the DINESERV model along with the hierarchical TOPSIS method as measurement tool for evaluating quality in the restaurant services context. More in detail, on the basis of the DINESERV theoretical framework of the restaurant service quality, hierarchical TOPSIS is applied to compare quality of restaurant services. Actually, due to the prioritization process of hierarchical TOPSIS, investigated services providers are consistently and effectively assessed against criteria and sub-criteria of DINESERV, so allowing the identification of both best practices and weaknesses of delivered serv…

Building Composite Indicators With Unweighted-TOPSIS

2023

Composite indicators have been widely used in a large number of fields, including innovation and entrepreneurship as a useful tool for conveying summary information about overall performance in a relatively simple way. The construction of composite indicators implies several stages concerning collection of data, selection of criteria and individual indicators, normalization and weighting of criteria and indicators, aggregation, and comparison of overall performance of the alternatives or options. This article aims at contributing to the construction of synthetic indicators by showing with a real example, how the proposed methodology can overcome the problem of the establisment of the decisi…

SOILS WITH HIGH ORGANIC CARBON STORAGE CAPACITY IN DEPTH

2012

Most studies about soil organic carbon (OC) stock focus on the topsoil storage capacity, however, it has been proved that OC can reach relatively high values also in depth. The aim of this work was a preliminary investigation of the soil types with a high OC content in depth and the relationship with the main pedogenetic factors. The dataset was the 1,414 Italian National Soil Typologies (STU). The selected attributes were: mean value of OC in the superficial functional horizon (L1); weighted average value between 50 and 100 cm (L2) and under 100 cm (L3); WRB classification; main lithology, morphology and land-use. About 92% of typologies had more than 0.58% of OC in L1, about 30% in L2, an…