Search results for "certainty"

The effect of agglomeration economies and geography on the survival of accommodation businesses in Sicily

2021

The study explores the geographical pattern of the accommodation industry in the Italian insular region of Sicily, focusing on the determinants of the risk of market exit. We adopt a standard framework of business survival analysis where agglomeration economies play an important role. We then extend the analysis by considering the role of geography to explore whether the risk of market exit depends on nearness to desirable amenities. The geography is here measured by the distance from the coast and the altitude of the place where the firm is located. When we look at the entire population of accommodation firms that started between 2010 and 2014, we find evidence that the risk of failure inc…

Pandemic Prevention and Personality Psychology: Gender Differences in Preventive Health Behaviors during COVID-19 and the Roles of Agreeableness and …

2022

One of the greatest public health crises in recent times, the COVID-19 pandemic, has come with a myriad of challenges in terms of health communication and public cooperation to prevent the spread of the disease. Understanding which are the key determinants that make certain individuals more cooperative is key in effectively tackling pandemics and similar future challenges. In the present study (N = 800), we investigated whether gender differences in compliance with preventive health behaviors (PHB) at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic could be established, and, if so, whether the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness could help explain this presumed relationship. Consis…

A PERFORMANCE-BASED TOOL FOR PRIORITISING WATER METER SUBSTITUTION IN A URBAN DISTRIBUTION NETWORK

2011

User water consumption is usually measured by volumetric water meters. Water meters also provide indispensable data used by the utilities for issuing bills, obtaining the system water balance, identifying failures in the network, water theft and anomalous user behaviour. Therefore, the utilities rely on such instruments for the technical and economic management of water systems. Despite their importance, water meters are characterised by relevant intrinsic errors that are responsible for a part of so-called apparent losses, i.e. water volumes reaching a final user without being accounted for. The aim of this paper is to provide a water meter management tool that analyses the meters performa…

Taking Aim and Hitting the Target. Some Remarks on the Aristotelian Notion of eustoichia

2018

L’articolo è dedicato alla nozione aristotelica di eustochia (la capacità di fare buone congetture), nella convinzione che essa possa contribuire al ripensamento della nostra costitutiva precarietà. Diversamente da una lettura tradizionale che vede Aristotele principalmente come il filosofo del ragionamento deduttivo, l’articolo sostiene invece l’importanza di questa capacità cognitiva nel pensiero aristotelico. Con questo scopo, vengono analizzati i tre principali contesti in cui Aristotele fa riferimento all’eustochia: la costruzione del sillogismo (APo, 89b 10), il raggiungimento della virtù (EN, 1106b 16) e la creazione di metafore ((Rh. 1412a 13). Nonostante le evidenti differenze, que…

Retrieval of atmospheric CH4profiles from Fourier transform infrared data using dimension reduction and MCMC

2016

We introduce an inversion method that uses dimension reduction for the retrieval of atmospheric methane (CH4) profiles. Uncertainty analysis is performed using the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) statistical estimation. These techniques are used to retrieve CH4 profiles from the ground-based spectral measurements by the Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) instrument at Sodankyla (67.4 degrees N, 26.6 degrees E), Northern Finland. The Sodankyla FTS is part of the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), a global network that observes solar spectra in near-infrared wavelengths. The high spectral resolution of the data provides approximately 3 degrees of freedom about the vertical struc…

Horror movies post 9/11: delineating tourism in a context of certainty

2014

In recent years, specialized literature has devoted much attention to the narratives of cinema and destination attractiveness. International cinema projects of the calibre of the Lord of the Rings ...

Multitasking in Driving as Optimal Adaptation Under Uncertainty

2021

Objective The objective was to better understand how people adapt multitasking behavior when circumstances in driving change and how safe versus unsafe behaviors emerge. Background Multitasking strategies in driving adapt to changes in the task environment, but the cognitive mechanisms of this adaptation are not well known. Missing is a unifying account to explain the joint contribution of task constraints, goals, cognitive capabilities, and beliefs about the driving environment. Method We model the driver’s decision to deploy visual attention as a stochastic sequential decision-making problem and propose hierarchical reinforcement learning as a computationally tractable solution to it. The…

The influence of the prior distribution on the uncertainty analysis assessment of an urban drainage stormwater quality model

2009

Deep learning and process understanding for data-driven Earth system science

2017

Machine learning approaches are increasingly used to extract patterns and insights from the ever-increasing stream of geospatial data, but current approaches may not be optimal when system behaviour is dominated by spatial or temporal context. Here, rather than amending classical machine learning, we argue that these contextual cues should be used as part of deep learning (an approach that is able to extract spatio-temporal features automatically) to gain further process understanding of Earth system science problems, improving the predictive ability of seasonal forecasting and modelling of long-range spatial connections across multiple timescales, for example. The next step will be a hybri…

Automatic program for peak detection and deconvolution of multi-overlapped chromatographic signals

2005

Several interlinked algorithms for peak deconvolution by non-linear regression are presented. These procedures, together with the peak detection methods outlined in Part I, have allowed the implementation of an automatic method able to process multi-overlapped signals, requiring little user interaction. A criterion based on the evaluation of the multivariate selectivity of the chromatographic signal is used to auto-select the most efficient deconvolution procedure for each chromatographic situation. In this way, non-optimal local solutions are avoided in cases of high overlap, and short computation times are obtained in situations of high resolution. A new algorithm, fitting both the origin…