Because of evidence of causal association between antibiotic use and bacterial resistance, the implementation of national policies has emerged as a interesting tool for controlling and reversing bacterial resistance. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of public policies on antibiotic use in Europe using a differences-in-differences approach. Comparable data on systemic...
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In: Lecture notes in computer science, 2011, vol. 7022, p. 198-209
The importance of the Internet as a communication medium is reflected in the large amount of documents being generated every day by users of the different services that take place online. In this work we aim at analyzing the properties of these online user-generated documents for some of the established services over the Internet (Kongregate, Twitter, Myspace and Slashdot) and comparing them...
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In: Lecture notes in computer science, 2010, vol. 5993, p. 649-652
User-generated short documents assume an important role in online communication due to the established utilization of social networks and real- time text messaging on the Internet. In this paper we compare the statistics of different online user-generated datasets and traditional TREC collections, investigating their similarities and dferences. Our results support the applicability of...
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In: L’analisi linguistica e letteraria, 2008, vol. 2, p. 859-872
This paper considers a specific communicative activity type of the financial context – analysts and investors conference calls – from an argumentative perspective. On the basis of a concrete example bound to an important and very recent merger story (the failed attempt to combine Barclays and ABN AMRO banks), it is shown that conference calls, apparently conceived for ...
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In: International encyclopedia of statistical science, 2011, p. 1240-1242
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In: Lecture notes in computer science, 2011, vol. 6653, no. -, p. 3-15
Prior-art search is a critical step in the examination procedure of a patent application. This study explores automatic query generation from patent documents to facilitate the time-consuming and labor-intensive search for relevant patents. It is essential for this task to identify discriminative terms in different fields of a query patent, which enables us to distinguish relevant patents from...
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In: Studies in communication sciences, 2008, vol. 8, no. 2, p. 279-302
This paper brings to light the important but insufficiently recognized role played by argumentation in financial activities and, more in particular, in corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A). This role shows to be crucial in many phases of the M&A process, in particular in the public offer phase, when corporate managers have to convince shareholders of the expediency of the proposed deal but...
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In: VMV 2010 : Vision, modeling & visualization, 2010, p. 211–218
In this paper we present a new algorithm for interactively painting onto 3D meshes that exploits recent advances of GPU technology. As the user moves a brush over the 3D mesh, its paint pattern is projected onto the 3D geometry at the current viewing angle and copied to the corresponding region in the object’s texture atlas. Both operations are realized on the GPU, with the advantage that all...
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We describe an empirical evaluation of a visualization approach based on a 3D city metaphor, implemented in a tool called CodeCity. We designed the controlled experiment based on a set of lessons extracted from the current body of research and perfected it during a preliminary pilot phase. We then conducted the experiment in four locations across three countries over a period of four months,...
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Partial replication is a way to increase the scalability of replicated systems since updates only need to be applied to a subset of the system’s sites, thus allowing replicas to handle independent parts of the workload in parallel. In this paper, we propose P-Store, a partial database replication protocol for wide area networks. In P-Store, each transaction T optimistically executes on one...
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