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• Normalizing images with respect to healthy prostate tissue is optimal. • Histogram-based normalization should be used otherwise. • Over 87% of radiomic features drastically change after normalization. • Improper normalization is worse than no normalization. The variance in intensities of MRI scans is a fundamental impediment for quantitative MRI analysis. Intensity values are not only highly dependent on acquisition parameters, but also on the subject and body region being scanned. This warrants the need for image normalization techniques to ensure that intensity values are consistent within tissues across different subjects and visits. Many intensity normalization methods have been developed and proven successful for the analysis of brain pathologies, but evaluation of these methods for images of the prostate region is lagging. In this paper, we compare four different normalization methods on 49 T2-w scans of prostate cancer patients: 1) the well-established histogram normalization, 2) the generalized scale normalization, 3) an extension of generalized scale normalization called generalized ball-scale normalization, and 4) a custom normalization based on healthy prostate tissue intensities. The methods are compared qualitatively and quantitatively in terms of behaviors of intensity distributions as well as impact on radiomic features. Our findings suggest that normalization based on prior knowledge of the healthy prostate tissue intensities may be the most effective way of acquiring the desired properties of normalized images. In addition, the histogram normalization method outperform the generalized scale and generalized ball-scale methods which have proven superior for other body regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term “overeducation" refers to a work situation where the level of education of the worker clearly exceeds the educational requirements of the performed activity. From a macroeconomic perspective, the overeducation is a waste of human capital, since the expertise of skilled workers is not used. This phenomenon is present in all OECD countries, especially among the immigrant population. However, it is particularly serious in the countries of the Southern Europe. In Italy, the 2011 Census data actually reveal that 65.9% of highly educated foreigners has a blue collar or another unskilled job. In contrast, only 34.1% of foreigners is involved in organizational, technical, intellectual and scientific activities or in business management, an incidence of 36 percentage points lower than the one of Italians (70.1%). Highly skilled immigrants also have a higher chance of not finding any work. Comparison with the 2001 census data reveals that the imbalances, and the consequent waste of human capital, is even worse than it was ten years ago, since the current economic situation obviously exacerbated these problems. The causes of this situation definitely depend on the particular characteristics of our production system that is increasingly less oriented toward the skilled labor and undermines the possibility to get an appropriate job even for thousands of Italian graduates. However, the greatest impact of overeducation registered for the foreign component of the workforce must be also related to the well-known difficulty of recognition of educational qualifications obtained in a non-EU foreign country and to the need to get any job, even though unskilled, which very often is the conditio sine qua non to obtain a residence permit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the population of foreign residents in Italy holding an university or tertiary educational qualification and the job performed by these skilled migrants, in order to verify the eventual presence of the "over-qualification" phenomenon. The data were gathered by ISTAT, in occasion of the 14th General Census of Inhabitants and Houses on 2001. These data show how the presence of skilled immigrants is more common than commonly believed. However, this remarkable amount of human resources is only partially employed, since less than one half of these people have a job corresponding to their qualification level. It turns out that the percentage of over-qualified workers is higher than the average among Italian citizens. Moreover, the penalization in the labor market of immigrants coming from a number of geographic areas and gender discrimination of immigrants in the field of highly qualified employment are also evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The different possibilities and modalities of insertion in the labour market of arrival constitute one of the essential elements of the process of integration. The contribution, which represents a reading by community of the phenomenon, aims at underlining the similarities and the differences that characterize the main immigrant communities. The analyses that have been carried out have confirmed the profound diversities, due mainly to the gender dimension and the nation of origins, that mark the processes of insertion of foreign workers in the Italian labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]