Educational assortative mating in Italy: what can Gini’s homogamy index still say?

The homogamy index proposed by Gini is applied to describe the changes occurred in marital choice - across time and regions in Italy. The relevant increase in education by women has provoked an increase in the number of homogamous couples and in an increasing proportion of women who marry downward. Relevant differences are observed in the case of informal unions and mixed marriages

Establishing Parameters for Selecting Eligible Neutral Current Neutrino-Proton Elastic Scattering Events using MINERνA Detector Samples

The neutrino has been a theorized particle since the early 1900’s but its elusive nature has made detecting, understanding, and characterizing it particularly difficult. Experiments to detect neutrinos aim to better discern how this Standard Model particle interacts with matter, its own unique properties, and its ties to the history of our universe. The MINVERvA collaboration studies scattering cross sections by using five different nuclear targets (water, carbon, iron, helium, and lead) to gain a wide array of data involving a range of interaction types. These precision measurements directly reduce the systematic uncertainties for larger neutrino experiments that search for neutrino oscillations (such as NOvA and DUNE). Through this thesis, we aim to study MINERvA data to estimate parameters needed to construct an experimental cross-section for neutral current (NC) elastic neutrino-proton scattering events. We examine events within the 100 MeV to 10 GeV energy range as this contains the highest probability for the desired interaction. We create criteria for differentiating between neutrino-proton versus neutron-proton events to construct a Python script for selecting eligible NC scattering events

Testing incremental politics : the case of North Sea oil

In the quest to secure the much vaunted benefits of North Sea oil, highly non-incremental technologies have been adopted. Nowhere is this more the case than with the early fields of the central and northern North Sea. By focusing on the inflexible nature of North Sea hardware, in such fields, this thesis examines the problems that this sort of technology might pose for policy making. More particularly, the following issues are raised. First, the implications of non-incremental technical change for the successful conduct of oil policy is raised. Here, the focus is on the micro-economic performance of the first generation of North Sea oil fields and the manner in which this relates to government policy. Secondly, the question is posed as to whether there were more flexible, perhaps more incremental policy alternatives open to the decision makers. Conclusions drawn relate to the degree to which non-incremental shifts in policy permit decision makers to achieve their objectives at relatively low cost. To discover cases where non-incremental policy making has led to success in this way, would be to falsify the thesis that decision makers are best served by employing incremental politics as an approach to complex problem solving

Housework and childcare in Italy: a persistent case of gender inequality

This article focuses on the gender gap in housework and childcare in Italian couples. Italian women still carry out three-quarters of domestic work and two-thirds of childcare. We focus on three possible theoretical explanations for the persistence of the gendered division of labor: time availability, relative resources, and conformity with traditional gender ideology. Time Use data from the 2008/09 Survey edition have been used: we considered couples, married or in consensual unions, with at least one child under 14 years of age and with the mother employed

Supply chains and energy security in a low carbon transition

This special edition to be published in Applied Energy brings together a range of papers that explore the complex, multi-dimensional and inter-related issues associated with the supply or value chains that make up energy systems and how a focus on them can bring new insights for energy security in a low carbon transition. Dealing with the trilemma of maintaining energy security, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and maintaining affordability for economies and end users are key issues for all countries, but there are synergies and trade-offs in simultaneously dealing with these different objectives. Currently, industrialised energy systems are dominated by supply chains based on fossil fuels and these, for the most part, have been effective in enabling energy security and affordability. However, they are increasingly struggling to do this, particularly in respect to efforts to tackle climate change, given that the energy sector is responsible for around two-thirds of the global greenhouse gas emissions [1]. A key challenge is therefore how to decarbonise energy systems, whilst also ensuring energy security and affordability. This special issue, through a focus on supply chains, particularly considers the interactions and relationships between energy security and decarbonisation. Energy security is a property of energy systems and their ability to withstand short-term shocks and longer-term stresses depends on other important system properties including resilience, robustness, flexibility and stability [2]. Energy systems are essentially a supply chain comprising of multiple and interrelated sub-chains based around different fuels, technologies, infrastructures, and actors, operating at different scales and locations – from extraction/imports and conversion through to end use [3]. These supply chains have become increasingly globalised and are influenced by the on-going shifts in global supply and demand. Thus the aim of this special issue is to explore and discuss how to enable the development of a secure and sustainable energy system through a better understanding of both existing and emerging low carbon energy supply chains as well as of new approaches to the design and management of energy systems. In part, because moving from a system dominated by fossil fuels to one based on low carbon creates a new set of risks and uncertainties for energy security as well as new opportunities. A large number of submissions from over 18 countries were received for this special edition and 16 papers were accepted after peer review. These address a variety of issues and we have chosen to discuss the findings under two key themes, although many of the papers cut across these: (1) Insights from, and for, supply chain analysis. (2) Insights for energy security and its management. We then provide in (3) a summary of insights and research gaps. Table 1 provides a snapshot of the areas covered by the papers showing: theme (s); empirical domains; and geographical coverage