Is resale anxiety an obstacle to electric vehicle adoption? Results from a survey experiment in Switzerland

Electrification of private motorised transport is one of the most effective pathways to net-zero carbon emissions in the road transport sector. However, adoption rates of battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) are still relatively low in most advanced industrialised countries. One of the most widely discussed but so far understudied potential obstacles to BEV adoption is resale anxiety. It refers to the fear of comparatively low expected resale values of BEVs, resulting, among other reasons, from expectations concerning rapid progress in battery technology. However, based on three survey-embedded vignette experiments in Switzerland (N = 3901 in total), we find the opposite of resale anxiety: a higher expected resale value of BEVs compared to conventional cars. Our findings suggest that regulatory policy and social norm signals in this area are gaining ground, boding well for consumer acceptance of BEVs in the coming years

Government regulation and public opposition create high additional costs for field trials with GM crops in Switzerland

Field trials with GM crops are not only plant science experiments. They are also social experiments concerning the implications of government imposed regulatory constraints and public opposition for scientific activity. We assess these implications by estimating additional costs due to government regulation and public opposition in a recent set of field trials in Switzerland. We find that for every Euro spent on research, an additional 78 cents were spent on security, an additional 31 cents on biosafety, and an additional 17 cents on government regulatory supervision. Hence the total additional spending due to government regulation and public opposition was around 1.26 Euros for every Euro spent on the research per se. These estimates are conservative; they do not include additional costs that are hard to monetize (e.g. stakeholder information and dialogue activities, involvement of various government agencies). We conclude that further field experiments with GM crops in Switzerland are unlikely unless protected sites are set up to reduce these additional cost

A geometric knowledge-based coarse-grained scoring potential for structure prediction evaluation

International audienceKnowledge-based protein folding potentials have proven successful in the recent years. Based on statistics of observed interatomic distances, they generally encode pairwise contact information. In this study we present a method that derives multi-body contact potentials from measurements of surface areas using coarse-grained protein models. The measurements are made using a newly implemented geometric construction: the arrangement of circles on a sphere. This construction allows the definition of residue covering areas which are used as parameters to build functions able to distinguish native structures from decoys. These functions, encoding up to 5-body contacts are evaluated on a reference set of 66 structures and its 45000 decoys, and also on the often used lattice ssfit set from the decoys'R us database. We show that the most relevant information for discrimination resides in 2- and 3-body contacts. The potentials we have obtained can be used for evaluation of putative structural models; they could also lead to different types of structure refinement techniques that use multi-body interactions

The role and limits of strategic framing for promoting sustainable consumption and policy

Strategic issue framing is widely regarded as an effective communication strategy to alter public opinion and citizens’ policy support. However, it is unclear to what extent strategic framing can increase support for ambitious demand-side actions and policies that make the cost of mitigation perceptible in citizens’ everyday lives. Taking an exploratory approach, we conducted qualitative interviews and a comparative framing experiment with 9,750 survey respondents from China, Germany, and the United States. We analyzed strategic issue framing effects in two areas known to be key for increasing the sustainability of consumption: meat/fish consumption, and fossil-fuel car usage. Employing both classical linear regressions and advanced Bayesian sparse estimations, we show that in all three countries widespread arguments in favor of reduced meat/fish consumption and car use are unlikely to substantially alter citizens’ concern, willingness to pay, behavioral intentions and policy support for demand-side action. Our findings suggest that in the absence of a broader behavioral change campaign, strategic issue framing alone is unlikely to be effective in changing entrenched attitudes and behaviors. On its own, it is also unlikely to substantially increase public support for demand-side policies to reduce consumption. More careful research is needed to help policymakers understand the role and limits of different strategic framing techniques

Effects of improved on-farm crop storage on perceived stress and perceived coping in pregnant women-Evidence from a cluster-randomized controlled trial in Kenya

BACKGROUND: Food insecurity can be harmful to pregnant women, as pregnancy is a challenging period with increased maternal nutritional requirements to ensure optimal fetal development and health of the mother. Whether food insecurity negatively affects maternal health may depend on how stressful pregnant women perceive this food insecurity to be and how strongly they believe they can cope with it. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), pregnant women from smallholder households suffer from food insecurity due to post-harvest losses (PHL), i.e., loss of crops because of inadequate storage. An agricultural intervention that improves crop storage has been shown to reduce food insecurity. However, it remains to be determined whether this agricultural intervention (treatment) has an additional positive effect on pregnant women's perceived stress levels and coping abilities. This study examines whether pregnant women from treatment households experience lower perceived stress levels and higher perceived coping abilities compared to pregnant women from control housholds. METHODS AND FINDINGS: In a randomized controlled trial (RCT), short message service (SMS)-based mobile phone surveys were conducted to assess the causal effect of a food security intervention (improved on-farm storage of maize) on perceived stress and coping in pregnant women from smallholder households. Pregnant women were identified through these monthly surveys by asking whether someone in their household was currently pregnant. The significant results revealed that pregnant women from treatment households experienced more perceived stress but better perceived coping abilities compared to pregnant women from control households. Uncertainty due to lack of experience, this might have contributed to the higher perceived stress, as the women could not easily judge the benefits and risks of the new storage technology. However, the technology itself is a tangible resource which might have empowered the pregnant women to counteract the effects of PHL and thus food insecurity. CONCLUSION: Our findings indicate that pregnant women from treatment households had higher perceived coping abilities but experienced more perceived stress. More research is needed on how this technology impacts maternal mental health in a broader sense and whether biological mechanisms, such as epigenetics, may underlie this association

The RMS Charge Radius of the Proton and Zemach Moments

On the basis of recent precise measurements of the electric form factor of the proton, the Zemach moments, needed as input parameters for the determination of the proton rms radius from the measurement of the Lamb shift in muonic hydrogen, are calculated. It turns out that the new moments give an uncertainty as large as the presently stated error of the recent Lamb shift measurement of Pohl et al.. De Rujula's idea of a large Zemach moment in order to reconcile the five standard deviation discrepancy between the muonic Lamb shift determination and the result of electronic experiments is shown to be in clear contradiction with experiment. Alternative explanations are touched upon.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, final version includes discussion of systematic and numerical error

Systematic mapping of climate and environmental framing experiments and re-analysis with computational methods points to omitted interaction bias

Ambitious climate policy requires acceptance by millions of people whose daily lives would be affected in costly ways. In turn, this requires an understanding of how to get the mass public on board and prevent a political backlash against costly climate policies. Many scholars regard ‘framing’, specially tailored messages emphasizing specific subsets of political arguments to certain population subgroups, as an effective communication strategy for changing climate beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. In contrast, other scholars argue that people hold relatively stable opinions and doubt that framing can alter public opinion on salient issues like climate change. We contribute to this debate in two ways: First, we conduct a systematic mapping of 121 experimental studies on climate and environmental policy framing, published in 46 peer-reviewed journals and present results of a survey with authors of these studies. Second, we illustrate the use of novel computational methods to check for the robustness of subgroup effects and identify omitted interaction bias. We find that most experiments report significant main and subgroup effects but rarely use advanced methods to account for potential omitted interaction bias. Moreover, only a few studies make their data publicly available to easily replicate them. Our survey of framing researchers suggests that when scholars successfully publish non-significant effects, these were typically bundled together with other, significant effects to increase publication chances. Finally, using a Bayesian computational sparse regression technique, we offer an illustrative re-analysis of 10 studies focusing on subgroup framing differences by partisanship (a key driver of climate change attitudes) and show that these effects are often not robust when accounting for omitted interaction bias