A brief note on Early Abbasid stucco decoration. Madinat al-Far and the first Friday Mosque of Isfahan

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how an in-depth study of the stucco decoration could be useful in dating different phases of the Early Abbasid period in the absence of other precise archaeological evidence. Two case studies are presented: the residence of Madinat al-Far in Syria and the Early Abbasid Mosque of Iṣfahān in Iran

Which Italian Family Farms Will Have a Successor?

The succession in family farm is a critical issue: it not only involves the transmission of wealth, but also of specific skills and of specific farm management techniques. Since a large share of farmers in Italy are old, the lack of prospective successors in their farms would imply that a change in the farm management will take place. In some cases this might lead to the abandonment of farms and to degradation of the territory. It is therefore important to explore the conditions under which a farm household can transmit the farm management within the household itself. In our paper we try to assess which are the determinants of the likely farm succession within the family and we test in a developed country the hypothesis put forward by Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1985) for LDCs that farm-specific knowledge creates an incentive for children to take on the farm. To do this, we estimate by probit models the determinants for the presence of prospective successors, taking as an indicator the presence of children working on the farm. Explanatory variables include personal characteristics of the operators, including their work status, and farm, location and labour market characteristics. The results suggest that specific knowledge does favour farm succession within the household, along with other variables already considered in the previous literature; nevertheless, the effects of these variables are in general weak, and more research is needed to identify them.Farm household, succession, farm specific knowledge, probit model, Farm Management, J43, Q12,

Consumers' Short- and Long-Term Response to "Mad Cow": Beef Consumption and Willingness-to-Pay for Organic Beef in Italy

This paper aims at assessing: 1) consumers' habits concerning beef consumption and their responses to the BSE both immediately and at a longer term; 2) consumers' attitudes and willingness to pay for organic beef, an obvious alternative to regular beef in terms of safety. It is based on two random telephone surveys, the first one conducted in 2001 (few months after the BSE crisis) and the second one in 2003. The analysis shows that though the effect of the BSE crisis has weakened along with time distance, it left some permanent signs in consumers' behaviour. The analysis of the effect of the time distance from the BSE crisis on consumers' attitudes towards organic beef leads to the main conclusion that the demand for organic beef reduced, but that in the meantime it became more inelastic.BSE, organic beef, willingness to pay, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Q13, Q21,

Colloquium: Multimessenger astronomy with gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos

Many of the astrophysical sources and violent phenomena observed in our Universe are potential emitters of gravitational waves and high-energy cosmic radiation, including photons, hadrons, and presumably also neutrinos. Both gravitational waves (GW) and high-energy neutrinos (HEN) are cosmic messengers that may escape much denser media than photons. They travel unaffected over cosmological distances, carrying information from the inner regions of the astrophysical engines from which they are emitted (and from which photons and charged cosmic rays cannot reach us). For the same reasons, such messengers could also reveal new, hidden sources that have not been observed by conventional photon-based astronomy. Coincident observation of GWs and HENs may thus play a critical role in multimessenger astronomy. This is particularly true at the present time owing to the advent of a new generation of dedicated detectors: the neutrino telescopes IceCube at the South Pole and ANTARES in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the GW interferometers Virgo in Italy and LIGO in the United States. Starting from 2007, several periods of concomitant data taking involving these detectors have been conducted. More joint data sets are expected with the next generation of advanced detectors that are to be operational by 2015, with other detectors, such as KAGRA in Japan, joining in the future. Combining information from these independent detectors can provide origin always of constraining the physical processes driving the sources and also help confirm the astrophysical origin of a GW or HEN signal in case of coincident observation. Given the complexity of the instruments, a successful joint analysis of this combined GW and HEN observational data set will be possible only if the expertise and knowledge of the data is shared between the two communities. This Colloquium aims at providing an overview of both theoretical and experimental state of the art and perspectives for GW and HEN multimessenger astronomy