Production, efficiency and corruption in Italian Serie A : a DEA analysis

This paper uses data from Italian Serie A football to analyse the technical efficiency of Italian football clubs , utilising a panel dataset comprising season aggregated match statistics over ten seasons from 2000/01 to 2009/10 inclusive . While there has been considerable research on production and efficiency in most of the major European football leagues , corresponding evidence relating to Serie A is limited. T his paper addresses this imbalance , e stimating a production function for the league and the relative efficiency of 36 teams , taking into consideration the impact of the Calciopoli corruption scan dal in 2006 . To achieve this , Da ta Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models ha ve been used to calculate the frontiers of efficient production. The results highlight how playing style has changed in response to the corruption scandal , emphasizing the importance of attacking play in Serie A

Environmental Asbestotic Pleural Plaques in Northeast Corsica: Correlations with Airborne and Pleural Mineralogic Analysis

We report a prevalence study of environmental pleural plaques in subjects over 50 years old from the northeastern Corsican village of Murato, built on asbestos surface deposits. The percentage of plaques was 41%, versus 7.5% in the control village of Vezzani. Although surface deposits contain both chrysotile and tremolite, airborne pollution and asbestos lung burden of exposed inhabitants consist essentially of tremolite as assessed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). However, TEM analysis of the parietal pleura of three animals bred in exposed areas showed a predominance of short fibers of chrysotile. The respective roles of tremolite and chrysotile in inducing pleural plaques in Corsica should thus be considered.—Environ Health Perspect 102(Suppl 5):251–252 (1994

A 50 l CYGNO prototype overground characterization

The nature of dark matter is still unknown and an experimental program to look for dark matter particles in our Galaxy should extend its sensitivity to light particles in the GeV mass range and exploit the directional information of the DM particle motion (Vahsen et al. in CYGNUS: feasibility of a nuclear recoil observatory with directional sensitivity to dark matter and neutrinos, arXiv:2008.12587, 2020). The CYGNO project is studying a gaseous time projection chamber operated at atmospheric pressure with a Gas Electron Multiplier (Sauli in Nucl Instrum Meth A 386:531, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0168-9002(96)01172-2, 1997) amplification and with an optical readout as a promising technology for light dark matter and directional searches. In this paper we describe the operation of a 50 l prototype named LIME (Long Imaging ModulE) in an overground location at Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (LNF) of INFN. This prototype employs the technology under study for the 1 cubic meter CYGNO demonstrator to be installed at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) (Amaro et al. in Instruments 2022, 6(1), https://www.mdpi.com/2410-390X/6/1/6, 2022). We report the characterization of LIME with photon sources in the energy range from few keV to several tens of keV to understand the performance of the energy reconstruction of the emitted electron. We achieved a low energy threshold of few keV and an energy resolution over the whole energy range of 10–20%, while operating the detector for several weeks continuously with very high operational efficiency. The energy spectrum of the reconstructed electrons is then reported and will be the basis to identify radio-contaminants of the LIME materials to be removed for future CYGNO detectors

Geophysical investigations for the identification of active seismic faults below alluvium for seismic hazard assessment

The existence of active faults hidden below Quaternary alluvium is a common geological scenario for intermontane basins, such as the areas struck by the recent earthquakes in Central Italy, and is of great importance for seismic hazard evaluation. Finding hidden faults is a challenging task from the geophysicist's point of view since the goal is twofold: to identify the seismic bedrock at a certain depth; and to detect lateral variations or dislocations that may indicate the presence of a fault. We propose a mixed approach encompassing at first single-station seismic noise measurements, to detect sudden lateral variations in the bedrock surface in a fast and cost-effective way, which might serve as a proxy for the potential identification of fault zones. Then, more accurate electrical resistivity tomography investigations are carried out only at selected sites as indicated by the preliminary noise analysis, as electrical methods cannot effectively be employed at a large scale for time and economic limitations. Surface-wave dispersion analysis is jointly interpreted together with ambient noise data to improve the seismic characterization of the alluvium, giving further insight on the assessment of the depth to bedrock. The proposed approach can be an effective way to manage and investigate a large portion of the territory within a sensible budget, as commonly needed in seismic hazard assessment and microzonation studies. We present a real-world application to the San Vittorino Plain (Central Italy) close to the epicentre of the 24 August 2016 Amatrice earthquake, where the geological faulted bedrock is covered by alluvial sediments of the Velino River up to a maximum estimated thickness of 150–200 m. Although engineered for the post-earthquake reconstruction emergency, the approach employed in our study can be adopted in other areas of similar geology, to ease the application of seismic microzonation in time of seismic silence as a tool for long-term land planning and management