Delusions of success: Costs and demand of high-speed rail in Italy and Spain

Mismatches between forecasted and actual costs and traffic figures are common in transport investments, especially in large scale ones, and so are delusions of the future demand. High-speed rail projects are often among the worst practices for cost overruns and demand overestimation, even where traffic figures may tell a history of apparent success. In the paper, we analyse two significant cases of delusions of success, namely the Italian and Spanish HSR programmes. The Italian one shows excellent demand performances, but is among the continent's worst cases for construction costs. The Spanish one, recognised worldwide as one of the most successful outcomes of HS policy, is the one where potential demand estimations were systematically neglected, and the planned network appears largely out-of-scale compared to actual traffic. In both cases, the forecasts were not simply biased, as well-known literature on megaproject failures has clearly shown: Italian lines were deliberately designed to increase the cost, and the Spanish network was deliberately planned out-of-scale. By means of the two cases, the paper will show that the core of the problem does not lie in the wrong estimations, but in deliberate choices of overinvestment, overdesign and overqualit

TARGET PLASMA FORMATION BY UHF POWER

Abstract The properties of plasma injected into open magnetic trap of uniform field from independent UHF source have investigated. Plasma is created in the UHF source at the frequency of 2400 MHz (power input 150 W) in the electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) regime at the pressure of neutral argon 10 −5 ÷10 −2 Torr. It is established that a rather quiescent plasma with controlled density within the range of 2·10 8 ÷2·10 12 cm −3 and temperature 2÷3 eV is accumulated in the trap. It turned out, that plasma lifetime in the trap is determined by a classical mechanism of particle escape at the expense of collisions, at fixed value of magnetic field in the trap it practically is not changed with the variation of neutral gas pressure and reaches the value ∼4·10 −3 s at the magnetic field strength in the trap equal 1600 Oe

The polo-like kinase 1 (PLK1) inhibitor NMS-P937 is effective in a new model of disseminated primary CD56+ acute monoblastic leukaemia

CD56 is expressed in 15–20% of acute myeloid leukaemias (AML) and is associated with extramedullary diffusion, multidrug resistance and poor prognosis. We describe the establishment and characterisation of a novel disseminated model of AML (AML-NS8), generated by injection into mice of leukaemic blasts freshly isolated from a patient with an aggressive CD56+ monoblastic AML (M5a). The model reproduced typical manifestations of this leukaemia, including presence of extramedullary masses and central nervous system involvement, and the original phenotype, karyotype and genotype of leukaemic cells were retained in vivo. Recently Polo-Like Kinase 1 (PLK1) has emerged as a new candidate drug target in AML. We therefore tested our PLK1 inhibitor NMS-P937 in this model either in the engraftment or in the established disease settings. Both schedules showed good efficacy compared to standard therapies, with a significant increase in median survival time (MST) expecially in the established disease setting (MST = 28, 36, 62 days for vehicle, cytarabine and NMS-P937, respectively). Importantly, we could also demonstrate that NMS-P937 induced specific biomarker modulation in extramedullary tissues. This new in vivo model of CD56+ AML that recapitulates the human tumour lends support for the therapeutic use of PLK1 inhibitors in AML

Investigating the determinants of a Peer-to-peer carsharing. The case of Milan

Carsharing systems are seen as a promising alternative to private mobility. Despite several systems are flourishing worldwide, their effective impact on the private mobility still remains negligible. One of the possible evolutions of carsharing system is to move towards a “peer to peer carsharing” (hereafter P2P): a carsharing in which cars are not centrally provided, but are owned by individuals who rent them when unused, in exchange of a monetary reward. Starting from a survey carried out in the year 2012, the paper aims at investigating the main determinants to adopt a P2P carsharing among the inhabitants of the municipality of Milan. Specifically, the probability to undertake a P2P carsharing is investigated by means of a descriptive statistics and two discrete choice models: binomial logit model and multinomial logit model, where the multinomial logit model allows to investigate the probability to share the personal car among different groups of people (nobody; friends, colleagues, and neighbours; all people). To our knowledge the paper represents the first attempt to investigate the propensity to join a P2P scheme by sharing the personal vehicle