The carbon-saving behaviour of residential households

The housing sector in 2004 was accountable for about 30% of total UK carbon emissions. The magnitude of this figure represents a significant imperative for policymakers to act on the sector through behavioural change strategies. Energy efficiency in households might easily be considered as driven mainly by economic motives, but this would not explain why even cost-free behavioural changes, like switching the lights off more often, are not adopted more widely. Literature has mainly concentrated either on the economic motives of pro-environmental behaviours or on the relevance of attitudes to shape them. Little has been said so far on the interaction between attitudes and the so called contextual factors. Diekmann and Presindörfer (2003) outlined the “low-cost hypothesis” which argues that pro-environmental behaviours are driven by pro-environmental attitudes only in the presence of low costs. However, little is known about households’ perceptions of costs and benefits in relation to energy saving behaviour. We propose to develop the low-cost hypothesis with a theoretical approach integrating attitudinal research and rational choice literature and explaining the interaction between tangible and intangible costs and benefits.Furthermore, the importance of resources such as education, information and income is highlighted in order to explain the magnitude of the perception of the costs and benefits considered by households. Finally, the scope for policy intervention aimed at shaping perceived costs and benefits to help the drive towards pro-environmental behaviour is discussed

Listing between lexicon and syntax: focus on frame-naming lists

http://www.italian-journal-linguistics.com/wp-content/uploads/6_Arcodia.pd

Cuore-Fegato-Rene: quando l'unione non fa la forza

n/

Origination and extinction patterns of mammals in three Central Western Mediterranean islands from the Late Miocene to Quaternary.

An overview of the population histories of three insular realms (Gargano palaeo-archipelago, Sardinia–Maritime Tuscany palaeobioprovince and the Sicilian insular complex) during the Late Miocene and Quaternary are here presented. The complexity of biodiversity changes in the islands is analysed to propose an interpretation of origination and extinction patterns. The study highlighted several important aspects of insular faunas. Evolutionary radiations were found to contribute significantly only to the Gargano faunal diversity, likely because the area was an archipelago at the time. Another interesting result is that large and small mammals do not disperse and become extinct all at the same time on each island. In fact, because of their distinct body sizes, large and small mammals have different dispersal ability and therefore different chances to cross-filtering barriers. But distinct body sizes means also different influence on diversity, resistance to environmental changes and likelihood of extinction. Another important point is that large mammalian carnivores at the top of the trophic net are quite more fragile and susceptible to become extinct than other predators. The study finally shows the clear influence that the intense Middle and Late Pleistocene climate-driven environmental changes had on island communities. The reconstruction of the faunal histories of Sardinia and Sicily shows that without exchanges with the mainland the island system represents a rather stable refuge area not too affected by the changes in the ‘‘physical’’ parameters of the environment. In contrast, if the island is frequently connected with the continent, insular faunal assemblages tend to behave as their mainland counterparts

Yurinskii's Coupling for Martingales

Yurinskii's coupling is a popular theoretical tool for non-asymptotic distributional analysis in mathematical statistics and applied probability, offering a Gaussian strong approximation with an explicit error bound under easily verified conditions. Originally stated in $\ell^2$-norm for sums of independent random vectors, it has recently been extended both to the $\ell^p$-norm, for $1 \leq p \leq \infty$, and to vector-valued martingales in $\ell^2$-norm, under some strong conditions. We present as our main result a Yurinskii coupling for approximate martingales in $\ell^p$-norm, under substantially weaker conditions than those previously imposed. Our formulation further allows for the coupling variable to follow a more general Gaussian mixture distribution, and we provide a novel third-order coupling method which gives tighter approximations in certain settings. We specialize our main result to mixingales, martingales, and independent data, and derive uniform Gaussian mixture strong approximations for martingale empirical processes. Applications to nonparametric partitioning-based and local polynomial regression procedures are provided.Comment: 55 pages, 1 figur

A comprehensive X-ray view of the active nucleus in NGC 4258

(Abridged) We present a detailed broadband X-ray spectrum of NGC 4258, with the goal of precisely measuring the coronal luminosity and accretion flow properties of the AGN, and track any possible variation across two decades of observations. We collect archival XMM-Newton, Chandra, Swift/BAT and NuSTAR spectroscopic observations spanning 15 years, and fit them with a suite of state of the art models, including a warped disk model which is suspected to provide the well known obscuration observed in the X-rays. We complement this information with archival results from the literature. Clear spectral variability is observed among the different epochs. The obscuring column density shows possibly periodic fluctuations on a timescale of 10 years, while the intrinsic luminosity displays a long term decrease of a factor of three in a time span of 15 years (from $L_{2-10~\text{keV}} \sim 10^{41}$ erg s$^{-1}$ in the early 2000s, to $L_{2-10~\text{keV}} \sim 3 \times 10^{40}$ erg s$^{-1}$ in 2016). The average absorption-corrected X-ray luminosity $L_{2-10~\text{keV}}$, combined with archival determinations of the bolometric luminosity, implies a bolometric correction $k_{\rm bol} \sim 20$, intriguingly typical for Seyferts powered by accretion through geometrically thin, radiatively efficient disks. Moreover, the X-ray photon index $\Gamma$ is consistent with the typical value of the broader AGN population. However, the accretion rate in Eddington units is very low, well within the expected RIAF regime. Our results suggest that NGC 4258 is a genuinely low-luminosity Seyfert II, with no strong indications in its X-ray emission for a hot, RIAF-like accretion flow.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A. 14 pages, 6 figures, 3 table

The compositional and mineralogical analysis of fired pigments in Nasca pottery from Cahuachi (Peru) by the combined use of the portable PIXE-alpha and portable XRD techniques

Abstract An analytical protocol based on the combined use of the portable PIXE-alpha (Particle Induced X-ray Emission) and XRD (X-ray Diffraction) non destructive techniques developed at the LANDIS laboratory (Laboratorio di Analisi Non Distruttive) of the INFN–CNR (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare–Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) in Catania (Italy), was applied for the characterisation of the surface paints of some archaeological fragments of Nasca pottery from the Ceremonial Centre of Cahuachi in Southern Peru. Measurements were carried out on the black, white, red, orange and grey pigments; quantitative information on the chemical composition as well as on the mineralogical phases present on the paints were obtained. Results allowed to make some considerations about the materials and the manufacturing technique used to realise such fired pigments. It should be noted that during firing the precursor minerals composing the pigments undergo a phase transformation and their identification presents some difficulties