The NBA’s Black Lives Matter activism did not lead to fewer viewers, but negative tweets may have affected ratings

Does activism impact consumer behavior? In new research, Matteo Pazzona and Nicola Spagnolo, examined whether the involvement of the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the Black Lives Matter movement was harmful to TV audience ratings. They find that for the NBA, activism was not costly in terms of TV viewership, at least in the short term. They also find that social media supporting (or opposing) such activism can also have an impact on viewers and ratings

Stato e consistenza della meccanizzazione agricola nella VIII Comunità montana

Nella presente relazione si vuole cercare di definire gli elementi ed i fattori condizionanti la meccanizzazione e, nel contempo, evidenziare il tipo di evoluzione e le carenze della meccanizzazione nella VIII Comunità montana «Marghine-Planargia». Tutto ciò con l'intendimento di meglio delineare le caratteristiche e le potenzialità del territorio in studio ed offrire, quindi, maggiori elementi di analisi per definire un' efficiente pianificazione aziendale e territoriale che, consentendo il superamento delle cause di marginalità dell'area, ne consenta un effettivo rilancio, in termini produttivistici e sociali

The Coexistence of PDO and Brand Labels: The Case of the Ready-sliced Parma Ham

The general purpose of the paper is to investigate consumer's attitude towards high quality agri-food products. The research analyses PDO labelled products packaged by law in the production area. Within the same area, the Producers' Group imposes the use of the Consortium label as a quality sign. As consequence, collective labels as well are find on a product packaging, by virtue of the fact that not only they graphically and symbolically represent quality, but they also inform customers about the properties of a specific PDO good. Moreover, on the same package other labels (industrial and private ones) are displayed on the same package. At this purpose, the research analysis of the customers' perception of such particular labels combination focusing the case of the ready-sliced Parma ham. The analysis gives the opportunity of evaluating, from an economic perspective, aspects related to the use of multi-labelling strategy

Periodo utile per la raccolta meccanica delle olive in Sardegna, con e senza cascolanti

Results are given of three years of testing on: - the dynamometric resistance when the drupes are detached; - the ripening index; - the percentage of falling fruit, useful indications are given for defining the correet times for mechanical olive harvesting in Northern Sardinia

The rebooting in sports and physical activities after COVID-19 italian lockdown: an exploratory study

The lockdown imposed in Italy to reduce the spread of COVID-19 posited unusual challenges to people practicing sports and physical activities. The rebooting of activities highlighted the need to cope with new behaviors and routines, such as wearing a face mask while exercising. We conducted a web-based survey in Italy at the start of physical activities’ rebooting, to investigate how people reacted to the new norms. Participants completed the questionnaires assessing insomnia, regulatory self-efficacy, optimism, mood states, and mental toughness. Age, gender, and environment were assumed as design variables. Results showed that in outdoor activities, the younger females as compared to the older manifest less regulatory self-efficacy, while the younger males manifest more regulatory self-efficacy than the older. In indoor activities, a reversed pattern of regulatory-self-efficacy was observed. Regarding life orientation, younger participants showed less optimism and positive expectation for the future and seem to be more exposed to the unexpected effects of the restrictions: they showed more sleep disturbances, confusion, depression, anger, and fatigue and less vigor and mental toughness than older participants. An understanding of the psychological implications of the rebooting phase can support the enactment of more appropriate behaviors to practice sports and physical activities when living at the time of the coronavirus

Rilievi sulla mungitura meccanica della pecora sarda e realizzazione di una nuova strumentazione

Through the remark of the transfer lines of the milk of two hals udders during the mechanical milking of the Sard sheep, the AA. show the advantage attainable working at an hollow level of 44,0 kPa instead of 50,5 kPa. They are then explained the characteristics of a new instrumentation for telemeasure, purposely prepared, that allows to record contemporaneously the activity motor of the udders and the parameters of working of the mechanical milking

A Coarse-grained model for diffusion in zeolites based on clustering of short MD trajectories

Zeolites form a class of microporous aluminosilicates of great interest due to their multifarious applications in industry and everyday life. Their porous structure allows small molecules to be adsorbed and to diffuse inside crystals, and depending on the zeolite type and on the diffusant species a variety of behaviours is possible. Molecular Dynamics is now widely used in order to understand the microscopic mechanisms of adsorption and diffusion occurring within these materials as well as in MOFs and ZIFs. A major drawback of MD for this kind of systems is its high computational cost, so that coarse-grained methods, speeding up simulations without losing the essential features of dynamics, are valuable tools for exploring the behaviour of guest molecules on time and space scales hardly, if at all, reachable with ordinary MD. The first step in our proposed method is the clustering of MD trajectories to obtain a discretized version of the motion of adsorbed molecules within the zeolite. Each pore in the aluminosilicate is partitioned in a number of regions and each point in the original trajectory is mapped to the proper region based on a distance criterion. The regions correspond roughly to the main basins in the potential energy surface (PES)

Cellular automata for the mesoscopic simulation of adsorption and diffusion in zeolites

The thermodynamic and transport properties of molecules hosted in the confining framework of a microporous material like a zeolite are strongly affected by the geometrical restrictions imposed by the pore walls. In the ongoing effort to understand the phenomena induced by the effect of confinement, the use of numerical simulation methods at the atomistic scale like Molecular Dynamics turns out to be computationally very costly due to the large number of degrees of freedom involved. This motivated the search for a further simplified description of a host/guest system. In the present thesis a Cellular Automata approach has been used to embed the local, fully-reliable structure of cell thermodynamic models together with a kinetic scheme mimicking the competition mechanism in which guest molecules move between different locations in a zeolitic host. The resulting model is a Thermodynamic Partitioning Cellular Automaton (ThPCA), designed ad hoc to simulate both adsorption and transport properties of simple guest species in a LTA-type zeolitic host at the mesoscopic scale. Effects of correlation in the guests’ motion affecting their diffusivity under confinement are also modeled, thus making the ThPCA model an efficient and easy environment to perform coarse-grained simulations of adsorption and diffusion of simple molecules in microporous materials

Diffusion in tight confinement: a lattice-gas cellular automaton approach. I. Structural equilibrium properties

The thermodynamic and transport properties of diffusing species in microporous materials are strongly influenced by their interactions with the confining framework, which provide the energy landscape for the transport process. The simple topology and the cellular nature of the α cages of a ZK4 zeolite suggest that it is appropriate to apply to the study of the problem of diffusion in tight confinement a time-space discrete model such as a lattice-gas cellular automaton (LGCA). In this paper we investigate the properties of an equilibrium LGCA constituted by a constant number of noninteracting identical particles, distributed among a fixed number of identical cells arranged in a three-dimensional cubic network and performing a synchronous random walk at constant temperature. Each cell of this network is characterized by a finite number of two types of adsorption sites: the exit sites available to particle transfer and the inner sites not available to such transfers. We represent the particle-framework interactions by assuming a differentiation in binding energy of the two types of sites. This leads to a strong dependence of equilibrium and transport properties on loading and temperature. The evolution rule of our LGCA model is constituted by two operations (randomization, in which the number of particles which will be able to try a jump to neighboring cells is determined, and propagation, in which the allowed jumps are performed), each one applied synchronously to all of the cells. The authors study the equilibrium distribution of states and the adsorption isotherm of the model under various conditions of loading and temperature. In connection with the differentiation in energy between exit and inner sites, the adsorption isotherm is described by a conventional Langmuir isotherm at high temperature and by a dual-site Langmuir isotherm at low temperature, while a first order diffuse phase transition takes place at very low temperature