Real Costs Assessment of Solar-Hydrogen and Some Fossil Fuels by means of a Combustion Analysis

In order to compare solar-hydrogen and the most used fossil fuels, the evaluation of the "external" costs related to their use is required. These costs involve the environmental damage produced by the combustion reactions, the health problems caused by air pollution, the damage to land from fuel mining, and the environmental degradation linked to the global warming, the acid rains, and the water pollution. For each fuel, the global cost is determined as sum of the market price and of the correspondent external costs. In order to obtain a quantitative comparison, the quality of the different combustion reactions and the efficiency of the technologies employed in the specific application sector have to be considered adequately. At this purpose, an entropic index that considers the degree of irreversibility produced during the combustion process and the degradation of surroundings is introduced. Additionally, an environmental index that measures the pollutants released during the combustions is proposed. The combination of these indexes and the efficiency of the several technologies employed in four energy sectors have allowed the evaluation of the total costs, highlighting an economic scenario from which the real advantages concerning the exploitation of different energy carrier are determined

Abstract, emotional and concrete concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors

According to embodied and grounded theories, concepts are grounded in sensorimotor systems. The majority of evidence supporting these views concerns concepts referring to objects or actions, while evidence on abstract concepts is more scarce. Explaining how abstract concepts such as ‘‘freedom’’ are represented would thus be pivotal for grounded theories. According to some recent proposals, abstract concepts are grounded in both sensorimotor and linguistic experience, thus they activate the mouth motor system more than concrete concepts. Two experiments are reported, aimed at verifying whether abstract, concrete and emotional words activate the mouth and the hand effectors. In both experiments participants performed first a lexical decision, then a recognition task. In Experiment 1 participants responded by pressing a button either with the mouth or with the hand, in Experiment 2 responses were given with the foot, while a button held either in the mouth or in the hand was used to respond to catch-trials. Abstract words were slower to process in both tasks (concreteness effect). Across the tasks and experiments, emotional concepts had instead a fluctuating pattern, different from those of both concrete and abstract concepts, suggesting that they cannot be considered as a subset of abstract concepts. The interaction between type of concept (abstract, concrete and emotional) and effector (mouth, hand) was not significant in the lexical decision task, likely because it emerged only with tasks implying a deeper processing level. It reached significance, instead, in the recognition tasks. In both experiments abstract concepts were facilitated in the mouth condition compared to the hand condition, supporting our main prediction. Emotional concepts instead had a more variable pattern. Overall, our findings indicate that various kinds of concepts differently activate the mouth and hand effectors, but they also suggest that concepts activate effectors in a flexible and task-dependent wa

The carry-over effect of competition in task-sharing: Evidence from the joint Simon task

The Simon effect, that is the advantage of the spatial correspondence between stimulus and response locations when stimulus location is a task-irrelevant dimension, occurs even when the task is performed together by two participants, each performing a go/no-go task. Previous studies showed that this joint Simon effect, considered by some authors as a measure of self-other integration, does not emerge when during task performance co-actors are required to compete. The present study investigated whether and for how long competition experienced during joint performance of one task can affect performance in a following joint Simon task. In two experiments, we required pairs of participants to perform together a social Simon task, before and after jointly performing together an unrelated non-spatial task (the Eriksen flanker task). In Experiment 1, participants always performed the joint Simon task under neutral instructions, before and after performing the joint flanker task in which they were explicitly required either to cooperate with (i.e., cooperative condition) or to compete against a co-actor (i.e., competitive condition). In Experiment 2, they were required to compete during the joint flanker task and to cooperate during the subsequent joint Simon task. Competition experienced in one task affected the way the subsequent joint task was performed, as revealed by the lack of the joint Simon effect, even though, during the Simon task participants were not required to compete (Experiment 1). However, prior competition no longer affected subsequent performance if a new goal that created positive interdependence between the two agents was introduced (Experiment 2). These results suggest that the emergence of the joint Simon effect is significantly influenced by how the goals of the co-acting individuals are related, with the effect of competition extending beyond the specific competitive setting and affecting subsequent interactions

The carry-over effect of competition in task-sharing: Evidence from the joint Simon task

The Simon effect, that is the advantage of the spatial correspondence between stimulus and response locations when stimulus location is a task-irrelevant dimension, occurs even when the task is performed together by two participants, each performing a go/no-go task. Previous studies showed that this joint Simon effect, considered by some authors as a measure of self-other integration, does not emerge when during task performance co-actors are required to compete. The present study investigated whether and for how long competition experienced during joint performance of one task can affect performance in a following joint Simon task. In two experiments, we required pairs of participants to perform together a joint Simon task, before and after jointly performing together an unrelated non-spatial task (the Eriksen flanker task). In Experiment 1, participants always performed the joint Simon task under neutral instructions, before and after performing the joint flanker task in which they were explicitly required either to cooperate with (i.e., cooperative condition) or to compete against a co-actor (i.e., competitive condition). In Experiment 2, they were required to compete during the joint flanker task and to cooperate during the subsequent joint Simon task. Competition experienced in one task affected the way the subsequent joint task was performed, as revealed by the lack of the joint Simon effect, even though, during the Simon task participants were not required to compete (Experiment 1). However, prior competition no longer affected subsequent performance if a new goal that created positive interdependence between the two agents was introduced (Experiment 2). These results suggest that the emergence of the joint Simon effect is significantly influenced by how the goals of the co-acting individuals are related, with the effect of competition extending beyond the specific competitive setting and affecting subsequent interactions

Shaping A Sustainable Future Through Integrating Sustainability, Creativity And Entrepreneurship In Engineering Education At Aalto University

This paper reports the authors’ experiences integrating sustainability, creativity, and entrepreneurship in engineering education at Aalto University under the project called the Aalto Co-Educator team. The Aalto Co-Educator team was formed to support the university strategy application into education through three main actions: course development, curriculum development and competence development. The goal of this paper is to share engineering educators\u27 experiences in providing sustainability, creativity and entrepreneurship education to engineering students in a rapidly changing nature of work

Cognitive conflict is an example of action-grounded cognition.

The aim of the present work was to show that cognitive conflict, an issue that has been widely studied within the boundaries of the classical cognitive approach, is a clear example of higher order cognition tied to perception and action. Examples of how the cognitive conflict arising from spatial correspondence tasks is highly grounded in body attributes and in environmental/situational factors are provided. Spatial performance is strongly modulated by handedness, prior experience and by social factors. In addition, in two experiments empirical findings are reported showing that the spatial correspondence effect is a function of the location of the dynamic event even when target location is in the opposite position. These results point to the notion that spatial performance is refractory from the intervention of higher order cognition