A Producer's Propensity to Conserve Framework: Application to a US and Australian Conservation Program

Increasing recognition of the environmental impact of agriculture has led to increasing public activity around the world encouraging public conservation programs. Different countries have taken different program approaches to accomplish this. The comparison and contrast here is between Australia and the United States, examining the CREP program in the U.S. and the Eco Tender program in Australia. A different historical experience in the U.S. sets certain parameters that are expected in their conservation programs. To some extent, the Australian program could take more of a clean slate approach. The Australian program is able to take a broader landscape approach, specifically considering multiple benefits with knowledge about off-site benefits as well. This is tied into a structured auction process that does not allow gaming of the auction process. While the U.S. approach does include a bidding process, its structure is such that it has characteristics of an incentive program. The U.S. approach also gives less incentive to farmers to provide environmental amenities at the lowest possible cost. Taking off-site impacts into consideration and finding ways to induce competition among farmers to provide amenities at the lowest cost to the public are seen as important characteristics of cost effective conservation programs.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Optical emission investigation of laser-produced MgB2 plume expanding in an Ar buffer gas

Optical emission spectroscopy is used to study the dynamics of the plasma generated by pulsed-laser irradiation of a MgB2 target, both in vacuum and at different Ar buffer gas pressures. The analysis of the time-resolved emission of selected species shows that the Ar background gas strongly influences the plasma dynamics. Above a fixed pressure, plasma propagation into Ar leads to the formation of blast waves causing both a considerable increase of the fraction of excited Mg atoms and a simultaneous reduction of their kinetic flux energy. These results can be particularly useful for optimizing MgB2 thin film deposition processes.Comment: 11 pages,4 figures, Applied Physics Letters in pres

The Lira’s purchasing power from Italy’s unification to the single European Currency

This article analyses the behaviour of several price indexes over the whole life of the Italian lira (1861-1998), and for various sub-periods defined by the exchange-rate regimes of the Italian monetary history. We focus on the persistence and stationarity properties of the inflation process and their dependence on the real cycle. An international comparison with the United States and the United Kingdom further supports the conclusion that Italian inflation was abnormal as far as its mean value, degree of persistence and relationship to the real cycle are concerned. In particular, we find that the output-inflation relationship had a textbook-like, positive slope only during periods of low inflation and low production volatility

The quality of web communication by Italian tourist ports

Nautical tourism is a growing form of tourism, and the Mediterranean Sea is a major destination. Italy has a long tradition in nautical tourism, as its large number of tourism ports refl ects. Ports are core actors in nautical tourism systems, devoted to meeting increasing and complex demand by nautical tourists; marketing communication is consequently a critical activity, for tourist ports, where websites play a crucial role. However, despite its importance, the evaluation of tourist ports websites is an almost unexplored research fi eld, where a large research gap exists. Our paper evaluates the quality of 51 Italian tourist ports websites using the 2QCV3Q model, a multi-purpose qualitative evaluation tool. Th e overall quality of Italian tourist ports websites was assessed on the basis of comparison to a group of benchmark ports in the Mediterranean Sea and worldwide. Results suggest that Italian tourist ports websites require improvement, especially of their content and the services provided. In this respect, our methodology provides an exhaustive assessment of the quality of a port's website and its determinants, helping to support managers in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their website and prioritizing related actions

Shock loss measurements in non-ideal supersonic flows of organic vapors

This paper presents the first ever direct measurements of total pressure losses across shocks in supersonic flows of organic vapors in non-ideal conditions, so in the thermodynamic region close to the liquid-vapor saturation curve and the critical point where the ideal gas law is not applicable. Experiments were carried out with fluid siloxane MM (hexamethyldisiloxane, C6H18OSi2), commonly employed in medium-/high-temperature organic Rankine cycles (ORCs), in the Test Rig for Organic VApors (TROVA), a blowdown wind tunnel at the Laboratory of Compressible fluid dynamics for Renewable Energy Applications (CREA lab) of Politecnico di Milano. A total pressure probe was inserted in superheated MM vapor flow at Mach number similar to 1.5 with total conditions in the range 215 - 230 degrees C and 2 - 12 bar at varying levels of non-ideality, with a compressibility factor evaluated at total conditions between Z(T) = 0.68 - 0.98. These operating conditions are representative of the first-stage stator of ORC turbines. Measured shock losses were compared with those calculated from pre-shock quantities by solving conservation equations across a normal shock, with differences always below 2% attesting a satisfactory reliability of the implemented experimental procedure. An in-depth analysis was then carried out, highlighting the direct effects of non-ideality on shock intensity. Even at the mildly non-ideal conditions with Z(T) greater than or similar to 0.70 considered here, non-ideality was responsible for a significantly stronger shock compared to the ideal gas limit at same pre-shock Mach number, with differences as large as 6%.[GRAPHICS]

Stress in Context: Morpho-Syntactic Properties Affect Lexical Stress Assignment in Reading Aloud

Recent findings from English and Russian have shown that grammatical category plays a key role in stress assignment. In these languages, some grammatical categories have a typical stress pattern and this information is used by readers. However, whether readers are sensitive to smaller distributional differences and other morpho-syntactic properties (e.g., gender, number, person) remains unclear. We addressed this issue in word and non-word reading in Italian, a language in which: (1) nouns and verbs differ in the proportion of words with a dominant stress pattern; (2) information specified by words sharing morpho-syntactic properties may contrast with other sources of information, such as stress neighborhood. Both aspects were addressed in two experiments in which context words were used to induce the desired morpho-syntactic properties. Experiment 1 showed that the relatively different proportions of stress patterns between grammatical categories do not affect stress processing in word reading. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that information specified by words sharing morpho-syntactic properties outweighs stress neighborhood in non-word reading. Thus, while general information specified by grammatical categories may not be used by Italian readers, stress neighbors with morpho-syntactic properties congruent with those of the target stimulus have a primary role in stress assignment. These results underscore the importance of expanding investigations of stress assignment beyond single words, as current models of single-word reading seem unable to account for our results

An Unusual Evolution of Krukenberg Tumour: A Case Report

Krukenberg tumours are rare metastatic tumours of the ovaries characterized by the presence of mucin-producing neoplastic Signet Ring Cell Carcinoma (SRCC). At first glance, this tumour may be confused with a primary ovarian tumour. Surgery and chemotherapy combination have led to improvement in prognosis, but it still remains severe. We report the case of a 60-year-old woman with a Krukenberg tumour rising from a low differentiated gastric adenocarcinoma. The patient was clinically stable for 26 months after surgery until she experienced a prompt decline and died of cerebral haemorrhage within two weeks. The aim of this article was to give an overview of the Krukenberg tumour starting from our case report and comparing it with clinicopathological characteristics of this pathology derived from a review of recent literatur

Singing to infants matters: early singing interactions affect musical preferences and facilitate vocabulary building

This research revealed that the frequency of reported infant-parent singing interactions predicted 6-month-old infants' performance in laboratory music experiments and mediated their language development in the second year. At 6 months, infants (n=36) were tested using a preferential listening procedure assessing their sustained attention to instrumental and sung versions of the same novel tunes whilst the parents completed an ad-hoc questionnaire assessing home musical interactions with their infants. Language development was assessed with a follow-up when the infants were 14-month-old (n=26). The main results showed that 6-month-olds preferred listening to sung rather than instrumental melodies, and that self-reported high levels of parental singing with their infants[i] were associated with less pronounced preference for the sung over the instrumental version of the tunes at 6 months, and [ii] predicted significant advantages on the language outcomes in the second year. The results are interpreted in relation to conceptions of developmental plasticity

Manifolds with bounded integral curvature and no positive eigenvalue lower bounds

We provide an explicit construction of a sequence of closed surfaces with uniform bounds on the diameter and on $L^p$ norms of the curvature, but without a positive lower bound on the first non-zero eigenvalue of the Laplacian $\lambda_1$. This example shows that the assumption of smallness of the $L^p$ norm of the curvature is a necessary condition to derive Lichnerowicz and Zhong-Yang type estimates under integral curvature conditions

Mechanical Properties of Porous Ceramics

It is widely known that increasing interest in porous ceramics is due to their special properties, which comprise high volumetric porosity (up to 90%) with open or closed pores, and a broad range of pore sizes (micropores: d  d > 2 nm and macropores: d > 50 nm). These properties have many uses comprehending macroscaled devices, mesoscaled materials and microscaled pieces. During their usage, these materials are usually submitted to thermal and/or mechanical loading stresses. Therefore, it is a premise to understand how these porous structures behave under thermomechanical stresses to design materials that show adequate properties for the required application. In this context, the aim of this chapter is to review the mechanical properties of macroporous ceramics