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The Next Green Frontier: Legal Readiness for Climate Finance
No full textThe international debate has increasingly shifted attention to the crucial issue of environmental protection, focusing interest on the transition to a "green" economy. From the Sustainable Development Goals to COP27 in Dubai, the goal is to move towards an economic development model based on decarbonisation. In this context, finance has acquired an increasingly active role through the mobilization of capital directed towards sustainable projects. Green finance is increasingly active and can take on the role that everyone expects as an irreplaceable ally in achieving the climate objectives set out in Paris in 2015; however, several aspects still need to be improved, such as the uniformity of standards and certification criteria. But sadly, many green bonds are actually of little use from an environmental point of view. This is mainly due to a regulatory framework that is still too weak. Green bonds currently cover, in fact, a multitude of realities, with funding for projects that only have a green label. And among the issuers there are also some subjects well known for the pollution they contribute to produce
Language and critical thinking at the secondary school level in Italy: The impact of CLIL
No full textWhile critical thinking is becoming gradually more important in education, memorisation of rules, procedures and facts is still predominant. Italy has undergone a moderate level of innovation over the last two decades. Despite this, rote-learning strategies appear to be the norm at secondary education level (Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019). This paper examines whether the currently compulsory CLIL activity, with its focus on higher-order thinking skills (Coyle et al., 2010), has had a beneficial impact on learning in Italian secondary education. More specifically, teachers’ current practices and students’ reactions to them after the official CLIL implementation are discussed, through analysis of data collected from 1,343 respondents to a questionnaire distributed throughout the country. The findings align with the thinking-centered, integrative nature of the approach advanced by CLIL scholars, providing evidence both of the success of CLIL teacher training measures in the Italian context and of further cognitive achievements stemming from CLIL activity. However, critical considerations of the need to update assessment measures in light of these findings are included
Measuring Peer Effects in a Network Perspective. Survey Design and Privacy Issues
No full textThe present contribution discusses a strategy to address methodological and ethical challenges in network survey designs. The approach seeks to balance statistical rigor with the protection of participants’ privacy. Its applicability is demonstrated through a case study involving high school students in Southern Italy aiming at exploring the factors related to their post-diploma educational choices. Recognising the role of peers’ influence, the study adopts a statistical model that includes the students’ relationships within a class, i.e. the class adjacency matrix, considering different kinds of interactions among classmates. All students in the classes selected through a quota sampling procedure are included in a whole network study, raising important ethical and privacy con-cerns. To address these issues, anonymisation protocols are implemented to ensure data protection and management
Radionuclide distributions in Mediterranean coastal ecosystems as assessed by the concurrent analysis of marine sediments and macrophytes
No full textRadionuclides, in relation to their radiological and environmental behaviour, may threaten marine ecosystems, where they undergo partitioning among water, sediments and biota, with potential transfer through food webs and spatial transports. Unfortunately, radionuclides are commonly neglected in monitoring of marine coastal ecosystems, especially of the Mediterranean Sea, where scant information is available not only on their activity in abiotic matrices, such as water and sediments, but also in sessile organisms such as macrophytes that may be potentially useful in biomonitoring applications. The present research aimed at investigating the spatial variations in the activity concentrations of natural and artificial radionuclides along the Tyrrhenian coast, evaluating their partitioning between sediments and macrophytes and the specific accumulation capabilities of the latter. Overall, 17 radionuclides were quantified: 7 Be, 40 K, 137 Cs, 208 Tl, 210 Pb, 210 Po, 212 Bi, 212 Pb, 214 Bi, 214 Pb, 224 Ra, 226 Ra, 232 Th (228 Ac), 235 U and 238 U (234 Th), with the major contribution to total marine radioactivity provided by 40 K, 210 Pb and 210 Po, and variable concentrations among the different species. In particular, brown algae such as Cystoseira spp. are able to accumulate a large variety of radionuclides and may represent good general biomonitors, whereas other species appear to be more selective towards specific
radionuclides
FT-DropBlock: A Novel Approach for Spatiotemporal Regularization in EEG-based Convolutional Neural Networks
No full textThe use of Deep Learning (DL) and digital signal processing in Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) to improve the analysis of Electroencephalogram (EEG) data has shown promise, but overfltting of DL models remains a challenge, particularly in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) designed for spatiotemporal data. This paper introduces Features-Time DropBlock (FT-DropBlock), a novel adaptation of DropBlock regularization tailored for EEG processing, targeting the spatiotemporal dimensions represented by features and time points to achieve structured regularization. Contiguous blocks of features and their associated time points are strategically dropped, promoting robust learning by encouraging spatiotemporal coherence and reducing overfitting. To our knowledge, at the time of writing, no previous use of DropBlock in EEG-based CNNs has been reported in the literature. Our approach is the first to use DropBlock to enforce structured regularization across features and time dimensions to preserve spatial consistency within feature maps and ensure temporal regularization. We tested our approach by replacing conventional Dropout with FTDropBlock at selected regularization stages in three EEG-based CNNs. Experimental results conducted on the publicly available BCI Competition IV 2a Dataset show that our approach demonstrates significant improvements over traditional Dropout regularization in classification accuracy and robustness against overfitting, highlighting the effectiveness of this targeted FT-DropBlock strategy for EEG-based CNNs
Mobilising China’s One-Child Generation. Education, Nationalism and Youth Militarisation in the PRC
No full textThis review by Giovannipaolo Ferrari assesses Orna Naftali’s 2024 monograph, Mobilising China’s One-Child Generation: Education, Nationalism and Youth Militarisation in the PRC. Naftali deploys extensive fieldwork and documentary analysis to show how the Chinese state has used school curricula, patriotic rituals and paramilitary-style camps to shape the identities and loyalties of those born under the one-child policy. Ferrari highlights the book’s methodological rigor and its valuable contribution to our understanding of contemporary CCP youth policy, while also noting that further attention to regional variation (especially between inland and coastal areas) and to gendered experiences of mobilization would strengthen the argument. Overall, the review applauds Naftali’s nuanced portrait of how education and nationalism combine to produce a disciplined, militarized generation of Chinese youth
Tra geopolitica e cronaca italiana. Traiettorie del narcotraffico latinoamericano in Europa
No full textTailoring sub-5 nm Fe-doped CeO2 nanocrystals within confined spaces to boost photocatalytic hydrogen evolution under visible light
No full textThis work aimed to study the efficiency of the reverse micelle (RM) preparation route in the syntheses of sub-5 nm Fe-doped CeO2 nanocrystals for boosting the visible-light-driven photocatalytic hydrogen production from methanol aqueous solutions. The effectiveness of confining precipitation reactions within micellar cages was evaluated through extensive physicochemical characterization. In particular, the nominal composition (0-5 mol% Fe) was preserved as ascertained by ICP-MS analysis, and the absence of separate iron-containing crystalline phases was supported by X-ray diffraction. The effective aliovalent doping and modulation of the optical properties were investigated using UV-Vis, Raman, and photoluminescence spectroscopies. 2.5 mol% iron was found to be an optimal content to achieve a significant decrease in the band gap, enhance the concentration of oxygen vacancy defects, and increase the charge carrier lifetime. The photocatalytic activity of Fe-doped CeO2 prepared at different Fe contents with RM preparation was studied and compared with undoped CeO2. The optimal iron load was identified to be 2.5 mol%, achieving the highest hydrogen production (7566 lmol L-1 after 240 min under visible light). Moreover, for comparison, the conventional precipitation (P) method was adopted to prepare iron containing CeO2 at the optimal content (2.5 mol% Fe). The Fe-doped CeO2 catalyst prepared by RM showed a significantly higher hydrogen production than that obtained with the sample prepared by the P method. The optimal Fe-doped CeO2, prepared by the RM method, was stable for six reuse cycles. Moreover, the role of water in the mechanism of photocatalytic hydrogen evolution under visible light was studied through the test in the presence of D2O. The obtained results evidenced that hydrogen was produced from the reduction of H+ by the electrons promoted in the conduction band, while methanol was preferentially oxidized by the photogenerated positive holes. (c) 2024 Science Press and Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. and Science Press. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies