305,376 research outputs found
Fattori socioeconomici e divari nel consumo di acqua in bottiglia tra il Nord e il Sud Italia
No full textThe increase in bottled water consumption in Europe, despite the high quality of tap water, raises important issues about consumer behavior and their choices regarding water use. Particularly, Italy stands out for one of the highest per capita bottled water consumption rates in Europe. This phenomenon claims for a more comprehensive analysis, especially in less developed regions, and significant efforts in infrastructure modernization, including those provided by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). This study aims to examine bottled water consumption patterns at the national level and analyze regional differences, considering variations in infrastructure levels. This descriptive framework allows us to identify potential regional disparities in drinking water supply, which could differently influence bottled water consumption across different areas. Then, using data from the Italian Multipurpose Household Survey by ISTAT from 2014 to 2020, we explore the impact of economic and socio-demographic factors on bottled water consumption, to identify geographical specificities and the main factors shaping consumer preferences. Findings indicate that the local economic context has a differentiated impact on bottled water consumption, which responds differently on a territorial basis to factors such as service levels, trust in institutions, perceived qualitative characteristics of water resources, and economic conditions of households
Evaluation of cultural heritage digital collections: the DiLEO perspective
No full textCultural heritage collections are essential knowledge infrastructures that reflect the different cultures and civilizations revealed in certain temporal and spatial frames. They provide a solid representation of the historical background of human communities, the development of their linguistic idioms, the blooming or withering of their artistic expression, while in cases of international aggregations, like the European Union, they constitute important instruments for the social and ethnic cohesion. There are significant previous efforts that focused on the development of cultural heritage collections, which contributed on the fertilization of the successful creation, management and coordination of cultural heritage management activities. Despite many of these efforts pursued issues of quality and its assessment, there are still plenty of open topics in regard to the evaluation of these collections. PROMISE Network of Excellence addresses many of these topics based on three pillars, namely the adoption of regular and thorough experimental evaluation activities, the collaboration and re-use over the acquired knowledge-base and the automation of the experimental evaluation process. In this speech, we introduce the Digital Library Evaluation Ontology (DiLEO) that integrates the dominant concepts of the digital library evaluation domain and their relations. DiLEO formulates a concrete framework aiming to homogenize under a common language the tower of Babel of evaluation approaches, methods, techniques and practices. The presented ontology can contribute to the scope and aims of PROMISE NoE in two large areas: (a) in the creation of knowledge bases around cultural heritage evaluation, and (b) in the planning of forthcoming evaluation activities
Linking external collaborations, eco-innovation and sustainable growth. An empirical analysis on the Italian manufacturing firms
No full textThis paper analyses the relationships between eco-innovation and business performance by exploring the role of external collaborations as a potential factor explaining the persisting heterogeneity of economic effects of eco-innovation. Basing on a large survey of 3,000 Italian manufacturing firms, the study investigates to what extent collaborations with supply chain and quadruple helix actors, including public institutions, universities and civil society, contribute in sustaining firm’s growth by improving the effectiveness of different types of eco-innovations. We find that the relationship between eco-innovation and business performance is moderated by both supply-chain and quadruple helix collaborations. However, external collaborations with actors of the quadruple helix show a pronounced heterogeneity. While process eco-innovation may in particular benefit from establishing collaborations with public institutions, product eco-innovation relies more on interactions with civil society suggesting that market-driven factors still exert a main role in influencing the market success of this type of eco-innovation
Processi cumulativi e politica industriale in una visione di Nuova Geografia Economica
No full textThe New Economic Geography explained spatial concentration of the economic activities through the agglomeration concept, i.e. through self-reinforcing mechanisms created and sustained by the market. But it didn’t deepen its policy implications. This suggests there cannot be only an agglomeration model or a set of rules that leads to the agglomeration because the market selects according to the economic benefit and territorial quality, i.e. according to the factors endowment.
So, a holistic industrial policy is required because there are stronger and weaker areas which coincide with a different dynamic uncertainty.
Concluding, agglomeration –in the meaning of the NEG- can be considered as a benchmarking tool in a macro holistic policy, which regards sectoral and factors micro policies and micro-territorial ones. In this paper we try to give an answer to these issues by using industrial policy as "macro-policy", i.e. including other micro policies like the regional one
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Tariff revisions and the impact of variability of solar irradiation on PV policy support: The case of Italy
No full textThe solar irradiation is one the most critical parameter to ensure the overall profitability of photovoltaic (PV) projects. During the period of the European solar boom, the PVGIS-3 radiation data have been largely used by policy makers in setting remuneration levels, as well as by project developers, banks and asset managers for professional assessment of the underlying financial return of the investment. High quality and more accurate data included in the updated PVGIS-CMSAF show that solar resources in Europe have been greatly underestimated by PVGIS-3. The present paper evaluates how reported changes in solar irradiation have affected both PV projects profitability and overall costs of subsidy for final consumers. By focusing on a large sample of Italian PV plants, our findings highlight that solar irradiation levels higher than those initially assumed have caused excessive rents and windfall profits for PV project developers thus potentially harming electricity users which are indirectly bearing the burden of the renewable energy sources (RES) incentives. In regulatory contexts suffering from information asymmetries between RES producers and regulatory agencies, support tariff set by public authorities should be periodically revised according to transparent procedures, whenever significant changes in long-term solar irradiation data occur
Generalizations of 3-Sasakian manifolds and skew torsion
No full textIn the first part, we define and investigate new classes of almost 3-contact
metric manifolds, with two guiding ideas in mind: first, what geometric objects
are best suited for capturing the key properties of almost 3-contact metric
manifolds, and second, the newly defined classes should admit 'good' metric
connections with skew torsion. In particular, we introduce the Reeb commutator
function and the Reeb Killing function, we define the new classes of canonical
almost 3-contact metric manifolds and of 3--Sasaki manifolds
(including as special cases 3-Sasaki manifolds, quaternionic Heisenberg groups,
and many others) and prove that the latter are hypernormal, thus generalizing a
seminal result by Kashiwada. We study their behaviour under a new class of
deformations, called -homothetic deformations, and prove that they
admit an underlying quaternionic contact structure, from which we deduce the
Ricci curvature. For example, a 3--Sasaki manifold is Einstein
either if (the 3--Sasaki case) or if
, where .
The second part is actually devoted to finding these adapted connections. We
start with a very general notion of -compatible connections, where
denotes any element of the associated sphere of almost contact
structures, and make them unique by a certain extra condition, thus yielding
the notion of canonical connection (they exist exactly on canonical manifolds,
hence the name). For 3--Sasaki manifolds, we compute the
torsion of this connection explicitly and we prove that it is parallel, we
describe the holonomy, the -Ricci curvature, and we show that the
metric cone is a HKT-manifold. In dimension 7, we construct a cocalibrated
-structure inducing the canonical connection and we prove the existence of
four generalized Killing spinors
DETERMINANTS OF NASCENT ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTIVITIES: THE ITALIAN CASE
No full textThis paper investigates the factors affecting the start up or not of entrepreneurial activities in Italy by focusing on the role played by some socio-demographic and entrepreneurial characteristics during 2001-2010. The paper presents a quantitative analysis of new business process in Italy by using data come from the Italian Adults Population Survey of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM).
Results show that nascent entrepreneurs in Italy have a lower likelihood of having more than 45 years old respect to non nascent entrepreneurs, a higher likelihood for appertaining to the lowest income level and that are less likely to declare that they do not have the skills for entrepreneurship. Fostering entrepreneurship (especially among females and youth) and enhancing entrepreneurial attitudes and skills could represent an important way to add variety to the Italian economic process, enhance competitiveness, and fully realize its innovation potential. However, there are also structural barriers that influence the propensity to become a Nascent Entrepreneur. Policy makers should address context-specific tools favoring venture creation, especially introducing incentives for female and young entrepreneurs, and supporting the development of entrepreneurial network
Is the localized seminal plasma hypersensitivity the mucosal aspect of protein contact dermatitis?
No full textNON DISPONIBIL
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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