Search results for "Shadow"

The shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the new Baltic front

2021

Aliide Naylor is a British freelance journalist who moved to St. Petersburg to take an MA at the European University, and then stayed in Russia to work at The Moscow Times as well as the state-fina...

Architettura in alzato. Questioni di territorio, paesaggio, ambiente

2021

Negata alla tipologia l’architettura del Sud nel saggio riconosce una specifica identità e perfetta eccezionalità nell’essenza del luogo. Se la facciata istituisce un rapporto con l’estetica del paesaggio, i temi che essa sottende definiscono altre significative relazioni. L’ordinamento logico delle membrature, la chiarezza geometrica e il rigore dei rapporti rimandano ad una architettura che si misura, ed è misura stessa, del territorio e della sua morfologia. A sua volta, lo spessore della facciata esprime la relazione con l’ambiente e interpreta in maniera poetica i condizionamenti climatici, intervenendo sul controllo della luce, sui vuoti nei paramenti murari, sulla determinazione dell…

Laser-Generated Acoustic Signal Interaction with Surface Flaws on Rail Wheels

2005

Long- and short-range acoustic-signal interaction with surface-breaking cracks and geometric boundaries of the rail-wheel tread area are presented in this article. Ultrasonic signals are generated using a laser-line source of varying length and distance from a crack and are detected with a 1-MHz contact transducer to map the sound field behind the crack in the near, intermediate, and far fields of the insonified region. The factors that affect the behavior of a laser-generated surface acoustic wave propagating along the tread area of a rail wheel are discussed. A signal normalization method is proposed to help in sensing the presence of a crack from the transmitted signal unaffected by the …

Shadow trees of Mandelbrot sets

2003

Desarrollo de productos avanzados para la misión SEOSAT/Ingenio

2016

SEOSAT/Ingenio es la futura misión española de observación de la Tierra en el óptico en alta resolución espacial. Mientras que los productos de imagen a Nivel 1, radiancias geo-referenciadas a nivel de sensor, se encuentran en una fase avanzada de desarrollo existiendo para ello un contrato industrial, los productos de Nivel 2 deben ser desarrollados por los propios usuarios. Este hecho limita el uso de las imágenes a la comunidad científica, restringiendo sus posibles aplicaciones fuera de ésta. Así pues, bajo el marco de un proyecto coordinado y motivados por ofrecer productos de Ingenio/SEOSAT de Nivel 2 a disposición de cualquier usuario, se origina y desarrolla este trabajo. En este ar…

Environmental Benefit of Improving Wastewater Quality: A Shadow Prices Approach for Sensitive Areas

2018

The use of effluents from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) as a non-conventional source of water for wetlands in arid and semi-arid regions is becoming the most-often sought solution for maintaining water flow in sensitive wetlands there. However, the managing effluent quality should be a requirement because excess nutrients (mainly nitrogen and phosphorus) can generate eutrophication problems in wetlands. In the Mediterranean area in general, wetlands are strongly vulnerable to eutrophication, which is why they are classified as sensitive areas. Our study uses a data set from 24 WWTPs, effluents of which are discharged to wetlands in the coast of Community of Valencia. We use the shado…

Second-best taxation for a polluting monopoly with abatement investment

2018

This paper characterizes the optimal tax rule to regulate a polluting monopoly when the firm has the possibility of investing in an abatement technology and the environmental damages are caused by a stock pollutant. The optimal policy is given by the stagewise feedback Stackelberg equilibrium of a dynamic policy game between a regulator and a monopolist. The regulator playing as the leader chooses an emission tax to maximize net social welfare, and the monopolist acting as the follower selects the output and the investment in abatement technology to maximize profits. We find that the optimal tax has two components. The first component is negative and equal to the gap between the marginal re…

Trust and punishment

2021

Abstract This paper explores the impact of institutions on the evolution of preferences (culture) and on economic outcomes. Punishment institutions determine the capacity and the individual cost of punishing opportunistic behavior, while preferences are endogenous and can be influenced by a cultural transmission process that is conditioned by the existing punishment institutions. We investigate the interaction and evolution between the preferences for reciprocity or rewarding of the allocator and the preferences to punish hostile behaviour by the investor in a trust game with a costly punishment phase. Our main result provides a rationale for the existence of a strong positive relationship …

Measuring the shadow economy and its drivers: the case of peripheral EMU countries

2019

We adopt a long-run perspective to investigate the size of the shadow economy and explore the trends in this area. The analysis is based on a panel of peripheral EMU countries over the period 1965-2015. Our empirical approach relies on a multiple indicators and multiple causes (MIMIC) framework. This approach is a variant of structural equation modelling (SEM). We used two sets of variables, (i.e. potential determinants and indicator variables) to estimate an underlying (unobserved) index that measures the evolution of the shadow economy. Ascertaining the relative importance of the shadow economy enabled analysis of its relationship with other institutional and social issues (e.g. corruptio…

Efficiency assessment of wastewater treatment plants: A data envelopment analysis approach integrating technical, economic, and environmental issues

2015

The assessment of the efficiency of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is essential to compare their performance and consequently to identify the best operational practices that can contribute to the reduction of operational costs. Previous studies have evaluated the efficiency of WWTPs using conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models. Most of these studies have considered the operational costs of the WWTPs as inputs, while the pollutants removed from wastewater are treated as outputs. However, they have ignored the fact that each pollutant removed by a WWTP involves a different environmental impact. To overcome this limitation, this paper evaluates for the first time the efficien…