Extended Tromograph Surveys for a Full Experimental Characterisation of the San Giorgio Cathedral in Ragusa (Italy).

Geophysical surveys are widely used to reconstruct subsoil seismo-stratigraphic structures with a non-invasive approach. In this study the geophysical surveys were carried out with the aim to characterise the San Giorgio Cathedral in Ragusa (Italy) and the area on which it is built from a dynamic point of view. A 3D subsoil model was realised through the integration of two active (i.

Data about marine area-based management tools to assess their contribution to the UN sustainable development goals.

The dataset presented in this article contains information about marine Area-Based Management Tools (ABMTs) used to assess their contribution to the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Following the scope of the analysis, ABMTs were identified by scrutinizing international and regional legal sources related to ocean management in the fields of marine conservation, fisheries, deep sea bed mining, underwater natural and cultural heritage, environmental conservation, and marine spatial planning. Legal sources were screened to depict the following characteristics of individual ABMTs: i) management objectives; ii) authorities responsible for delivering such objectives; iii) the system of management and planning entailed in the ABMT including the zoning type; and iv) the specific spatial scope and domain each ABMT refer to in vertical depth and horizontal domain.

Performance comparison of heat recovery systems to reduce viral contagion in indoor environments.

Strong ventilation increments are currently suggested for containing the airborne diffusion of COVID-19 in indoor environments. However, it can involve an unacceptable growing of energy consumption. Therefore, maximum care must be addressed to improve efficiency of ventilation heat recovery (VHR).

Testing Sentinel-1 SAR Interferometry Data for Airport Runway Monitoring: A Geostatistical Analysis.

Multi-Temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MT-InSAR) techniques are gaining momentum in the assessment and health monitoring of infrastructure assets. Amongst others, the Persistent Scatterers Interferometry (PSI) technique has proven to be viable for the long-term evaluation of ground scatterers. However, its effectiveness as a routine tool for certain critical application areas, such as the assessment of millimetre-scale differential displacements in airport runways, is still debated.

Managing multiple pressures for cetaceans' conservation with an Ecosystem-Based Marine Spatial Planning approach.

Despite the recognized important ecological role that cetaceans play in the marine environment, their protection is still scarcely enforced in the Mediterranean Sea even though this area is strongly threatened by local human pressures and climate change. The piecemeal of knowledge related to cetaceans' ecology and distribution in the basin undermines the capacity of addressing cetaceans' protection and identifying effective conservation strategies. In this study, an Ecosystem-Based Marine Spatial Planning (EB-MSP) approach is applied to assess human pressures on cetaceans and guide the designation of a conservation area in the Gulf of Taranto, Northern Ionian Sea (Central-eastern Mediterranean Sea).

High energy efficiency ventilation to limit COVID-19 contagion in school environments.

This study investigates the possibility to contain COVID-19 contagion in indoor environments via increasing ventilation rates obtained through high energy efficiency systems combining thermal recovery by heat exchanger and thermodynamic recovery by heat pump. The starting point of this assessment is a procedure to evaluate in naturally ventilated environments, the current infectious risk by using measurements of indoor/outdoor CO concentrations to calculate actual air changes per hour. The method was applied to some typical school environments in Italy.

Operationalizing risk-based cumulative effect assessments in the marine environment.

Ecosystem-based management requires an assessment of the cumulative effects of human pressures and environmental change. The operationalization and integration of cumulative effects assessments (CEA) into decision-making processes often lacks a comprehensive and transparent framework. A risk-based CEA framework that divides a CEA in risk identification, risk analysis and risk evaluation, could structure such complex analyses and facilitate the establishment of direct science-policy links.

Towards an Ecosystem-Based Marine Spatial Planning in the deep Mediterranean Sea.

The deep sea covers about 79% of the Mediterranean basin, including habitats potentially able to deliver multiple ecosystem services and numerous resources of high economic value. Thus, the deep Mediterranean Sea represents an important frontier for marine resources exploitation, which is embedded within the European Blue Growth Strategy goals and agendas. The deep sea is crucial for the ecological functioning of the entire basin.

A fast-moving target: achieving marine conservation goals under shifting climate and policies.

In the Anthropocene, marine ecosystems are rapidly shifting to new ecological states. Achieving effective conservation of marine biodiversity has become a fast-moving target because of both global climate change and continuous shifts in marine policies. How prepared are we to deal with this crisis? We examined EU Member States Programs of Measures designed for the implementation of EU marine environmental policies, as well as recent European Marine Spatial Plans, and discovered that climate change is rarely considered operationally.

More on the question 'When does absence of evidence constitute evidence of absence?' How Bayesian confirmation theory can logically support the answer.

In forensic science it is not rare that common sayings are used to support particular inferences. A typical example is the adage 'The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. This paper analyzes the rationale hidden behind such statement and it offers a structural way to approach the analysis of this particular adage throughout a careful analysis of four different scenarios.

Threats to marine biodiversity in European protected areas.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) represent the main tool for halting the loss of marine biodiversity. However, there is increasing evidence concerning their limited capacity to reduce or eliminate some threats even within their own boundaries. Here, we analysed a Europe-wide dataset comprising 31,579 threats recorded in 1692 sites of the European Union's Natura 2000 conservation network.

Fostering the Understanding of Positive Test Results.

Background: The majority of health-service users seem unable to properly compute the positive predictive value of medical tests. The research reported in the present study sought to investigate whether, and to what extent, probabilistic inferences about a positive test result can be improved by changing the traditional way in which probability judgments are elicited and medical information is presented.

Methods: Online survey respondents were presented with a positive test result regarding a pregnant woman, and had to estimate the chances that her unborn baby had an anomaly (standard judgment), to apportion the numbers of chances for and against this hypothesis (distributive judgment), and to indicate whether the hypothesis that the baby had an anomaly was more or less likely than its alternative (relative judgment).

Mapping soil organic matter in the Baranja region (Croatia): Geological and anthropic forcing parameters.

Spatial mapping of soil organic matter (SOM) and evaluation of the related natural and anthropic influencing factors are crucial to monitor the extent of degraded land and the evolution of soil functions. The objective of this work is to study the spatial distribution of SOM in a highly exploited agricultural area in the Baranja Region (Croatia). The spatially dense dataset available (4825 top-soil samples from 0 to 30 cm) allowed to produce reliable SOM maps using geostatistical interpolation kriging algorithms and to study the relationships with possible influencing factors.

Combined effects of environmental factors on human perception and objective performance: A review of experimental laboratory works.

This study reports the outcomes of a literature survey aimed at exploring how different environmental factors-that is acoustic, thermal, visual, and air quality stimuli-interact in affecting building occupants' perception and performance. Recent laboratory studies have been collected, and their methodological approaches reviewed in terms of experimental design, adopted exposures conditions, perception and performance assessment methods. Results have been summarized and compared to identify interaction patterns between environmental factors and possible practical implications for improving the design of both experimental studies and the built environment.

Children's quantitative Bayesian inferences from natural frequencies and number of chances.

Zhu and Gigerenzer (2006) showed that an appreciable number of Chinese children aged between 9 and 12years old made correct quantitative Bayesian inferences requiring the integration of priors and likelihoods as long as they were presented with numerical information phrased in terms of natural frequencies. In this study, we sought to replicate this finding and extend the investigation of children's Bayesian reasoning to a different numerical format (chances) and other probability questions (distributive and relative). In Experiment 1, a sample of Italian children was presented with the natural frequency version of five Bayesian inference problems employed by Zhu and Gigerenzer (2006), but only a tiny minority of them were able to produce correct responses.

Assessing habitat quality in relation to the spatial distribution of protected areas in Italy.

The conservation of species and habitats is increasingly threatened by anthropogenic impacts, particularly land use change, from local to global scales. Although many efforts have been carried out so far to halt or at least reduce the biodiversity loss (e.g.

Another chance for good reasoning.

Disagreement on the "probability status" of chances casts doubt on Girotto and Gonzalez's (2001) conclusion that the human mind can make sound Bayesian inferences involving single-event probabilities. The main objection raised has been that chances are de facto natural frequencies disguised as probabilities. In the present study, we empirically demonstrated that numbers of chances are perceived as being distinct from natural frequencies and that they have a facilitatory effect on Bayesian inference tasks that is completely independent from their (minor) frequentist readings.

Insights into bedrock surface morphology using low-cost passive seismic surveys and integrated geostatistical analysis.

The HVSR (Horizontal to Vertical Spectral Ratio) technique is very popular in the context of seismic microzonation and for the mapping of shallow seismic reflectors, such as the sediment/bedrock transition surface. This easy-to-deploy single station passive seismic technique permits the collection of a considerable amount of HVSR data in a cost-effective way. It is not surprising that some recent studies have adopted single station micro-tremor analyses in order to retrieve information on geological structures in 1D, 2D or even 3D reconstructions.

Questioning the preparatory function of counterfactual thinking.

Why do individuals mentally modify reality (e.g., "If it hadn't rained, we would have won the game")? According to the dominant view, counterfactuals primarily serve to prepare future performance.

A Discounted Cash Flow variant to detect the optimal amount of additional burdens in Public-Private Partnership transactions.

The Discounted Cash Flow method is a long since well-known tool to assess the feasibility of investment projects, as the background which shapes a broad range of techniques, from the Cost-Benefit Analysis up to the Life-Cycle Cost Analysis. Its rationale lies in the comparison of deferred values, only once they have been discounted back to the present. The DCF variant proposed here fits into a specific application field.

Natural Frequencies Do Not Foster Public Understanding of Medical Test Results.

Major organizations recommend presenting medical test results in terms of natural frequencies, rather than single-event probabilities. The evidence, however, is that natural frequency presentations benefit at most one-fifth of samples of health service users and patients. Only one study reported a substantial benefit of these presentations.

Young children do not succeed in choice tasks that imply evaluating chances.

Preverbal infants manifest probabilistic intuitions in their reactions to the outcomes of simple physical processes and in their choices. Their ability conflicts with the evidence that, before the age of about 5years, children's verbal judgments do not reveal probability understanding. To assess these conflicting results, three studies tested 3-5-year-olds on choice tasks on which infants perform successfully.

Real estate market and building energy performance: Data for a mass appraisal approach.

Mass appraisal is widely considered an advanced frontier in the real estate valuation field. Performing mass appraisal entails the need to get access to base information conveyed by a large amount of transactions, such as prices and property features. Due to the lack of transparency of many Italian real estate market segments, our survey has been addressed to gather data from residential property advertisements.

Temporal distribution of intertidal macrozoobenthic assemblages in a Nanozostera noltii-dominated area (Lagoon of Venice).

We describe the temporal distribution of intertidal macrozoobenthic assemblages in a small marsh pond of the Lagoon of Venice colonized by the seagrass Nanozostera noltii (Hornemman) Tomlinson et Posluzny. Three stations ranging in the degree of N. noltii cover were selected about 100 m apart and sampled 9 times at regular intervals from March 1996 to March 1997.