The well-to-wheels assessment is widely used in the automotive sector to analyze the efficiency and competitiveness of different powertrain/fuel options. The paper proposes a global index that takes into account both the energy and environmental aspects on an uniform basis, through the assignment of the costs associated to the energy and to the pollutant emissions. The European market is analyz...

This paper uses monthly data from April 2005 to August 2013 for Taiwan to propose a novel tourism indicator, namely the Tourism Conditions Index (TCI). TCI accounts for the spillover weights based on the Granger causality test and estimates of the multivariate BEKK model for four TCI indicators to predict specific tourism and economic environmental indicators for Taiwan. The foundation of the T...

Executive Summary Soil quality is an account of the soil's ability to provide ecosystem and social services through its capacities to perform its functions under changing conditions (after Tóth et al. 2007.) The concept of soil quality expressed by this definition allows practical applications with regards to targeted social and/or ecosystem services, including agri-environmental services. The ...

This paper attempts to simulate the development status of Xi’an City from 2012 to 2025 with the method of Systems Dynamics (SD), in order to provide a reference for the future development of Xi’an city. On the basis of theoretical analysis and empirical analysis, in 2025, the carrying capacity indexes of 5 socio-economic development schemes from the highest to the lowest are status-continuous s...

While large grids are currently supporting the work of thousands of scientists, very little is known about their actual use. Because of strict organizational permissions, there are few or no traces of grid workloads available to the grid researcher and practitioner. To address this problem, in this work we present the Grid Workloads Archive (GWA), which is at the same time a workload data excha...

The Square Kilometer Array will have the sensitivity, spatial resolution, and frequency resolution to provide new scientific knowledge of evolved stars. Four basic areas of scientific exploration are enhanced by the construction of the SKA: 1) detection and imaging of photospheric radio continuum emission and position correlation with maser distributions, 2) imaging of thermal dust emission aro...

In recent years there have been many approaches to understand the cross-country diffusion rate of the most common environmental management standards issued by the International Organization for Standardization, the ISO 14000 series, due to their spectacular growth around the world, even though a certain saturation has been detected in some countries. However, few studies have shed light on the ...

BACKGROUND This study examined whether objective measures of food, physical activity and built environment exposures, in home and non-home settings, contribute to children's body weight. Further, comparing GPS and GIS measures of environmental exposures along routes to and from school, we tested for evidence of selective daily mobility bias when using GPS data. METHODS This study is a cross-s...

BACKGROUND Smoking prevalence and smoking behaviours have changed in society and an increased awareness of the importance of protecting children from environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) is reported. The aim of this study was to find out if smoking prevalence and smoking behaviours were influenced by parenthood, and if differences in health-related quality of life differed between smoking and non-...