Potentials and Prerequisites on the Way to a Circular Economy: A Value Chain Perspective on Batteries and Buildings

It is becoming increasingly clear that linear modes of production and consumption are unsustainable. A circular economy would help to minimize both environmental and social problems. As a result, the concept is gaining momentum in the political discourse. However, current policies do not seem sufficient to transform linear value chains to circular ones. This paper compares the potentials of and prerequisites for a circular economy along two important value chains. As a best practice example, the legal framework along the battery value chain is analyzed. This analysis is used to derive recommendations for how to improve the legal framework along the building value chain. We find that the battery value chain is already addressed by targeted instruments and the instruments addressing the building value chain have to be aligned and their credibility improved through mandatory requirements. A value chain-specific approach to develop the legal framework is promising for key sectors, while both general frameworks and value chain-specific instruments are required to fully exploit the CE for every product.

The Effectiveness of a Diverse COVID-19 Vaccine Portfolio and Its Impact on the Persistence of Positivity and Length of Hospital Stays: The Veneto Region’s Experience

The vaccination campaign for the Veneto region (northeastern Italy) started on 27 December 2020. As of early December 2021, 75.1% of the whole Veneto population has been fully vaccinated. Vaccine efficacy has been demonstrated in many clinical trials, but reports on real-world contexts are still necessary. We conducted a retrospective cohort study on 2,233,399 residents in the Veneto region to assess the reduction in the COVID-19 burden, taking different outcomes into consideration. First, we adopted a non-brand-specific approach borrowed from survival analysis to estimate the effectiveness of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 in preventing infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. We used t-tests and multivariate regressions to examine vaccine impact on breakthrough infections, in terms of the persistence of positivity and the length of hospital stays. Evidence emerging from this study suggests that unvaccinated individuals are significantly more likely to become infected, need hospitalization, and are at a higher risk of death from COVID-19 than those given at least one dose of vaccine. Cox models indicate that the effectiveness of full vaccination is 88% against infection, 94% against hospitalization, and 95% against death. Multivariate regressions suggest that vaccination is significantly correlated with a shorter period of positivity and shorter hospital stays, with each step toward completion of the vaccination cycle coinciding with a reduction of 3.3 days in the persistence of positivity and 2.3 days in the length of hospital stay.

Design of a Parallel and Scalable Crawler for the Hidden Web

The WWW contains huge amount of information from different areas. This information may be present virtually in the form of web pages, media, articles (research journals / magazine), blogs etc. A major portion of the information is present in web databases that can be retrieved by raising queries at the interface offered by the specific database and is thus called the Hidden Web. An important issue is to efficiently retrieve and provide access to this enormous amount of information through crawling. In this paper, we present the architecture of a parallel crawler for the Hidden Web that avoids download overlaps by following a domain-specific approach. The experimental results further show that the proposed parallel Hidden web crawler (PSHWC), not only effectively but also efficiently extracts and download the contents in the Hidden web databases

O edukacji włączającej – z uwzględnieniem problemu bezpieczeństwa uczniów w kontekście formalnoprawnym

The key issue of this article is inclusive education in connection with the formal and legal aspects of students’ safety when they are staying in educational institutions. In the first part, author describes the basic assumptions of the social model of education and it’s international conditions, also referring to solutions that have been recently implemented in the Polish education system. The second part indicates the problems that may be met by educational institutions and teachers trying to achieve a state of full inclusion. They relate to the school’s caring function in terms of security guarantees. The diversity of student population, especially wide range of educational needs may make it impossible for teachers to develop specific approach to individual pupil. It’s caused by formal items, largely determined by the financial situation of particular local government units.

Il quotidiano alla prova della geografia sociale: riflessioni liminari

Geography is certainly a discipline little loved by the public, even though the spatial dimension of societies is an element of fundamental importance in people’s life. This contribution aims to show how this spatial dimension is omnipresent in the daily life of people, societies and territories and tries to illustrate the specific approach of social geography in analyzing these phenomena. We will focus primarily on the manifestations of daily life that can be read with the gaze of social geography. We will then refer to the perspective of this discipline and we will go through its different levels of analysis, to finally arrive at outlining the most used methodologies and tools for conducting studies and research.

Pedagogical Translanguaging

Learning through the medium of a second or additional language is becoming very common in different parts of the world because of the increasing use of English as the language of instruction and the mobility of populations. This situation demands a specific approach that considers multilingualism as its core. Pedagogical translanguaging is a theoretical and instructional approach that aims at improving language and content competences in school contexts by using resources from the learner's whole linguistic repertoire. Pedagogical translanguaging is learner-centred and endorses the support and development of all the languages used by learners. It fosters the development of metalinguistic awareness by softening of boundaries between languages when learning languages and content. This Element looks at the way pedagogical translanguaging can be applied in language and content classes and how it can be valuable for the protection and promotion of minority languages. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.