Ethanol-blended gasoline has been used in Brazil for 20 years and, probably, is going to be more widely used in North America due to the MtBE environmental effects on groundwater. The potential impacts caused by the presence of ethanol in UST spills are related to the co-solvency effect and the preferential degradation of ethanol over the BTEX compounds. These interactions may increase the leng...

This study consisted of two parts. In the first part, the contrast-transfer efficiency (CTE) in elastography was extended to account for continuous changes of modulus distribution. It was shown that, for a finite size background, the strain contrast approaches the modulus contrast in the case of Gaussian distributions. Thus, an increase in the CTE was obtained. For a fixed background size, it w...

I? the last two years, the research group Olibal has been collaborating with different Museums and institutions in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands (Spain) in order to introduce new technologies in Cultural Heritage Management. Most Spanish Cultural institutions have not introduced yet those technologies in their everyday life due to the lack of public funding as well as their scant experienc...

Rural development is a process involving local people in solving their problems. As a strategy designed to improve the social and economic well-being of rural populations, rural developmentundoubtedlysupportsnation-widedevelopmentina country like Iran with a rural-basedsociety. Theconstitutionof the Islamic Republic of Iran stipulates that ­rural development should be viewed as a key function o...

Despite constant post-war efforts to decipher the development process, it appears that little practical progress has been made. Many theories have been proposed (some leading directly to policy), but very few developing countries have succeeded in breaking the bonds of underdevelopment. Social theorists from Karl Marx to Daniel Bell have argued that economic development brings pervasive cultura...

Over the past decade it has gradually become apparent that we are living in an age that is characterized by globalization. There is no single accepted definition of this process, although the word has been in our vocabulary for forty years. Our initial efforts to make sense of it have understandably focused so far on economic and political consequences. These are the most conspicuous, but the l...

How much do cultural biases affect economic exchange? We try to answer this question by using the relative trust European citizens have for citizens of other countries. First, we document that this trust is affected not only by objective characteristics of the country being trusted, but also by cultural aspects such as religion, a history of conflicts, and genetic similarities. We then find tha...

Increasing localisation represents one of the most spectacular processes of the economies that develop and transform as a result of globalisation processes: while the (relative) importance of national economies is decreasing, the economic role of regions and cities seems to grow. Global competition has intensified also in space, especially with the growing importance of the knowledge-based econ...