Benchmarking culture in Europe: A data envelopment analysis approach to identify city-specific strengths

Culture is an integral part of a city's quality of life, a driver of urban change, and a genuine economic sector. To support benchmarking of urban culture and facilitate peer learning amongst policymakers, the European Commission has recently created the ‘Cultural and Creative Cities Index’. While this index builds on a standardised method to aggregate 29 indicators for the 155 selected cities, it is explicitly acknowledged that a ‘gold standard’ for a ‘Cultural and Creative City’ does not exist. Instead, different approaches should be allowed for in capturing cities’ cultural and creative vitality. This is the point of departure for this paper, which employs a Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) modelling approach to allow cities to combine such respect for performance diversity with peer learning and benchmarking. Expert-based weights are used to provide expert-consistent bounds for the shares of key dimensions in a city's final BoD index value. We identify three city clusters, amongst which there are large performance differences. Accordingly, we focus on the within-group identification of peer cities and target values, which we illustrate in more detail for Bilbao, Krak?w and Umeå, towards the formulation of fit-for-purpose policy measures that can support culture-led development.     

Modification of Mineral Powder by Various Organic Materials: Their Potential as Reinforcement for Unsaturated Polyester Composites

Russian Journal of Applied Chemistry - Industrial by product dumped from iron making industry (slag) has been modified by various chemical agents, particularly, paraffin wax, liquid nitrile...     

Dual Palladium(II)/Tertiary Amine Catalysis for Asymmetric Regioselective Rearrangements of Allylic Carbamates

The streamlined catalytic access to enantiopure allylic amines as valuable precursors towards chiral β‐ and γ‐aminoalcohols as well as α‐ and β‐aminoacids is desirable for industrial purposes. In this article an enantioselective method is described that transforms achiral allylic alcohols and N‐tosylisocyanate in a single step into highly enantioenriched N‐tosyl protected allylic amines via an allylic carbamate intermediate. The latter is likely to undergo a cyclisation‐induced [3,3]‐rearrangement catalysed by a planar chiral pentaphenylferrocene palladacycle in cooperation with a tertiary amine base. The otherwise often indispensable activation of palladacycle catalysts by a silver salt is not required in the present case and there is also no need for an inert gas atmosphere. To further improve the synthetic value, the rearrangement was used to form dimethylaminosulfonyl‐protected allylic amines, which can be deprotected under non‐reductive conditions.     

Selective Benzylic CH-Borylations by Tandem Cobalt Catalysis

Metal-catalyzed C?H activations are environmentally and economically attractive synthetic strategies for the construction of functional molecules as they obviate the need for pre-functionalized substrates and minimize waste generation. Great challenges reside in the control of selectivities, the utilization of unbiased hydrocarbons, and the operation of atom-economical dehydrocoupling mechanisms. An especially mild borylation of benzylic CH bonds was developed with the ligand-free pre-catalyst Co[N(SiMe₃)₂]₂ and the bench-stable and inexpensive borylation reagent B₂pin₂ that produces H₂ as the only by-product. A full set of kinetic, spectroscopic, and preparative mechanistic studies are indicative of a tandem catalysis mechanism of CH-borylation and dehydrocoupling via molecular Co^I catalysts.     

Photoprotection by Workwear: Ultraviolet Protection Factors for Artificial Radiation from Welding Arcs

Photoprotection by clothing is one of the most effective protective measures against solar ultraviolet radiation (UVR), and the related concept of UV protection factors (UPF) for fabrics has proven itself for decades. Although immense work has been carried out regarding factors influencing textile sun protection, the idea of UPFs for artificial UVR, if necessary with different action spectra, is payed little attention. In this work, a modified UPF equation is proposed utilizing welding arcs and the ICNIRP action spectrum. These welding UPFs (wUPF) were calculated for some workwear as a function of welding power, technique and welded material. No wUPF welding power dependence existed. By means of normalized standard emission spectra, that were further clustered with regard to welding technique, it was found that the wUPF depends exclusively on the fabric’s transmittance and the ICNIRP weighting function yielding a reduced wUPF formula. Finally, a comparison of solar and welding UPFs, based on either their full or reduced equations, is discussed.     

Understanding the Origin of Highly Selective CO2 Electroreduction to CO on Ni,N-doped Carbon Catalysts

Ni,N-doped carbon catalysts have shown promising catalytic performance for CO₂ electroreduction (CO₂R) to CO; this activity has often been attributed to the presence of nitrogen-coordinated, single Ni atom active sites. However, experimentally confirming Ni−N bonding and correlating CO₂ reduction (CO₂R) activity to these species has remained a fundamental challenge. We synthesized polyacrylonitrile-derived Ni,N-doped carbon electrocatalysts (Ni-PACN) with a range of pyrolysis temperatures and Ni loadings and correlated their electrochemical activity with extensive physiochemical characterization to rigorously address the origin of activity in these materials. We found that the CO₂R to CO partial current density increased with increased Ni content before plateauing at 2 wt % which suggests a dispersed Ni active site. These dispersed active sites were investigated by hard and soft X-ray spectroscopy, which revealed that pyrrolic nitrogen ligands selectively bind Ni atoms in a distorted square-planar geometry that strongly resembles the active sites of molecular metal–porphyrin catalysts.