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•Reuse music medieval parchments contain rare finds of lost local music tradition of great musicological interest.•Combining paleographic analysis with scientific investigation helps ...to recovery dating, provenance, origin, and attribution of reused manuscripts.•Selected noninvasive and portable photographic and spectrochemical techniques help increase the readability of texts and identify writing materials.•Comparing the relative ratios of the chemical elements of medieval inks can confirm the attribution of different manuscripts to the same original volume and differentiate the stages of writing.
In this research, we analyzed two handwritten music parchments, dated back between the late 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century, using non-invasive multiband (MBI) and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI), portable Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (p-XRF), and External Reflection FTIR spectrometry (ER-FTIR). The two parchments were discovered in different libraries in Northern Italy, in Milan and Pavia, respectively, as covers of paper books (a manuscript and a printed book). Since the findings represent a valuable evidence of rare Lombard polyphonic music of the late Middle Ages, they have aroused great musicological and philological interest leading to the fusion of humanistic disciplines with multiple analytical set-ups to get insights into their story. The paleographic, stylistic, and musical similarity of the two manuscripts raised questions about their origin: whether the two fragments were originally part of the same musical manuscript disassembled at a later period and reused as book covers, and whether different portions of the manuscripts were written at different stages of time. The study addressed the origin of the parchments through the non-invasive spectrochemical and superficial characterization of the inks and parchment substrate. The results of the proposed multi-analytical approach proved effective and reliable in the morphological and chemical distinction of medieval inks from inks applied in later periods and identifying parchment manufacturing processes and degradation products. In addition, relative ratios Cu/Fe and Zn/Cu were used as fingerprints for black inks confirming the common origin of the two medieval musical manuscripts and the writing of different portions of the manuscripts using the same ink, likely within a short period. Overall, this study highlights not only the synergic contribution of a multidisciplinary approach, but also limitations and analytical strategies to overcome critical drawbacks in the analysis of historical manuscripts.
Coordinated and cooperative efforts among international actors are necessary for climate policy effectiveness. From a macroeconomic perspective, the greater the synchronization of business cycles, ...the greater the potential for policy coordination and joint decision making. In light of the procyclical behaviour between the business cycle and the carbon emission cycle, this work tries to shed light on carbon emission fluctuations of sixteen major developed and developing economies during 1946–2021. In analogy with “classical” business cycle research, the analysis dates expansionary and contractionary phases, determines their durations and amplitudes. It also inspects emission synchronization between pairs and groups of countries in order to assess their degree of carbon integration. Carbon emission fluctuations are mostly an expansionary phenomenon. Compared to developed countries, developing countries feature on average longer cycles (i.e., a lower number of full cycles), less time spent in contraction, longer expansionary phases, shorter contractionary phases and larger absolute amplitudes. Pairwise carbon emission fluctuations are synchronized in 34.2% cases. Developed economies have their own common emission cycle. As for developing economies, results are heterogeneous. Only part of them, in fact, shows evidence of a common carbon emission cycle despite a relatively recent history of cooperation, heterogeneous geographical locations and socio-cultural features.
This paper, in its exploratory nature, develops a descriptive empirical analysis which tries to capture the “regularities” underlying the relationship between the economy, fossil energy use and ...anthropogenic air pollutants at business cycle frequency. The analysis uses as framework the economy of the United States in the period 1990–2019. The results are organized in terms of “stylized facts” which, in their essential nature, provide a rough idea of the cyclical interactions between the variables of interest. In addition to this, they also act as a benchmark to assess how well theoretical macroeconomic models are able to mimic the reality. A first result is the relatively high volatility characterizing both fossil energy use and air pollutants with respect to the business cycle. A second result is the moderately high procyclicality between fossil energy use, in particular oil, and the business cycle. Among air pollutants, CO2 and CO share a moderately high level of procyclicality. With few exceptions, the other pollutants are only weakly associated with the business cycle.
We consider an infinite horizon optimal control problem for a pure jump Markov process X , taking values in a complete and separable metric space I , with noise-free partial observation. The ...observation process is defined as Y t = h ( X t ), t ≥ 0, where h is a given map defined on I . The observation is noise-free in the sense that the only source of randomness is the process X itself. The aim is to minimize a discounted cost functional. In the first part of the paper we write down an explicit filtering equation and characterize the filtering process as a Piecewise Deterministic Process. In the second part, after transforming the original control problem with partial observation into one with complete observation (the separated problem) using filtering equations, we prove the equivalence of the original and separated problems through an explicit formula linking their respective value functions. The value function of the separated problem is also characterized as the unique fixed point of a suitably defined contraction mapping.
Macroeconomic research on carbon policy mostly revolves around carbon pricing mechanisms such as carbon taxes, cap-and-trade-schemes, and a mix of them. Despite their relevance, however, carbon ...pricing is not the only policy available to mitigate carbon emissions. A richer and diversified arsenal of carbon policies may prove more effective in addressing carbon mitigation across different social, economic and geographic contexts. We proposed a policy experiment, which took the form of a technical tax on fossil energy use aiming at stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions. The technical tax responded to variations in all elements that are supposed to alter climatic phenomena, that is, domestic carbon emissions, domestic fossil energy use, and the industrial stock of atmospheric carbon dioxide, to which all world economies contribute. The macro-effects of the technical tax were simulated using an off-the-shelf Real Business Cycles (RBC) model targeting the economy of the United States and featuring a climatic block. The economy was perturbed by a technology shock and an energy-price shock. Special care was devoted to the processes of validation and calibration. The tax was responsive to the business cycle and showed positive aspects. When a technology shock hit the economy, it curbed carbon emissions with minor costs in terms of potential output losses. It also protected the economy from an increase in energy prices, mitigating the fall in output despite the drop in fossil energy use. Last but not least, the tax effectively stabilized carbon dioxide emissions by reducing their variance.
This paper deals with a nonlinear filtering problem in which a multi-dimensional signal process is additively affected by a process
ν
whose components have paths of bounded variation. The presence of ...the process
ν
prevents from directly applying classical results and novel estimates need to be derived. By making use of the so-called reference probability measure approach, we derive the Zakai equation satisfied by the unnormalized filtering process, and then we deduce the corresponding Kushner–Stratonovich equation. Under the condition that the jump times of the process
ν
do not accumulate over the considered time horizon, we show that the unnormalized filtering process is the unique solution to the Zakai equation, in the class of measure-valued processes having a square-integrable density. Our analysis paves the way to the study of stochastic control problems where a decision maker can exert singular controls in order to adjust the dynamics of an unobservable Itô-process.
New literary evidence of five Italian Ars Nova ballatas has emerged from the Datini fund of the State Archives of Prato. The analysis shows how the ballatas – four set to music by Francesco degli ...Organi (Landini) and one by Guglielmo di Francia – were transcribed directly from a musical manuscript. Additional investigations on identifying the hand responsible for writing the ballatas will confirm the new witness’s dating to 1396-1397, making this the oldest dated witness of Landini’s work. Further evidence, datable shortly after, comes from a writing exercise preserved in another document within the Datini collection. A hand, probably identifiable with that of the «fanciullo» Piero di Lapo Mazzei, entered nineteen times a portion of the ripresa of the ballata Fortuna ria set to music by Francesco Landini.
Si segnala il rinvenimento di cinque ballate dell’Ars Nova italiana attestate in forma avventizia in un documento del fondo Datini dell’Archivio di Stato di Prato. L’analisi dei meccanismi di copia dimostra come le ballate – quattro intonate da Francesco degli Organi (Landini) e una da Guglielmo di Francia – furono trascritte direttamente da un manoscritto con musica. Indagini supplementari sull’identificazione della mano che ha vergato le ballate con quella che ha compilato la lista di debitori e creditori in cui sono ospitate potranno confermare la datazione della nuova testimonianza al 1396-1397, facendone il più antico testimone datato dell’opera di Landini. Di pochi anni più tardo è un esercizio di scrittura conservato all’interno di un altro documento del fondo Datini, una porzione della ripresa della ballata Fortuna ria intonata dallo stesso Francesco, copiata diciannove volte da un «fanciullo», probabilmente identificabile con Piero di Lapo Mazzei.
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