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Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a new method for the provision of popular education emerged in Europe. The Sardinian Kingdom represents a good example of this evolution: in 1729, Piedmont was the first state in Europe to launch a "modern" educational policy with the creation of a public school system. Education was considered a concession granted by the King to deserving subjects who demonstrated the possession of pure morals and faith in Catholicism. The French Revolution imported the idea of education as a right for all citizens and made genuine attempts to reform the school, but it lacked sufficient time to build a new school system. In the following years Napoleon, who had no interest in popular education, tried to use the school to transform the inhabitants of Piedmont into French citizens, but schooling in Piedmont managed to preserve some of its own peculiarities. In 1814, when the Savoy monarchy was restored, it did not remove the French educational system, but tried to change it for its own aims. Nevertheless, Savoy gave much more attention to popular education and attempted to oblige all citizens to attend primary school. The history of the last decades had shown the importance of education in fostering loyal subjects. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was clear that the message of the Enlightenment, which promoted the school as a way to achieve private and public happiness, had been distorted: in the following centuries education would be considered a duty rather than a right. (Contains 20 footnotes.)

We investigate the effect of retirement on memory using the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The availability of a panel data-set allows individual heterogeneity to be controlled for when estimating the effect of transitions into retirement on a commonly employed memory measure, word recall. We control for endogeneity of the retirement decision applying an instrumental variable technique to our fixed-effects transformation. Our main finding is that, conditional on the average non-linear memory age path of the typical individual, time spent in retirement has a positive effect on word recall. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to test the self cleaning efficiency of self cleaning glass, afield experiment was conducted in Paris, at a site with representative background urban pollution. Hydrophilic photocatalytic TiO2 coated glasses and a traditional float glass (reference) were exposed in sheltered and unsheltered conditions, for various time durations. In parallel, air sampling was carried out in order to assess the chemical compositions of airborne particulates. Analytical measurements were performed on the aerosols and on the deposits that occurred on the glasses. The analyses involved the determination of the organic fraction (organic carbon, particulate organic matter, water soluble organic carbon), elemental carbon and soluble inorganic fractions. The impairment of the optical properties of the glass was followed via haze measurements. Based on this field exposure, the efficiency of the self cleaning glass was highlighted, in particular there was an important decrease of the organic fraction measured on TiO2 coated glasses as compared to the reference glass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To study the weathering of soda-lime-silica float glass exposed to a polluted, urban environment, an outdoor exposure experiment was conducted in Paris. Both 'tin bath' and 'air' faces were exposed in two locations: sheltered and unsheltered locations from the rain. Samples were withdrawn after one, two, six, 12 and 24 months and analysed by SIMS, EPMA, FTIR spectroscopy and SEM. Analyses show the formation of leached layers some tens of nanometers thick as a consequence of exposure. For all exposure modes the surfaces were depleted in sodium and, to a lesser extent, calcium, and relatively enriched in silica. In general, unsheltered samples are more weathered than their sheltered homologues, and the 'air side' appears more weathered than the 'tin bath' side. For all the samples the thickness of the leached layer grows over time. Hydration of this layer is clearly detected by SIMS which revealed hydrogen enrichment in the uppermost surface. Beside the uniform leaching process, the samples seem to undergo other localised weathering phenomena. Indeed some hollow and jagged areas, observed by SEM might be interpreted as evidence of local corrosion phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]