A subjective survey on perceived environmental quality has been carried out on 51 secondary-school classrooms, some of which have been acoustically renovated, and acoustical measurements were carried out in eight of the 51 classrooms, these eight being representative of the different types of classrooms that are the subject of the survey. A questionnaire, which included items on overall quality and its single aspects such as acoustical, thermal, indoor air and visual quality, has been administered to 1006 students. The students perceived that acoustical and visual quality had the most influence on their school performance and, with the same dissatisfaction for acoustical, thermal and indoor air quality, they attributed more relevance, in the overall quality judgment, to the acoustical condition. Acoustical quality was correlated to speech comprehension, which was correlated to the speech transmission index, even though the index does not reflect all the aspects by which speech comprehension can be influenced. Acoustical satisfaction was lower in nonrenovated classrooms, and one of the most important consequences of poor acoustics was a decrease in concentration. The stronger correlation between average noise disturbance scores and LAmax levels, more than LAeq and LA90, showed that students were more disturbed by intermittent than constant noise.

The purpose of this article is to study several preservation properties of the mean inactivity time order under the reliability operations of convolution, mixture, and shock models. In that context, the increasing mean inactivity time class of lifetime distributions is characterized by means of right spread order and increasing convex order. Some applications in reliability theory are described. Finally, a new test of such a class is discussed.

The reliable prediction in probabilistic terms of the consequences of aeolian events related to sand transport phenomena is a key element for human activities in arid regions. Threshold shear velocity generating sand lifting is a key component of such a prediction. It suffers from the effect of uncertainties of different origin, such as those related to the physical phenomena, measurement procedures, and modelling. Semi empirical models are often fitted to a small amount of data, while recent probabilistic models needs the probability distribution of several random variables. Triggered by this motivation, this paper proposes a purely statistical approach to fluid threshold shear velocity for sand saltation, treated as a single comprehensive random variable. A data set is derived from previously published studies. Estimates of conditional probability distributions of threshold shear velocity for given grain diameters are given. The obtained statistical moments are critically compared to some deterministic semi empirical models refitted to the same collected data. The proposed statistical approach allows to obtain high order statistics useful for practical purposes