Search results for " monitoring."
showing 10 items of 2717 documents
Neural and Kernal Methods for Therapeutic Drug Monitoring
2011
Recently, important advances in dosage formulations, therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM), and the emerging role of combined therapies have resulted in a substantial improvement in patients’ quality of life. Nevertheless, the increasing amounts of collected data and the non-linear nature of the underlying pharmacokinetic processes justify the development of mathematical models capable of predicting concentrations of a given administered drug and then adjusting the optimal dosage. Physical models of drug absorption and distribution and Bayesian forecasting have been used to predict blood concentrations, but their performance is not optimal and has given rise to the appearance of neural and kern…
Long-term impacts of increased timber harvests on ecosystem services and biodiversity: A scenario study based on national forest inventory data
2020
Abstract The transition to a climate-neutral economy is expected to increase future timber demands and endanger the multifunctionality of forests. National scenario analyses are needed to determine long-term forest management impacts and support forest policy making in defining guidelines for the sustainable provision of forests’ ecosystem services and biodiversity (ESB). Using national forestry inventory data, the forest management model MASSIMO and a model to estimate harvesting costs, we simulated forest development in Switzerland under five politically relevant timber harvesting scenarios until 2106 (business as usual and four increased timber mobilisation scenarios). Model results were…
Tourism and terrorism: conflicts and commonalities
2012
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore why tourists continue to visit troubled and often violent nations, even when there is perceived risk. Tourism and terrorism reflect very different philosophies, but there are also some disturbing commonalities. Both need modern technology to be effective, both rely heavily on media management and both require the manipulation of perceptions and attitudes.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses historical evidence to examine the rise and fall in world travel and tourism demand related to acts of terrorism.Findings – The paper observes that the Caribbean experienced a 13.5 percent decline in US visitors after the 9/11 terrorist attack in …
Potential of contemporary evolution to erode fishery benefits from marine reserves
2016
Marine reserves are valued for their ecological role: protecting fish populations from overharvesting while, at the same time, potentially maintaining fisheries yields via recruitment effects (net export of pelagic eggs and larvae) and spillover (net export of post-settled juveniles and mature fish) across reserve borders. Focussing on the spillover effect, we argue that when fitness of the protected individuals depends on the relative size of their home ranges compared to the reserve size, and home range size is a property of the individuals, rapid local adaptation might occur in favour of individuals with smaller home ranges. Individuals that avoid fishing mortality by spending most of th…
Brown and green LAI mapping through spectral indices
2015
Abstract When crops senescence, leaves remain until they fall off or are harvested. Hence, leaf area index (LAI) stays high even when chlorophyll content degrades to zero. Current LAI approaches from remote sensing techniques are not optimized for estimating LAI of senescent vegetation. In this paper a two-step approach has been proposed to realize simultaneous LAI mapping over green and senescent croplands. The first step separates green from brown LAI by means of a newly proposed index, ‘Green Brown Vegetation Index (GBVI)’. This index exploits two shortwave infrared (SWIR) spectral bands centred at 2100 and 2000 nm, which fall right in the dry matter absorption regions, thereby providing…
Efficiency of a digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV) method for monitoring the surface velocity of hyper-concentrated flows
2018
Digital particle image velocimetry records high resolution images and allows the identification of the position of points in different time instants. This paper explores the efficiency of the digital image-technique for remote monitoring of surface velocity and discharge measurement in hyper-concentrated flow by the way of laboratory experiment. One of the challenges in the application of the image-technique is the evaluation of the error in estimating surface velocity. The error quantification is complex because it depends on many factors characterizing either the experimental conditions or/and the processing algorithm. In the present work, attention is devoted to the estimation error due …
Vaquita Face Extinction from Bycatch. Comment on Manjarrez-Bringas, N. et al., Lessons for Sustainable Development: Marine Mammal Conservation Polici…
2019
We are among the scientists who have documented the environmental and ecological changes to the Upper Gulf of California following the reduction in the Colorado River’s flow. We object to any suggestion that our research supports Manjarrez-Bringas et al.’s conclusion that the decline in the Colorado River’s flow is the reason for the decline in the population of the endangered vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus). Manjarrez-Bringas et al.’s conclusions are incongruent with their own data, their logic is untenable, their analyses fail to consider current illegal fishing practices, and their recommendations are unjustified and misdirected. Vaquita face extinction because of bycatch, not because …
Marine reserves : fish life history and ecological traits matter
2010
Copyright by the Ecological Society of America
Quantitative thermoelastic stress analysis by means of low-cost setups
2020
Abstract A low-cost Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) experimental setup is proposed which uses an ordinary micro-bolometer and in-house developed signal processing scripts. The setup is evaluated by analysing the thermoelastic signal from a tensile and a SENT specimen made of stainless steel AISI 304L, and the bolometer performances are compared with those of a state of the art photon detector. Signal processing is based on off-line cross-correlation, using a self-reference signal which is retrieved from the acquired thermal data. Procedures are in particular developed to recognise, quantify and correct errors due to spectral leakage and loss of streamed frames. The thermoelastic signal …
Training Secondary Education Teachers through the Prism of Sustainability: The Case of the Universitat de València
2018
Designing the training of future teachers through holistic and interdisciplinary visions is vital to developing coherent contents, epistemologies, and methodologies that put Education for Sustainability into action. The research presented here analyzes the teaching guides from the curriculum for the Master&rsquo