Search results for "Indicator"
showing 10 items of 997 documents
Energy saving in WWTP: Daily benchmarking under uncertainty and data availability limitations
2016
Efficient management of Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTPs) can produce significant environmental and economic benefits. Energy benchmarking can be used to compare WWTPs, identify targets and use these to improve their performance. Different authors have performed benchmark analysis on monthly or yearly basis but their approaches suffer from a time lag between an event, its detection, interpretation and potential actions. The availability of on-line measurement data on many WWTPs should theoretically enable the decrease of the management response time by daily benchmarking. Unfortunately this approach is often impossible because of limited data availability. This paper proposes a methodolo…
An Environmental Analysis of the Effect of Energy Saving, Production and Recovery Measures on Water Supply Systems under Scarcity Conditions
2015
Water is one of the primary resources provided for maintaining quality of life and social status in urban areas. As potable water is considered to be a primary need, water service has usually been managed without examining the economic and environmental sustainability of supply processes. Currently, due to increases in energy costs and the growth of environment preservation policies, reducing water leakage, energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) production have become primary objectives in reducing the environmental footprint of water service. The present paper suggests the implementation of some performance indicators that show the interdependence of water loss, energy consumption and…
The Benefits of Believing in Chance or Fate: External Locus of Control as a Protective Factor for Coping with the Death of a Spouse
2010
The death of a spouse is an extremely stressful life event that consequently causes a large drop in life satisfaction. Reactivity to the loss, however, varies markedly, a phenomenon that is currently not well understood. Because lack of controllability essentially contributes to the stressful nature of this incident, the authors analyzed whether individual differences in belief in external control influence the coping process. To examine this issue, widowed individuals ( N = 414) from a large-scaled panel study were followed for the 4 years before and after the loss by using a latent growth model. Results showed that belief in external control led to a considerably smaller decline in life …
Modelling of Adequate Costs of Utilities Services
2016
The paper propose methodology for benchmark modelling of adequate costs of utilities services, which is based on the data analysis of the factual cases (key performance indicators of utilities as the predictors). The proposed methodology was tested by modelling of Latvian water utilities with three tools: (1) a classical version of the multi-layer perceptron with error back-propagation training algorithm was sharpened up with task-specific monotony tests, (2) the fitting of the generalized additive model using the programming language R ensured the opportunity to evaluate the statistical significance and confidence bands of predictors, (3) the sequential iterative nonlinear regression proce…
Economic comparison between offshore and inshore aquaculture production systems of European sea bass in Italy
2014
Abstract Offshore production system is predicted to increase in the near future driven by the lack of coastal space and lower environmental impacts. The aim of this paper has been to evaluate the economic performance of offshore production system respect to inshore one, by comparing net present value (NPV), discounted payback time (DPBT) and internal rate of return (IRR) of two Italian mariculture farms that produce European sea bass. Results showed a better economic profitability of offshore farm, even if sensitivity analysis revealed that financial indicators of both aquaculture production systems have been very sensitive to market condition changes. So, offshore production system could r…
Determinants of vaccine hesitancy and effectiveness of vaccination counseling interventions among a sample of the general population in Palermo, Ital…
2020
Counteract vaccine hesitancy is a public health priority. Main objectives of the cross-sectional study conducted were to evaluate knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding vaccination issues, to estimate the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy and to estimate the effectiveness of vaccination counseling on community advocacy in a sample of general population. An anonymous validated questionnaire was administered in April 2017 at the main shopping center of Palermo and was followed by tailored vaccination counseling interventions. To estimate the effectiveness of the interventions four main connection parameters to the vaccinarsi.org website were evaluated, in the two months before and after …
Semantics bias in cross-national comparative analyses : Is it good or bad to have "fair" health?
2016
The Health Behavior in School-aged Children is a cross-national study collecting data on social and health indicators on adolescents in 43 countries. The study provides comparable data on health behaviors and health outcomes through the use of a common protocol, which have been a back bone of the study sine its initiation in 1983. Recent years, researchers within the study have noticed a questionable comparability on the widely used item on self-rated health. One of the four response categories to the item “Would you say your health is….?” showed particular variation, as the response category “Fair” varied from 20 % in Latvia and Moldova to 3–4 % in Bulgaria and Macedonia. A qualitative min…
Evaluation of health outcomes in elderly patients with asthma and COPD using disease-specific and generic instruments: the Salute Respiratoria nell'A…
2001
To compare the effects of asthma and COPD on health status (HS) in elderly patients, and to assess the correlation between disease-specific and generic instruments assessing HS.Multicenter, cross-sectional, observational study.The Salute Respiratoria nell'Anziano (respiratory health in the elderly) Study network of outpatient departments.One hundred ninety-eight asthma patients and 230 COPD patientsor = 65 years old.HS was assessed by the Saint George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ) and five generic outcomes: Barthel's index, 6-min walk test, mini mental state examination, geriatric depression scale (GDS), and quality-of-sleep index. Independent correlates of SGRQ scores were assessed by…
Regression imputation for Space-Time datasets with missing values
2009
Data consisting in repeated observations on a series of fixed units are very common in different context like biological, environmental and social sciences, and different terminology is often used to indicate this kind of data: panel data, longitudinal data, time series-cross section data (TSCS), spatio-temporal data. Missing information are inevitable in longitudinal studies, and can produce biased estimates and loss of powers. The aim of this paper is to propose a new regression (single) imputation method that, considering the particular structure and characteristics of the data set, creates a “complete” data set that can be analyzed by any researcher on different occasions and using diff…
Biological Strategies of Lichen Symbionts to the Toxicity of Lead (Pb)
2019
Lichens are symbiotic organisms, originated by mutualistic associations of heterotrophic fungi (mycobiont), photosynthetic partners (photobionts) which can be either cyanobacteria (cyanobionts) or green microalgae (phycobionts), and bacterial consortia. They are poikilohydric organisms without cuticles or nutrient absorption organs adapted to anhydrobiosis. They present a large range of tolerance to abiotic stress (UV radiation, extreme temperatures, high salinity, mineral excess, etc.) and prosper all around the Earth, especially in harsh habitats, including Antarctica and warm deserts. Their biodiversity is widely used as a bioindicator of environmental quality due to this diversity of to…