Search results for "Project"

1977: Hopes Fulfilled—Building Democracy in Turbulent Economic Times

2020

This chapter offers an analysis of the main economic and institutional transformations in Spain from 1977 onwards. The severe economic and financial crisis that hit Spain in the mid-1970s coincided with the arrival of democracy after Franco’s death and shaped the nature and scope of the implemented reforms (Pactos de la Moncloa). While the crisis and political instability limited the possibility of making a more radical adjustment, the consensus among different social actors, unions and political parties was fundamental to the reforms. This time hopes were fulfilled and although some reforms were left pending, those that were adopted played a seminal role in putting the Spanish economy and …

State–Religious Relationships in Ethiopia

2016

In this chapter, Steen-Johnsen depicts how the Ethiopian regime uses fear tactics in order to keep the religious peacebuilders in accordance with their political strategies. She presents rich empirical material describing how religious leaders engaged in peacebuilding fear sanctions if they do not adhere to the strategies of the regime. She finds that processes of securitization as well as historical patterns of state–religious interactions affect how political strategies are enacted in Ethiopia. She argues that these findings make a strong argument of considering how the enactment of political strategies influences the scope of opportunities of religious peacemakers.

Mozambique’s Megaproject-Based Economic Model: Still Struggling with Uneven Development?

2019

Megaprojects in aluminium production, coal and natural gas extraction, and hydropower generation play a key role in the Mozambican economy. Based on the concepts of global value chains and linkages, this chapter shows that remarkable transformations are taking place in these sectors, including the expansion of production, the attraction of FDI and the emergence of new players from the Global South who now compete with transnational companies from traditional economic partner countries of Mozambique. The authors highlight potentials (in terms of economic transformation, especially positive side effects through the provision of electricity and rehabilitation of transport infrastructure) as we…

Bee reverse-learning behavior and intra-colony differences: Simulations based on behavioral experiments reveal benefits of diversity

2014

Abstract Foraging bees use color cues to help identify rewarding from unrewarding flowers. As environmental conditions change, bees may require behavioral flexibility to reverse their learnt preferences. Learning to discriminate perceptually similar colors takes bees a long time, and thus potentially poses a difficult task to reverse-learn. We trained free-flying honeybees to learn a fine color discrimination task that could only be resolved (with about 70% accuracy) following extended differential conditioning. The bees were then tested for their ability to reverse-learn this visual problem. Subsequent analyses potentially identified individual behavioral differences that could be broadly …

Acute toxicity of organochlorined pesticides to the European eel,Anguilla anguilla: The dependency on exposure time and temperature

1987

Performance of membrane bioreactor (MBR) systems for the treatment of shipboard slops: Assessment of hydrocarbon biodegradation and biomass activity …

2015

In order to prevent hydrocarbon discharge at sea from ships, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) enacted the MARPOL 73/78 convention in which any oil and oil residue discharged in wastewater streams must contain less than 5. ppm hydrocarbons. Effective treatment of this petroleum-contaminated water is essential prior to its release into the environment, in order to prevent pollution problem for marine ecosystems as well as for human health. Therefore, two bench scale membrane bioreactors (MBRs) were investigated for hydrocarbon biodegradation. The two plants were initially fed with synthetic wastewater characterised by an increasing salinity, in order to enhance biomass acclimatio…

Analysis of Pollutant Emissions on City Arteries—Aspects of Transport Management

2021

The aim of the study is to present a methodology for analyzing pollution emissions in a medium-sized city using modern traffic simulations in the aspect of minimizing exhaust emissions. The scope of the research and the methods of analysis used differ from those applied in big cities projects that can be found in the literature, Therefore the progressive elaboration model has been applied methodically to formulate and carry out the feasibility study. To perform microscopic traffic simulations, the software Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO—German Aerospace Center (DLR), Berlin, Germany) was applied. Thanks to the simulations, changes in traffic organization were accurately identified in th…

Lie Detection: fMRI

2019

Objective detection of deception was extensively studied, starting from polygraph to more modern techniques, the functional MR (fMRI), and they are based on neural (sympathetic) activation that is evoked in stressful conditions, such as lying. The role of fMRI in neurophysiology has been extensively developed and studied, and its principles lie in the correlation between the brain demand of energy during determined task and its supply. Although being extensively studied, its role for judiciary purpose presents many shortcomings.

Principal polynomial analysis for remote sensing data processing

2011

Inspired by the concept of Principal Curves, in this paper, we define Principal Polynomials as a non-linear generalization of Principal Components to overcome the conditional mean independence restriction of PCA. Principal Polynomials deform the straight Principal Components by minimizing the regression error (or variance) in the corresponding orthogonal subspaces. We propose to use a projection on a series of these polynomials to set a new nonlinear data representation: the Principal Polynomial Analysis (PPA). We prove that the dimensionality reduction error in PPA is always lower than in PCA. Lower truncation error and increased independence suggest that unsupervised PPA features can be b…

Pieri’s 1898 Geometry of Position Memoir

2021

This chapter contains an English translation of Mario Pieri’s 1898c memoir, The Principles of the Geometry of Position Composed into a Deductive Logical System,1 his most important contribution to the foundations of projective geometry.