Search results for "ample"
showing 10 items of 2398 documents
Physical and hydraulic characterization of a clay soil at the plot scale
2010
Summary The soil physical and hydraulic properties have to be determined for interpreting and simulating many hydrological processes. An investigation was carried out to determine the physical and hydraulic characteristics of a clay soil at the plot scale. An intensive sampling of the surface soil layer of two plots of 4 × 11 m2 was carried out by measuring, for each plot, dry soil bulk density, ρb, and antecedent soil water content, θi, at 88 sampling points and field-saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, Kfs, at 176 sampling points. A wide range of Kfs values (0.7–5107 mm h−1) were measured by the Simplified Falling Head (SFH) technique. For each variable, the two plots yielded very simi…
Applying the bootstrap technique for studying soil redistribution by caesium-137 measurements at basin scale
2000
Abstract The use of the bootstrap technique to estimate the reference level of137 Cs in an uneroded site is tested. The analysis is developed using 137Cs measurements made in a small experimental Sicilian basin. In the reference area the 137Cs activity is normally distributed with a known sample mean value, m equal to 94.4 mBq cm−2. The influence of137 Cs reference site sampling was determined generating samples having a fixed size, N and six different values of the sample coefficient of variation, CV, by a Monte Carlo technique. Then, for each size N, the probability distribution of the mean μ of the sequences generated by Monte Carlo technique is defined. The soil redistribution is determ…
Towards Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Industry-Near Environments
2019
Deep reinforcement learning has over the past few years shown great potential in learning near-optimal control in complex simulated environments with little visible information. Rainbow (Q-Learning) and PPO (Policy Optimisation) have shown outstanding performance in a variety of tasks, including Atari 2600, MuJoCo, and Roboschool test suite. Although these algorithms are fundamentally different, both suffer from high variance, low sample efficiency, and hyperparameter sensitivity that, in practice, make these algorithms a no-go for critical operations in the industry.
Study of the leisure influence on attitude for leisure and mental health in a sample of portuguese seniors
2017
Increased human longevity has been attributed to technological and medical advances, as well as improved hygiene and nutritional conditions, access to health care, changes in eating habits and cognitive development strategies (Osório, 2007). The present study examined the influence of leisure actions in the psychological well-being, leisure attitude and distress of seniors. The sample consisted of 403 participants (37,2% male; 62,8% female). Concerning the perception of health condition, 82,6% subjects were considered independent and 17,4% participants were considered dependent. The instruments used were the MHI (Ribeiro, 2001) and the LAS (Freire & Fonte, 2007). Main results exposed that p…
Quantitative colorimetric-imaging analysis of nickel in iron meteorites.
2011
A quantitative analytical imaging approach for determining the nickel content of metallic meteorites is proposed. The approach uses a digital image of a series of standard solutions of the nickel-dimethylglyoxime coloured chelate and a meteorite sample solution subjected to the same treatment as the nickel standards for quantitation. The image is processed with suitable software to assign a colour-dependent numerical value (analytical signal) to each standard. Such a value is directly proportional to the analyte concentration, which facilitates construction of a calibration graph where the value for the unknown sample can be interpolated to calculate the nickel content of the meteorite. The…
Information and Communication Technology as a Differentiation Tool in Restaurants
2014
Hospitality companies implement various communication and information technologies to improve efficiency and customer service, among other aspects. However, the literature has paid little attention to investment in technology by restaurants. Therefore, this article aims at testing the use of technology as a differentiation instrument by restaurants. As a result of this analysis for a sample of 150 restaurant owners or managers, these findings allow the identification of the specific technology solutions that make the difference across restaurants and, thus, to infer the information and communication technologies that should be prioritized by restaurant owners/managers depending on their res…
Oxygen consumption of F0 and F1 larval and juvenile European seabass Dicentrarchus labrax in resonse to ocean acidification and warming
2022
Ongoing climate change is leading to warmer and more acidic oceans. The future distribution of fish within the oceans depends on their capacity to adapt to these new environments. Only few studies have examined the effects of ocean acidification (OA) and warming (OW) on the metabolism of long-lived fish over successive generations. We therefore aimed to investigate the effect of OA on larval and juvenile growth and metabolism on two successive generations of European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax L.) as well as the effect of OAW on larval and juvenile growth and metabolism of the second generation. European sea bass is a large economically important fish species with a long generation time…
Development and evaluation of image-series for portion size estimation in dietary assessment among adults
2021
AbstractPortion size images are advantageous in dietary assessment. The aim of the present study was to develop and validate new culturally specific image-series for portion size estimation to be used in a new Norwegian version of a British web-based dietary assessment tool (myfood24). Twenty-three image-series of different foods, each containing seven portion size images, were created and validated in a group of adults (n41, 58 % female) aged 19–44 (median 23), out of which 63 % had higher (tertiary) education. The participants compared 46 portions of pre-weighed foods to the portion size images (1886 comparisons in total). Portion size estimations were either classified as correct, adjace…
Approaches to find complementary separation conditions for resolving complex mixtures by high-performance liquid chromatography
2012
Chromatographic problems are usually addressed trying to find out a single experimental condition aimed to resolve all compounds in the sample. However, very often, the chromatographic system is not able to provide full resolution. When a separation fails, the usual choice is introducing a drastic change in the chromatographic system (e.g. column, solvent, pH). There are, however, other possibilities that take advantage of the gathered information in the failed separation, without the need of new experiments, based on the concept of complementary separations (e.g. isocratic mobile phases, gradients, columns, chromatographic modes). One separation condition will focus on the resolution of so…
Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.
2011
Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have ena…