Search results for "final"
showing 10 items of 288 documents
Students' attitude towards the use of educational video games to develop competencies
2018
The use of educational video games (EVGs) is gaining momentum as a means to motivate and to engage students in their learning process. Nevertheless, previous research is taking for granted that students have a positive attitude towards EVGs and did not ensure a proper understanding of students' characteristics that might influence their attitude towards them. Therefore, this study's main goal is to explore four students' characteristics (perceived relevance, perceived confidence, media affinity, and perceived self-efficacy) that influence students' attitude towards the use of EVGs to develop competencies. Using the fsQCA method to analyze data gathered on a sample of 128 undergraduate stude…
Wiper Tools in Turning Finishing of Quenched Steel
2005
In the last years, the research on metal machining has been focused on the development of tools that can support an increment of the cutting parameters instead of the increment of tool life; this strategy is focused to obtain a relevant productivity increment without getting worse the final product quality. The new design of the tool corner radius has allowed preserving the same product quality due to the “wiper effect” generated during the cut. The employ of such re-designed tools can allow substantial productivity improvements and, by employing the same feedrate, it is possible to achieve excellent surface finish and eliminate the grinding operation. With the aim to verify the possibility…
Sustainability evaluation of Sicily's lemon and orange production: An energy, economic and environmental analysis
2013
The island of Sicily has a long standing tradition in citrus growing. We evaluated the sustainability of orange and lemon orchards, under organic and conventional farming, using an energy, environmental and economic analysis of the whole production cycle by using a life cycle assessment approach. These orchard systems differ only in terms of a few of the inputs used and the duration of the various agricultural operations. The quantity of energy consumption in the production cycle was calculated by multiplying the quantity of inputs used by the energy conversion factors drawn from the literature. The production costs were calculated considering all internal costs, including equipment, materi…
Assessment of methodologies and data used to calculate desalination costs
2017
Abstract In desalination, similarly with other industries, the cost of the final product is one of the most important criteria that define the commercial success of a specific technology. Therefore, when new projects are planned or new technologies are proposed, the analysis of the expected costs attracts a lot of attention and is compared to (perceived) costs of state-of-the-art desalination or costs of alternative fresh water supply options. This comparison only makes sense if the cost assessment methodologies are based on the same principles and use common assumptions. This paper assesses: (i) the methodologies used to calculate the water cost; (ii) the boundary conditions and (iii) the …
Definition of a laboratory optimization protocol for road bitumen improved with recycled tire rubber
2012
Abstract Bearing in mind the need to answer one of the most frequent needs for civil construction, in general, and major project such as road infrastructures in particular, this paper presents the results of a laboratory experimental study in order to evaluate the performance improvement that is possible to achieve when modifying road bitumen with CRM (Crumb Rubber Modifier) from discarded tire rubber (TR), using a Wet Process. The environmental advantage is double, since the aim of the research is to obtain high performance road bitumen thanks to the re-use of a discarded material, such as the rubber tires, which otherwise would be dumped in scrap-yard. In particular, this experimental stu…
Testing for a Political Bias in Freedom House Democracy Scores: Are U.S. Friendly States Judged To Be More Democratic?
2012
Several scholars have criticized the Freedom House democracy ratings as being politically biased; do countries indeed incorrectly receive better ratings that have stronger political ties with the United States? Starting from the assumption that other indices of democracy can be used as benchmark data, different estimation strategies are employed to gauge whether differences between a number of alternative indices of democracy and the FH ratings can be explained in a systematic manner by variables that record relationships between the U.S. and the countries under investigation. Differentiating between the period before 1989 and after 1988, I obtain consistent evidence of a substantial bias i…
Hunting for valuables from landfills and assessing their market opportunities A case study with Kudjape landfill in Estonia
2017
Landfill mining is an alternative technology that merges the ideas of material recycling and sustainable waste management. This paper reports a case study to estimate the value of landfilled materials and their respective market opportunities, based on a full-scale landfill mining project in Estonia. During the project, a dump site (Kudjape, Estonia) was excavated with the main objectives of extracting soil-like final cover material with the function of methane degradation. In total, about 57,777 m3 of waste was processed, particularly the uppermost 10-year layer of waste. Manual sorting was performed in four test pits to determine the detailed composition of wastes. 11,610 kg of waste was…
Characterization of nuclear effects in muon-neutrino scattering on hydrocarbon with a measurement of final-state kinematics and correlations in charg…
2018
This paper reports measurements of final-state proton multiplicity, muon and proton kinematics, and their correlations in charged-current pionless neutrino interactions, measured by the T2K ND280 near detector in its plastic scintillator (C$_8$H$_8$) target. The data were taken between years 2010 and 2013, corresponding to approximately 6$\times10^{20}$ protons on target. Thanks to their exploration of the proton kinematics and of kinematic imbalances between the proton and muon kinematics, the results offer a novel probe of the nuclear-medium effects most pertinent to the (sub-)GeV neutrino-nucleus interactions that are used in accelerator-based long-baseline neutrino oscillation measureme…
Beneficios de un programa de soporte para familiares de pacientes al final de la vida: estudio multicéntrico
2018
RESUMEN EXTENDIDO BENEFICIOS DE UN PROGRAMA DE SOPORTE PARA FAMILIARES DE PACIENTES AL FINAL DE LA VIDA: ESTUDIO MULTICÉNTRICO 1. INTRODUCCIÓN La situación de final de vida supone una serie de retos añadidos que han de afrontar el paciente y su familia, quienes han de ir adaptándose a numerosas pérdidas progresivas que culminarán con el fallecimiento del familiar (Mitrani, 2006). Ante la situación de enfermedad grave y final de vida de uno de sus miembros, la mayoría de las familias cuentan con una persona que asume la responsabilidad central del cuidado, el “cuidador familiar principal”, definido como: “aquel miembro de la familia que se encarga de los cuidados del paciente, la mayor parte…
Observation of Photon Polarization in theb→sγTransition
2014
This Letter presents a study of the flavor-changing neutral current radiative $B^{\pm} \to K^{\pm}\pi^{\mp}\pi^{\pm}\gamma$ decays performed using data collected in proton-proton collisions with the LHCb detector at $7$ and $8\,$TeV center-of-mass energies. In this sample, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $3\,\text{fb}^{-1}$, nearly $14\,000$ signal events are reconstructed and selected, containing all possible intermediate resonances with a $K^{\pm}\pi^{\mp}\pi^{\pm}$ final state in the $[1.1, 1.9]\,$GeV/$c^{2}$ mass range. The distribution of the angle of the photon direction with respect to the plane defined by the final-state hadrons in their rest frame is studied in interva…