Search results for "tick"
showing 10 items of 166 documents
Quality management in the public sector accounting department - (un)avoidable quality costs and unlikely financial impacts
2017
This paper investigates the nature of quality costs and the likelihood of their having financial impacts in the public sector. An illustrative quality development case project in an accounting department of a Finnish city administration is presented. The empirical data includes answers to a qualitative project question sheet, workshop material and participative observation. Quality problems are classified according to their quality cost category and the extent to which they are avoidable. Some of the quality costs proved unavoidable and some are likely to lack financial impact, exhibiting sticky cost behaviour. The study indicates that certain prevention and appraisal costs in the public se…
Use and acceptance of new technology by older people. Findings of the international MOBILATE survey: ‘Enhancing mobility in later life’
2005
Technology has become part of today’s life. It constitutes a fundamental aspect of the environment also for older people who are not familiar with most of the new technologies. Is their use of technology based on certain abilities and is this related with such factors as income, lack of alternatives, past performance, or availability of equipment? Methods The MOBILATE 2000 database of a survey conducted in 5 European countries was aimed at the enhancement of out-of-home mobility of older people. The project offers data describing the use and acceptance of new technologies. Insight can be gained into the characteristics of users and non-users of more or less common technologies like ATM, tic…
Autonomous patrol and surveillance system using unmanned aerial vehicles
2015
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly popular for civil applications due to their flight capabilities and mobility. This paper proposes an indoor autonomous patrol and surveillance system using unmanned aerial vehicles. The system consists of six components: (1) a low cost vision-based pose estimation of UAVs, (2) vision-based state estimation, (3) UAV patrol path planning, (4) UAV controller to desired waypoints, (5) manual joystick controller and (6) assignment of priority hierarchy to multiple control inputs of a robot. The components were integrated successfully and the designed system was experimented in an indoor setup. Results has shown that the proposed system is suitable…
Assaying waterborne psychoactive drugs by the response to naturalistic predator cues in the stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus)
2020
Abstract Ecotoxicological effects of psychiatric drugs and drug metabolites released by the human population are of increasing environmental concern. In this study we evaluate behavioral responses to visual predator cues in wild caught three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) after exposure to water-born citalopram, a widely prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor with antidepressant and anxiolytic effects. Fish were exposed to ecological relevant concentrations of citalopram (0.15 or 1.5 μg L−1) for 10 or 20 days. After drug exposure, individual fish were moved to a test arena where they were exposed to two naturalistic visual predator cues; a shadow from beneath, which …
Biomagnification of organohalogens in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) from its main prey species in three areas of the Baltic Sea
2012
Abstract Factors affecting the biomagnification of organohalogens in Baltic salmon from sprat, herring and three-spined stickleback were assessed in three feeding areas. Second sea-year salmon contained (in fresh weight of whole fish) 79–250 ng g− 1 polychlorinated biphenyls (ΣPCB), 0.9–2.7 pg g− 1 dibenzo-p-dioxins (ΣPCDD), 8–19 pg g− 1 dibenzofurans (ΣPCDF), 96–246 pg g− 1 coplanar PCBs, 2.4–3.6 ng g− 1 polybrominated diphenylethers (ΣPBDE), and 39–136 ng g− 1 Σindicator PCB6. The EU limits for WHO toxic equivalent concentrations in fish feed were already exceeded in one-year-old sprat and herring and were exceeded many-fold in older age groups. The differences in the biomagnification rat…
Horizontal Competition Among Governments
2005
Governments situated on the same level of a multi-level governmental system compete with each other as well as with those placed higher or lower. This paper is concerned with horizontal competition only. It discusses both competition based on the mobility of agents (individuals, business firms, or factors) and competition related to the circulation of information. With regard to the first kind, it focuses on the capacity that governments keep to decide their policies and compete in spite of the mobility of agents. Some attention is also given to the implications of some non-standard assumptions about the underlying political setup. The discussion of information-based competition includes th…
Mobility Fee—Creating Better Cities, Creating a Better Future!
2021
The following paper explores an alternative to financing public transportation in densely populated urban areas through ticket sales as a possible incentive to increase the usage of public transportation with the intent of reducing car traffic and pollution in urban spaces. It addresses the option of collecting a “mobility fee” from residents of an area to replace the revenue generated by ticket sales. Since the fee as it is envisioned in this paper would be collected from residents regardless of whether they actually use public transportation, this method would result in the usage of public transportation itself not being associated with any additional monetary cost. The text elaborates on…
Spatiotemporal and gender-specific parasitism in two species of gobiid fish
2018
Parasitism is considered a major selective force in natural host populations. Infections can decrease host condition and vigour, and potentially influence, for example, host population dynamics and behavior such as mate choice. We studied parasite infections of two common marine fish species, the sand goby (Pomatoschistus minutus) and the common goby (Pomatoschistus microps), in the brackish water Northern Baltic Sea. We were particularly interested in the occurrence of parasite taxa located in central sensory organs, such as eyes, potentially affecting fish behavior and mate choice. We found that both fish species harbored parasite communities dominated by taxa transmitted to fish through …
Divergent Macroparasite Infections in Parapatric Swiss Lake-Stream Pairs of Threespine Stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus)
2015
Spatial heterogeneity in diversity and intensity of parasitism is a typical feature of most hostparasite interactions, but understanding of the evolutionary implications of such variation is limited. One possible outcome of infection heterogeneities is parasite-mediated divergent selection between host populations, ecotypes or species which may facilitate the process of ecological speciation. However, very few studies have described infections in populationpairs along the speciation continuum from low to moderate or high degree of genetic differentiation that would address the possibility of parasite-mediated divergent selection in the early stages of the speciation process. Here we provide…