scholarly journals SCREENING OF ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF POLLUTION WITH THE QGIS PLUGIN ENVIFATE

Author(s):  
F. Geri ◽  
O. Cainelli ◽  
G. Salogni ◽  
P. Zatelli ◽  
M. Ciolli

Public and academic interest in environmental pollution caused by toxic substances and other sources, like noise, is constantly raising. To protect public health and ecosystems it is necessary to maintain the concentrations of pollutants below a safety threshold. In this context the development of models able to assess environmental pollution impact has been identified as a priority for future research. Scientific community has therefore produced many predictive models in the field. The vast majority of them needs to be run by specialists with a deep technical knowledge of the modeled phenomena in order to process the data and understand the results and it is not feasible to use this models for simple prescreening activities. Planners, evaluators and technical operators need reliable, usable and simple tools in order to carry out screening analysis of impact assessment. <br><br> The ENVIFATE software is currently under development by the Department of Civil, environmental and mechanical engineering of the University of Trento, Italy, in the frame of a project funded by the Italian Veneto Region with the aim to make available to nonspecialists screening analysis to assess the risks of a set of possible environmental pollution sources in protected areas. <br><br> The development of ENVIFATE follows these basic requirements: i) Open-Source ii) multiplatform iii) user friendly iv) GIS oriented. In order to respect these principles we have chosen to develop a plugin of QGIS, using python as a development language and creating a module for each environmental compartment analyzed: rivers, lakes, atmospheric dispersion, dispersion in groundwater and noise. <br><br> The plugin architecture is composed of a series of core functions characterized by command line interfaces that can be called from third-party applications (such as Grass GIS), connectable in custom data flows and with a high level of modularity and scalability. The base of the different models are highly tested and reliable algorithms adopted by the Italian Institute for Protection and Environmental Research (Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale – ISPRA). Due to their simplicity, and for safety reasons, the structure of these models is constrained to provide conservative results, so to overestimate actual risk. This approach allows to provide statistically validated instruments to be used in different environmental contexts. All modules of the plugin provide numerical and cartographical results: in particular the command-line interface provides "static" results, or linked to a particular spatial and temporal state, while the Qgis plugins iterate the single analysis along space and time in order to provide georeferenced maps and time distributed results.

Solar Physics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 296 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner Pötzi ◽  
Astrid Veronig ◽  
Robert Jarolim ◽  
Jenny Marcela Rodríguez Gómez ◽  
Tatiana Podlachikova ◽  
...  

AbstractKanzelhöhe Observatory for Solar and Environmental Research (KSO) of the University of Graz (Austria) is in continuous operation since its foundation in 1943. Since the beginning, its main task was the regular observation of the Sun in full disc. In this long time span covering almost seven solar cycles, a substantial amount of data was collected, which is made available online. In this article we describe the separate processing steps from data acquisition to high level products for different observing wavelengths. First of all we present in detail the quality classification, which is important for further processing of the raw images. We show how we construct centre-to-limb variation (CLV) profiles and how we remove large scale intensity variations produced by the telescope optics in order to get images with uniform intensity and contrast. Another important point is an overview of the different data products from raw images to high contrast images with heliographic grids overlaid. As the data products are accessible via different sources, we also present how to get information about the availability and how to obtain these data. Finally, in an appendix, we describe in detail the information in the FITS headers, the file naming and the data hierarchy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Yongguang Zhong ◽  
Qian Wang

Governments of various countries have formulated relevant EPR environmental regulations for environmental pollution caused by electrical and electronic products, and enterprises mainly respond to this regulation through product ecodesign strategies. In view of this, this paper takes a three-stage supply chain system composed of a manufacturer, a retailer and a third-party recycler as the research object, and develops a demand-oriented product ecodesign strategy for five scenarios under different environmental regulations, including eco-input subsidy, sales subsidy, consumption subsidy and recycling subsidy. This study finds that the manufacturer does not actively engage in product ecodesign if the government does not implement subsidy policies; when the government implements subsidy policies such as eco-input subsidy, sales subsidy, or consumption subsidy, the manufacturer will design a high-level ecological product. However, under the recycling subsidy policy, the manufacturer will design a low-level ecological product. These results suggest that different subsidy policies may lead to different eco-product strategies of the manufacturer. In particular, the recycling subsidy policy can encourage a recycler to recycle actively, thus reducing the environmental pollution cost of a manufacturer, but the manufacturer is reluctant to improve the ecological level of the finished product.


Author(s):  
Wongpanya Nuankaew ◽  
◽  
Sittichai Bussaman ◽  
Direk Teeraputon ◽  
Pratya Nuankaew

Senior projects allow students to move the learning process from basic knowledge to an interdisciplinary approach. The purpose of the research is to survey the attitude and perception as collaboration between researchers and students to develop a clustering model for advisors and students, and to develop factors that are significant to predict the right match in the senior projects course. Data collection was with a questionnaire consisting of 463 samples from 7 administrators, 68 lecturers, 26 staff and 362 students from two universities: The Rajabhat Mahasarakham University, and the University of Phayao. The research methodology is designed and divided into three sections: preparation, implementation, and conclusion. The result shows that the satisfaction and the overall acceptance level were at a high level (mean = 4.04, S.D. = 0.88). Moreover, the developed model has the highest level of efficiency (accuracy = 98.06%). For future research projects, the researchers are committed on the development of learners’ achievement and aims to promote a learning culture based on the results of this research, and active learning of educational institutions.


Methodology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Livacic-Rojas ◽  
Guillermo Vallejo ◽  
Paula Fernández ◽  
Ellián Tuero-Herrero

Abstract. Low precision of the inferences of data analyzed with univariate or multivariate models of the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) in repeated-measures design is associated to the absence of normality distribution of data, nonspherical covariance structures and free variation of the variance and covariance, the lack of knowledge of the error structure underlying the data, and the wrong choice of covariance structure from different selectors. In this study, levels of statistical power presented the Modified Brown Forsythe (MBF) and two procedures with the Mixed-Model Approaches (the Akaike’s Criterion, the Correctly Identified Model [CIM]) are compared. The data were analyzed using Monte Carlo simulation method with the statistical package SAS 9.2, a split-plot design, and considering six manipulated variables. The results show that the procedures exhibit high statistical power levels for within and interactional effects, and moderate and low levels for the between-groups effects under the different conditions analyzed. For the latter, only the Modified Brown Forsythe shows high level of power mainly for groups with 30 cases and Unstructured (UN) and Autoregressive Heterogeneity (ARH) matrices. For this reason, we recommend using this procedure since it exhibits higher levels of power for all effects and does not require a matrix type that underlies the structure of the data. Future research needs to be done in order to compare the power with corrected selectors using single-level and multilevel designs for fixed and random effects.


10.28945/3529 ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 217-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen L MacLennan ◽  
Anthony A Pina ◽  
Kenneth A Moran ◽  
Patrick F Hafford

Is the Doctor of Business Administration (D.B.A) a viable degree option for those wishing a career in academe? The D.B.A. degree is often considered to be a professional degree, in-tended for business practitioners, while the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree is por-trayed as the degree for preparing college or university faculty. Conversely, many academic programs market their D.B.A. programs to future academicians. In this study, we investigat-ed whether the D.B.A. is, in fact, a viable faculty credential by gathering data from univer-sity catalogs and doctoral program websites and handbooks from 427 graduate business and management programs to analyze the terminal degrees held by 6159 faculty. The analysis indicated that 173 institutions (just over 40% of the total) employed 372 faculty whose ter-minal degree was the D.B.A. This constituted just over 6% of the total number of faculty. Additionally, the program and faculty qualification standards of the six regional accrediting agencies and the three programmatic accrediting agencies for business programs (AACSB, IACBE, and ACBSP) were analyzed. Results indicated that all these accrediting agencies treated the D.B.A. and Ph.D. in business identically and that the D.B.A. was universally considered to be a valid credential for teaching business at the university level. Suggestions for future research are also offered.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sina Faizollahzadeh Ardabili ◽  
Amir Mosavi ◽  
Pedram Ghamisi ◽  
Filip Ferdinand ◽  
Annamaria R. Varkonyi-Koczy ◽  
...  

Several outbreak prediction models for COVID-19 are being used by officials around the world to make informed-decisions and enforce relevant control measures. Among the standard models for COVID-19 global pandemic prediction, simple epidemiological and statistical models have received more attention by authorities, and they are popular in the media. Due to a high level of uncertainty and lack of essential data, standard models have shown low accuracy for long-term prediction. Although the literature includes several attempts to address this issue, the essential generalization and robustness abilities of existing models needs to be improved. This paper presents a comparative analysis of machine learning and soft computing models to predict the COVID-19 outbreak as an alternative to SIR and SEIR models. Among a wide range of machine learning models investigated, two models showed promising results (i.e., multi-layered perceptron, MLP, and adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system, ANFIS). Based on the results reported here, and due to the highly complex nature of the COVID-19 outbreak and variation in its behavior from nation-to-nation, this study suggests machine learning as an effective tool to model the outbreak. This paper provides an initial benchmarking to demonstrate the potential of machine learning for future research. Paper further suggests that real novelty in outbreak prediction can be realized through integrating machine learning and SEIR models.


The paper is a review on the textbook by A. V. Yeremin, «The History of the National Prosecutor’s office» and the anthology «The Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Empire in the Documents of 1722–1917» (authors: V. V. Lavrov, A. V. Eremin, edited by N. M. Ivanov) published at the St. Petersburg Law Institute (branch) of the University of the Prosecutor’s office of the Russian Federation in 2018. The reviewers emphasize the high relevance and high level of research, their theoretical and practical significance. The textbook and the anthology will help the students increase their legal awareness, expand their horizons.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 4460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammadsoroush Tafazzoli ◽  
Ehsan Mousavi ◽  
Sharareh Kermanshachi

Although the two concepts of lean and sustainable construction have been developed due to different incentives, and they do not pursue the same exact goals, there exists considerable commonality between them. This paper discusses the potentials for integrating the two approaches and their practices and how the resulting synergy from combining the two methods can potentially lead to higher levels of fulfilling the individual goals of each of them. Some limitations and challenges to implementing the integrated approach are also discussed. Based on a comprehensive review of existing papers related to sustainable and lean construction topics, the commonality between the two approaches is discussed and grouped in five categories of (1) cost savings, (2) waste minimization, (3) Jobsite safety improvement, (4) reduced energy consumption, and (5) customers’ satisfaction improvement. The challenges of this integration are similarly identified and discussed in the four main categories of (1) additional initial costs to the project, (2) difficulty of providing specialized expertise, (3) contractors’ unwillingness to adopt the additional requirements, and (4) challenges to establish a high level of teamwork. Industry professionals were then interviewed to rank the elements in each of the two categories of opportunities and challenges. The results of the study highlight how future research can pursue the development of a new Green-Lean approach by investing in the communalities and meeting the challenges of this integration.


Author(s):  
Mateusz Iwo Dubaniowski ◽  
Hans Rudolf Heinimann

A system-of-systems (SoS) approach is often used for simulating disruptions to business and infrastructure system networks allowing for integration of several models into one simulation. However, the integration is frequently challenging as each system is designed individually with different characteristics, such as time granularity. Understanding the impact of time granularity on propagation of disruptions between businesses and infrastructure systems and finding the appropriate granularity for the SoS simulation remain as major challenges. To tackle these, we explore how time granularity, recovery time, and disruption size affect the propagation of disruptions between constituent systems of an SoS simulation. To address this issue, we developed a high level architecture (HLA) simulation of three networks and performed a series of simulation experiments. Our results revealed that time granularity and especially recovery time have huge impact on propagation of disruptions. Consequently, we developed a model for selecting an appropriate time granularity for an SoS simulation based on expected recovery time. Our simulation experiments show that time granularity should be less than 1.13 of expected recovery time. We identified some areas for future research centered around extending the experimental factors space.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (Supplement_3) ◽  
pp. iii464-iii464
Author(s):  
Dharmendra Ganesan ◽  
Nor Faizal Ahmad Bahuri ◽  
Revathi Rajagopal ◽  
Jasmine Loh PY ◽  
Kein Seong Mun ◽  
...  

Abstract The University of Malaya Medical Centre, Kuala Lumpur had acquired a intraoperative MRI (iMRI) brain suite via a public private initiative in September 2015. The MRI brain suite has a SIEMENS 1.5T system with NORAS coil system and NORAS head clamps in a two room solution. We would like to retrospectively review the cranial paediatric neuro-oncology cases that had surgery in this facility from September 2015 till December 2019. We would like to discuss our experience with regard to the clear benefits and the challenges in using such technology to aid in the surgery. The challenges include the physical setting up the paediatric case preoperatively, the preparation and performing the intraoperative scan, the interpretation of intraoperative images and making a decision and the utilisation of the new MRI data set to assist in the navigation to locate the residue safely. Also discuss the utility of the intraoperative images in the decision of subsequent adjuvant management. The use of iMRI also has other technical challenges such as ensuring the perimeter around the patient is free of ferromagnetic material, the process of transfer of the patient to the scanner and as a consequence increased duration of the surgery. CONCLUSION: Many elements in the use of iMRI has a learning curve and it improves with exposure and experience. In some areas only a high level of vigilance and SOP (Standard operating procedure) is required to minimize mishaps. Currently, the iMRI gives the best means of determining extent of resection before concluding the surgery.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document