Gamification or How to Make a “Green” Behavior Become a Habit

One of the main challenges faced by tourist destinations is waste management. A poor waste collection and management policy is an additional factor affecting the tourist destination's sustainability within this general problem. These situations are trying to be solved with incentives derived from gamification tools that motivate people to recycle. This study, within the scope of a European project called UrbanWaste, found significant results that suggested that this tool can promote recycling behavior, but what happens when customers come back home? Gamification even makes a habit take root in the people who use it by activating external motivators. This recycling habit emanates from an altruistic feeling and aims to leave a better world for future generations (intrinsic motivation). However, they also recommend the app to show a benevolent image by making the behavior visible (internalized extrinsic motivation) and improving destination branding.

INTERNATIONAL LAW STANDARDS REGARDING SUBSTANTIVE PETTY OFFENCES LAW

This article attempts to identify and analyse, in the light of the provisions of the acts of international law, the following issues belonging to the substantive part of the law on petty offences: the general problem of criminalization in petty offenses law and; the question of the criminal nature of the law of petty offenses, and thus the application of individual provisions to it and the resulting guarantees appropriate to that law; the application of the principle of guilt on the basis of the analysed regulations as a premise for assigning liability; the principle of ne bis in idem; the principle of nullum crimen nulla poena sine lege, especially in so far as it derives from the principle of lex mitior retro agit.

Accessing Cloud Services Using Token based Framework for IoT Devices

Nowadays cloud environments are used by many business service sectors like healthcare, retail marketing, banking, and many business fields. At the same time, the usage of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in different sectors also increasing tremendously. So, there is a general problem for securing any business service in enterprise cloud environments restricting by only authorized devices. We are proposing cryptographic techniques with the help of a token-based framework by enabling a secure handshake between consuming applications and the source business service which aims to authorize the target end consumers of the respective business service. The proposed work aims to achieve the desired secure handshake so that any consuming application or device requests the desired business service with a secret token and an input combination. The source business service creates a secure token using any latest robust cryptographic algorithm on the above input combination and returns the token to the consuming application. The consuming application requests to the source business service, it must pass the above token which if validated then only would receive the required data. Hence, in this paper, we propose the delegation of the authorization task to the end consumers, who are responsible to fetch the security tokens and use them in their application lifecycle.

Review of Hugh Ross Williamson, Charles and Cromwell (London: Duckworth, 1946)

Wight notes that Williamson’s account of the English Civil War follows ‘the romantic view of history’ as ‘the relationship or interaction of characters’ in sometimes tragic circumstances. Williamson ‘shows a good dramatic sense’, Wight observes, in his narrative of events involving Cromwell and King Charles I of England; but the book fails to show insight on ‘the deeper dialectic of conservative and revolutionary psychology. It illuminates neither the particular clash between the Anglicanism of the King and the Independency of the Lieutenant-General, nor the general problem of political morals in a revolutionary situation.’ Cromwell and Charles were both ‘compelled to political methods which in private circumstances they would have condemned’. Owing in part to Williamson’s ‘life-long Cromwellian fervour’, the book does not attain ‘a high level of political literacy’, nor does it demonstrate deep discernment about the history of these conflicts.

MATHEMATICAL MODELS OF DECISION SUPPORT IN THE PROBLEMS OF LOGISTICS NETWORKS OPTIMIZATION

The subject of research in the article is the process of decision support in the problems of logistics networks optimization. The goal of the work is to develop a set of mathematical models of logistics network optimization problems to increase the efficiency of decision support systems by coordinating the interaction between automatic and interactive procedures of computer-aided design systems. The following tasks are solved in the article: review and analysis of the current state of the problem of decision support in the problems of logistics networks optimization; decomposition of the problem of decision support for the optimization of logistics networks; development of a mathematical model of the general problem of network optimization in terms of economy, efficiency, reliability and survivability; development of a set of technological mathematical models for the correct reduction of many effective options for building logistics networks for the final choice, taking into account difficult to formalize factors, knowledge and experience of the decision maker (DM). The following methods are used: systems theory, utility theory, optimization and operations research. Results. Analysis of the current state of the problem of logistics networks optimization has established the existence of the problem of correct reduction of a subset of effective options for their construction for ranking, taking into account difficult to formalize factors, as well as knowledge and experience of DM. The decomposition of the problem into tasks is performed: definition of the principles of network construction; network structure selection; determination of the topology of network elements; choice of network operation technology; determination of parameters of elements and communications (means of cargo delivery); multi criteria evaluation and selection of the best option for building a network. A mathematical model of the general problem of network optimization in terms of economy, efficiency, reliability and survivability is proposed. To coordinate the interaction between automatic and interactive network optimization procedures, it is proposed to use a combined method of ranking options, which allows you to identify and correctly reduce the subset of effective options for ranking DM. To implement the method, mathematical models of problems of the procedure of ranking options in the technologies of project decision support have been developed, which allow to combine the advantages of the technologies of the ordinalistic and cardinalistic approaches. Conclusions. The developed set of mathematical models expands the methodological bases of automation of processes of support of multi criteria decisions on optimization of logistic networks, allows to carry out correct reduction of set of effective options of their construction for the final choice taking into account factors, knowledge and experience of DM. The practical use of the proposed models and procedures will reduce the time and capacity complexity of decision support technologies, and through the use of the proposed selection procedures - to improve their quality across a variety of functional and cost indicators.

Projecting onto rectangular matrices with prescribed row and column sums

In 1990, Romero presented a beautiful formula for the projection onto the set of rectangular matrices with prescribed row and column sums. Variants of Romero’s formula were rediscovered by Khoury and by Glunt, Hayden, and Reams for bistochastic (square) matrices in 1998. These results have found various generalizations and applications.In this paper, we provide a formula for the more general problem of finding the projection onto the set of rectangular matrices with prescribed scaled row and column sums. Our approach is based on computing the Moore–Penrose inverse of a certain linear operator associated with the problem. In fact, our analysis holds even for Hilbert–Schmidt operators, and we do not have to assume consistency. We also perform numerical experiments featuring the new projection operator.

Fellow Citizens or Aliens? Galician Refugees during the First World War in Hungary

The outbreak of the First World War (1914–1918) forced the countless civilians to leave their homes and to become war refugees. This topic has remained largely unexplored by the historians. The number of refugees from the multinational Galicia in the years 1914–1918 was large in many parts of the former Austria-Hungary, which finds its reflection in archival materials scattered over various archives and over an extensive territory. This paper presents the issue of the Galician war refugees who found themselves in the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen. It also outlines the general problem of emigration as well as describes relations between the refugees and the local people. It was not only due to antagonisms but also due to the administrative decisions of the Hungarian authorities that the Galician refugees remained alien to the locals, despite the fact they all were citizens of the same Habsburg Monarchy.

The very early universe

The universe at very early times, before the GUT era, is discussed. The entropy problem is described. The horizon and flatness problems are subsumed into the general problem of finding plausible models of the physics of the Planck era or the era immediately after it. An outline of inflationary cosmology is given, including quantitative treatment of a scalar inflaton field, treated in both a classical and quantum approach, in order to find the average dynamics and the spectrum of perturbations, respectively.

Damascus can manage fragmented military forces

Significance President Bashar al-Assad's two principal foreign backers, Russia and Iran, support and to some extent direct sizeable forces in Syria on which Assad relies. That contributes to a complex constellation of pro-Damascus forces, which raises a question over the level of Assad's control. Impacts Military and militia predation on local populations is a general problem, not necessarily tied to specific units. Israeli claims that specific army units provide cover for a growing Hezbollah presence in southern Syria are plausible but hard to prove. Iran-backed militias can offer relatively high salaries, helping their local recruitment campaigns including a recent drive in Deir ez-Zour.

Human-Centric Functional Modeling and Evolutionary Biology

The newly emerging science of Human-Centric Functional Modeling provides an approach towards modeling biological and other systems that is hypothesized to maximize human capacity to understand and navigate complexity in those systems. This paper provide an overview exploring how Human-Centric Functional Modeling might be applied in evolutionary biology, and how this increase in capacity to understand the complexity that organisms have evolved into might be achieved. The broader usefulness of Human-Centric Functional Modeling is that it provides a simple mathematical definition of what constitutes a biological system, defines the problem-solving domain of any biological system in terms of abstract mathematical spaces, and provides an expression defining general problem-solving ability in any such domain. This enables it to be seen that all systems with general problem-solving ability in their own domain are potentially an abstraction of a single mathematical pattern of adaptive problem-solving that might apply to all domains. From this perspective nature has already potentially solved problems in biological organisms that can be represented in some abstract functional state spaces as the same general problem that must be solved to address problems in a wide range of other systems, including existential challenges from poverty to climate change, where Human-Centric Functional Modeling enables it to be seen that not only can nature’s solutions be copied, but that nature has demonstrated its solutions to have worked for hundreds of millions of years.