Evolution of Depositional Environments in Response to the Holocene Sea-Level Change in the Lower Delta Plain of Nakdong River Delta, Korea

The Nakdong River delta, located in southeastern Korea, preserves thick and wide sediments, which are suitable for the high-resolution study of the evolution of depositional environments in the lower delta plain area. This study traces the Holocene evolution of the Nakdong River delta using deep drill core (ND-3; 46.60 m thick) sediments from the present delta plain. Sedimentary units of the sediments were classified based on grain size compositions and sedimentary structures: (A) alluvial zone, (B) estuarine zone, (C) shallow marine, (D) prodelta, (E) delta front, and (F) delta plain. The weathered sediment, paleosol, was observed at 43.16 m below the surface. There is an unconformity (43.10 m) to separate a Pleistocene sediment layer in the lowermost part differentiating from a Holocene sediment layer in the upper part of the core. The shallow marine sedimentary unit (32.20~23.50 m), in which grain size decreases upward is overlain by the prodelta unit (23.50~15.10 m), which consists of fine-grained sediments and relatively homogeneous sedimentary facies. The boundary between the delta front unit (15.10~8.00 m) and the delta plain unit (8.00~0.00 m) appears to lie at 8.0 m, and the variation in grain size is different; coarsening upward in the delta front unit and fining upward in the delta front unit, respectively. These sediments are characterized by a lot of sand–mud couplets and mica flakes aligned along with cross-stratification, which may be deposited in relatively high-energy environments. Until 13 cal ka BP, the sea level was 70 m below the present level and the drilling site might be located onshore. At 10 cal ka BP, the sea level was located 50 m below the present level and the drilling site might be moved to an estuarine environment. From 8 to 6 cal ka BP, a transgression phase occurred as a result of coastline invasion by the rapid rise of the sea level. Thus, the drilling site was drowned in a shallow marine environment. After 6 cal ka BP, the sea level reached the present level, and, since then, progradation might begin to form, primarily by more sediment input. After this period, the progradation phase continues as the sediments have advanced and the delta grows.

NEED FOR GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES TOWARDS PRODUCTIVITY AND SELF RELIANCE IN THE NIGERIAN ECONOMY

The present level of unemployment in the nation is worrisome, to say the least. Graduates of tertiary institutions are roaming the streets in search of never - to- come jobs. There can be no real economic empowerment in any developing economy until certain fundamental issues have been put right. The growth and development of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME’S) present a way out of this doldrums. Aggressive efforts are needed to bring about the sustenance and survival of these SME'S paramount of which is a peaceful environment. This paper highlighted the significance of SME subsector in developing economies, challenges and prospects of SMEs in Nigeria as a developing economy in order to enhance economic empowerment by sustaining the growth and development of SME'S with a view to reducing unemployment and decisively address security challenges that has been a source of serious concern to potential foreign and indigenous investors alike, thereby setting in motion an unprecedented growth and development in this all-important sub-sector. KEYWORD: Unemployment, SME’s, Productivity, Entrepreneurial.

Basic Principles of Creating and Using the Waste-free Technologies in the System of Recycled Water Supply and Water Purification

The need to protect the environment makes it necessary to significantly change the general approaches to environmental efficiency of production, to minimize the impact on nature at the present level of productivity and quality. Today instead of the temporary measures aimed at overcoming the effects of pollution, the long-term measures are being taken more and more often at the design and construction stages to nullify the causes of pollution in advance rather than to have its effects in the future. The processes and devices that have been previously used to collect and dispose the industrial waste are now considered a passive approach to environmental protection. The matter is that the amount of waste generated during the production process remains almost unchanged, and this does not meet the new environmental requirements. The active approach involves creating the modern low-waste and non-waste technologies that can efficiently use raw materials in production processes, as well as converting the waste into easily recyclable components that are least harmful to the environment. The article considers the conceptual principles that show the essence of the active approach to improving the industrial technologies in order to protect the environment. It is mainly focused on studying the features of recycled water supply and water purification.

Job Satisfaction of Self Financing Engineering College Teachers: Before and During COVID 19

Job satisfaction is one of the most widely discussed issue in organizational behaviour and Human Resource Management. In present study the researcher investigated the present level of job satisfaction among the Self Financing Engineering College Teachers: Before And During COVID 19.Job satisfaction is an elusive, even mythical, concept that has been increasingly challenged and refined particularly since the Herzberg, Mauser and Synderman study in 1959. The most important information to have regarding an employee in an institution is a validated measure of his/her level of job satisfaction (Roznowski and Hulin, 1992). A better understanding of job satisfaction and factors associated with it helps top level management in educational institutions guide employees' activities in a desired direction. The morale of employees is a deciding factor in the institution's efficiency (Chaudhary and Banerjee, 2004). The affective component encompasses the good and bad feelings about a job, such as how people feel about their supervisors, co-workers, salaries, fringe benefits, office settings and commute to work. This information can be based on facts, conjecture and rumours. And a person's predisposition to respond in a favourable or unfavourable way to things on a job is the behavioural component. This aspect of an attitude determines the course of action a person chooses.

The Potential of Tufa as a Tool for Paleoenvironmental Research—A Study of Tufa from the Zrmanja River Canyon, Croatia

Tufa is a fresh-water surface calcium carbonate deposit precipitated at or near ambient temperature, and commonly contains the remains of macro- and microphytes. Many Holocene tufas are found along the Zrmanja River, Dalmatian karst, Croatia. In this work we present radiocarbon dating results of older tufa that was found for the first time at the Zrmanja River near the Village of Sanaderi. Tufa outcrops were observed at different levels, between the river bed and up to 26 m above its present level. Radiocarbon dating of the carbonate fraction revealed ages from modern, at the river bed, up to 40 kBP ~20 m above its present level. These ages fit well with the hypothesis that the Zrmanja River had a previous surface connection with the Krka River, and changed its flow direction toward the Novigrad Sea approximately 40 kBP (Marine Isotope Stage 3). Radiocarbon AMS dating of tufa organic residue yielded a maximum conventional age of 17 kBP for the highest outcrop position indicating probable penetration of younger organic material to hollow tufa structures, as confirmed by radiocarbon analyses of humin extracted from the samples. Stable carbon isotope composition (δ13C) of the carbonate fraction of (−10.4 ± 0.6)‰ and (−9.7 ± 0.8)‰ for the Holocene and the older samples, respectively, indicate the autochthonous origin of the carbonate. The δ13C values of (−30.5 ± 0.3)‰ and (−29.6 ± 0.6)‰ for organic residue, having ages <500 BP and >5000 BP, respectively, suggest a unique carbon source for photosynthesis, mainly atmospheric CO2, with an indication of the Suess effect in δ13C during last centuries. The oxygen isotopic composition (δ18O) agrees well with deposition of tufa samples in two stages, the Holocene (−8.02 ± 0.72‰) and “old” (mainly MIS 3 and the beginning of MIS 2) (−6.89 ± 0.34‰), suggesting a ~4 °C lower temperature in MIS 3 compared to the current one.

Parenting by lying in Turkey: associations with negative psychosocial outcomes and psychopathy in adulthood

Parenting by lying—a practice whereby parents lie to their children as a means of emotional or behavioral control—is common throughout the world. This study expands upon the existing, albeit limited, research on parenting by lying by exploring the prevalence and long-term associations of this parenting practice in Turkey. Turkish university students (N = 182) retrospectively reported on their experiences of parenting by lying in childhood, their current frequency of lying towards parents, their present level of psychosocial adjustment problems, and their expression of psychopathic traits. The results found that recalling higher levels of parenting by lying in childhood was significantly and positively associated with both increased lying to parents as well as the expression of secondary psychopathic traits in adulthood. The novel findings uncovered in this paper highlight the potential long-term associations that parental lying to children may have on their psychosocial development in adulthood.

COMMENT on Zorilla-Azcué, S., Gonzalez-Rodríguez, A., Oyama, K., González, M.A. & Rodríguez-Correa, H., The DNA history of a lonely oak: Quercus humboldtii phylogeography in the Colombian Andes. Ecology and Evolution 2021, doi:10.100-2/ece3.7529.

We praise the authors for their work, and for the lyric title of their paper. We give a concise sketch of the present level of understanding of Quercus forest in Colombia. We identify the shortcomings in this published paper. We improve the relevance of this paper about Quercus as well as for future phylogenetic investigations other montane forest taxa to be framed in the rapidly improving palaeoecological understanding of the Northern Andes.

The Need for Negativity

Several of my recent Editorials have dealt with terminological/conceptual errors and confusions that have been all too prevalent among psi researchers. In this Editorial, I want to consider a related issue often raised about parapsychological concepts and explanation. Probably we’ve all heard the complaint that parapsychology’s core concepts have only been defined negatively, with respect to our present level of ignorance—for example, taking “telepathy” to be “the causal influence of one mind on another independently of the known senses.” Perhaps some of you have even expressed that complaint yourselves. Of course, the assumption underlying those complaints is that this definitional strategy is a problem. However, it seems like a perfectly reasonable procedure to me, and I can easily accept the possibility that we might eventually learn enough about phenomena so defined that we can later construct better, detailed, and more informative analytical definitions. But at least as far as psi research is concerned, I consider it presumptuous—at our present (and considerable) level of ignorance—to proceed any other way. We hardly have the barest hint, based on all the available data, as to what psi is doing in the world (i.e., both inside and outside the lab). In fact, formal, experimental evidence has been particularly unilluminating. It has barely succeeded, if it’s succeeded at all, in convincing parapsychological fence-sitters that there are any genuine paranormal phenomena to study (I’ve explored some reasons for this in Braude, 1997). And it certainly hasn’t shed light on how pervasive, extensive, and refined psi effects might be, or whether effects of radically different magnitudes would be the result of substantially different processes. At best, typical quantitative research examines only straitjacketed expressions of phenomena that non-laboratory evidence suggests occur more impressively (if not flamboyantly) “in the wild.” So it strikes me as appropriately modest and circumspect to define “PK” (for example) as “the effect of an organism on a region r of the physical world without any known sort of physical interaction between the organism's body and r.” (For additional specific parapsychological definitions, see Braude, 2002).

Clustering Using Cyclic Spaces of Reversible Cellular Automata

This paper introduces a cycle-based clustering technique using the cyclic spaces of reversible cellular automata (CAs). Traditionally, a cluster consists of close objects, which in the case of CAs necessarily means that the objects belong to the same cycle; that is, they are reachable from each other. Each of the cyclic spaces of a cellular automaton (CA) forms a unique cluster. This paper identifies CA properties based on “reachability” that make the clustering effective. To do that, we first figure out which CA rules contribute to maintaining the minimum intracluster distance. Our CA is then designed with such rules to ensure that a limited number of cycles exist in the configuration space. An iterative strategy is also introduced that can generate a desired number of clusters by merging objects of closely reachable clusters from a previous level in the present level using a unique auxiliary CA. Finally, the performance of our algorithm is measured using some standard benchmark validation indices and compared with existing well-known clustering techniques. It is found that our algorithm is at least on a par with the best algorithms existing today on the metric of these standard validation indices.

A new Holocene sea-level record for Singapore

Relative sea-level (RSL) records from far-field regions distal from ice sheets remain poorly understood, particularly in the early Holocene. Here, we extended the Holocene RSL data from Singapore by producing early Holocene sea-level index points (SLIPs) and limiting dates from a new ~40 m sediment core. We merged new and published RSL data to construct a standardized Singapore RSL database consisting of 88 SLIPs and limiting data. In the early Holocene, RSL rose rapidly from −21.0 to −0.7 m from ~9500 to 7000 cal. yrs. BP. Thereafter, the rate of RSL rise decelerated, reaching a mid-Holocene highstand of 4.0 ± 4.5 m at 5100 cal. yrs. BP, before falling to its present level. There is no evidence of any inflections in RSL when the full uncertainty of SLIPs is considered. When combined with other standardized data from the Malay-Thai Peninsula, our results also show substantial misfits between regional RSL reconstructions and glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) model predictions in the rate of early Holocene RSL rise, the timing of the mid-Holocene highstand and the nature of late-Holocene RSL fall towards the present. It is presently unknown whether these misfits are caused by regional processes, such as subsidence of the continental shelf, or inaccurate parameters used in the GIA model.