Solid wastes management, Biogas and compost generated from organic waste at Al-Akaider landfill in Jordan

Jordan has been facing a wide variety of sudden changes in humanitarian issues (population growth, industrialization rapid, urbanization process, influx of refugees to Jordan etc.). These unexpected changes forced people to make quick reactions to adapt and settle, which resulted in further generation of solid waste which normally was dumped in landfills and caused contamination of soil, water and air. Solid Waste Management (SWM) has been an integral part of every human society. Improper SWM accelerates natural resources degradation and has a great impact on climate change and the quality of life of citizens. Hence, in this paper, we highlight the environmental and health problems of the Al-Akaider landfill in Jordan. We propose a multi-pronged integrated approach to improve solid waste management at the Al Ekaider landfill. In keeping with this approach, a general action plan has been proposed that could be tailored to recycle Organic Waste (OW) to produce biogas and compost. © 2018 JASET, International Scholars and Researchers Association

Action Fluency in Parkinson’s Disease: A Mini-Review and Viewpoint

Increasing evidence shows that the typical motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are often accompanied, if not preceded, by cognitive dysfunctions that are potentially linked to further complications of the disease. Notably, these cognitive dysfunctions appear to have a significant impact in the domain of action processing, as indicated by specific impairments for action-related stimuli in general, and verbs in particular. In this mini-review, we focus on the use of the action fluency test as a tool to investigate action processing, in PD patients. We discuss the current results within the embodied cognition framework and in relation to general action-related impairments in PD, while also providing an outlook on open issues and possible avenues for future research. We argue that jointly addressing action semantic processing and motor dysfunctions in PD patients could pave the way to interventions where the motor deficits are addressed to improve both motor and communicative skills since the early disease stages, with a likely significant impact on quality of life.

Linearized supergravity with a dynamical preferred frame

We study supersymmetric extension of the Einstein-aether gravitational model where local Lorentz invariance is broken down to the subgroup of spatial rotations by a vacuum expectation value of a timelike vector field called aether. Embedding aether into a chiral vector superfield, we construct the most general action which describes dynamics of linear perturbations around the Lorentz-violating vacuum and is invariant under the linearized supergravity transformations. The analysis is performed both in the off-shell non-minimal superfield formulation of supergravity and in the “on-shell” approach invoking only physical component fields. The resulting model contains a single free coupling, in addition to the standard supergravity parameters. The spectrum of physical excitations features an enhanced on-shell gravity multiplet comprising four states with helicities 2, 3/2, 3/2 and 1 propagating with superluminal velocity. The remaining excitations propagate with the speed of light. We outline the observational constraints on the model following from its low-energy phenomenology.

Relativistic fermions: Introduction

Some basic concepts needed for the discussion of Fermi fields have been introduced earlier, as in quantum mechanics (QM) with Grassmann variables, a representation by field integrals of the statistical operator e<συπ>−βH</συπ> for the non-relativistic Fermi gas in the formalism of second quantization, and an expression for the evolution operator. Here, it is first recalled how relativistic fermions transform under the spin group. The free action for Dirac fermions is analysed, the relation between fields and particles explained, an expression for the scattering matrix obtained, and the non-relativistic limit of a model of self-coupled massive Dirac fermions derived. A formalism of Euclidean relativistic fermions is then introduced. In the Euclidean formalism: fermions transform under the fundamental representation of the spin group Spin(d) associated with the SO(d) rotation group (spin 1/2 fermions for d = 4). As for the scalar field theory, the Gaussian integral, which corresponds to a free field theory is calculated. Then the generating functional of correlation functions is obtained by adding a source term to the action. The field integral corresponding to a general action with an interaction expandable in powers of the field, can be expressed in terms of a series of Gaussian integrals, which can be calculated, for example, with the help of Wick's theorem. The connection between spin and statistics is verified by a simple perturbative calculation. The appendix describes a few additional properties of the spin group, the algebra of γ matrices, and the corresponding spinors for Euclidean fermions.

Abnormal Behavior Detection in Uncrowded Videos with Two-Stream 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

The increasing demand for surveillance systems has resulted in an unprecedented rise in the volume of video data being generated daily. The volume and frequency of the generation of video streams make it both impractical as well as inefficient to manually monitor them to keep track of abnormal events as they occur infrequently. To alleviate these difficulties through intelligent surveillance systems, several vision-based methods have appeared in the literature to detect abnormal events or behaviors. In this area, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have also been frequently applied due to their prevalence in the related domain of general action recognition and classification. Although the existing approaches have achieved high detection rates for specific abnormal behaviors, more inclusive methods are expected. This paper presents a CNN-based approach that efficiently detects and classifies if a video involves the abnormal human behaviors of falling, loitering, and violence within uncrowded scenes. The approach implements a two-stream architecture using two separate 3D CNNs to accept a video and an optical flow stream as input to enhance the prediction performance. After applying transfer learning, the model was trained on a specialized dataset corresponding to each abnormal behavior. The experiments have shown that the proposed approach can detect falling, loitering, and violence with an accuracy of up to 99%, 97%, and 98%, respectively. The model achieved state-of-the-art results and outperformed the existing approaches.

Political Ideology and Moral Dilemma Judgments: An Analysis Using the CNI Model

Many real-world dilemmas involve disagreement about whether decisions should follow moral norms in an unconditional manner ( deontology) or be based on the consequences for the greater good ( utilitarianism). To examine how political ideology may account for some of these disagreements, the current research used a formal modeling approach to investigate the associations between political ideology and (a) sensitivity to consequences, (b) sensitivity to moral norms, and (c) general preference for inaction versus action in responses to moral dilemmas. Across three studies ( N = 996) with samples from the United States (Studies 1 and 3) and the United Kingdom (Study 2), conservatives were less influenced by overall consequences for the greater good in comparison with liberals. Political ideology was not significantly associated with sensitivity to moral norms and general action tendencies. The findings provide more nuanced insights into how political ideology may contribute to disagreements on real-world moral dilemmas.

Psychopathy and Moral Dilemma Judgments: A CNI Model Analysis of Personal and Perceived Societal Standards

Research on moral dilemma judgment suggests that higher levels of psychopathy are associated with a greater preference for utilitarian over deontological judgments. The current research investigated whether this association reflects (1) differences in the understanding of what society considers right or wrong or (2) differences in personal standards about the acceptability of certain actions. Using the CNI model, we further explored whether the obtained differences are rooted in differential standards regarding the significance of consequences, moral norms, or general action preferences. The results suggest that (1) both differences in personal standards and differences in perceived societal standards contribute to associations between psychopathy and moral dilemma judgments and (2) personal and perceived societal standards play different roles for different determinants of moral dilemma judgments. Implications for clinical and moral psychology and for research at their intersection are discussed.

Fatty acids in rumen and meat of lambs fed with different condensed and hydrolysable tannin extracts

Five groups of lambs (n = 9 each) were used to test the effect of plant extracts rich in hydrolysable (HT) or condensed tannin (CT) on animal performance, fatty acid composition of rumen content and meat. The control group (CO) received a concentrate-based diet without tannins supplementation. The other groups received the same diet as the control lambs plus 4% chestnut (CH) and tara (TA) extracts as a source of HT and mimosa (MI) and gambier (GA) extracts as a source of CT. Dietary CH negatively affected animal performance. The rumen content of the different groups showed comparable levels of 18:3 c9c12c15, 18:2 c9c12, 18:2 c9t11, 18:1 t11 and 18:0, whereas 18:1 t10 was greater in CO. Also, 18:1 t10 tended to be lower in the rumen of HT than CT-fed lambs. These data were partially confirmed in meat, where CO showed a greater percentage of individual trans 18:1 fatty acids in comparison with tannins-fed groups. Our findings challenge some accepted generalizations on the use of tannins in ruminant diets as they were ineffective to favour the accumulation of dietary PUFA or healthy fatty acids of biohydrogenation origin in the rumen content and lamb meat, but suggest a general action of tannins on the whole biohydrogenation process.

Confronting inflation models with the coming observations on primordial gravitational waves

The recent observations from CMB have imposed a very stringent upper-limit on the tensor/scalar ratio r of inflation models, $$r < 0.064$$ r < 0.064 , which indicates that the primordial gravitational waves (PGW), even though possible to be detected, should have a power spectrum of a tiny amplitude. However, current experiments on PGW is ambitious to detect such a signal by improving the accuracy to an even higher level. Whatever their results are, it will give us much information about the early Universe, not only from the astrophysical side but also from the theoretical side, such as model building for the early Universe. In this paper, we are interested in analyzing what kind of inflation models can be favored by future observations, starting with a kind of general action offered by the effective field theory (EFT) approach. We show a general form of r that can be reduced to various models, and more importantly, we show how the accuracy of future observations can put constraints on model parameters by plotting the contours in their parameter spaces.