Search Results (26)

This study focuses on the impact of wastewater discharges from the Besòs treatment plant on the coastal water quality of Barcelona, particularly under adverse weather conditions. A simplified mathematical model was developed to predict, in real time, the concentration of bacterial indicators (Enterococci and E. coli) along nearby beaches. This model aims to quickly detect contamination events and trigger alerts to evacuate swimming areas before water quality tests are completed. The simulator uses meteorological data—such as wind direction and speed, rainfall intensity, and solar irradiance, among others—to anticipate pollution levels without requiring immediate water sampling. The model was tested against real-world scenarios and validated with historical meteorological and bacteriological data collected over six years. The results show that bacterial pollution occurs mainly during intense rainfall events combined with specific wind conditions, particularly when winds blow from the southeast (SE) or east–southeast (ESE) at moderate to high speeds. These wind patterns carry under-treated wastewater toward the coast. Conversely, winds from the north or northwest tend to disperse the contaminants offshore, posing little to no risk to swimmers. This study confirms that pollution events are relatively rare—about two per year—but pose significant health risks when they do occur. The simulator proved reliable, accurately predicting contamination episodes without producing false alarms. Minor variables such as water temperature or suspended solids showed limited influence, with wind and sunlight being the most critical factors. The model’s rapid response capability allows public authorities to take swift action, significantly reducing the risk to beachgoers. This system enhances current water quality monitoring by offering a predictive, cost-effective, and preventive tool for beach management in urban coastal environments. Full article

Eccentric muscle actions are integral to human movement, rehabilitation, and performance training due to their characteristic high force output (overload) and low energy cost and perceived exertion. Despite the growing use of eccentric devices, a gap in the research exists exploring multi-muscle activation profiles during multi-joint eccentric-only, isokinetic exercise. This study aimed to quantify and compare surface electromyographic (EMG) activity of four leg muscles—vastus lateralis (VL), tibialis anterior (TA), biceps femoris (BF), and medial gastrocnemius (GM)—during a standardized (isokinetic) submaximal eccentric multi-joint exercise using the Eccentron dynamometer. Eighteen healthy adults performed eccentric exercise at 40% of their maximal eccentric strength. Surface EMG data were analyzed using root mean square (RMS) and integrated EMG (iEMG) variables. Repeated-measures ANOVAs and effect sizes (ES) were used to evaluate within-subject differences across muscles. Results showed significantly greater activation in the VL compared to all other muscles (p < 0.05; and ES of 1.28–3.17 versus all other muscles), with the TA also demonstrating higher activation than the BF (p < 0.05). The BF exhibited the lowest activation, suggesting limited hamstring engagement. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the multi-joint isokinetic eccentric leg press movement (via an Eccentron machine) in targeting the quadriceps and dorsiflexors, while indicating the possible need for supplementary hamstring and plantar flexor exercises when aiming for a comprehensive lower body training routine. This study provides important insights for optimizing eccentric training protocols and rehabilitation strategies. Full article

There are many existing buildings for which seismic rehabilitation interventions are required, especially in earthquake-prone areas like Italy. At the same time, the huge energy cost increase in Europe highlights the need for sustainable techniques that are able to increase the energy efficiency of buildings. These issues are even more significant for weak social groups living in social housing buildings, often in poor and vulnerable conditions. In order to address the solution regarding building renovations from the social, structural, and energy efficiency perspectives, in the framework of the Horizon Europe REHOUSE (Renovation packagEs for HOlistic improvement of EU’s bUildingS Efficiency, maximizing RES generation and cost-effectiveness) Project, this paper proposes an integrated methodology of building assessment that was tested on a social housing building in Margherita di Savoia, a small town of Apulia Region, Italy. In addition to the structural and energy aspects, the social one is particularly important since the building is located in the “Capitanata Area”, considered to be one of the most socially vulnerable areas in Italy. For this reason, an assessment methodology must consider reducing the overall impact of the assessment activities while explaining to tenants the purpose of the assessment and future renovation actions, maintaining the accuracy of the assessment results. Therefore, this study outlines an assessment methodology, demonstrated through its application to the case study building, that integrates the structural, energy, and social aspects, showing that the tenants’ involvement is also crucial for the technical evaluations. The final result is a low-impact approach for the building knowledge gathering needed to start a deep renovation intervention in social housing. Full article

From a managerial perspective, project success hinges on estimates at completion as they allow tailoring response actions to cost and schedule overruns. While the literature is moving towards sophisticated approaches, standard methodologies, such as Earned-Value Management (EVM) and Earned Schedule (ES), are barely implemented in certain contexts. Therefore, it is necessary to improve performance forecasting without increasing its difficulty. The objective of this study was twofold. First, to guide modeling and implementing project progress within cost and to schedule Performance Factors (PFs). Second, to test several PFs utilized within EVM and ES formulae to forecast project cost and duration at completion. Progress indicators dynamically adjust the evaluation approach, shifting from neutral to conservative as the project progresses, either physically or temporally. This study compared the performance of the progress-based PFs against EVM and ES standard, combined, and average-based PFs on a dataset of 65 real construction projects, in both cost and duration forecasting. The results show that progress-based PFs provide more accurate, precise, and timely forecasts than other PFs. This study allows practitioners to select one or more of the proposed PFs, or even to develop one, following the guidelines provided, to reflect best their assumptions about the future course of project performance. Full article

Trichogramma, an effective biological control agent, demonstrates promise in environmentally sustainable pest management through its parasitic action toward insect eggs. This study evaluates the parasitism fitness and ability of T. chilonis with regard to two factitious host eggs, aiming to develop a cost-effective biological control program. While T. chilonis demonstrated the ability to parasitize both host eggs, the results indicate a preference for ES eggs over COS eggs. The parasitism and emergence rates of T. chilonis regarding ES eggs (parasitism: 89.3%; emergence: 82.6%) surpassed those for COS eggs (parasitism: 74.7%; emergence: 68.8%), with a notable increase in the number of emergence holes observed in the ES eggs compared to the COS eggs. Moreover, the developmental time of T. chilonis for ES eggs (10.8 days) was shorter than that for COS eggs (12.5 days), resulting in a lower number of dead wasps produced. Notably, no significant difference was observed in the female ratios between the two species. A comprehensive analysis was conducted, comparing the size and shell thickness of the two factitious hosts. The ES eggs exhibited smaller dimensions (length: 1721.5 μm; width: 1178.9 μm) in comparison to the COS eggs (length: 2908.8 μm; width: 2574.4 μm), with the ES eggshells being thinner (33.8 μm) compared to the COS eggshells (47.3 μm). The different host species had an effect on the body length of the reared parasitoids, with T. chilonis reared on COS hosts exhibiting a larger body length (female: 626.9 µm; male: 556.7 µm) than those reared on ES hosts (female: 578.8 µm; male: 438.4 µm). Conclusively, the results indicate that ES eggs present a viable alternative to COS eggs for the mass production of Trichogramma species in biological control programs. Full article

Skeleton-based human action recognition based on Neural Architecture Search (NAS.) adopts a one-shot NAS strategy. It improves the speed of evaluating candidate models in the search space through weight sharing, which has attracted significant attention. However, directly applying the one-shot NAS method for skeleton recognition requires training a super-net with a large search space that traverses various combinations of model parameters, which often leads to overly large network models and high computational costs. In addition, when training this super-net, the one-shot NAS needs to traverse the entire search space of the complete skeleton recognition task. Furthermore, the traditional method does not consider the optimization of the search strategy. As a result, a significant amount of search time is required to obtain a better skeleton recognition network model. A more efficient weighting model, a NAS skeleton recognition model based on the Single Path One-shot (SNAS-GCN) strategy, is proposed to address the above challenges. First, to reduce the model search space, a simplified four-category search space is introduced to replace the mainstream multi-category search space. Second, to improve the model search efficiency, a single-path one-shot approach is introduced, through which the model randomly samples one architecture at each step of the search training optimization. Finally, an adaptive Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is proposed to obtain a candidate structure of the perfect model automatically. With these three steps, the entire network architecture of the recognition model (and its weights) is fully and equally trained significantly. The search and training costs will be greatly reduced. The search-out model is trained by the NTU-RGB + D and Kinetics datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed model’s search strategy. The experimental results show that the search time of the proposed method in this paper is 0.3 times longer than that of the state-of-the-art method. Meanwhile, the recognition accuracy is roughly comparable compared to that of the SOTA NAS-GCN method. Full article

The entrepreneurship literature shows inconsistent results in outcome effectiveness, such as entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), entrepreneurial intention (EI), and entrepreneurial behavior. This could be due to the sole focus on the motivational aspects of behavioral change. Action planning, a volitional intervention used to modify health behavior, could resolve the inconsistent results mentioned above. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the direct impacts of action planning intervention (API) following entrepreneurship education (EE) on ESE, EI, and opportunity recognition and to examine the behavioral change process from motivational and volitional perspectives. In this randomized controlled trial (RCT), we considered action planning to enhance entrepreneurial behavior after EE. The sample included 83 participants from a university in Myanmar. We randomly assigned the students to the API and control groups. We collected data on ESE and EI before and after training. We used objective measures for opportunity recognition through an opportunity evaluation framework. Serial mediation analysis revealed that the volitional impact on opportunity recognition was positively significant. From a motivational standpoint, ESE improved significantly, but we found no significant impact on EI; ESE and EI were serial mediators, with no specific mediation solely by ESE or EI. The findings contribute to the EE literature by presenting a brief and cost-effective API for EE. Full article

With the proliferation of video surveillance system deployment and related applications, real-time video analysis is very critical to achieving intelligent monitoring, autonomous driving, etc. Analyzing video stream with high accuracy and low latency through the traditional cloud computing represents a non-trivial problem. In this paper, we propose a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based edge real-time video analysis framework with one edge server (ES) and multiple user equipments (UEs). A cost minimization problem composed of delay, energy and accuracy is formulated to improve the quality of experience (QoE) of the UEs. In order to efficiently solve this problem, we propose the joint video frame resolution scaling, task offloading, and resource allocation algorithm based on the Deep Q-Learning Network (JVFRS-TO-RA-DQN), which effectively overcomes the sparsity of the single-layer reward function and accelerates the training convergence speed. JVFRS-TO-RA-DQN consists of two DQN networks to reduce the curse of dimensionality, which, respectively, select the offloading and resource allocation action, as well as the resolution scaling action. The experimental results show that JVFRS-TO-RA-DQN can effectively reduce the cost of edge computing and has better performance in terms of convergence compared to other baseline schemes. Full article

Medication adherence is a key precondition of the effectiveness of evidence-based therapies. However, in real-life settings, non-adherence to medication is still very common. This leads to profound health and economic consequences at both individual and public health levels. The problem of non-adherence has been extensively studied in the last 50 years. Unfortunately, with more than 130,000 scientific papers published on that subject so far, we are still far from finding an ultimate solution. This is, at least partly, due to fragmented and poor-quality research that has been conducted in this field sometimes. To overcome this deadlock, there is a need to stimulate the adoption of best practices in medication adherence-related research in a systematic way. Therefore, herein we propose the establishment of dedicated medication adherence research Centres of Excellence (CoEs). These Centres could not only conduct research but could also create a profound societal impact, directly serving the needs of patients, healthcare providers, systems and economies. Additionally, they could play a role as local advocates for good practices and education. In this paper, we propose some practical steps that might be taken in order to establish such CoEs. We describe two success stories, i.e., Dutch and Polish Medication Adherence Research CoEs. The COST Action “European Network to Advance Best practices & technoLogy on medication adherencE” (ENABLE) aims to develop a detailed definition of the Medication Adherence Research CoE in the form of a list of minimal requirements regarding their objectives, structure and activities. We hope that it will help to create a critical mass and catalyse the setup of regional and national Medication Adherence Research CoEs in the near future. This, in turn, may not only increase the quality of the research but also raise the awareness of non-adherence and promote the adoption of the best medication adherence-enhancing interventions. Full article

Ecosystem services have been steadily incorporated into policy and planning, particularly for conservation. While biophysical and economic values are often part of ecosystems assessments, integrating participatory approaches with these valuation tools into planning is essential. This study demonstrates the importance of undertaking case studies with an integrated approach from valuation to practice. We focus on the evaluation of ecosystem services based on user priorities in three different countries that comprise the northwestern part of the Amazon basin: Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. A total of 473 community and government representatives were interviewed and their priorities for ecosystem services were elicited. We used three approaches to value the prioritized services, market prices, cost avoided, and the value transfer method. We linked the economic valuation results with policy and development alternatives that focus on ES management and we utilized an adaptive policy framework as a crucial step to assess the “trade off” in relation to any given economic, social, and environmental goal. Seven ecosystem services were identified as priorities: fish, timber, and non-timber forest products as provisioning services; disease regulation, water purification, and carbon sequestration as regulating services; and scenic beauty as the only cultural service. The ecosystem services contributing to the highest proportion of local GDP were regulation of malaria (3.9%) in Colombia, followed by ecotourism (1.75%) in Ecuador and fish (1.7%) in Peru. The instruments developed to help integrate this information into policy actions are mostly related to improving the property right systems currently implemented in each country. The results of this study will enable the management of ecosystem service values to be targeted in planning development at the subnational level in each country. Full article

The Vermont (VT) Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA, 2020) sets greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets at 26% below 2005 by 2025, 40% below 1990 by 2030 and 80% below 1990 by 2050 for energy-related emissions only. Vermont’s omission of GHG emissions from land conversions could result in significant costs of inaction (COI), which could hinder the state’s mitigation and adaptation plans and result in climate crisis-related risks (e.g., credit downgrade). Science-based spatio-temporal data of GHG emissions from soils because of land conversions can be integrated into the conceptual framework of “action” versus “inaction” to prevent GHG emissions. The application of soil information data and remote sensing analysis can identify the GHG emissions from land conversions, which can be expressed as “realized” social costs of “inaction”. This study demonstrates the rapid assessment of the value of regulating ecosystems services (ES) from soil organic carbon (SOC), soil inorganic carbon (SIC), and total soil carbon (TSC) stocks, based on the concept of the avoided social cost of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions for VT by soil order and county using remote sensing and information from the State Soil Geographic (STATSGO) and Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO) databases. Classified land cover data for 2001 and 2016 were downloaded from the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC) website. These results provide accurate and quantitative spatio-temporal information about likely GHG emissions, which can be linked to VT’s climate action plan. A failure to considerably reduce emissions from land conversions would increase climate change costs and potential legal consequences for VT and beyond its borders. Full article

Coastline ecological restoration is a critical approach for improving the coastal ecological environment and natural disaster mitigation capacity. Zhejiang Province, with the longest coastline in China, has carried out a three-year action of coastline remediation and restoration, expecting to complete the 300-km coastline restoration by 2020 as part of China’s coastline restoration project. We developed a cost–benefit framework synthesizing the ecosystem services (ES) analysis pattern and input-output approach to evaluate Zhejiang’s coastline ecological restoration projects. The results showed that the average value of ecosystem services (VES) of coastline restoration in Zhejiang was approximately 11,829 yuan/m, which was lower than the average VES of natural coastline. Obviously, damaged natural coastline could cause VES degradation, which cannot make up for the loss in a short time. In an optimistic scenario, coastline ecological restoration projects would deliver enormous well-being to Zhejiang and even China. Our results suggested that making decisions should be based on the net value after accounting for costs (NES), because ignoring costs might mislead planners to overstate the perceived benefits. The study provided a realistic data basis and method for coastline restoration projects in terms of the design, implementation and effectiveness evaluation to achieve sustainable development. Full article

Nanomaterials featuring branched carbon nanotubes (b-CNTs), nanofibers (b-CNFs), or other types of carbon nanostructures (CNSs) are of great interest due to their outstanding mechanical and electronic properties. They are promising components of nanodevices for a wide variety of advanced applications spanning from batteries and fuel cells to conductive-tissue regeneration in medicine. In this concise review, we describe the methods to produce branched CNSs, with particular emphasis on the most widely used b-CNTs, the experimental and theoretical studies on their properties, and the wide range of demonstrated and proposed applications, highlighting the branching structural features that ultimately allow for enhanced performance relative to traditional, unbranched CNSs. Full article

Drilling more efficiently and with less non-productive time (NPT) is one of the key enablers to reduce field development costs. In this work, we investigate the application of a data-driven optimization method called extremum seeking (ES) to achieve more efficient and safe drilling through automatic real-time minimization of the mechanical specific energy (MSE). The ES algorithm gathers information about the current downhole conditions by performing small tests with the applied weight on bit (WOB) and drill string rotational rate (RPM) while drilling and automatically implements optimization actions based on the test results. The ES method does not require an a priori model of the drilling process and can thus be applied even in instances when sufficiently accurate drilling models are not available. The proposed algorithm can handle various drilling constraints related to drilling dysfunctions and hardware limitations. The algorithm’s performance is demonstrated by simulations, where the algorithm successfully finds and maintains the optimal WOB and RPM while adhering to drilling constraints in various settings. The simulations show that the ES method is able to track changes in the optimal WOB and RPM corresponding to changes in the drilled formation. As demonstrated in the simulation scenarios, the overall improvements in rate of penetration (ROP) can be up to 20–170%, depending on the initial guess of the optimal WOB and RPM obtained from e.g., a drill-off test or a potentially inaccurate model. The presented algorithm is supplied with specific design choices and tuning considerations that facilitate its simple and efficient use in drilling applications. Full article

This study presents an integrated examination of both the ecosystem services (ES) and ecosystem disservices (EDS) associated with smallholder animal husbandry in rural livelihoods in three villages in southeast South Africa. It recognises the contribution of ES supporting and resulting from smallholder livestock and poultry production, but also details the limiting factors or EDS, such as tick-borne disease, birds of prey or unpalatable rangeland, produced by the same system. Using a mixed-methods approach, including focus group discussions with various Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) activities, key informant interviews, household surveys and land-use change mapping on GIS, we consider the relative value and benefits from ES after the effects of EDS, as well as the management and strategies that households adopt to minimise EDS. The effects of ES and EDS were expressed in economic terms to provide a common framework to assess the magnitude of their contribution or effect. Although animal husbandry made measurable contributions to households, with an average gross value of between R2605–R9753 across villages, EDS undermined the meaningful production of livestock and poultry goods and services. The average EDS-induced economic loss in households was between R8289–R22,426 per annum. Despite active management, often at substantial cost to the household, EDS undermined the health of livestock which resulted in a loss of the animal or potential goods and services produced. We emphasise the need to recognise both the positive and negative contributions of ecosystems to identify the complex feedbacks between ES and EDS which interact to determine local ways of doing things. Full article