Knoxschack4358

Bathymetric surveys of the same body of water, performed at regular intervals, apart from updating the geospatial information used to create paper and electronic maps, allow for several additional analyses, including an evaluation of geomorphological changes occurring in the coastal zone. This research is particularly important in places where the shape of the coastal zone has been violently disturbed, including by human activity. Tombolo is such a phenomenon and it dynamically shapes the new hydrological conditions of the coastal zone. Apart from natural factors, it may be caused by the construction of hydrotechnical facilities in the littoral zone. It causes a significant disturbance in the balance of the marine environment, resulting in the bottom accretion and dynamic changes in the coastline. This has been the case since 2010 in Sopot, where the rapidly advancing tombolo is not only changing environmental relations but also threatening the health-spa character of the town by stopping the transport of sand along the coast. This paper analyses changes in seabed shape in the pier area in Sopot between 2010 and 2018. In the analysis, both archival maps and bathymetric surveys over a period of 8 years were used; based on these, numerical bottom models were developed and their geospatial changes were analyzed. The results showed that changes in the seabed in this area are progressing very quickly, despite periodic dredging actions organized by administrative bodies.Hispanic children constitute the largest ethnic minority in the United States of America, and yet few studies examine the relationship between mindfulness and Hispanic children's quality of life. This 2018 study seeks to gain insight into how mindfulness is associated with Hispanic children's quality of life. We surveyed 96 children in 5th- and 6th-grade classes in three Northern New Jersey elementary schools in 2018. Structure Equation Modeling was used to examine the associations between mindfulness, executive function, social-emotional skills, and quality of life. The results indicate that mindfulness is significantly and directly associated with executive function (β = 0.53), and that executive function is positively associated with social-emotional skills (β = 0.54) and quality of life (β = 0.51) of the sampled Hispanic children. The total effects on quality of life are significant for mindfulness (β = 0.33), executive function (β = 0.62), and social-emotional skills (β = 0.20). The findings shed light upon factors that can affect Hispanic children's quality of life and call for interventions related to these factors in order to improve their well-being.The major purpose of this research was to study the predictive value of the top managers' psychological characteristics regarding their networking behavior. In the international business management context of small- and medium-sized enterprises, we took the top managers' cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence as determinant capabilities to perform better in their external networking. The sample was composed of 307 Portuguese SMEs' international decision-makers, specifically founders, owners, chief executive officers (CEOs), managers of international activities, international market managers, or commercial managers. The data was collected from 2-30 April 2019 through online surveys directed to the Portuguese decision-makers that were directly responsible for the firms' international activities. As a data collection instrument, the surveys were pretested and sent by e-mail. The average age of the participants was approximately 50 years old for males and 45 years old for females. Spautin-1 inhibitor We used self-reported measures to assess the different constructs and the hierarchical regression analysis to test our hypotheses. The results showed that cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence were significant drivers of decision-makers' external networking behavior. A new factor structure concerning external networking behavior was retained. The major results exhibited the predictive value of some cultural and emotional intelligence dimensions over the new retained external networking behavior factors. Therefore, in the international business management context, the capability to adapt to new cultural contexts, as well as the capability to reason about emotions, improved the international decision-makers' external networking behavior.Real-time obstacle avoidance path planning is critically important for a robot when it operates in a crowded or cluttered workspace. At the same time, the computational cost is a big concern once the degree of freedom (DOF) of a robot is high. A novel path planning strategy, the distorted configuration space (DC-space) method, was proposed and proven to outperform the traditional search-based methods in terms of computational efficiency. link2 However, the original DC-space method did not sufficiently consider the demands on automatic planning, convex space preservation, and path optimization, which makes it not practical when applied to the path planning for robot manipulators. The treatments for the problems mentioned above are proposed in this paper, and their applicability is examined on a three DOFs robot. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed improved distorted configuration space (IDCS) method on rapidly finding an obstacle-free path. Besides, the optimized IDCS method is presented to shorten the generated path. The performance of the above algorithms is compared with the classic Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) searching method in terms of their computation time and path length.Tomato, and its concentrate are important food ingredients with outstanding gastronomic and industrial importance due to their unique organoleptic, dietary, and compositional properties. Various forms of food adulteration are often suspected in the different tomato-based products causing major economic and sometimes even health problems for the farmers, food industry and consumers. Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and electronic tongue (e-tongue) have been lauded as advanced, high sensitivity techniques for quality control. The aim of the present research was to detect and predict relatively low concentration of adulterants, such as paprika seed and corn starch (0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10%), sucrose and salt (0.5, 1, 2, 5%), in tomato paste using conventional (soluble solid content, consistency) and advanced analytical techniques (NIR spectroscopy, e-tongue). The results obtained with the conventional methods were analyzed with univariate statistics (ANOVA), while the data obtained with advanced analytical methods were analyzed with multivariate methods (Principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), partial least squares regression (PLSR). The conventional methods were only able to detect adulteration at higher concentrations (5-10%). For NIRS and e-tongue, good accuracies were obtained, even in identifying minimal adulterant concentrations (0.5%). Comparatively, NIR spectroscopy proved to be easier to implement and more accurate during our evaluations, when the adulterant contents were estimated with R2 above 0.96 and root mean square error (RMSE) below 1%.The profile of the profession of pharmacists has profoundly changed over the last decades. Pharmacy education has moved towards competency-based education. The pharmacy game, called GIMMICS®, developed at the University of Groningen, is unique in combining simulation with serious gaming to teach a wide range of competencies. In this article, we describe the learning goals, the assessment methods, the teaching tools, and the students' view of the pharmacy game. The learning goals are to train the competencies of collaboration, leadership, communication, and pharmaceutical expertise. The core of the game is the simulation of community pharmacy practice activities, such as patient counseling, processing of prescriptions, and collaboration with other health professionals. Students are assessed individually and as a pharmacy team. The pharmacy team, with the largest number of patients wins the game. Student evaluations show that they value the course. Currently, seven universities from around the globe have adopted the pharmacy game in their curriculum, adjusting the course to their country's pharmacy practice and educational system.The discussion of fungal species delineation has yet to reach a consensus, despite the advancements in technology, which helped modernise traditional approaches. In particular, the phylogenetic species concept was one of the tools that has been used with considerable success across the fungal kingdom. The fast rise of fungal genomics provides an unprecedented opportunity to expand measuring the relatedness of fungal strains to the level of whole genomes. However, the use of genomic information in taxonomy has only just begun, and few methodological guidelines have been suggested so far. Here, a simple approach of computationally measuring genomic distances and their use as a standard for species delineation is investigated. A fixed threshold genomic distance calculated by the quick and easy-to-use tools Mash and Dashing proved to be an unexpectedly widely applicable and robust criterion for determining whether two genomes belong to the same or to different species. The accuracy of species delineation in an uncurated dataset of GenBank fungal genomes was close to 90%-and exceeded 90% with minimal curation. As expected, the discriminative power of this approach was lower at higher taxonomic ranks, but still significantly larger than zero. Simple instructions for calculation of a genomic distance between two genomes and species similarity thresholds at different k-mer sizes are suggested. The calculation of genomic distance is identified as a powerful approach for delineating fungal species and is proposed-not as the only criterion-but as an additional tool in the versatile toolbox of fungal taxonomy.Declining rate of productivity and environmental sustainability is forcing growers to use organic manures as a source of nutrient supplement in maize farming. However, weed is a major constraint to maize production. A field study was carried out over two seasons to evaluate various integrated nutrient and weed management practices in hybrid maize. The treatment combinations comprised of supplementation of inorganic fertilizer (25% nitrogen) through bulky (Farmyard manure and vermicompost) and concentrated (Brassicaceous seed meal (BSM) and neem cake (NC)) organic manures and different mode of weed management practices like chemical (atrazine 1000 g ha-1) and integrated approach (atrazine 1000 g ha-1 followed by mechanical weeding). Repeated supplementation of nitrogen through concentrated organic manures reduced the density and biomass accumulation of most dominant weed species, Anagalis arvensis by releasing allelochemicals into the soil. link3 But organic manures had no significant impact on restricting the growth of bold seeded weeds like Vicia hirsuta and weed propagated through tubers i.e., Cyperus rotundus in maize. By restricting the weed growth and nutrient removal by most dominating weeds, application of BSM enhanced the growth and yield of maize crop. Repeated addition of organic manures (BSM) enhanced the maize grain yield by 19% over sole chemical fertilizer in the second year of study. Application of atrazine as pre-emergence (PRE) herbicide significantly reduced the density of A. arvensis, whereas integration of mechanical weeding following herbicide controlled those weeds which were not usually controlled with the application of atrazine. As a result, atrazine at PRE followed by mechanical weeding produced the highest maize grain yield 6.81 and 7.10 t/ha in the first year and second year of study, respectively.