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Abstract. The goal of this research work was to assist consumers in considering environmental aspects of food consumption. A simplified, modular LCA approach has been used to evaluate the impacts from the consumers ' point of view. Comparative LCA's have been calculated for five single aspects of decisions: type of agricultural practice, origin, packaging material, type of preservation, and consumption. The inventory for one module includes the environmental impacts related to one particular product characteristic. The modular LCA allows one to investigate the trade-offs among different decision parameters. It could be shown that most of the decision parameters might have an influence on the overall impact of a vegetable product. Greenhouse production and vegetables transported by air cause the highest surplus environmental impact. For meat products, the agricultural production determines the overall environmental impact. The total impact for vegetable or meat purchases ma...

The purpose of the article is to analyse Operation “Olympic Games” including, in particular, to indicate the political background to the activities aimed at preventing the development of Iran’s nuclear programme, and to examine the preparation and conduct of the operation, the involvement of the US and Israeli intelligence services, and the use of intelligence methods and sources. An equally important objective is to indicate the real consequences of the cyberattack with the Stuxnet virus. In the research process, a critical analysis of literature in the field of Intelligence Studies and source materials (including legal acts, strategies, reports, and other official studies of the entities forming the US Intelligence Community) was carried out. The example of Operation Olympics Games shows that complex cyber-sabotage operations resulting in the destruction of critical infrastructure on a large scale require the involvement of numerous state resources and advanced cyber activities, a...

Guidelines designed to aid in the restoration of rare species have been previously proposed using two primary strategies to select individuals for augmentation and reintroduction: mixing progeny from different populations or separating individuals from different populations. Understanding the genetic structure and diversity of an endangered species can offer insights into conservation management strategies. We used random amplified polymorphic DNA markers to assess the genetic structure and diversity of Jacquemontia reclinata, a federally endangered species endemic to Southeastern Florida. We sampled 20 percent of total number of individuals from eight of the ten known wild populations. Across individuals high levels of polymorphic loci (94.7%) were found and larger populations had greater genetic diversity. Cluster and ordination analyses found that one population was genetically differentiated from all the others; this population grows in a unique habitat. Most genetic variation (77.5%) was found within populations, and genetic distances between populations were not explained by their geographic distances. We recommend the use of two management units in restoration programs for J. reclinata, one consisting of the genetically differentiated population and the second consisting of the other seven populations sampled.Dos estrategias diferentes para la selección de individuos se han propuesto en los programas de restauración de especies raras. La primera se basa en la mezcla de progenies de varias poblaciones, la segunda considera más adecuado el separar individuos de poblaciones diferentes. El entender la estructura y la diversidad genética de una especie amenazada puede ofrecer una gran ayuda en el establecimiento de estrategias de conservación. Usamos marcadores moleculares RAPDs para estimar la estructura y la diversidad genética de Jacquemontia reclinata, una especie considerada como amenazad por el gobierno federal de Estados Unidos de América y que es endemica del sureste de Florida. Veinte por ciento de los individuos conocidos de J. reclinata se muestrearon en ocho de las diez poblaciones conocidas de esta especie. Se encontraron un gran número de loci polimórficos (94.7%) y en general poblaciones con un alto número de individuos tienen mayores niveles de diversidad genética. Técnicas de análisis multivariante de agrupamiento y ordenación sugieren que una de las poblaciones está geneticamente diferenciada de las otras. La mayor parte de la diversidad genética se encuentra dentro de las poblaciones (77.5%) y las distancias genéticas entre poblaciones no aparecen correlacionadas por sus distancias geográficas. Se recomienda el uso de dos unidades de manejo en programas de restauración de J. reclinata, una de ellas formada por la población que se ha diferenciado geneticamente de las otras, la segunda formada pr el resto de las siete poblaciones estudiadas.

City size distributions, defined on the basis of population, are often described by power laws. Zipf's Law states that the exponent of the power law for rank-size distributions of cities is near −1. Verification of power law scaling for city size distributions at continental and global scales is complicated by small sample sizes, inappropriate estimation techniques, inconsistent definitions of urban

This article seeks to quantitatively assess the impact of exchange rate volatility on nonoil export flows in Nigeria. Theoretically, volatility-trade link is ambiguous, although a strand of studies reported inverse link between export flow and volatility. This article employed fundamental analysis where the flow of nonoil exports from the Nigerian economy is assumed to be predicated on fundamental variables: the naira exchange rate volatility, the US dollar volatility, Nigeria's Terms of Trade (TOT) and Index of Openness (OPN). Empirical results showed the presence of unit root at level; however, the null hypothesis of nonstationarity was rejected at first difference. Cointegration results revealed that a stable long-run equilibrium relationship exists between nonoil exports and the fundamental variables. Using quarterly observations for 20 years, vector cointegration estimate revealed that the naira exchange rate volatility decreased nonoil exports by 3.65%, while the same estimate for the US dollar volatility increased export of nonoil in Nigeria by 5.2% in the year 2003. This article recommends the measures that would promote greater openness of the economy and exchange rate stability in the economy.

This paper deals with design and development of an automated testing tool for Object Oriented Software. By an automated testing tool, we mean a tool that automates a part of the testing process. It can include one or more of the following processes: test strategy generation, test case generation, test case execution, test data generation, reporting and logging results. By object-oriented software we mean a software designed using OO approach and implemented using a OO language. Testing of OO software is different from testing software created using procedural languages. Several new challenges are posed. In the past most of the methods for testing OO software were just a simple extension of existing methods for conventional software. However, they have been shown to be not very appropriate. Hence, new techniques have been developed. This thesis work has mainly focused on testing design specifications for OO software. As described later, there is a lack of specification-based testing ...

El presente trabajo aporta novedades de la obra antropológica del psiquiatra suizo Luis Binswanger, en tanto que fenomenólogo mostrando el camino recorrido por este especialista de las ciencias de la intimidad en la búsqueda de un método y una fundamentación ...

Recommended Citation Shrestha, MB and Chowdhury, K., A Sequential Procedure for Testing Unit Roots in the Presence of Structural Break in Time Series Data, Department of Economics, University of Wollongong, 2005. http://ro.uow.edu.au/commwkpapers/112

We study a general class of non-cooperative games coming from combinatorial covering and facility location problems. A game for k players is based on an integer programming formulation. Each player wants to satisfy a subset of the constraints. Variables represent resources, which are available in costly integer units and must be bought. The cost can be shared arbitrarily between players. Once a unit is bought, it can be used by all players to satisfy their constraints. In general the cost of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in this game can be prohibitively high, as both prices of anarchy and stability are in Θ(k). In addition, deciding the existence of pure Nash equilibria is NP-hard. These results extend to recently studied single-source connection games. Under certain conditions, however, cheap Nash equilibria exist: if the integrality gap of the underlying integer program is 1 and in the case of single constraint players. In addition, we present algorithms that compute cheap approximate Nash equilibria in polynomial time.

The invention is a microcomponent sheet architecture wherein macroscale unit processes are performed by microscale components. The sheet architecture may be a single laminate with a plurality of separate microcomponent sections or the sheet architecture may be a plurality of laminates with one or more microcomponent sections on each laminate. Each microcomponent or plurality of like microcomponents perform at least one chemical process unit operation. A first laminate having a plurality of like first microcomponents is combined with at least a second laminate having a plurality of like second microcomponents thereby combining at least two unit operations to achieve a system operation.

This paper presents a new test for fractionally integrated (FI) processes. In particular, we propose a testing procedure in the time domain that extends the well-known Dickey-Fuller approach, originally designed for the I(1) versus I(0) case, to the more general setup of FId0 versus FId1, with d1 < d0. When d0 = 1, the proposed test statistics are based on the OLS estimator, or its t-ratio, of the coefficient on d1yt−1 in a regression of yt on d1yt−1 and, possibly, some lags of yt. When d1 is not taken to be known a priori, a pre-estimation of d1 is needed to implement the test. We show that the choice of any T 1/2-consistent estimator of d1 ∈ 0 1 suffices to make the test feasible, while achieving asymptotic normality. Monte-Carlo simulations support the analytical results derived in the paper and show that proposed tests fare very well, both in terms of power and size, when compared with others available in the literature. The paper ends with two empirical applications.

Testing for unit roots has special significance in terms of both economic theory and the interpretation of estimation results. As there are several methods available, researchers face method selection problem while conducting the unit root test on time series data in the presence of structural break. This paper proposes a sequential search procedure to determine the best test method for