1,132 research outputs found

    Increasing Sustainable Bivalve Aquaculture Productivity Using Remote Non-Invasive Sensing and Upweller Technologies

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    The work and findings described by this thesis aim to develop technologies and approaches relevant to bivalve aquaculture, focusing on non invasive sensing to monitor bivalve shellfish, primarily the Pacific oyster (Magallana gigas). Following the introduction, Chapter 2 presents an overview of the Non Invasive Oyster Sensor (NOSy), a sensor developed at the University of Essex that records bivalve openness (gape). NOSy was conceived to automatically detect spawning as an aid to oyster growers and has proved useful in field and laboratory, work which underpins three chapters in this thesis. NOSy remains under development, and has potential for use in aquaculture, monitoring and research. Chapter 3 assesses the role of salinity in driving estuarine oyster behaviour. We replicated an estuarine tidal salinity cycle and recorded the gape of oysters exposed to it. Behaviours during the experiment did not resemble those in the estuary, suggesting that salinity alone does not drive estuarine oyster behaviour. We also discuss the challenges of controlling salinity in a laboratory, and suggest it is an under-studied area. Chapter 4 discusses land based systems for young oyster growing. Land-based systems have the potential to improve growth, condition and survival while reducing labour and maintenance costs. We trialled a system over three summers, with promising results. Reduction of localised densities improved growth rate and uniformity. Cost forecasts suggest that adoption of land based growing systems could result in substantial savings. Chapter 5 presents gaping records from an area where Blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) have become non harvestable in recent years due to contamination. We used NOSy to assess gaping patterns of the mussel population to evaluate how their behaviours affect their vulnerability to contamination. Mussels in the bay closed over low tide as a response to extremely low salinity, inferring protection from contamination by limiting the mussel’s exposure

    Children and Youth at Risk in Times of Transition: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

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    Children and youth belong to one of the most vulnerable groups in societies. This was the case even before the current humanitarian crises around the world which led millions of people and families to flee from wars, terror, poverty and exploitation. Minors have been denied human rights such as access to education, food and health services. They have been kidnapped, sold, manipulated, mutilated, killed, and injured. This has been and continues to be the case in both developed and developing countries, and it does not look as if the situation will improve in the near future. Rather, current geopolitical developments, political and economic uncertainties and instabilities seem to be increasing the vulnerability of minors, especially in the wars and armed conflicts currently being waged not only in Europe, but on almost every continent. How can risks children and youth are exposed to in times of transition be reduced? Which role do state agencies, non-governmental organisations, as well as children's coping strategies play in mitigating the vulnerabilities of minors? This volume addresses risks to which children and young people are exposed, especially in times of transition. The focus is on different groups of children in the European wartime and post-war societies of the Second World War, 'occupation children' in Germany, teenage National Socialist collaborators in Norway, and more recent cases such as child soldiers, refugee children, and children of European "Islamic State" fighters. The contributions come from international scholars and different academic disciplines (educational and social sciences, humanities, law, and international peace and conflict studies) and are based on historical, quantitative, and/or qualitative analyses.Kinder und Jugendliche gehören zu den am meisten gefährdeten Gruppen einer Gesellschaft. Dies war auch schon vor den aktuellen humanitären Krisen in der Welt der Fall, die Millionen von Menschen und Familien zur Flucht vor Kriegen, Terror, Armut und Ausbeutung veranlassten. Minderjährigen wurden Menschenrechte wie der Zugang zu Bildung, Nahrung und medizinischer Versorgung verweigert. Sie wurden entführt, verkauft, manipuliert, verstümmelt, getötet und verletzt. Dies war und ist sowohl in den Industrie- als auch in den Entwicklungsländern der Fall, und es sieht nicht so aus, als würde sich die Situation in naher Zukunft verbessern. Dieser Band befasst sich mit Risiken, denen Kinder und Jugendliche vor allem in Zeiten des Übergangs ausgesetzt sind. Im Mittelpunkt stehen verschiedene Gruppen von Kindern in den europäischen Kriegs- und Nachkriegsgesellschaften des Zweiten Weltkriegs, "Besatzungskinder" in Deutschland, jugendliche NS-Kollaborateure in Norwegen und neuere Fälle wie Kindersoldat*innen, Flüchtlingskinder und Kinder von europäischen "Islamischen Staat"-Kämpfer*innen. Die Beiträge stammen von internationalen Wissenschaftler*innen und verschiedenen akademischen Disziplinen (Erziehungs- und Sozialwissenschaften, Geisteswissenschaften, Rechtswissenschaften und internationale Friedens- und Konfliktstudien) und basieren auf historischen, quantitativen und/oder qualitativen Analysen

    Effects of municipal smoke-free ordinances on secondhand smoke exposure in the Republic of Korea

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    ObjectiveTo reduce premature deaths due to secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure among non-smokers, the Republic of Korea (ROK) adopted changes to the National Health Promotion Act, which allowed local governments to enact municipal ordinances to strengthen their authority to designate smoke-free areas and levy penalty fines. In this study, we examined national trends in SHS exposure after the introduction of these municipal ordinances at the city level in 2010.MethodsWe used interrupted time series analysis to assess whether the trends of SHS exposure in the workplace and at home, and the primary cigarette smoking rate changed following the policy adjustment in the national legislation in ROK. Population-standardized data for selected variables were retrieved from a nationally representative survey dataset and used to study the policy action’s effectiveness.ResultsFollowing the change in the legislation, SHS exposure in the workplace reversed course from an increasing (18% per year) trend prior to the introduction of these smoke-free ordinances to a decreasing (−10% per year) trend after adoption and enforcement of these laws (β2 = 0.18, p-value = 0.07; β3 = −0.10, p-value = 0.02). SHS exposure at home (β2 = 0.10, p-value = 0.09; β3 = −0.03, p-value = 0.14) and the primary cigarette smoking rate (β2 = 0.03, p-value = 0.10; β3 = 0.008, p-value = 0.15) showed no significant changes in the sampled period. Although analyses stratified by sex showed that the allowance of municipal ordinances resulted in reduced SHS exposure in the workplace for both males and females, they did not affect the primary cigarette smoking rate as much, especially among females.ConclusionStrengthening the role of local governments by giving them the authority to enact and enforce penalties on SHS exposure violation helped ROK to reduce SHS exposure in the workplace. However, smoking behaviors and related activities seemed to shift to less restrictive areas such as on the streets and in apartment hallways, negating some of the effects due to these ordinances. Future studies should investigate how smoke-free policies beyond public places can further reduce the SHS exposure in ROK

    Aligning the Peatland Code with the UK Peatland Inventory [Final report]

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    The updated report, released March 2023, presents the results of research to update and expand the Peatland Code including updating existing Peatland Code Emission Factors to align them with the UK Peatland Inventory; investigating the potential to include new reporting categories in the Code; and assessing opportunities for improved emissions reporting

    SUTMS - Unified Threat Management Framework for Home Networks

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    Home networks were initially designed for web browsing and non-business critical applications. As infrastructure improved, internet broadband costs decreased, and home internet usage transferred to e-commerce and business-critical applications. Today’s home computers host personnel identifiable information and financial data and act as a bridge to corporate networks via remote access technologies like VPN. The expansion of remote work and the transition to cloud computing have broadened the attack surface for potential threats. Home networks have become the extension of critical networks and services, hackers can get access to corporate data by compromising devices attacked to broad- band routers. All these challenges depict the importance of home-based Unified Threat Management (UTM) systems. There is a need of unified threat management framework that is developed specifically for home and small networks to address emerging security challenges. In this research, the proposed Smart Unified Threat Management (SUTMS) framework serves as a comprehensive solution for implementing home network security, incorporating firewall, anti-bot, intrusion detection, and anomaly detection engines into a unified system. SUTMS is able to provide 99.99% accuracy with 56.83% memory improvements. IPS stands out as the most resource-intensive UTM service, SUTMS successfully reduces the performance overhead of IDS by integrating it with the flow detection mod- ule. The artifact employs flow analysis to identify network anomalies and categorizes encrypted traffic according to its abnormalities. SUTMS can be scaled by introducing optional functions, i.e., routing and smart logging (utilizing Apriori algorithms). The research also tackles one of the limitations identified by SUTMS through the introduction of a second artifact called Secure Centralized Management System (SCMS). SCMS is a lightweight asset management platform with built-in security intelligence that can seamlessly integrate with a cloud for real-time updates

    Towards A Practical High-Assurance Systems Programming Language

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    Writing correct and performant low-level systems code is a notoriously demanding job, even for experienced developers. To make the matter worse, formally reasoning about their correctness properties introduces yet another level of complexity to the task. It requires considerable expertise in both systems programming and formal verification. The development can be extremely costly due to the sheer complexity of the systems and the nuances in them, if not assisted with appropriate tools that provide abstraction and automation. Cogent is designed to alleviate the burden on developers when writing and verifying systems code. It is a high-level functional language with a certifying compiler, which automatically proves the correctness of the compiled code and also provides a purely functional abstraction of the low-level program to the developer. Equational reasoning techniques can then be used to prove functional correctness properties of the program on top of this abstract semantics, which is notably less laborious than directly verifying the C code. To make Cogent a more approachable and effective tool for developing real-world systems, we further strengthen the framework by extending the core language and its ecosystem. Specifically, we enrich the language to allow users to control the memory representation of algebraic data types, while retaining the automatic proof with a data layout refinement calculus. We repurpose existing tools in a novel way and develop an intuitive foreign function interface, which provides users a seamless experience when using Cogent in conjunction with native C. We augment the Cogent ecosystem with a property-based testing framework, which helps developers better understand the impact formal verification has on their programs and enables a progressive approach to producing high-assurance systems. Finally we explore refinement type systems, which we plan to incorporate into Cogent for more expressiveness and better integration of systems programmers with the verification process

    Adjustment and automation of a damage monitoring system in poplar clone (Populus spp.) plantations using ecophysiological sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT). Applicability as an early warning system

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    [ES] El aumento significativo de plagas, enfermedades forestales y el impacto del cambio climático en las plantas, requieren del desarrollo de sistemas el seguimiento y detección temprana de los daños y efectos que provocan sobre las masas forestales, para minimizar su incidencia negativa sobre las mismas. La aplicación de la tecnología del internet de las cosas (IoT) junto con sensores ecofisiológicos son capaces de medir variables que se pueden emplear como indicadores de estrés biótico o abiótico, que permiten el seguimiento y monitoreo en tiempo casi real y de forma remota del estado sanitario de los árboles. Este trabajo ha tenido como objetivo el desarrollo un sistema de alerta temprana y seguimiento de daños, calibrado en plantaciones de clones de chopo (Populus spp.) basado en el IoT y sensores ecofisiológicos TreeTalkers (TT+), proporcionando un reporte final que contiene gráficas de las principales variables y un resumen de las alertas, para que su utilización sea operativa y permita la toma de decisiones por parte del gestor forestal. Para ello, se han desarrollado dos códigos con el lenguaje de programación en R, según el origen de los datos a emplear, que permiten la automatización del procesamiento de los datos registrados por los sensores y el reporte de alertas por valores anómalos. Estos códigos tienen la ventaja de que pueden ser aplicados a otros ecosistemas de sensores con otras especies y en otros lugares. Se ha realizado la calibración del sistema para choperas, empleando 6 sensores localizados en tres plantaciones de la provincia de León. Analizando los datos con una frecuencia de cada hora entre abril y agosto de 2022, se pudo establecer valores umbral para registrar las alertas de daños/estrés y de funcionamiento del propio sistema. Comparando los análisis de la densidad del flujo de savia medida por los sensores, con los crecimientos en diámetro medidos en campo semanalmente y con el estado sanitario determinado semanalmente de forma visual, ha permitido verificar la validez de esta variable como indicador de alerta temprana de daños en choperas. Además, se han incluido como indicadores de posibles daños los crecimientos radiales del fuste por debajo de un umbral y el ángulo de volcamiento del árbol mayor de 45°, como indicador de posibles daños mecánicos. Se prevé incluir en un futuro otros indicadores de alerta como la radiación recibida por el sensor (indicador de defoliación) o la humedad relativa del fust
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