ASSESSING THE EFFICIENCY OF LOCAL ACTION GROUPS AND AUCTIONS FOR DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING AGRI-ENVIRONMENTAL MEASURES IN THE EU - RESULTS FROM AN EXPERT SURVEY

In this article the authors focus on two important innovations for agri-environmental measures in the new council regulation: The implementation of local action groups and a call for tenders. The article describes how relevant actors assess the innovations. The results are based on 276 interviews, carried out in 2006 in nine EU Member States. Generally, actors assume that measures designed in local action groups are not necessarily more economically efficient than current measures, but they do have potential to result in a higher ecological effectiveness and in a greater acceptance. However, the opinion on auctions is comparatively critical

Evaluation of piezodiagnostics approach for leaks detection in a pipe loop

Pipe leaks detection has a great economic, environmental and safety impact. Although several methods have been developed to solve the leak detection problem, some drawbacks such as continuous monitoring and robustness should be addressed yet. Thus, this paper presents the main results of using a leaks detection and classification methodology, which takes advantage of piezodiagnostics principle. It consists of: i) transmitting/sensing guided waves along the pipe surface by means of piezoelectric device ii) representing statistically the cross-correlated piezoelectric measurements by using Principal Component Analysis iii) identifying leaks by using error indexes computed from a statistical baseline model and iv) verifying the performance of the methodology by using a Self Organizing Map as visualization tool and considering different leak scenario. In this sense, the methodology was experimentally evaluated in a carbon-steel pipe loop under different leaks scenarios, with several sizes and locations. In addition, the sensitivity of the methodology to temperature, humidity and pressure variations was experimentally validated. Therefore, the effectiveness of the methodology to detect and classify pipe leaks, under varying environmental and operational conditions, was demonstrated. As a result, the combination of piezodiagnostics approach, cross-correlation analysis, principal component analysis, and Self Organizing Maps, become as promising solution in the field of structural health monitoring and specifically to achieve robust solution for pipe leak detection.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Search versus Knowledge: An Empirical Study of Minimax on KRK

This article presents the results of an empirical experiment designed to gain insight into what is the effect of the minimax algorithm on the evaluation function. The experiment’s simulations were performed upon the KRK chess endgame. Our results show that dependencies between evaluations of sibling nodes in a game tree and an abundance of possibilities to commit blunders present in the KRK endgame are not sufficient to explain the success of the minimax principle in practical game-playing as was previously believed. The article shows that minimax in combination with a noisy evaluation function introduces a bias into the backed-up evaluations and argues that this bias is what masked the effectiveness of the minimax in previous studies

Owner’s Commitment to the Planning and Controlling Processes to Improve Performance in Small and Medium Manufacturing Companies

Owners of small companies usually have the role as the top management that has to commit to the provision of time, cost, and resources. For the top management, the most important aspect to run the business is to develop and to create a value for the company so that the value can increase the performance. Based on the previous researches, good commitment and leadership style from the top management have effects on planning and controlling processes in improving organization performance. Meanwhile, the survey results from interviewing and collecting questionnaires from 110 practitioners of small manufacturing companies and examining the hypothesis create a fit model which has been thoroughly tested using Partial Least Square (PLS). After the PLS test, the results show that: first, there is a positive effect but not significant commitment from the company owners to the effectiveness of the company planning processes second, there is a positive effect and significant commitment from the company owners to the effectiveness of the controlling processes third, planning process conducted by departments inside the company has positive effect and significance to the controlling processes in small companies fourth, the planning process conducted by companies has positive effect and significance to increase company performance fifth, the controlling process conducted by companies has positive effect and significance to increase company performance. Further exploration, owners of small companies in East Java have the tendency not to focus on planning process but to stress more on controlling process

Detection of curved lines with B-COSFIRE filters: A case study on crack delineation

The detection of curvilinear structures is an important step for various computer vision applications, ranging from medical image analysis for segmentation of blood vessels, to remote sensing for the identification of roads and rivers, and to biometrics and robotics, among others. %The visual system of the brain has remarkable abilities to detect curvilinear structures in noisy images. This is a nontrivial task especially for the detection of thin or incomplete curvilinear structures surrounded with noise. We propose a general purpose curvilinear structure detector that uses the brain-inspired trainable B-COSFIRE filters. It consists of four main steps, namely nonlinear filtering with B-COSFIRE, thinning with non-maximum suppression, hysteresis thresholding and morphological closing. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a data set of noisy images with cracked pavements, where we achieve state-of-the-art results (F-measure=0.865). The proposed method can be employed in any computer vision methodology that requires the delineation of curvilinear and elongated structures.Comment: Accepted at Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP) 201

Impact of NHS Direct on demand for immediate care: observational study

OBJECTIVES: To quantify the impact of NHS Direct on the use of accident and emergency, ambulance, and general practitioner cooperative services. DESIGN: Observational study of trends in use of NHS Direct and other immediate care services over 24 months spanning introduction of NHS Direct. Setting Three areas in England in first wave of introduction of NHS Direct, and six nearby general practitioner cooperatives as controls. SUBJECTS: All contacts with these immediate care services. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Changes in trends in use after introduction of NHS Direct. Results NHS Direct received about 68 500 calls from a population of 1.3 million in its first year of operation, of which 72% were out of hours and 22% about a child aged under 5 years. Changes in trends in use of accident and emergency departments and ambulance services after introduction of NHS Direct were small and non­significant. Changes in trends in use of general practitioner cooperatives were also small but significant, from an increase of 2.0% a month before introduction of NHS Direct to - 0.8% afterwards (relative change - 2.9% (95% confidence interval - 4.2% to - 1.5%)). This reduction in trend was significant both for calls handled by telephone advice alone and for those resulting in direct contact with a doctor. In contrast, the six control cooperatives showed no evidence of change in trend; an increase of 0.8% a month before NHS Direct and 0.9% after (relative change 0.1% ( - 0.9% to 1.1%)). CONCLUSION: In its first year NHS Direct did not reduce the pressure on NHS immediate care services, although it may have restrained increasing demand on one important part—general practitioners' out of hours services

The Effectiveness of Foreign Exchange Interventions for the Turkish Economy : A Post-Crisis Period Analysis

This study has two purposes. First, it attempts to improve the literature on foreign exchange interventions of the central banks for the emerging market economies, which have not been studied in details. The Turkish economy in the post-crisis period constitutes a good example in this context. Second, it proposes a new methodology, a time-varying parameter model, to analyze the effectiveness of the foreign exchange interventions. When the results from such an exercise are compared with the ones obtained from an event-study analysis, we find that the purchase-based interventions seem to be successful especially after the financial markets were stabilized. In that sense, we detect an asymmetry regarding the effectiveness of interventions. About the relationship between the interest rates and the exchange rates, we find that the uncovered interest rate parity condition operates in an unconventional way supporting the views put forth by the new emerging markets literature.Foreign Exchange Interventions, Emerging Markets, Event Study and Time Varying Parameter Model

Hardware architecture implemented on FPGA for protecting cryptographic keys against side-channel attacks

This paper presents a new hardware architecture designed for protecting the key of cryptographic algorithms against attacks by side-channel analysis (SCA). Unlike previous approaches already published, the fortress of the proposed architecture is based on revealing a false key. Such a false key is obtained when the leakage information, related to either the power consumption or the electromagnetic radiation (EM) emitted by the hardware device, is analysed by means of a classical statistical method. In fact, the trace of power consumption (or the EM) does not reveal any significant sign of protection in its behaviour or shape. Experimental results were obtained by using a Virtex 5 FPGA, on which a 128-bit version of the standard AES encryption algorithm was implemented. The architecture could easily be extrapolated to an ASIC device based on standard cell libraries. The system is capable of concealing the real key when various attacks are performed on the AES algorithm, using two statistical methods which are based on correlation, the Welch’s t-test and the difference of means.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft