What is Allium achaium Boiss. & Orph.? Disentangling the taxonomy of a Greek mountain species

Allium oreohellenicum Tzanoud., Tsakiri & Raus (Amaryllidaceae), endemic of the Greek mountains, is described and illustrated as a species new to science. Information regarding its cytology, geographical distribution and taxonomic relationships is also provided. Material belonging to A. oreohellenicum was formerly known/classified as A. achaium Boiss & Orph., a taxon described in 1882 based on a gathering by Orphanides from Mt Klokos (N Peloponnisos, Greece). A detailed study of the Orphanides gathering concerned revealed that it essentially belongs to A. frigidum Boiss. & Heldr., a taxon described 28 years earlier, and so the need for a new name

Southern Orientation and Natural Cross Ventilation: Mind the Gap(s) What Clients, Valuers, Realtors and Architects Believe

Sun, Air and Water are the most powerful sources of life on earth. Southern Orientation (SO) and Natural Cross Ventilation (NCV) are the best expressions of our relationship to those eternal forces. SO and NCV are behind any successful Passive Solar Design. Health, comfort, air quality, natural lighting, residential satisfaction, good micro-climatic conditions, green spaces, vegetation, energy-saving, and psychological well-being rely on these two archetypal determinants. Architectural practice is constantly accentuating the fact that our homes and cities need solar access and ventilation. Research in the Health and environmental sector reveals an urgent need for SO and NCV. Research from the real estate field is segmented and not conclusive on these values. People are buying apartments overlooking the importance of SO and NCV. Developers are building in a bulk manner, unaware of any benefits. Realtors are underestimating these qualities. Most importantly, valuers estimate all other factors, except these two. There is confusion on what has a real value for our life and to what extend this can be measured and quantified. Survey-based economic techniques will have to be employed for the valuation of SO and NCV as for now, according to research, they do not seem to have a market value (or price). We might have to rely more on “stated preference” models, in contrast to a price-based “revealed preference” model. The contribution of this work is intended to be the trigger to all, for attention on SO and NCV as archetypal determinants of value

The Expansion of ICT: A New Framework of Inclusion and Exclusion from the Global Realm

The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their interaction with certain social systems, led to the emergence of the phenomenon of globalization. Globalization lays on a technological infrastructure that makes it possible, by minimizing the time needed for communication and inter-systemic interactions. This also, has led to a strong support of the global financial system to the ICT industry, so that the latter can provide faster applications at any level of networking, thus putting both globalization and the ICT industry in an accelerating mutual development. This paper, examines the problems certain social systems face into this new environment, due to the structural coupling of those systems with a technological backbone that functions as a system of inclusion (and thus exclusion as well) of those social systems which do not conceive of the ICT as a prerequisite for their own continuation. That situation is challenging the political subsystems, as to their ability to govern the social systems through their way towards a global society. The paper initially presents the state of globalization in a brief way and next introduces some of the basic concepts of contemporary systems theory. At the rest parts, we examine the problems posed to the basic social system-reconstituting functions by the “real-time” communications global network and finally we introduce some preliminary thoughts about the ways the political system (or any other management system for the matter) can try to solve those problems

A competence-based industrial learning approach for factories of the future

Manufacturing industry can improve its competitiveness through innovation and technological excellence, and appropriate Industrial Learning can help to achieve this goal through allowing the manufacturing workforce to acquire new skills related to the advanced developments in information and communication technologies. This raises the need for new Industrial Learning tools and methods from the viewpoint of learning content, learning processes, and delivery mechanisms. In this paper, we present a generic competence-based approach for Industrial Learning developed in the framework of ActionPlanT project. The approach is composed of (i) an Industrial Learning model which serves to represent and understand competence-based learning, and (ii) a methodology which implements through a number of steps the Industrial Learning actions defined using the Industrial Learning model in industrial organisations. Both the model and the methodology are presented in details. A metrics-based method for evaluating the implementation of the learning actions defined using the approach is also describe

Energy markets and global economic conditions

This paper evaluates alternative indicators of global economic activity and other market fundamentals in terms of their usefulness for forecasting real oil prices and global petroleum consumption. We find that world industrial production is one of the most useful indicators that has been proposed in the literature. However, by combining measures from a number of di¤erent sources we can do even better. Our analysis results in a new index of global economic conditions and new measures for assessing future tightness of energy demand and expected oil price pressures. We illustrate their usefulness for quantifying the main factors behind the severe contraction of the global economy and the price risks faced by shale oil producers in early 2020

Access to Housing and Social Inclusion in a Post-Crisis Era: Contextualizing Recent Trends in the City of Athens

The way housing affordability evolved since WW2 in Greece—and in its capital city in particular—is an example of how the South European welfare system managed, for several decades, to provide socially inclusive housing solutions without developing the services of a sizeable welfare state until global forces and related policies brought it to an end. The increased role of the market in housing provision since the 1980s, the rapid growth of mortgage lending in the 1990s, the neoliberal policy recipes imposed during the crisis of the 2010s and the unleashed demand for housing in the aftermath of the crisis have led to increased housing inequalities and converged the outcome of this South European path with the outcome of undoing socially inclusive housing solutions provided by the welfare state in other contexts. The article follows longstanding and recent developments concerning the housing model in Greece and especially in the city of Athens, focusing on mechanisms that have allowed access to affordable housing for broad parts of the population during different historical periods, and examines the extent to which the current housing model remains inclusive or not. The aim here is to discuss the most important challenges concerning access to decent housing and highlight the need for inclusive housing policies to be introduced into the current social and political agenda

Measuring the Success of Activity Based Costing within the Enterprise Resource Planning Environment in Greek Companies

Activity-based costing (ABC) is a strategic tool that can enhance all processes and functions of an organization once it is implemented successfully. This study aims to examine the ABC implementation success in Greek companies in major sectors of the economy. A web-based questionnaire was conducted between February 2020 to January 2021 and collected data from 102 companies found in major sectors of the Greek economy. ABC implementation success was assessed across five dimensions, namely, general attitude toward the implementation process, technical and technological characteristics, impact on organizational process, perceived usefulness in improving job performance, and perceive ease of use. Further, this study compared companies that fully implemented ABC to those that still practice traditional cost accounting (TCA), assessing factors that influence ABC success within Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Findings from this study show that a successful integration among ERP and ABC can minimize the operation costs and enhance the competitiveness of the enterprise. In particular, the findings indicated that the degree of ABC within ERP implementation success positively motivates the extent of its use, enhances user performance, increases productivity, and increases user satisfaction with the system. This study contributes to the existing literature since there has been limited research on measuring the success of ABC within ERP implementation in Greek companies. Further, it provides theoretical and practical insights about factors that might influence the success implementation of ABC within ERP that can be applied to other countries. Overall, entities with ABC implementation have improved outcomes relative to those with TCA

Corticotropin-releasing factor receptors couple to multiple g-proteins to activate diverse intracellular signaling pathways in mouse hippocampus: role in neuronal excitability and associative learning

Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) exerts a key neuroregulatory control on stress responses in various regions of the mammalian brain, including the hippocampus. Using hippocampal slices, extracts, and whole animals, we investigated the effects of human/rat CRF (h/rCRF) on hippocampal neuronal excitability and hippocampus-dependent learning in two mouse inbred strains, BALB/c and C57BL/6N. Intracellular recordings from slices revealed that application of h/rCRF increased the neuronal activity in both mouse inbred strains. Inhibition of protein kinase C (PKC) by bisindolylmaleimide I (BIS-I) prevented the h/rCRF effect only in hippocampal slices from BALB/c mice but not in slices from C57BL/6N mice. Inhibition of cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) by H-89 abolished the h/rCRF effect in slices from C57BL/6N mice, with no effect in slices from BALB/c mice. Accordingly, h/rCRF elevated PKA activity in hippocampal slices from C57BL/6N mice but increased only PKC activity in the hippocampus of BALB/c mice. These differences in h/rCRF signal transduction were also observed in hippocampal membrane suspensions from both mouse strains. In BALB/c mice, hippocampal CRF receptors coupled to Gq/11 during stimulation by h/rCRF, whereas they coupled to Gs, Gq/11, and Gi in C57BL/6N mice. As expected on the basis of the slice experiments, h/rCRF improved context-dependent fear conditioning of BALB/c mice in behavioral experiments, and BIS-I prevented this effect. However, although h/rCRF increased neuronal spiking in slices from C57BL/6N mice, it did not enhance conditioned fear. These results indicate that the CRF system activates different intracellular signaling pathways in mouse hippocampus and may have distinct effects on associative learning depending on the mouse strain investigated

The short-term impact of director trading in UK closed-end funds

Most closed-end funds are transparent entities that hold securities that are actively traded in liquid markets. In such a setting, the argument that director transactions mitigate information asymmetry has very limited applicability. Our results provide support for the theory of Barber and Odean [2008. “All that Glitters: The Effect of Attention and News on the Buying Behavior of Individual and Institutional Investors.” Review of Financial Studies 21: 785–818]: retail investor decision-making is influenced by attention-grabbing events. Director purchases are one such attention-grabbing event and are associated with significant positive price returns – the magnitudes of which are linked to the size of the purchase, the size of the fund, and the investment mandate. Trading volumes increase at the time of the purchase but most of the initial price responses and trading volumes dissipate over the following 15 days