ANALYSIS OF THE PERSPECTIVES OF INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL COOPERATION FOR THE CENTRAL REGIONS OF UKRAINE

The conducted analysis of the prospects of international environmental cooperation for the central regions of Ukraine showed that the most developed area of cooperation is green tourism, which is rapidly developing in the central regions. To a large extent, this is due to the natural conditions and the preserved archaism of local life that attracts tourists. On the other side, the support of green tourism by the government, improvement of the material condition of owners of green homesteads increases the interest of local communities in cooperation with international organizations.Using of international experience in the field of energy saving by local communities is being implemented by individual farms at the level of individual relationships with international organizations, but it has no massive component.Cooperation of the central regions of Ukraine with the international community is the most promising in the direction of forming a transnational ecological network. The main reserve for the formation of a regional ecological network is the lands of the water fund, degraded and unproductive agricultural landscapes. The allocation of lands for the water fund and its mapping must use plans and requires adequate financing. The threat to implementation of the regional program for the development of the ecological network and its coordination with transnational ecological corridors is the lack of financing and inconsistency of the resolution of the land ownership rights in the alienation of land to the nature reserve fund.The use of funding from international environmental funds in the central regions of Ukraine is limited due to the lack of experience in the participation of environmental NGOs in international ecological projects aimed at nature conservation, the lack of interest of local communities in land alienation in the nature reserve fund

Current situation of oil refinery in Bulgaria

This article deals with the classification approach for oil refineries in international practices. Criteria of refinery estimation group, including its financial status estimation, have been investigated. The analysis object is "Lukoil Neftochim Bourgas" AD (LNCHB) activity. This company is a leading enterprise in Bulgaria. The analysis of LNCHB operating: energy intensity index; index of operating costs and return on investment index have been performed

Cluster analysis and ensemble transfer learning for COVID-19 classification from computed tomography scans

The paper presents a brief analysis of publications utilizing the public SARS-CoV-2 dataset, consisting of patients’ computer tomography scans captured from Brazil hospitals and an experimental setup addressing the found data challenges. The analysis shows that all protocols, with one exception, suffer from data leakage arising from data organization where the patients and their images are not grouped. Each patient is represented with several scans. It can provide misleading results as data of the same individual may occur in both training and test sets. Furthermore, only one paper proposed ensemble learning utilizing as base models VGG-16, ResNet50, and Xception. Therefore, we proposed and experimented with the following strategy to mitigate the found risks of bias: data standardization and normalization to achieve proper contrast and resolution; k-means and group shuffle split to avoid data leakage; augmentation and ensemble transfer learning to deal with limited sample size and over-fitting. Compared with the earlier proposed ensemble approach, the current one stacks VGG-16, Densenet-201, and Inception v3, achieving higher accuracy (99.3 %), second in the related work, and most significantly, it applies augmentation and clustering analysis to avoid overestimation. In contrast, the paper also presented critical metrics in the medical domain: negative prediction value (99.55%), false positive rate (0.89%), false negative rate (0.42%), and false discovery rate (0.83%). The strategy has two main advantages: reducing data pitfalls and decreasing generalization error. It can serve as a baseline to increase the performance quality and mitigate the risk of bias in the field

Randomized Clinical Trial of the Need for Antibiotic Treatment for Low-Risk Catheter-Related Bloodstream Infection Caused by Coagulase-Negative Staphylococci

According to clinical guidelines, the management of catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSI) due to coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS) includes catheter removal and antibiotic treatment for 5 to 7 days. However, in low-risk episodes, it remains uncertain whether antibiotic therapy is necessary. This randomized clinical trial aims to determine whether the non-administration of antibiotic therapy is as safe and effective as the recommended strategy in low-risk episodes of CRBSI caused by CoNS. With this purpose, a randomized, open-label, multicenter, non-inferiority clinical trial was conducted in 14 Spanish hospitals from 1 July 2019 to 31 January 2022. Patients with low-risk CRBSI caused by CoNS were randomized 1:1 after catheter withdrawal to receive/not receive parenteral antibiotics with activity against the isolated strain. The primary endpoint was the presence of any complication related to bacteremia or to antibiotic therapy within 90 days of follow-up. The secondary endpoints were persistent bacteremia, septic embolism, time until microbiological cure, and time until the disappearance of a fever. EudraCT: 2017-003612-39 INF-BACT-2017. A total of 741 patients were assessed for eligibility. Of these, 27 were included in the study; 15 (55.6%) were randomized to the intervention arm (non-antibiotic administration) and 12 (44.4%) to the control arm (antibiotic therapy as per standard practice). The primary endpoint occurred in one of the 15 patients in the intervention group (septic thrombophlebitis) and in no patients in the control group. The median time until microbiological cure was 3 days (IQR 1-3) in the intervention arm and 1.25 days (IQR 0.5-2.62) in the control arm, while the median time until fever resolution was zero days in both arms. The study was stopped due to the insufficient number of recruited patients. These results seem to indicate that low-risk CRBSI caused by CoNS can be managed without antibiotic therapy after catheter removal; efficacy and safety are not affected

Activity Overinvestment: The Case of R&D

The literature on corporate diversification has often argued for and established the case that companies often overdiversify in a product market sense – i.e. enter into unrelated product markets where they may not fully cover their cost of capital. Yet, even without engaging in unrelated diversification, managers need to make resource allocation decisions to a variety of activities that a company conducts to consummate its business. In this article we focus on Research and Development (R&D) activity and we discuss the effects that the uncertainty, boundary ambiguity, feedback latency, R&D lumpiness and legitimacy that characterize technological contexts can have in making overinvestment in R&D likely. Specifically, in this article we a) draw attention to the construct of activity overinvestment, and specifically R&D overinvestment, b) use the received literature to argue that there exists a prima facie case for examining this construct and its antecedents in order to evaluate the extent and implications of R&D overinvestment, and c) make the more general case that the resource allocation literature needs to study the issue of activity overinvestment systematically

The JWST Galactic Center Survey -- A White Paper

The inner hundred parsecs of the Milky Way hosts the nearest supermassive black hole, largest reservoir of dense gas, greatest stellar density, hundreds of massive main and post main sequence stars, and the highest volume density of supernovae in the Galaxy. As the nearest environment in which it is possible to simultaneously observe many of the extreme processes shaping the Universe, it is one of the most well-studied regions in astrophysics. Due to its proximity, we can study the center of our Galaxy on scales down to a few hundred AU, a hundred times better than in similar Local Group galaxies and thousands of times better than in the nearest active galaxies. The Galactic Center (GC) is therefore of outstanding astrophysical interest. However, in spite of intense observational work over the past decades, there are still fundamental things unknown about the GC. JWST has the unique capability to provide us with the necessary, game-changing data. In this White Paper, we advocate for a JWST NIRCam survey that aims at solving central questions, that we have identified as a community: i) the 3D structure and kinematics of gas and stars; ii) ancient star formation and its relation with the overall history of the Milky Way, as well as recent star formation and its implications for the overall energetics of our galaxy's nucleus; and iii) the (non-)universality of star formation and the stellar initial mass function. We advocate for a large-area, multi-epoch, multi-wavelength NIRCam survey of the inner 100\,pc of the Galaxy in the form of a Treasury GO JWST Large Program that is open to the community. We describe how this survey will derive the physical and kinematic properties of ~10,000,000 stars, how this will solve the key unknowns and provide a valuable resource for the community with long-lasting legacy value.Comment: This White Paper will be updated when required (e.g. new authors joining, editing of content). Most recent update: 24 Oct 202