Green Modernization – The political, social and societal setting of Morocco’s solar energy policies

In 2009, Morocco initiated an ambitious energy transition program. The aim is to increase the country’s independence from energy imports until 2030. The plan targets the reduction of the import of fossils and large investments into renewable energies. The goal set is to meet 42% of its power generating capacity needs through renewables by 2020 and 52% by 2030. Morocco’s bold and ambitious plans are often highlighted as a model for how to invest into future technologies and bring about clean energy transition. Due to its geography, weather conditions and solar irradiance, Morocco is considered to have huge potentials regarding wind and solar energy production. Morocco’s energy transition program includes the construction of a number of large and medium scale solar plants until 2020. Their planning and construction is often managed by MASEN (Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy), a public limited company. Recently, Noor 1, the first of several large scale solar plants was completed. Noor 1 is situated in Ouarzazate in the East of the country. Currently Noor Tata is in the planning phase. Similar with Morocco, energy transition has been also a hot topic in Austria. However, different from Morocco, planning, decision-making and governance structures have rather reflected the country's federal system. Austria's energy transition strategy is a decentralized one. As much as this often entails strong involvement and ownership on societal level, as much its success is dependent on a complex set of diverse political entrepreneurs on different political and administrative levels (national-federal-district and local). LINKS project aims at learning from both; Austrian and Moroccan experiences. In its last phase, the project deals with the question whether decentralized small-scale energy production models as implemented in some of the Austrian energy model regions are transferrable to Morocco. This assessment takes place against the background of the Moroccan state's ambitions to decentralize and strengthen the regional and provincial levels. Accordingly, this report elaborates the structural, political, social and societal setting in which Morocco's energy policy is embedded. The report tries to define the major actors, analyse the decision-making structures, and review the socio-technical imaginaries which have shaped national energy policies. "Socio-technical imaginaries" define mind-sets and frames which do not only guide policies and strategies but also give insights about the expectations connected with technological developments. The report aims at providing a background for the preparation of the stakeholder forum to be held in Tata/Morocco in October 2017. The forum aims at bringing together local and regional stakeholders and to debate at eye level experiences, expectations and ideas for solar energy production in their region. This working paper was produced within the LINKS project (Linking climate change mitigation, energy security and regional development in climate and energy model regions in Austria) (funded by the ACRP)

Multiagent cooperation for solving global optimization problems: an extendible framework with example cooperation strategies

This paper proposes the use of multiagent cooperation for solving global optimization problems through the introduction of a new multiagent environment, MANGO. The strength of the environment lays in itsflexible structure based on communicating software agents that attempt to solve a problem cooperatively. This structure allows the execution of a wide range of global optimization algorithms described as a set of interacting operations. At one extreme, MANGO welcomes an individual non-cooperating agent, which is basically the traditional way of solving a global optimization problem. At the other extreme, autonomous agents existing in the environment cooperate as they see fit during run time. We explain the development and communication tools provided in the environment as well as examples of agent realizations and cooperation scenarios. We also show how the multiagent structure is more effective than having a single nonlinear optimization algorithm with randomly selected initial points

Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks Based Flame Detection in Video

Real-time flame detection is crucial in video based surveillance systems. We propose a vision-based method to detect flames using Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (DCGANs). Many existing supervised learning approaches using convolutional neural networks do not take temporal information into account and require substantial amount of labeled data. In order to have a robust representation of sequences with and without flame, we propose a two-stage training of a DCGAN exploiting spatio-temporal flame evolution. Our training framework includes the regular training of a DCGAN with real spatio-temporal images, namely, temporal slice images, and noise vectors, and training the discriminator separately using the temporal flame images without the generator. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively detects flame in video with negligible false positive rates in real-time

Video fire detection - Review

This is a review article describing the recent developments in Video based Fire Detection (VFD). Video surveillance cameras and computer vision methods are widely used in many security applications. It is also possible to use security cameras and special purpose infrared surveillance cameras for fire detection. This requires intelligent video processing techniques for detection and analysis of uncontrolled fire behavior. VFD may help reduce the detection time compared to the currently available sensors in both indoors and outdoors because cameras can monitor "volumes" and do not have transport delay that the traditional "point" sensors suffer from. It is possible to cover an area of 100 km2 using a single pan-tilt-zoom camera placed on a hilltop for wildfire detection. Another benefit of the VFD systems is that they can provide crucial information about the size and growth of the fire, direction of smoke propagation. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Waterpipe (narghile) smoking among medical and non-medical university students in Turkey

Objectives. This investigation was performed in order to determine the prevalence rate of waterpipe smoking in students of Erciyes University and the effects of some socio-demographic factors

Co-circulation of West Nile virus and distinct insect-specific flaviviruses in Turkey

Background: Active vector surveillance provides an efficient tool for monitoring the presence or spread of emerging or re-emerging vector-borne viruses. This study was undertaken to investigate the circulation of flaviviruses. Mosquitoes were collected from 58 locations in 10 provinces across the Aegean, Thrace and Mediterranean Anatolian regions of Turkey in 2014 and 2015. Following morphological identification, mosquitoes were pooled and screened by nested and real-time PCR assays. Detected viruses were further characterised by sequencing. Positive pools were inoculated onto cell lines for virus isolation. Next generation sequencing was employed for genomic characterisation of the isolates. Results: A total of 12,711 mosquito specimens representing 15 species were screened in 594 pools. Eleven pools (2%) were reactive in the virus screening assays. Sequencing revealed West Nile virus (WNV) in one Culex pipiens (s.l.) pool from Thrace. WNV sequence corresponded to lineage one clade 1a but clustered distinctly from the Turkish prototype isolate. In 10 pools, insect-specific flaviviruses were characterised as Culex theileri flavivirus in 5 pools of Culex theileri and one pool of Cx. pipiens (s.l.), Ochlerotatus caspius flavivirus in two pools of Aedes (Ochlerotatus) caspius, Flavivirus AV-2011 in one pool of Culiseta annulata, and an undetermined flavivirus in one pool of Uranotaenia unguiculata from the Aegean and Thrace regions. DNA forms or integration of the detected insect-specific flaviviruses were not observed. A virus strain, tentatively named as “Ochlerotatus caspius flavivirus Turkey”, was isolated from an Ae. caspius pool in C6/36 cells. The viral genome comprised 10,370 nucleotides with a putative polyprotein of 3,385 amino acids that follows the canonical flavivirus polyprotein organisation. Sequence comparisons and phylogenetic analyses revealed the close relationship of this strain with Ochlerotatus caspius flavivirus from Portugal and Hanko virus from Finland. Several conserved structural and amino acid motifs were identified. Conclusions: We identified WNV and several distinct insect-specific flaviviruses during an extensive biosurveillance study of mosquitoes in various regions of Turkey in 2014 and 2015. Ongoing circulation of WNV is revealed, with an unprecedented genetic diversity. A probable replicating form of an insect flavivirus identified only in DNA form was detected

Patterns of active and passive smoking, and associated factors, in the South-east Anatolian Project (SEAP) region in Turkey

BACKGROUND: Smoking is an important health threat in Turkey. This study aimed to determine the frequency of and main factors associated with smoking in persons of 15 years and over, and the frequency of passive smoking in homes in the South-east Anatolian Project (SEAP) Region in Turkey. METHODS: A cross sectional design was employed. The sample waschosen by the State Institute of Statistics using a stratified cluster probability sampling method. 1126 houses representing the SEAP Region were visited. Questionnaires about tobacco smoking and related factors were applied to 2166 women and 1906 men (of 15 years old and above) in their homes. Face-to-face interview methods were employed. Participants were classified as current, ex, and non-smokers. The presence of a regular daily smoker in a house was used as an indication of passive smoking. The chi-square andlogistic regressionanalysis methods were used for the statistical analysis. RESULTS: The prevalence of smoking, in those of 15 years and over, was 11.8% in women and 49.7% in men. The prevalence of current smokers was higher in urban (34.5 %) than in rural (22.8 %) regions. The mean of total cigarette consumption was 6.5 packs/year in women and 17.9 packs/year in men. There was at least one current smoker in 70.1% of the houses. CONCLUSION: Smoking is a serious problem in the South-eastern Anatolian Region. Male gender, middle age, a high level of education and urban residency were most strongly associated with smoking

Seismic resistance of traditional timber-frame hımış

Hımış structures have hardly ever found as extensive a role as other traditional timber housing, such as those originating from Japan or Central Europe, within the wide discourse on the seismic performance of timber-frame architecture that has gained significant momentum in the last few decades owing to advancing testing technologies. While the hımış construction technique was perhaps not born as a result of a conscious search for a seismically resistant building form, it was soon widely appreciated for its structural features advantageous under seismic loading - especially from the sixteenth century when it has become a well-established construction technique in part of the Balkans and in today’s Turkey. Despite widely available anecdotal information based on post-disaster studies regarding its performance under earthquakes, robust quantitative data on the seismic behaviour of these structures were practically non-existent until quite recently, and are still somewhat limited. However, we are now able to confirm that hımış constructions do have intrinsic qualities that are very beneficial under seismic action. This paper aims to make a brief review of the current state of our knowledge on structural performance of hımış buildings under earthquake loading, with specific emphasis on infill/cladding techniques, connection details and energy dissipation characteristics

Hydrophobically Modified Sulfobetaine Copolymers with Tunable Aqueous UCST through Postpolymerization Modification of Poly(pentafluorophenyl acrylate)

Polysulfobetaines, polymers carrying highly polar zwitterionic side chains, present a promising research field by virtue of their antifouling properties, hemocompatibility, and stimulus-responsive behavior. However, limited synthetic approaches exist to produce sulfobetaine copolymers comprising hydrophobic components. Postpolymerization modification of an activated ester precursor, poly(pentafluorophenyl acrylate), employing a zwitterionic amine, 3-((3-aminopropyl)dimethylammonio)propane-1-sulfonate, ADPS, is presented as a novel, one-step synthetic concept toward sulfobetaine (co)polymers. Modifications were performed in homogeneous solution using propylene carbonate as solvent with mixtures of ADPS and pentylamine, benzylamine, and dodecylamine producing a series of well-defined statistical acrylamido sulfobetaine copolymers containing hydrophobic pentyl, benzyl, or dodecylacrylamide comonomers with well-controllable molar composition as evidenced by NMR and FT-IR spectroscopy and size exclusion chromatography.This synthetic strategy was exploited to investigate, for the first time, the influence of hydrophobic modification on the upper critical solution temperature (UCST) of sulfobetaine copolymers in aqueous solution. Surprisingly, incorporation of pentyl groups was found to increase solubility over a wide composition range, whereas benzyl groups decreased solubility—an effect attributed to different entropic and enthalpic contributions of both functional groups. While UCST transitions of polysulfobetaines are typically limited to higher molar mass samples, incorporation of 0–65 mol % of benzyl groups into copolymers with molar masses of 25.5–34.5 kg/mol enabled sharp, reversible transitions from 6 to 82 °C in solutions containing up to 76 mM NaCl, as observed by optical transmittance and dynamic light scattering. Both synthesis and systematic UCST increase of sulfobetaine copolymers presented here are expected to expand the scope and applicability of these smart materials