The ethical and socially responsible behavior of the commercial companies

In the Romanian society and economy the need to distinguish certain behaviors based on the principles of ethics and social responsibility becomes obvious. The totality of the decisions made by the commercial companies must ensure the observance of the interests of all entities which interact with these. The situation of each commercial company whose decisions are inconsistent with the requirements of ethics and social responsibility will sooner or later be endangered because it affects the interests of others, it means in fact affecting one’s own interests

Le taux de fécondité totale dans le mariage et ses extensions

What we will call the age-based TMFR is computed conventionally by adding up age-specific marital fertility rates in the hope of estimating the number of children ever born to a woman who is married throughout her childbearing years. Demographers have long been strongly skeptical about this quantity because it normally indicates implausibly many children. Our analysis of data from the Romanian GGS confirms this finding, and we propose an alternative duration-based TMFR computed in the spirit of parity-progression ratios. At the same time, we extend the method to cover any type of living arrangement (cohabitation, marriage, non-partnered arrangement, and so on). Because each resulting total union-type fertility rate (TUFR) explicitly accounts for the living arrangement, it improves on the conventional total fertility rate (TFR), which does not. We embed the investigation in an event-history analysis with fixed and time-varying control covariates and find patterns of relative risks for such variables that reveal interesting features of childbearing behavior in the Romanian data, which we use to illustrate the method. In most cases, these patterns are quite robust against model re-specification, including the shift from the age-based to the duration-based approach. Since, the number of female respondents is “only” about 6,000 (minus records that cannot be used for the current purpose) in a normal single-round GGS, there is considerable inherent random variation in the data set, but we show that simple few-term moving average graduation suffices to overcome this problem.Le taux de fécondité totale en mariage (TFTM) selon l’âge est calculé par convention en sommant les taux de fécondité par âge dans le mariage en vue d’obtenir une estimation du nombre total d’enfants nés d’une femme qui aurait été mariée tout au long de sa vie reproductive. Depuis longtemps les démographes considèrent cette mesure avec scepticisme car elle aboutit souvent à un nombre total d’enfants beaucoup trop élevé. Notre analyse des données du EGG roumain confirme cette constatation et nous proposons dès lors, comme alternative, un TFTM selon la durée, dans l’esprit des probabilités d’agrandissement des familles. Par ailleurs, nous étendons la méthode à tous types de situation de couple (cohabitation, mariage, sans partenaire, etc.). Comme le taux de fécondité totale selon le type d’union (TFTU) tient compte explicitement de la situation de couple, il doit être préféré au TFTM qui ne tient pas compte de ce critère. Notre étude est conduite dans le cadre d’une analyse biographique tenant compte de covariables fixes ou dépendantes du temps. Les résultats de l’analyse nous permettent de découvrir des caractéristiques intéressantes de la fécondité roumaine, que nous utilisons pour illustrer la méthode. Dans la plupart des cas, ces caractéristiques sont robustes face à une re-spécification du modèle, notamment le passage de l’approche basée sur l’âge à l’approche tenant compte de la durée. Comme le nombre de répondants à l’enquête EGG à un passage n’est ‘que’ de l’ordre de 6000 (moins les cas qui n’ont pas pu être utilisés pour le présent travail), il existe une fluctuation aléatoire importante dans les données. Nous montrons toutefois qu’un lissage par moyenne mobile à quelques termes seulement nous permet de surmonter cette difficulté

Glassy carbon electrode modified with graphene oxide and gold nanoparticles for ascorbic acid detection

Glassy carbon electrodes modified with graphene oxide (GO), gold nanoparticles (AuNP) and methylene blue (MB) were produced by drop casting method for ascorbic acid (AA) determination. Nafion was used as a polymeric immobilizing matrix. The GCE/GO-AuNP-MB-Nafion and GCE/GO-AuNP-Nafion electrodes were characterized by using cyclic voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy to investigate electrocatalytic effect, stability and reproductibility. After optimization, the analytical parameters of the modified electrodes were determined by amperometry. The limit of detection for ascorbic acid at GCE/GO-AuNP-Nafion modified electrode was 2.4 µM and the linear domain from 5 to 50 µM. The electrodes showed significant electrocatalytic effect with good stability and reproductibility

Investigation of Corrosion Protection by Chemically Applied Patina on Artistic Bronzes

Increase of pollution in recent years, requires monitoring of the corrosion behavior of artistic bronzes coated with syntetic patina, in urban atmosphere. This present work aims to investigate the corrosion rezistance of various artificial patina currently used in bronze sculpture. Electrochemical and microscopic methods were used to investigate the protective effect of several chemically produced patinas on artistic bronze

Visual Exploration and Object Recognition by Lattice Deformation

Mechanisms of explicit object recognition are often difficult to investigate and require stimuli with controlled features whose expression can be manipulated in a precise quantitative fashion. Here, we developed a novel method (called “Dots”), for generating visual stimuli, which is based on the progressive deformation of a regular lattice of dots, driven by local contour information from images of objects. By applying progressively larger deformation to the lattice, the latter conveys progressively more information about the target object. Stimuli generated with the presented method enable a precise control of object-related information content while preserving low-level image statistics, globally, and affecting them only little, locally. We show that such stimuli are useful for investigating object recognition under a naturalistic setting – free visual exploration – enabling a clear dissociation between object detection and explicit recognition. Using the introduced stimuli, we show that top-down modulation induced by previous exposure to target objects can greatly influence perceptual decisions, lowering perceptual thresholds not only for object recognition but also for object detection (visual hysteresis). Visual hysteresis is target-specific, its expression and magnitude depending on the identity of individual objects. Relying on the particular features of dot stimuli and on eye-tracking measurements, we further demonstrate that top-down processes guide visual exploration, controlling how visual information is integrated by successive fixations. Prior knowledge about objects can guide saccades/fixations to sample locations that are supposed to be highly informative, even when the actual information is missing from those locations in the stimulus. The duration of individual fixations is modulated by the novelty and difficulty of the stimulus, likely reflecting cognitive demand

Divorce Trends in Seven Countries Over the Long Transition from State Socialism: 1981–2004

The collapse of communism was a defining geopolitical event of late-20th century Europe, with well-documented economic, social, and political implications. Yet there is a striking absence of research on how it influenced divorce. The objective of this study is to provide an exploratory analysis of trends in divorce over the long transition from communism—starting from the decline of the communist economy in the 1980s and ending with economic revival—in seven countries: Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Russia. We discuss how the transition could be expected to either increase or decrease divorce risks. We analyze retrospective micro-level data on first marriages from the Changing Life Course Regimes in Eastern Europe (CLiCR) dataset. Based on our event-history analyses, we find that divorce rates increased in each country at some stage during the long transition and these increases cannot be explained by compositional change of the marriages. However, no uniform pattern emerged in the timing and duration of the increase in divorce risk. This striking variation leads us to conclude that even the effect of major societal ruptures is contextually contingent