TUNNEL EXCAVATION IN CLAYEY-MARLY FORMATIONS: THE CASE OF KALLIDROMO TUNNEL

This paper presents the excavation of Kallidromo railway tunnel in clay and clay-marl formations. During the past years various approaches were considered both at the design and construction level, for the completion of this difficult part of the tunnel. Finally a method has been selected and successfully applied which combines the principles of yielding and double support

Empowering non-academic staff for the implementation of sustainability in higher education institutions

Sustainability within higher education institutions (HEIs) is a well-established topic in the literature. Many fields of education for sustainable development have been explored, mainly focused on HEI students, as well as on academic staff. The technical, administrative, and management staff, referred to as non-academic staff has not received as much attention as the remaining HEI community, which leaves a gap in the successful implementation of sustainability practices and policies, as they play a vital and central role in the HEIs’ everyday functioning. Hence, the EUSTEPs project launched two sustainability training courses dedicated exclusively to this segment of the university community, aiming to increase their knowledge on facts and tools for the best sustainability transition. The first short-term online training, organized by the University of Aveiro and Universidade Aberta, Portugal, was run in May 2021. The training targeted 27 non-academic staff from different sectors. The second online training course was implemented one year later and involved 17 elements from the previous training. The results showed very high levels of overall satisfaction and full achievement of the participants’ expectations in sustainability issues. The non-academic staff learned and discussed the human–environment relationship, tracked and discussed their personal ecological footprint in the workspace, actively participated on how to run the university ecological footprint calculator, developed within the EUSTEPs project, and felt mobilized to implement actions to reduce their university’s environmental impacts (as well as in their general daily activities). Similar training programs can be used to impower non-academic staff for the implementation of sustainability in other higher education institutions, hence contributing to a successful integrated sustainability approach for the whole school.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

How to integrate sustainability teaching and learning in Higher Education Institutions? From context to action for transformation towards SDGs implementation: a literature review

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The Ecological Footprint of Greek Citizens: Main Drivers of Consumption and Influencing Factors

The Ecological Footprint (EF) is undoubtedly an important tool for calculating humans’ impact on the environment. For this tool to be even more accessible and understood by most of the people, many online ecological footprint calculators have been created, the most reliable of which was developed by Global Footprint Network (GFN). Aim of this study is to present the Greek population’s main drivers of consumption patterns after customizing the GFN’s international online calculator to the Greek statistics and national accounts. Moreover, the goal of this study is to assess the factors influencing the Ecological Footprint of Greek citizens. The development of a Greek-specific calculator was based on long-lasting research that included gathering and analyzing information about the Greek population. Five hundred seventy-four Greeks used the calculator after its adaptation, and data were collected regarding their total ecological footprint and its differentiation by land type and by consumption category. According to the results, Greece has a low mean of ecological footprint in comparison to other European countries, but there is still a lot of ground to cover for achieving a truly acceptable sustainable way of living. Additionally, only the variable of gender seems to affect the ecological footprint of Greeks, with females having significantly lower personal EF (M = 3.37) than males (M = 4.36, p = 0.011). The adapted online calculator and the produced results regarding the EF of Greek citizens are considered as a valuable tool for policy makers, stakeholders, and educational institutions

Σχεδίαση και υλοποίηση αλγορίθμων OPT-2 σε νέας γενιάς αναδιατασσόμενη λογική

Summarization: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most well-known and thoroughly studied problems within the domain of combinatorial optimization. The number of its practical, real-life applications is sheer: Manufacturing, logistics, telecommunications, statistics, scheduling, and even psychology are some of them, to name a few. Since it is an NP-Hard problem, solving it to optimality requires an exponentially-increasing time as its size grows, thus rendering its exact solution prohibitive for large datasets or when time constitutes a crucial factor. This has ultimately led to the development of an abundance of heuristics, specifically designed to address this issue, providing orders of magnitude reduced running times at the cost of sub- or near-optimal results. One of the oldest and most recognized such heuristic is 2-OPT. The aim of this thesis is the design and implementation of 2-OPT in recent technology reconfigurable logic (FPGA), through the utilization of both the newly-(re)emerged High Level Synthesis flow (HLS) and the classic HDL-based flow as well; the corresponding tools are part of the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite. Experimental results show that the implemented hardware architectures are capable of delivering speedups of up to nearly 10x (5x on average) for small to medium scale problem sizes. These speedups are obtained when comparing the performance of the aforementioned architectures against the highly optimized Concorde TSP software package running on a 3.4GHz Intel Core-i7 6700 CPU with 16GB RAM. The presented work originates from research conducted nearly a decade ago in the Microprocessor & Hardware Lab at the School of ECE, Technical University of Crete

Renewable and nuclear energy : An international study of students' beliefs about, and willingness to act, in relation to two energy production scenarios

Renewable and nuclear energy are two plausible alternatives to fossil fuel-based energy production. This study reports students’ beliefs about the usefulness of these two options in reducing global warming and their willingness to undertake actions that would encourage their uptake. Using a specially designed questionnaire, students’ (n > 12,000; grades 6 to 10) responses were obtained from 11 countries. Links between their beliefs about these energy options and their willingness to act were quantified using a range of novel derived indices: significant differences between beliefs and willingness to act were found across the various counties. One derived index, the Potential Effectiveness of Education, measures the extent to which enhancing a person’s belief in the effectiveness of an action might increase their willingness to undertake that action: this indicated that education may impact willingness to act in some countries more than others. Interpretations are proffered for the reported differences between countries including whether the extent of students’ concern about global warming had impacted their decisions and whether cultural attributes had any influence. Pedagogical ways forward are related to the findings

High-Resolution Melting (HRM) Analysis for Rapid Molecular Identification of <i>Sparidae</i> Species in the Greek Fish Market

The red porgy (Pagrus pagrus) and the common dentex (Dentex dentex) are Sparidae species of high commercial value, traded in the Greek market. In some cases, fish species identification from Greek fisheries is difficult for the consumer due to the strong morphological similarities with their imported counterparts or closely related species such as Pagrus major, Pagrus caeroleustictus, Dentex gibbosus and Pagellus erythrinus, especially when specimens are frozen, filleted or cooked. Techniques based on DNA sequencing, such as COI barcoding, accurately identify species substitution incidents; however, they are time consuming and expensive. In this study, regions of mtDNA were analyzed with RFLPs, multiplex PCR and HRM in order to develop a rapid method for species identification within the Sparidae family. HRM analysis of a 113 bp region of cytb and/or a 156 bp region of 16s could discriminate raw or cooked samples of P. pagrus and D. dentex from the aforementioned closely related species and P. pagrus specimens sampled in the Mediterranean Sea when compared to those fished in the eastern Atlantic. HRM analysis exhibited high accuracy and repeatability, revealing incidents of mislabeling. Multiple samples can be analyzed within three hours, rendering this method a useful tool in fish fraud monitoring