ENERGY MANAGEMENT – PUBLIC POLICIES AND IMPLEMENTATION. THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS, FROM OVERLAP TO SYNERGY

Energy management refers to all activities aimed to improve the effectiveness of the production, transport, distribution and use of energy. On the supply side of the chain, the number of actors is relatively limited, and either the competitive pressure or the regulation of natural monopolies leads to increased efficiency. On the demand, side the number of actors is enormous (all consumers, from large industries to households). Therefore, specific policies for improving energy efficiency have to be put în place. And those policies strongly interfere with environmental and social policies. The role of institutions and particularly of the public administration is very important and should lead by example. At the same time, given the potential overlaps, it is important to ensure that the public institutions involved have well defined functions and liaise with each other în a way to exploit synergies. Various ministries, agencies, local authorities, NGOs are involved and sometimes do what other public actors should do, and not enough of what they realy should do. Even în countries with over twenty years of experience în this field, there is a need to improve the performance of public administration, to reform the functions and ways of operation of the various institutions. The current paper will present approaches of public authorities to energy efficiency în various EU countries and identify key success factors for securing effective policy development and implementation.energy management, energy efficiency, public administration, institutional reform.

Small scale agriculture as a resilient system in rural Romania

A brief overview of rural Romanian phenomena and processes in modern history reveals that rural areas and small rural households were highly stable systems, providing social and economic security. In all history, except during the communist period, small-scale agriculture was and continues to be the main provider of jobs in the rural labour market in the absence of other non-agricultural employment opportunities. In all times, consumption of self-produced food, supported by small farms, has had a leverage effect against poverty. More than that, the statistical information shows that small farms achieve higher levels of economic performance compared to large farms by diversifying their production structure and, through that, they make an important contribution to national food security. In the post-communist period (i.e. after 1989) in Romania, these functions and roles of the small farms have been restored and are widely recognised. If the meaning of ‘socio-economic resilience’ is the ability of an individual, of a household, community, region or country to resist, to adapt and to recover quickly after a crisis, shock or change, the economic and social functions and roles assumed in the transition period by small Romanian rural farms give them the attributes of a resilient answer of the entire Romania to the post-communist changes and shocks

Sexuality and religion in the public sphere. Opinions of French students on mediatization of intimate sphere

This article explores the passive participation of French students within the construction of public opinion on sexuality and religion. The research was conducted on 375 French students’ sample, aged 18 to 23 in the second year of Bachelor's degree in Humanities and Social Sciences within a control environment of documentary research, discursive production, and audiovisual creativity. The experience took place over two consecutive years, respectively, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. The experiment was based on three distinct explorations corresponding to distinct individual cognitive experiences aimed at the representation, expression and meaning of the intimate limits assigned by students to public display through the mediatization of sexuality and religion. The opinion of French students on the mediatization of intimate sphere in view of their passive participation within the construction of this opinion feeds two scenarios: privatization of the public sphere and commodification of the intimate sphere.; Este artículo explora la participación pasiva de los estudiantes franceses en la construcción de la opinión pública sobre sexualidad y religión. La investigación se llevó a cabo con 375 estudiantes franceses, entre 18 y 23 años, inscritos en segundo año de la licenciatura en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, en un entorno controlado de investigación documental, producción discursiva y creatividad audiovisual. La experiencia tuvo lugar durante dos años consecutivos, 2017-2018 y 2018-2019. El experimento se basó en tres exploraciones distintas correspondientes a diversas experiencias cognitivas individuales dirigidas a la representación, expresión y significado de los límites íntimos asignados por los estudiantes en relación con la exhibición pública mediatizada de la sexualidad y la religión. La opinión de los estudiantes franceses sobre la mediatización de la esfera íntima a través de su participación pasiva en la construcción de opinión, alimenta dos escenarios: la privatización de la esfera pública y la mercantilización de la esfera íntima

The irrigation system in Brăila – a farmer economic focused approach

In the present context marked by ever increasing global climate changes, the use of irrigations in agriculture represents not only an option but more and more a necessity for ensuring a higher yield of agricultural products whose demand increases every year based on population growth. The present paper focuses on the specific elements of the irrigation systems from Brăila County, the way the farmers have access to and the different implications derived by using these systems. The paper turns to quantitative analysis of available statistical data and qualitative analysis of the interviews with local farmers focused on economic efficiency of the water used for irrigations. 

A Novel Contrastive Learning Method for Clickbait Detection on RoCliCo: A Romanian Clickbait Corpus of News Articles

To increase revenue, news websites often resort to using deceptive news titles, luring users into clicking on the title and reading the full news. Clickbait detection is the task that aims to automatically detect this form of false advertisement and avoid wasting the precious time of online users. Despite the importance of the task, to the best of our knowledge, there is no publicly available clickbait corpus for the Romanian language. To this end, we introduce a novel Romanian Clickbait Corpus (RoCliCo) comprising 8,313 news samples which are manually annotated with clickbait and non-clickbait labels. Furthermore, we conduct experiments with four machine learning methods, ranging from handcrafted models to recurrent and transformer-based neural networks, to establish a line-up of competitive baselines. We also carry out experiments with a weighted voting ensemble. Among the considered baselines, we propose a novel BERT-based contrastive learning model that learns to encode news titles and contents into a deep metric space such that titles and contents of non-clickbait news have high cosine similarity, while titles and contents of clickbait news have low cosine similarity. Our data set and code to reproduce the baselines are publicly available for download at https://github.com/dariabroscoteanu/RoCliCo.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 202

The Influence of Musical Rhythms on Consumer Buyer Behavior of Retail Gadget Products

AbstractThis research is focused on highlighting musical rhythm differences in gadget detail recognition after exposure to a visual presentation with a musical background and represents the second stage of a three part research study applied on the same participants. Method: Participants were 60 undergraduate students’ age between 20 and 24 years old from the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Bucharest. Materials were images and possible prices of eight gadget products. The instrument was a questionnaire investigating the prices related to each gadget product image. Results highlighted no musical rhythm differences in gadget detail recognition

Critérios de reconhecimento dos depósitos de inundação tsunamigénica no contexto do Ordenamento do Território

Os tsunamis são fenómenos naturais extremos que representam elevados perigos para muitas regiões costeiras. Os estudos sobre os eventos extremos de inundação que afetaram a costa portuguesa referem sobretudo o tsunami de AD 1775, considerado o mais devastador no território português. No presente estudo optou-se por analisar sedimentologicamente a sondagem CF2 localizada na margem direita do Rio Alcabrichel, a aproximadamente 650 m da foz, na praia de Porto Novo, na costa ocidental portuguesa. Esta sondagem já foi estudada anteriormente no âmbito do Projeto FMI-5000 e os resultados do projeto apontaram para a ocorrência de dois eventos extremos de inundação marinha associados aos possíveis eventos tsunamigénicos que afetaram o litoral português. Na presente dissertação foi continuado o estudo sedimentológico da referida sondagem, utilizando além dos critérios estratigráficos e texturais, outros indicadores de inundação marinha, alguns deles inovadores nos estudos de paleotsunamis, que poderiam clarificar os processos deposicionais e revelar informações adicionais sobre aqueles eventos extremos. O estudo tem como objetivo principal detetar potenciais indicadores tsunamigénicos, sobretudo morfoscópicos, geoquímicos e microtexturais nos grãos de quartzo que permitam reconhecer o(s) depósito(s) de tsunami no estuário do Rio Alcabrichel e estabelecer a área exposta ao risco de tsunami. A interpretação litoestratigráfica e textural permitiu identificar 5 unidades litoestratigráficas que correspondem ao preenchimento sedimentar que proporcionou a formação de uma planície aluvial na parte jusante do Rio Alcabrichel. As unidades litoestratigráficas denominadas UL1, UL2 e UL4, são constituídas sobretudo por material lodoso, silte e argila, com algumas intercalações de material arenoso, enquanto no topo da sondagem, a unidade UL5 corresponde ao sistema dunar existente no local. Na unidade UL2 foi detetada uma lâmina de areia muito fina, de 3cm de espessura, denominada UL2a e cuja origem foi associada a um possível evento tsunamigénico. Intercalada entre as unidades UL2 e UL4 ocorre uma lâmina essencialmente arenosa, maciça de maior espessura (10 cm), denominada UL3 e as datações por radiocarbono realizadas no âmbito do Projeto FMI-5000 para esta unidade colocaram este evento na proximidade cronológica do tsunami de AD 1755. Os resultados da caraterização textural permitiram atribuir a génese tsunamigénica para a unidade UL3. No entanto, no caso da subunidade UL2a, a associação a um possível evento tsunamigénico foi inconclusiva, considerando-se que um temporal costeiro foi provavelmente o responsável pela sua formação. Os resultados da análise geoquímica corroboram a origem tsunamigénica da unidade UL3 e a análise estatística dos dados geoquímicos permitiu atribuir a génese de temporal para a subunidade UL2a, devido à maior dominância dos elementos terrígenos sobre marinhos. Através da análise morfoscópica foi possível discriminar os distintos ambientes sedimentares e associar as areias tsunamigénicas com a fonte potencial para o depósito, identificando também três diferentes fases de tsunami, relacionadas com as ondas de inundação e de retorno. A análise microtextural, recorrendo às imagens de muito alta resolução, obtidas por microscopia eletrónica de varrimento (MEV), revelou nas areias tsunamigénicas a presença de assinaturas microtexturais típicas de eventos extremos de inundação marinha, com abundantes marcas de percussão e superfícies frescas, mostrando a importância da hidrodinâmica no processo de transporte dos sedimentos. Adicionalmente, demonstrou-se que a geomorfologia local representa um fator extremamente importante na propagação do fluxo de tsunami, condicionando a extensão do depósito e o limite interior da inundação tsunamigénica. A conjugação desta variável com as caraterísticas do depósito de tsunami permitiu estabelecer a área exposta ao risco de tsunami, demonstrando deste modo a importância do estudo no contexto do Ordenamento do Território.Tsunamis are extreme natural events with great magnitude responsible for important hazards in many coastal areas. The studies on the extreme flood events that affected the Portuguese coast refer mainly to the tsunami of AD 1775, considered the most devastating for Portuguese territory. In the present study, it was applied a sedimentological analysis of the CF2 core located on the right bank of the Alcabrichel River, approximately 650m upstream the river mouth, at Porto Novo beach, on the Portuguese west coast. This core has been previously studied in the framework of the FMI-5000 Project and the results pointed to the occurrence of two extreme marine flood events associated with the possible tsunamigenic origin that affected the Portuguese coastline. In the present dissertation, the sedimentological study of this core was continued using the stratigraphic and textural criteria and other indicators of marine flooding, some of them innovative in paleotsunamis studies, that could clarify the depositional processes and reveal additional information about these extreme events. The main purpose of the study is to detect potential tsunamigenic indicators, especially morphoscopic, geochemical and microtextural features in the quartz grains that allow to recognize the tsunami deposit(s) in the Alcabrichel River estuary and establish the area exposed to tsunami risk. The stratigraphic and textural interpretation allowed to identify 5 lithostratigraphic units. They correspond to the sedimentary filling of an alluvial plain downstream the Alcabrichel River. The UL1, UL2 and UL4 lithostratigraphic units consist mainly of mud, silt and clay, with some sandy material intercalations, while at the top of the core, the UL5 unit corresponds to the existing dune system. In the UL2 unit a very thin sand lamina, about 3 cm thickness, called UL2a, was detected and its origin was associated with a possible tsunamigenic event. Interposed between the UL2 and UL4 units is a massive, essentially sandy (10cm) thicker layer called UL3 and the radiocarbon dating performed under the FMI-5000 Project for this unit placed this event in circa AD 1755 tsunami. The results of the textural characterization suggested that the UL3 unit is a tsunamigenic deposit. However, in the case of the UL2a subunit the association to a possible tsunamigenic event was inconclusive, considering that a coastal storm was probably responsible for its formation. The results of the geochemical analysis confirmed the tsunamigenic origin of the UL3 unit and the statistical analysis of the geochemical data allowed to consider the UL2a subunit, like a sandy storm deposit, due to the greater dominance of the terrigenous elements on the marine elements. Through the morphoscopic analysis it was possible to discriminate the different sedimentary environments and to associate the tsunamigenic sands with the potential source for the deposit, identifying three different tsunami waves related to the flood and backwash waves. The microtextural analysis of the tsunami sands, using very high-resolution images obtained by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), revealed the presence of microtextural signatures typical for extreme events of marine flood, with abundant percussion marks and fresh surfaces, showing the importance of hydrodynamics in the sediment transport process. In addition, local geomorphology has been shown to be an extremely crucial factor in the propagation of the tsunami flow, conditioning the extent of the deposit and the inner boundary of the tsunamigenic flood. The combination of this variable with the characteristics of the tsunami deposit allowed establishing the area exposed to tsunami risk, thus demonstrating the importance of the study in the Spatial Planning framework