Cost and benefit analysis of legalization versus demolition of illegal buildings

The main topic of the M.Sc. thesis is illegal building. Illegal building constitutes building outside of commonly accepted norm – building and planning regulations, which represent societal and expert consensus of land use. \ud \ud The main theme of master thesis concerns illegal building of houses, which still represent a big part of illegal building in Slovenia. When such a building is discovered by a building inspector an enforcement notice is served to the investor. The main goal of the building inspector is to achieve legality of the site in question through demolition of the illegal building. However, the investor can also achieve legality through regularisation – a process, in which the investor obtains suitable building permit after the building is already built. Each of the two options encompasses different costs and different benefits, but above all yields different results. The first option – demolition of illegal building – yields as its result the return to previous state. The second option offers absolution by obtaining necessary permits after the building work is done. \ud Master thesis analyses costs and benefits of both options of achieving legality and calculates economic costs and benefits in two case studies. The results are analysed and compared to prove that regularisation of houses on land that was not previously meant to be developed causes a lot of costs to the local municipality, which dues, paid by the investor, fail to match. The results of the analysis show that this hypothesis is only partially true, because local municipality has every power to ensure that the costs of regularisation remain in the domain of the investor. \ud The analysis also confirmed that in urbanized areas, costs of demolition are higher than costs of regularisation, but also showed that, outside urban areas, the costs of demolition and regularisation are approximately on the same level.\u

Preliminarna studija o vertikalnim migracijama dinoflagelata u dinamičnom obalnom moru (Tršćanski zaljev, sjeverni Jadran)

The purpose of this preliminary study was to define the vertical migration pattern in the dinoflagellate community in the shallow coastal sea. Migrations were followed in an area of mussel farming, through two 24-hour samplings, first during mixed and second during stratified water column conditions. Despite variable physical environment we were able to follow vertical migrations of some autotrophic dinoflagellate species in the period of stratified water column. The results also suggest that Heterocapsa sp. may preserve its vertical migration pattern also under mixed conditions. Migrations were observed also for Dinophysis sacculus that can cause DSP problems in the area.Svrha ove preliminarne studije je definirati obrasce vertikalnih migracija zajednice dinoflagelata u plitkom obalnom moru. Migracije su praćene na području uzgoja dagnji, kroz dva 24-satna uzorkovanja, prvo za vrijeme pomiješanih i drugo za vrijeme stratificiranih uvjeta vodenog stupca. Unatoč promjenjivom fizičkom okolišu bili smo u mogućnosti slijediti vertikalne migracije nekih autotrofnih vrsta dinoflagelata u razdoblju stratificiranog vodenog stupca. Rezultati također sugeriraju da Heterocapsa sp. može očuvati obrazac svoje vertikalne migracije čak i u pomiješanim uvjetima. Migracije su promatrane i za vrstu Dinophysis sacculus koja može uzrokovati dijaretičko trovanje školjkama (DSP) na tom području

Analyzing Disproportionate Reaction via Comparative Multilingual Targeted Sentiment in Twitter

Global events such as terrorist attacks are commented upon in social media, such as Twitter, in different languages and from different parts of the world. Most prior studies have focused on monolingual sentiment analysis, and therefore excluded an extensive proportion of the Twitter userbase. In this paper, we perform a multilingual comparative sentiment analysis study on the terrorist attack in Paris, during November 2015. In particular, we look at targeted sentiment, investigating opinions on specific entities, not simply the general sentiment of each tweet. Given the potentially inflammatory and polarizing effect that these types of tweets may have on attitudes, we examine the sentiments expressed about different targets and explore whether disproportionate reaction was expressed about such targets across different languages. Specifically, we assess whether the sentiment for French speaking Twitter users during the Paris attack differs from English-speaking ones. We identify disproportionately negative attitudes in the English dataset over the French one towards some entities and, via a crowdsourcing experiment, illustrate that this also extends to forming an annotator bias

The assessment of children with special needs

AbstractThe assessment of children with special needs is already, and still is, a dilemma in the everyday school's life either form the teachers’ point of view to the pupils’ one and their parents’ too.Our intent was to detect what are the practices of assessing children with special needs which are included in a mainstream and are given adequate learning aid, to find out what are the problems in assessing those pupils and to present some best practices of assessing children with special needs.In the research were included more than one hundred teachers from primary and secondary schools who already have had some experiences in teaching children with special needs. They were asked to complete a survey about assessing children, making tests, motivating pupils, defining criteria and problems that arise when they have to assess pupils, especially those with special needs. They also had the possibility to present their own best practices in assessing children with special needs.The results show that teachers are fairly independent in assessing children with special needs. Generally they have fewer problems when assessing children that are hearing-impaired, physically-impaired or visually-impaired. On the other hand they have major problems in assessing children with specific language impairment or children with ADD or ADHD. They have difficulties in evaluating tests with free response items, essays and performance tests.Teachers acknowledged that team work could help them in gaining more confidence especially if they can share their opinions with professionals that know a pupil best and were already working with him. They realize that establishing clear goals and developing a team based approach in evaluating the individual's achievements is a plus

News Cohesiveness: an Indicator of Systemic Risk in Financial Markets

Motivated by recent financial crises significant research efforts have been put into studying contagion effects and herding behaviour in financial markets. Much less has been said about influence of financial news on financial markets. We propose a novel measure of collective behaviour in financial news on the Web, News Cohesiveness Index (NCI), and show that it can be used as a systemic risk indicator. We evaluate the NCI on financial documents from large Web news sources on a daily basis from October 2011 to July 2013 and analyse the interplay between financial markets and financially related news. We hypothesized that strong cohesion in financial news reflects movements in the financial markets. Cohesiveness is more general and robust measure of systemic risk expressed in news, than measures based on simple occurrences of specific terms. Our results indicate that cohesiveness in the financial news is highly correlated with and driven by volatility on the financial markets

Utjecaj razlaganja plinova koji sadrze ugljik na kontaktni otpor prekidača na jezičac

During the operation of reed switches, a continuous increase of the contact resistance was observed. After the life time test, AES analyses of the contact surfaces showed an appearance of carbon, which originally wasn\u27t present. In order to find the origin of carbon on the surface, model reed switches were prepared, evacuated, and than filled with a protective gas with intentionally added carbon containing gases. After the lifetime test of the reed switch models, the contact resistance of switches filled with N2 + H2 , N2 + H2 + CO and N2 + H2 + CO +CO2 remained low while the resistance of switches filled with N2 +CO + CO2 and N2 +H2 + C2H2 increased substantially. AES analyses have shown that the quantity of carbon deposited on contacts of switches filled with N2 + H2 + C2H2 was much greater than that deposited on contacts of switches filled with the other gases. Since gas chromatographic analysis showed an appreciable lowering of the C2H2 concentration, we concluded that C2 H2 decomposed on the contact surfaces causing the increase of the contact resistance.Tijekom upotrebe prekidača na jezičac opaža se postupan porast kontaktnog otpora. Analize dodirnih površina Augerovom elektronskom spektroskopijom pokazale su pojavu ugljika na njima. Radi ispitivanja nastanka sloja ugljika načinjen je poseban prekidač na jezičac koji se mogao prazniti i puniti raznim plinskim smjesama: N2+H2, N2+H2+CO, N2+H2+CO+CO2 i N2+H2+CO+C2H2. Plinskom kromatografskom analizom je utvrđeno da je najveći uzrok naslaga ugljika plin C2H2 koji se raspada i taloži na kontaktnim površinama

Djelovanje kisikove plazme na polietersulfon

Polyether sulphone was found to be a useful material for production of high reliability humidity sensors. In order to obtain best properties of the sensors, the polymer surface should be activated before a thin layer of metal is deposited. A way to do it is exposition of the polymer to oxygen plasma. In order to prevent destructive action of the plasma, a very mild inductively coupled RF oxygen plasma was created in a vacuum system. The plasma density was of the order of 1016 m-3, and the electron temperature 4 eV. Active particles produced in plasma interact with the polymer causing oxidation of the surface layer and a continuous thinning of the polymer foil. In our case the rate of thinning was 25 mm per hour.Polietersulfon je pogodan materijal za osjetljive slojeve vrlo pouzdanih proba za vlažnost. Radi postizanja dobrih svojstava, površina polimera mora se aktivirati prije naparavanja metalne elektrode. Jedna od metoda je izlaganje polimera blagoj, induktivno proizvedenoj kisikovoj plazmi. Aktivirane čestice u plazmi uzrokuju oksidaciju površine polimera i njegovo stanjivanje. Primjenjivali smo stanjivanje brzinom 25 µm na sat