Effects of added sewage sludge on contamination with Cd by winter wheat (Triticum aestivum)

The accumulation and transfer of heavy metals along soil-plant at experimental field were investigated. The study was conducted in the north-east of Romania at the Ezăreni experimental farm of the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Iaşi, during 2007-2009, in a cropping systems, viz., rape - wheat (Brasica napus – Triticum aestivum). One of the objectives of the study was to determine the risk of soil and plants contamination with heavy metals on applied sewage sludge (SS) as less expensive organic fertilizer. For assess the effect of this fertilization were applied two doses of sewage sludge (20 t/ha and 30 t/ha). The results show that cadmium concentration increased with the increasing fertilization level. On the second year, the applied of 30 t/ha sewage sludge determinate a cadmium concentration greater than safely concentration for wheat plant

What about if buildings respond to my mood?

This work analyzes the possibilities of interaction between the built environment and its users, focused on the responsiveness of the first to the emotions of the latter. Transforming the built environment according to the mood, feelings, and emotions of users, moment by moment, is discussed and analyzed. The main goal of this research is to define a responsive model by which the built environment can respond in a personalized way to the users’ emotions. For such, computational technical issues, building construction elements and users’ interaction are identified and analyzed. Case studies where occurs an interaction between the physical space and users are presented. We define a model for an architecture that is responsive to the user’s emotions assuming the individual at one end and the space at the other. The interaction between both ends takes place according to intermediate steps: the collection of data, the recognition of emotion, and the execution of the action that responds to the detected emotion. As this work focuses on an innovative and disruptive aspect of the built environment, the recognition of the new difficulties and related ethical issues are discussed.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The Wietenberg Culture: Periodization and Chronology

Based on pottery shapes and ornaments, the study proposes a new periodization of the Wietenberg culture in three distinctive phases: early, classical and late. The early phase is represented by pottery with origins in the late Early Bronze Age; it coincides with Chidioșan I‑II and Boroffka A1‑2 phases. According to the 14 C results, this phase can be dated between the 20th and the 18th centuries BC. In the classical phase, new elements in the pottery technology (shapes and decorations) emerged, present in the last two levels of the settlement at Derșida. This phase is similar to the Chidioșan III and Boroffka B‑C stages and, according to the 14 C dates it lasted between the 18th and the 16th centuries BC. The last phase was dened by N. Chidioșan, who identified at several sites vessels that were different in shape and ornament from the ones on the settlement at Derșida. The sites from this phase cover only the western half of the previously occupied area, as a consequence of the appearance of the Noua culture, contemporary for a short time with the Wietenberg. It is similar to Chidioșan IV and Boroffka D phases. The 14 C dates for the Noua and the late Wietenberg sites limit chronologically the late Wietenberg phase to the 16th and 15th centuries BC

Rethinking Time, Culture, and Socioeconomic Organisation in Bronze Age Transylvania

South-west Transylvania was an important source of metal and other natural resources for Bronze Age Europe, helping to facilitate the development of increasingly hierarchical societies. The absence of a radiocarbon-based chronology for Transylvania, however, has impeded understanding of the region\u27s role within broader socioeconomic networks. Here, the presentation of the first radiocarbon chronology for the Wietenberg Culture in south-west Transylvania allows the authors to highlight the importance of interregional exchange and reliable access to metal for Bronze Age European societies, and emphasise that resource-procurement zones follow unique trajectories of socioeconomic organisation

Impact of model misspecification in shared frailty survival models.

Survival models incorporating random effects to account for unmeasured heterogeneity are being increasingly used in biostatistical and applied research. Specifically, unmeasured covariates whose lack of inclusion in the model would lead to biased, inefficient results are commonly modeled by including a subject-specific (or cluster-specific) frailty term that follows a given distribution (eg, gamma or lognormal). Despite that, in the context of parametric frailty models, little is known about the impact of misspecifying the baseline hazard or the frailty distribution or both. Therefore, our aim is to quantify the impact of such misspecification in a wide variety of clinically plausible scenarios via Monte Carlo simulation, using open-source software readily available to applied researchers. We generate clustered survival data assuming various baseline hazard functions, including mixture distributions with turning points, and assess the impact of sample size, variance of the frailty, baseline hazard function, and frailty distribution. Models compared include standard parametric distributions and more flexible spline-based approaches; we also included semiparametric Cox models. The resulting bias can be clinically relevant. In conclusion, we highlight the importance of fitting models that are flexible enough and the importance of assessing model fit. We illustrate our conclusions with two applications using data on diabetic retinopathy and bladder cancer. Our results show the importance of assessing model fit with respect to the baseline hazard function and the distribution of the frailty: misspecifying the former leads to biased relative and absolute risk estimates, whereas misspecifying the latter affects absolute risk estimates and measures of heterogeneity