Project management - a growing profession. The Romanian case.

The paper analyses the status of professionalization of project management in Romania and worldwide. The relevance of the topic is grasped in the context in which project management has been confronted with various shifts: from a technical/ engineering function to a macro-economic organizational concern, from a tools-and-techniques view to an innovation-driven approach, from widespread adoption by the industrialized world to an accelerated growth in developing nations, too. The explosion of practice has raised the issue of theoretical foundations and professionalization. The current status of professionalization of project management is discussed against a series of standards found in the sociology of professions literature, with a special focus on the issue of education in project management - education models, trends, global reach. The paper also assesses the Romanian educational offer in the field of project management in relation to the larger issue of professionalization, with a view to signalling possible areas of growth and improvement: ensuring accuracy of term usage, refining the educational curricula, initiating large-scale research programs on Romanian realities, publishing research results, building awareness around the benefits of the profession, increasing strength and visibility of professional associations, lobbying to require certification for key project management positions.

PCE: Piece-wise Convex Endmember Detection

DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2010.2041062 This item also falls under IEEE copyright. "© 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works."A new hyperspectral endmember detection method that represents endmembers as distributions, autonomously partitions the input data set into several convex regions, and simultaneously determines endmember distributions and proportion values for each convex region is presented. Spectral unmixing methods that treat endmembers as distributions or hyperspectral images as piece-wise convex data sets have not been previously developed

Who’s miserable now? Identifying clusters of people with the lowest subjective wellbeing in the UK

Policymakers are generally most concerned about improving the lives of the worst-off members of society. Identifying these people can be challenging. We take various measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) as indicators of the how well people are doing in life and employ Latent Class Analysis to identify those with greatest propensity to be among the worst-off in a nationally representative sample of over 215,000 people in the United Kingdom. Our results have important implications for how best to analyse data on SWB and who to target when looking to improve the lives of those with the lowest SWB (The authors owe a massive debt of gratitude to the Office for National Statistics for their support throughout this research. We are particularly grateful to Dawn Snape and Eleanor Rees for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper, to Salah Mehad for the thorough review of methodology, and to Vahe Nafilyan for advice on clustering analysis. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for the very helpful comments. Thank you all very much.)

Mustard catch crop enhances denitrification in shallow groundwater beneath a spring barley field

The study was funded by Department of Agriculture and Food through the Research Stimulus Fund Programme (Grant RSF 06383) in collaboration with the Department of Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.peer-reviewedOver-winter green cover crops have been reported to increase dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations in groundwater, which can be used as an energy source for denitrifiers. This study investigates the impact of a mustard catch crop on in situ denitrification and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from an aquifer overlain by arable land. Denitrification rates and N2O-N/(N2O-N + N2-N) mole fractions were measured in situ with a push–pull method in shallow groundwater under a spring barley system in experimental plots with and without a mustard cover crop. The results suggest that a mustard cover crop could substantially enhance reduction of groundwater nitrate NO3--N via denitrification without significantly increasing N2O emissions. Mean total denitrification (TDN) rates below mustard cover crop and no cover crop were 7.61 and 0.002 μg kg−1 d−1, respectively. Estimated N2O-N/(N2O-N + N2-N) ratios, being 0.001 and 1.0 below mustard cover crop and no cover crop respectively, indicate that denitrification below mustard cover crop reduces N2O to N2, unlike the plot with no cover crop. The observed enhanced denitrification under the mustard cover crop may result from the higher groundwater DOC under mustard cover crop (1.53 mg L−1) than no cover crop (0.90 mg L−1) being added by the root exudates and root masses of mustard. This study gives insights into the missing piece in agricultural nitrogen (N) balance and groundwater derived N2O emissions under arable land and thus helps minimise the uncertainty in agricultural N and N2O-N balances

The path to sustainable mobility systems - 8 theses on a digital mobility transition : a study commissioned by Huawei Technologies Germany GmbH

The transport sector accounts for 20 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions in Germany and it is therefore key to success for German climate policy. At present, however, there is no other sector with a wider gap in missing the trajectory to climate neutrality. The present study, conducted on behalf of Huawei within the project "Shaping the Digital Transformation - Digital Solution Systems for the Sustainability Transition", points out new pathways towards a sustainable and climate friendly transition of the transport sector. The report specifies concrete options to follow up on the ambitious goals of the new coalition agreement to foster clean and digital mobility solutions. The authors refined eight theses on how digitalisation can foster sustainable mobility solutions and how to shape a supporting policy framework, which is aligning the financial and regulatory guardrails for ramping up a sustainable mobility system while gradually phasing down the usage of private cars

Selected Biometric Characteristics of Wild Boar (Sus Scrofa Ferus) in North-East Romania

Our study analyzed selected biometric characteristics from 117 wild boars (Sus scrofa ferus) harvested during 2008 - 2014 in the Frasin and Marginea Forest hunting ground districts of Suceava County. Hunted boars were measured individually for head-body length (cm), height at withers (cm), length of metatarsus (cm), ear length (cm), tail length (cm) and body weight (kg) in accordance with their age-class and gender. These characteristics give information on the growth and development of wild boars and on the quality of their habitat. It was found that the average carcass weight was: piglets - 28.4 kg, yearling - 78.1 kg, subadults - 102.9 kg. The results show a faster body growth in females during their first year, while males make up for the weight difference in their 2nd and 3rd year. Statistical differences shown that males differentiate significantly to females by weight, body length, height at withers and length of metatarsus (P < 0.05) starting with their second year of life. The results regarding growth dynamic go along with the changes in boar’s social life, when the males are forced to leave and form smaller groups