Environmental sustainability between investments needs and financing possibilities in Romania

The problem of the environmental becomes pressing and they have already concerned the international, regional and national organizations. At the international level, there is a new strategy of the United Nations included in the „Millennium Development Goals“(MDG). Besides, the integrated Europe underlines the fact that the environmental investment projects should be subscribed to the cohesion policy with a lot of objectives established by the Lisbon Strategy, from March 2000, underlying the territorial dimension. The sustainable development also needs the finding of financing solutions, adequate to the market economy mechanisms. Romania started the economic reform after 1990, but there are still many deficiencies in the achievement of the correlation between the social-economic developments and environmental sustainability. First of all, in Romania, the main idea is that the environmental sustainability must be integrated into core development work, maximizing synergies. Secondly, in the market economy, the instruments used to put into practice this strategy should be built as a portfolio of public and private projects. Third, these projects need the financing funds and the good ability to access these funds.environmental sustainability, investment decision, financial aid, structural funds

Synthesis of poly(sulfonate ester)s by ADMET polymerization

Many hydrocarbon polymers containing heteroatom defects in the main chain have been investigated as degradable polyethylene-like materials, including aliphatic polyesters. Here, acyclic diene metathesis (ADMET) polymerization was used for the synthesis of aliphatic poly(sulfonate ester)s. The requisite sulfonate ester containing α,ω-diene monomers with varying numbers of methylene groups were synthesized, and their polymerization in the presence of ruthenium-N-heterocyclic (Ru-NHC) alkylidene catalysts was studied. A clear negative neighboring group effect (NNGE) was observed for shorter dienes, either inhibiting polymerization or resulting in low- molecular-weight oligomers. The effect was absent when undec-10-en-1-yl undec-10- ene-1-sulfonate was employed as the monomer, and its ADMET polymerization afforded polymers with appreciable number-average molecular weights of up to 37,000 g/mol and a dispersity Đ of 1.8. These polymers were hydrogenated to afford the desired polyethylene-like systems. The thermal and morphological properties of both saturated and unsaturated polymers were investigated. The incorporation of sulfonate ester groups in the polymer backbone offers an interesting alternative to other heteroatoms and helps further the understanding of the effects of these defects on the overall polymer properties

Using scientific machine learning for experimental bifurcation analysis of dynamic systems

Augmenting mechanistic ordinary differential equation (ODE) models with machine-learnable structures is an novel approach to create highly accurate, low-dimensional models of engineering systems incorporating both expert knowledge and reality through measurement data. Our exploratory study focuses on training universal differential equation (UDE) models for physical nonlinear dynamical systems with limit cycles: an aerofoil undergoing flutter oscillations and an electrodynamic nonlinear oscillator. We consider examples where training data is generated by numerical simulations, whereas we also employ the proposed modelling concept to physical experiments allowing us to investigate problems with a wide range of complexity. To collect the training data, the method of control-based continuation is used as it captures not just the stable but also the unstable limit cycles of the observed system. This feature makes it possible to extract more information about the observed system than the standard, open-loop approach would allow. We use both neural networks and Gaussian processes as universal approximators alongside the mechanistic models to give a critical assessment of the accuracy and robustness of the UDE modelling approach. We also highlight the potential issues one may run into during the training procedure indicating the limits of the current modelling framework.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figure

Light-responsive azo-containing organogels

While azo compounds are widely employed as radical initiators, they have rarely been used as stimuli-responsive motifs in macromolecular constructs. In this study, an azo-based cross-linker was prepared and reacted with poly(vinyl alcohol) to afford a series of stimuli-responsive organogels. Irradiation of these materials with UV light causes de-cross-linking and triggers a solid-to-liquid phase transition. Model adhesives with de-bonding-on-demand capability based on this design were explored

XIP Dashboard: visual analytics from automated rhetorical parsing of scientific metadiscourse

A key competency that we seek to build in learners is a critical mind, i.e. ability to engage with the ideas in the literature, and to identify when significant claims are being made in articles. The ability to decode such moves in texts is essential, as is the ability to make such moves in one’s own writing. Computational techniques for extracting them are becoming available, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tuned to recognize the rhetorical signals that authors use when making a significant scholarly move. After reviewing related NLP work, we introduce the Xerox Incremental Parser (XIP), note previous work to render its output, and then motivate the design of the XIP Dashboard, a set of visual analytics modules built on XIP output, using the LAK/EDM open dataset as a test corpus. We report preliminary user reactions to a paper prototype of such a novel dashboard, describe the visualizations implemented to date, and present user scenarios for learners, educators and researchers. We conclude with a summary of ongoing design refinements, potential platform integrations, and questions that need to be investigated through end-user evaluations

Visualizing the LAK/EDM literature using combined concept and rhetorical sentence extraction

Scientific communication demands more than the mere listing of empirical findings or assertion of beliefs. Arguments must be constructed to motivate problems, expose weaknesses, justify higher-order concepts, and support claims to be advancing the field. Researchers learn to signal clearly in their writing when they are making such moves, and the progress of natural language processing technology has made it possible to combine conventional concept extraction with rhetorical analysis that detects these moves. To demonstrate the potential of this technology, this short paper documents preliminary analyses of the dataset published by the Society for Learning Analytics, comprising the full texts from primary conferences and journals in Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) and Educational Data Mining (EDM). We document the steps taken to analyse the papers thematically using Edge Betweenness Clustering, combined with sentence extraction using the Xerox Incremental Parser's rhetorical analysis, which detects the linguistic forms used by authors to signal argumentative discourse moves. Initial results indicate that the refined subset derived from more complex concept extraction and rhetorically significant sentences, yields additional relevant clusters. Finally, we illustrate how the results of this analysis can be rendered as a visual analytics dashboard

Charmonium spectral functions from 2+1 flavour lattice QCD

Finite temperature charmonium spectral functions in the pseudoscalar and vector channels are studied in lattice QCD with 2+1 flavours of dynamical Wilson quarks, on fine isotropic lattices (with a lattice spacing of 0.057 fm), with a non-physical pion mass of $m_{\pi} \approx$ 545 MeV. The highest temperature studied is approximately $1.4 T_c$. Up to this temperature no significant variation of the spectral function is seen in the pseudoscalar channel. The vector channel shows some temperature dependence, which seems to be consistent with a temperature dependent low frequency peak related to heavy quark transport, plus a temperature independent term at \omega>0. These results are in accord with previous calculations using the quenched approximation.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, 2 table