Wetlands – As Significant Features of the Salt Karst Landscape in the Meledic Plateau, Vrancea Subcarpathians, Romania

AbstractIn the area of the Meledic Plateau it have been developed a great diversity of salt karst genuine features. Dolines, as type of karst macroforms, are the most important element which defines the distinctiveness of the geomorphological landscape from the western part of Meledic Plateau. Due to meteoric water source, the undulating topographic surface has induced freshwater lakes and wetlands. These wetlands are discrete units and biodiversity hot spots that give specificity to general appearance of the landscape. Based on hydrological features and main plant association criteria it has distinguished following types of wetlands: lakes, ponds, marshes, and wet meadows

QUALITY IN TERMS OF COST EFFICIENCY

The studies based on using selective research are one of the maininstruments in the strategy building process at the managing level of academic facilities and collecting the data in the most effective way possible is one of the main problems that this kind of studies can arise.A way of solving this problem could be collecting the necessary dataonline, which implies human and financial resources a lot reduced compared to the classical way. Based on selective research, conducted among students, it has been tested the quality of the data collected online, by comparing them to the ones collected by face-to-face interviews.The studies that use selective research, conducted in the academicenvironment, in student collectivities, alumni, future possible students, the employers that might need the university’s graduates etc., are quite suitable for using the online collecting method of the data, due to the characteristics of the analyzed collectivities

The reading problem in urban schools : who has it and what has been done about it?

EducationDoctor of Education (Ed.D.

Analyse de trajectoires pour l'indexation sémantique des vidéos à grande échelle

National audienceL'indexation sémantique automatique de grandes collections vidéo est un problème complexe qui ne peut se limiter à l'analyse de mots clefs saisis par les utilisateurs. L'extraction de descripteurs spatiaux et temporels à partir du contenu est devenu indispensable pour appréhender la grande richesse des contenus. Cependant, le coût de calcul associé à l'extraction de descriptions temporelles est bloquant et les systèmes actuels se limitent souvent au traitement de l'information spatiale. Dans ces travaux, nous proposons une méthode d'analyse de trajectoires de points caractéristiques. Ses besoins en ressources de calcul sont faibles et s'adaptent facilement à de grandes collections vidéo. Partant d'une description des trajectoires de points d'intérêt utilisant l'analyse du flot optique, une batterie de descripteurs basés sur les modèles Sac de Mots sont calculés pour représenter les vidéos. L'approche est évaluée dans le contexte difficile du challenge TRECVid Semantic INdexing (SIN)

SHADOW ECONOMY AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENTS: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS FOR THE CASE OF ROMANIA

Shadow economy (SE) represents a controversial phenomenon, present more or less in all economies, whose empirical estimates should be regarded with due reserve. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the nature of the relationship between Romanian shadow economy, expressed as % of the official GDP and the foreign direct investments (FDI) using two causality analysis methods, namely the Granger causality analysis method and the Toda-Yamamoto procedure, based on quarterly data, over the period 2000-2010. The paper will also try to particularize the implications of this relationship on the sustainable development of the Romanian economy. For that purpose we will use the shadow economy series estimated in a previous article using one of the monetary approaches, the currency demand approach, based on econometrical methodology of error correction models and co-integration. The quantitative demarche of shadow economy estimation is detailed in Alexandru (Davidescu) and Dobre (2013). The empirical results highlight a unidirectional short-run causality that runs only from foreign direct investments to the shadow economy. The impulse responses function indicates a short-run negative relationship between FDI and SE

Hydro-socio-economic implications for water management strategies: the case of Roussillon coastal aquifer

In many Mediterranean coastal areas, agriculture, drinking water supply, tourism and industry strongly depend on the available groundwater resources. As a result of the significant economic development during the last three decades along the coast, abstractions from coastal aquifers have increased tremendously, frequently leading to overexploitation and saltwater intrusion. Geological, hydrogeological and socio-economical studies as a multidisciplinary approach on a coastal Mediterranean aquifer- the Roussillon - have been carried out in order to design effective water management strategies on areas sensitive to seawater intrusion risk. Geology provides geometry and architecture of the different aquifers, hydrogeology assess the seawater intrusion risk while socio-economic study includes consulting the stakeholders with the aim of suggesting water management and policy option acceptable to the majority of population. This paper then highlights the economic interests at stake, diversity of viewpoints expressed by stakeholders and political dimension of the issue, which are likely to be encountered for all similar situations on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.GESTION DE L'EAU;STRATEGIE;HYDROGEOLOGIE;SOCIOLOGIE;ECONOMIE;MER MEDITERRANEE;ROUSSILLON

Retina-Enhanced SURF Descriptors for Semantic Concept Detection in Videos

International audienceThis paper proposes to investigate the potential benefit of the use of low-level human vision behaviors in the context of high-level semantic concept detection. A large part of the current approaches relies on the Bag-of-Words (BoW) model, which has proven itself to be a good choice especially for object recognition in images. Its extension from static images to video sequences exhibits some new problems to cope with, mainly the way to use the added temporal dimension for detecting the target concepts (swimming, drinking...). In this study, we propose to apply a human retina model to preprocess video sequences, before constructing a State-Of-The-Art BoW analysis. This preprocessing, designed in a way that enhances the appearance especially of static image elements, increases the performance by introducing robustness to traditional image and video problems, such as luminance variation, shadows, compression artifacts and noise. These approaches are valuated on the TrecVid 2010 Semantic Indexing task datasets, containing 130 high-level semantic concepts. We consider the well-known SURF descriptor as the entry point of the BoW system, but this work could be extended to any other local gradient based descriptor