The aftermath of civil war

Using an"event-study"methodology, this paper analyzes the aftermath of civil war in a cross-section of countries. It focuses on those experiences where the end of conflict marks the beginning of a relatively lasting peace. The paper considers 41 countries involved in internal wars in the period 1960-2003. In order to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the aftermath of war, the paper considers a host of social areas represented by basic indicators of economic performance, health and education, political development, demographic trends, and conflict and security issues. For each of these indicators, the paper first compares the post- and pre-war situations and then examines their dynamic trends during the post-conflict period. The paper concludes that, even though war has devastating effects and its aftermath can be immensely difficult, when the end of war marks the beginning of lasting peace, recovery and improvement are indeed achieved.Population Policies,Peace&Peacekeeping,Post Conflict Reintegration,Services&Transfers to Poor,Social Conflict and Violence

The aftermath of Civil War

Using an “event-study” methodology, this paper analyzes the aftermath of civil war in a cross-section of countries. It focuses on those experiences where the end of conflict marks the beginning of a relatively lasting peace. The paper considers 41 countries involved in internal wars in the period 1960-2003. In order to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the aftermath of war, the paper considers a host of social areas represented by basic indicators of economic performance, health and education, political development, demographic trends, and conflict and security issues. For each of these indicators, the paper first compares the post- and pre-war situations and then examines their dynamic trends during the post-conflict period. It conducts this analysis both in absolute and relative terms, the latter in relation to control groups of otherwise similar countries. The paper concludes that, even though war has devastating effects and its aftermath can be immensely difficult, when the end of war marks the beginning of lasting peace, recovery and improvement are indeed achieved.Civil War

The diverse effects of yeast on the aroma of non-sulfite added white wines throughout aging

Semi-synthetic must containing standard nutrients, a phenolic and aromatic fraction extracted from Albariño grapes and synthetic precursors of 3-mercaptohexanol (MOH) and 4-mercapto-4-pentan-2-one (MMP) were fermented with three different selected commercial S. cerevisiae yeasts. Wines were subjected to anoxic aging at 50 °C for 1, 2, 5 and 8 weeks, and their volatile composition was comprehensively determined by the analysis of 86 different aroma compounds using five different GC methods. Yeasts exert a strong influence on wine aroma throughout the whole aging period. Their effects extend beyond the well-known actions on yeast secondary metabolites, including the formation of little amounts of Strecker aldehydes or the formation of acids precursors of fruity esters, and on the enzymatic actions on the different grape aroma precursors. Additionally, yeasts influence wine aroma; first, by producing SO2 which reacts with ß-damascenone and increases Strecker aldehyde production in fermentation; second, by inducing the differential accumulation of Strecker aldehydes during anoxic aging; and third, by determining the stability of MOH, likely because of its reaction with vinylphenols or other yeast-related electrophiles

Seamless optimization of the GEMM kernel for task-based programming models

The general matrix-matrix multiplication (GEMM) kernel is a fundamental building block of many scientific applications. Many libraries such as Intel MKL and BLIS provide highly optimized sequential and parallel versions of this kernel. The parallel implementations of the GEMM kernel rely on the well-known fork-join execution model to exploit multi-core systems efficiently. However, these implementations are not well suited for task-based applications as they break the data-flow execution model. In this paper, we present a task-based implementation of the GEMM kernel that can be seamlessly leveraged by task-based applications while providing better performance than the fork-join version. Our implementation leverages several advanced features of the OmpSs-2 programming model and a new heuristic to select the best parallelization strategy and blocking parameters based on the matrix and hardware characteristics. When evaluating the performance and energy consumption on two modern multi-core systems, we show that our implementations provide significant performance improvements over an optimized OpenMP fork-join implementation, and can beat vendor implementations of the GEMM (e.g., Intel MKL and AMD AOCL). We also demonstrate that a real application can leverage our optimized task-based implementation to enhance performance.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Quantitative assessment of the variability in chemical profiles from source apportionment analysis of PM10 and PM2.5 at different sites within a large metropolitan area

The study aims to assess the differences between the chemical profiles of the major anthropogenic and natural PM sources in two areas with different levels of urbanization and traffic density within the same urban agglomeration. A traffic site and an urban background site in the Athens Metropolitan Area have been selected for this comparison. For both sites, eight sources were identified, with seven of them being common for the two sites (Mineral Dust, non-Exhaust Emissions, Exhaust Emissions, Heavy Oil Combustion, Sulfates & Organics, Sea Salt and Biomass Burning) and one, site-specific (Nitrates for the traffic site and Aged Sea Salt for the urban background site). The similarity between the source profiles was quantified using two statistical analysis tools, Pearson correlation (PC) and Standardized Identity Distance (SID). According to Pearson coefficients five out of the eight source profiles present high (PC > 0.8) correlation (Mineral Dust, Biomass Burning, Sea Salt, Sulfates and Heavy Oil Combustion), one presented moderate (0.8 > PC > 0.6) correlation (Exhaust) and two low/no (PC < 0.6) correlation (non-Exhaust, Nitrates/Aged Sea Salt). The source profiles that appear to be more correlated are those of sources that are not expected to have high spatial variability because there are either natural/secondary and thus have a regional character or are emitted outside the urban agglomeration and are transported to both sites. According to SID four out of the eight sources have high statistical correlation (SID < 1) in the two sites (Mineral Dust, Sea salt, Sulfates, Heavy Oil Combustion). Biomass Burning was found to be the source that yielded different results from the two methodologies. The careful examination of the source profile of that source revealed the reason for this discrepancy. SID takes all the species of the profile equally into account, while PC might be disproportionally affected by a few numbers of species with very high concentrations. It is suggested, based on the findings of this work, that the combined use of both tools can lead the users to a thorough evaluation of the similarity of source profiles. This work is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time a study is focused on the quantitative comparison of the source profiles for sites inside the same urban agglomeration using statistical indicators.The study was supported by “CALIBRA/EYIE” (MIS 5002799) and “PANhellenic infrastructure for Atmospheric Composition and climatE change” (MIS 5021516) implemented under the Action “Reinforcement of the Research and Innovation Infrastructure”, funded by the Operational Programme “Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation” (NSRF 2014–2020) and co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund). Collection and chemical analysis of samples were supported by LIFE + AIRUSE EU project (ENV/ES/584). Partial support was also received by H2020 ERAPLANET/SMURBS ERANET GA No 689443.Peer reviewe

Synthesis of merlinoite from Chinese coal fly ashes and its potential utilization as slow release K-fertilizer

This study focuses on the synthesis of merlinoite from Chinese coal fly ashes by KOH direct conversion method, with special emphasis on the application of synthetic merlinoite as fertilizer. These fly ashes were collected from two pulverized-coal combustion (PCC) power plants in Xinjiang, Northwest China. The synthesis results are influenced by fly ash characteristics and different synthesis conditions (KOH solution concentrations, activation temperature, time, and KOH/fly ash ratios). A high quality merlinoite-rich product was synthesized under optimal activation conditions (KOH concentration of 5 M, activation temperature of 150 °C, activation time of 8 h and KOH/fly ash ratio of 2 l/kg), with a cation exchange capacity (CEC) of 160 cmol kg−1. The synthetic merlinoite is proved to be an efficient slow release K-fertilizer for plant growth, indicating that it can be widely used for high-nutrient demanding crops growing in nutrient-limited soils and for large-area poor soil amendment in opencast coal mine areas around the power plants that will substantially grow with the increasing coal combustion in Xinjiang in the near future

Readout and Data Acquisition in the NEXT-NEW Detector based on SRS-ATCA

The Scalable Readout System (SRS) was defined by the CERN RD51 Collaboration as a multi-channel, scalable readout platform for a wide range of front ends. In 2014, SRS was ported to the ATCA (Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture) standard. NEXT is an underground experiment aimed at searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay. NEXT-DEMO, a small-scale demonstrator, was read-out using SRS. NEXT has adopted SRS-ATCA for its first stage, called NEXT-NEW. Our presentation will describe the readout, DAQ and trigger for NEXT-NEW based on SRS-ATCA. This is, to our knowledge, the first experiment operating entirely on SRS-ATCA.Esteve Bosch, R.; Toledo Alarcón, JF.; Rodriguez, J.; Querol, M.; Alvarez, V. (2016). Readout and Data Acquisition in the NEXT-NEW Detector based on SRS-ATCA. Journal of Instrumentation. 11(1):1-8. doi:10.1088/1748-0221/11/01/C01008S1811

Process-generated nanoparticles from ceramic tile sintering: Emissions, exposure and environmental release

Under a Creative Commons license.-- et al.The ceramic industry is an industrial sector in need of significant process changes, which may benefit from innovative technologies such as laser sintering of ceramic tiles. Such innovations result in a considerable research gap within exposure assessment studies for process-generated ultrafine and nanoparticles. This study addresses this issue aiming to characterise particle formation, release mechanisms and their impact on personal exposure during a tile sintering activity in an industrial-scale pilot plant, as a follow-up of a previous study in a laboratory-scale plant. In addition, possible particle transformations in the exhaust system, the potential for particle release to the outdoor environment, and the effectiveness of the filtration system were also assessed. For this purpose, a tiered measurement strategy was conducted. The main findings evidence that nanoparticle emission patterns were strongly linked to temperature and tile chemical composition, and mainly independent of the laser treatment. Also, new particle formation (from gaseous precursors) events were detected, with nanoparticles  87% efficiency in particle number concentrations removal.This work was supported by the European Commission FP7 (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-ITN) Marie Curie ITN project no. 315760 (HEXACOMM) and by the Spanish MINECO (PCIN-2015-173-C02-01) under the frame of SIINN, the ERA-NET for a Safe Implementation of Innovative Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, through SIINN-ERANET project CERASAFE (id.:16). Additional support was provided by LIFE projects AIRUSE (LIFE11 ENV/ES/584), CERAMGLASS (LIFE11 ENV/ES/560) and LASERFIRING (LIFE09 ENV/ES/435).Peer Reviewe

Process-generated nanoparticles from ceramic tile sintering : Emissions, exposure and environmental release

The ceramic industry is an industrial sector in need of significant process changes, which may benefit from innovative technologies such as laser sintering of ceramic tiles. Such innovations result in a considerable research gap within exposure assessment studies for process-generated ultrafine and nanoparticles. This study addresses this issue aiming to characterise particle formation, release mechanisms and their impact on personal exposure during a tile sintering activity in an industrial-scale pilot plant, as a follow-up of a previous study in a laboratory-scale plant. In addition, possible particle transformations in the exhaust system, the potential for particle release to the outdoor environment, and the effectiveness of the filtration system were also assessed. For this purpose, a tiered measurement strategy was conducted. The main findings evidence that nanoparticle emission patterns were strongly linked to temperature and tile chemical composition, and mainly independent of the laser treatment. Also, new particle formation (from gaseous precursors) events were detected, with nanoparticles A potential risk for nanoparticle and ultrafine particle release to the environment was also identified, despite the fact that the efficiency of the filtration system was successfully tested and evidenced a >87% efficiency in particle number concentrations removal. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe