FCA as a means for consolidation of clustering results derived from multiple experiments

C

Food policy in Bulgaria to ensure healthy eating in organized children’s groups

The nutrition of children and adolescents is a priority of the National Health Policy. This article provides an overview of the measures taken by the Ministry of Health in Bulgaria to protect health and promote healthy eating; the results of conducted nationally representative surveys and the content and priorities of policies proposed by international organizations such as the World Health Organization and the European Commission for improving nutrition and nutritional status of the population, focusing on the children's age group

When Life Gives You Lemons, Squeeze Them in People\u27s Eyes: Humor Styles in Adaptive and Maladaptive Contexts

The present series of investigations focused on an assessment of four humor styles—two positive styles (affiliative, self-enhancing), and two negative styles (aggressive, self-defeating)—individual differences in which are measured using the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). These styles of humor stand in contrast to the traditional concept of sense of humor, which has been shown to be vague and ultimately incapable of differentiating between positive and negative manifestations of humor. Across the investigations, the humor styles were assessed in relation to adaptive and maladaptive constructs to clarify the extent to which these functions of humor relate to indicators of adjustment and psychological well-being. Specifically, the variables were tested in conjunction with the intrapersonally adaptive construct of mental toughness, reflecting individual differences in resiliency and measured using the Mental Toughness 48 Inventory. They were also examined in relation to the Dark Triads traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy), representing interpersonally malevolent social strategies and assessed using three measures: the MACH-IV, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, and the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale. The humor styles were also tested in relation to two models of personality: the six-factor HEXACO model measured using the HEXACO 60, and a tripartite trait-temperament model assessed via the Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality Self-Report Form. The goal of these latter investigations was to situate the humor styles within personality models that provide an alternative framework to contemporary five-factor structures, and to further assess the construct validity of the HSQ. Results revealed that the two positive humor styles are largely adaptive, reflecting tendencies toward greater mental toughness, convivial social strategies, proactivity, and positive affect. In contrast, the negative humor styles are predominantly maladaptive, correlating with poor mental toughness, avid interpersonal exploitation, diminished reciprocal altruism, and a propensity toward negativity affectivity and poor impulse control. Further, all four humor styles exhibited interpretable associations with the two alternative models, thereby demonstrating the construct validity of the HSQ. At the same time, the HEXACO model was deemed to be more effective than five-factor models in reliably capturing the nuances of adaptive and maladaptive humor styles in an etiologically informative manner

Taiwan’s Economic Development : The Role of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises beyond the Statistics

Abstract: Taiwanese enterprises are efficiently producing a great deal of goods they had no experience in at all a few years ago. Moreover, in modern economies an increased utilisation of more and more advanced technologies as well as the more intensive use of physical and human capital can be observed. In this regard, the economic development of Taiwan is considered to be a complementary process of capital accumulation, innovation and learning. This economic evo-lution primarily takes place within the corporate sector. However, in reality the real activities of enterprises cannot be separated from their financial counterpart. Therefore, it is assumed that financial general conditions influence the investment and innovation behaviour of com-panies and vice versa. Regarding the above-outlined complementarities, it seems to be appropriate to include the heterogeneity of the company sector into the analysis. Here it has to be taken into considera-tion that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute to a great deal of entrepre-neurship, innovation and learning that play a decisive role in the process of economic devel-opment. In the spirit of Schumpeter (1912) it is argued that the importance of smaller enter-prises is not adequately disclosed in statistical data. Furthermore, SMEs may have advantages as far as the implementation of new technology in general and new capital-embedded tech-nology in particular is concerned. There is evidence that Taiwanese SMEs are playing a decisive role in technology assimilation as well as in the implementation of further technological advancements because of their en-trepreneurial characteristics. However, most economic contributions consider “entrepreneur-ship” to be exogenous. Therefore, a few characteristics of the Taiwanese economy are pre-sented suggesting why entrepreneurship is so prevalent in Taiwan’s economy. In this respect, the relationship between competitive environment and entrepreneurship seems to be a matter of special importance

Steganography System Using More Lsbs

Steganography is the method of hiding message in a cover object for cover communication. The article deals with the steganography system which hides text inside images without losing of data (BMP, PNG, TIFF and GIF). The secret message is hidden in the cover image using Last Significant Bit (LSB) method. Paper presents functionalities of the developing software, using LBS methods. Visual and statistical analysis of LBS method indicate the good results of its application. This work is licensed under a&nbsp;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</p

Nutrition in children from 1 to 7 years of age: challenges and legislation

Healthy nutrition is important for the growth, health and development of children. The national policy regarding the healthy nutrition of young children and preschool children is implemented by two ordinances of the Ministry of Health: Ordinance № 2 of 7 March, 2013 on healthy nutrition of children aged 0 to 3 years in kindergartens and children's kitchens, which regulates the requirements for healthy nutrition of children aged 0 to 3 years, organized on the territory of children's institutions and children's kitchens and Ordinance № 6 of 10 August 2011 on healthy nutrition of children aged 3 up to 7 years in children's institutions, regulates the requirements for healthy nutrition of children aged 3 to 7 years, organized on the territory of municipal, state and private children's institutions. The basis of these two ordinances are the requirements for energy and nutrient intake or the norms for the specific age groups of children, which best characterize the nutrition and allow for optimal growth and development of children. The results from the annual monitoring of the nutrition of children aged 1 to 3 and  3 to 7 years is used for the purposes of the national food policy, as a key strategy in increasing the well-being of children in Bulgaria

Development of volunteer-driven indices of biological integrity for wetlands in West Virginia

Wetland indices of biological integrity (IBIs) are used to satisfy the water resources monitoring requirements of the Clean Water Act (CWA). However, debate still exists on what classification systems and taxa to base these IBIs upon. Our cumulative research, representing indices of biological integrity designed for regional HGM subclasses, designated HGM management classes and Cowardin et al. (1979) classes for West Virginia. The indices were derived from metrics calculated from anuran, avian, macroinvertebrate, and vegetation communities; each representing increasing levels of resources associated with gathering the necessary data. For example, avian and anuran data used to derive floodplain wetland IBI metrics can be collected by volunteers, but the disturbance scores only account for 46% and 18% of the variation in IBI scores, respectively. Alternatively, the disturbance scores account for 56% and 47% of the variation in vegetation and invertebrate IBI scores, respectively. However, if the floodplain wetland was also a scrub-shrub wetland, by adding the avian and anuran metrics of both floodplain and scrub-shrub IBIs, the resulting hybrid-class, multi-taxa IBI disturbance scores accounts for 89% of the variation in IBI scores. We evaluate each of these taxa groups alone and in combination, in single and hybrid classification schemes, to examine changes in sensitivities to the disturbance gradient. The result is a decision making tool that can assist resource managers by providing them with the opportunity to stretch finite resources; while still ensuring the monitoring captures changes in wetland communities due to human disturbance.;Keywords. Indices of biological integrity, IBIs, wetlands, disturbance, anuran communities, avian communities, macroinvertebrate communities, vegetation communities, West Virginia