Branding Romania: A PESTEL framework based on a comparative analysis of two country brand indexes

Branding Romania is an oft-told story within national public debates. During the past years, the urgency of promoting a coherent Romanian brand to international audiences has been spurred by various factors. Amongst these factors we note general pressures caused by globalization and information abundance, pressures of delivering a European Union congruent brand and nevertheless internal pressures related to social changes. The present paper employs a comparative analysis of two widely used country brand indexes, in order to reveal the dimensions upon which a complex branding strategy could be developed. In light of our findings, we use an adapted model of the PESTEL analysis in order to evaluate Romania’s stance in the strategic branding process. The main emphasis lies on the interdependent and mutually-reinforcing spheres that could constitute the foundation of a consistent, long-term brand management.brand, country brand indexes, country branding, PESTEL analysis.

Analyzing domain shift when using additional data for the MICCAI KiTS23 Challenge

Using additional training data is known to improve the results, especially for medical image 3D segmentation where there is a lack of training material and the model needs to generalize well from few available data. However, the new data could have been acquired using other instruments and preprocessed such its distribution is significantly different from the original training data. Therefore, we study techniques which ameliorate domain shift during training so that the additional data becomes better usable for preprocessing and training together with the original data. Our results show that transforming the additional data using histogram matching has better results than using simple normalization.Comment: This preprint has not undergone peer review or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this contribution is published in [TODO], and is available online at https://doi.org/[TODO

Selection of Most Appropriate Procedures for Seismic Evaluation of Levees Based on Case Histories

The current methodology for embankment dams evaluation is not appropriate for levees of low heights, which have little effect on the stress state of the foundation soil and, therefore, on its response to the seismic action. In many cases the liquefaction potential of the alluvial deposits is not affected by the levee presence, although is the main factor in levee degradation. Lateral spreading of liquefiable foundation is the main cause of small levee cracking and settlement induced by earthquakes. On the other part, the procedures recommended for evaluation of lateral spreading are not directly applicable to the analysis of levees. In this paper both categories of procedures (for dams and for free field affected by lateral spreading) are applied comparatively for evaluation of a case history. This paper summarizes results of different procedures on a case history, where a California levee was severely damaged during Loma Prieta earthquake. Recommendations are made for the analysis of various categories of levees

THE ROMANIAN EXTERNAL TRADE IN LIVE ANIMALS AND ANIMAL PRODUCTS

In terms of foreign trade, in Romania there were some major changes over the past 20 years. In this paper we have focused on the Romanian external trade. The products which have been taken into account were live animals and animal products. Thus, we have made an analyse on the Romanian imports and exports at the global level and at the European level. Focused on the animal products, on the global level, there were registered major differences during the first seven years in the analysed period. Breaking by branches, we have pointed out huge distinctions between imports and exports, where the balance of trade was completely negative. Meanwhile, to have a good view on the international trade there were made links, based on some indexes between imports, exports, GDP and investments

Historical vignette: The first brain surgery performed by the first woman neurosurgeon in Romania, Dr. Sofia Ionescu-Ogrezeanu

Introduction. Sofia Ionescu-Ogrezeanu (b. April 25, 1920, F?lticeni - d. March 21, 2008, Bucharest), also known as the Lady of Romanian Neurosurgery, became the first woman neurosurgeon in the world after performing a brain surgery during World War II, a fact recognized as a world premiere during the 13th World Congress of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies (WFNS) in Morocco, in 2005. [1] Materials and methods. Sofia Ionescu is the first woman neurosurgeon. She was born on the fields of Bucovina, in F?lticeni, and became part of the "golden team" of the Romanian neurosurgery of the pioneering period. The decisive moment of her career took place in 1944, during the war when she was forced to perform an emergency operation on a child, a victim of the bombing. The article coagulates the reports regarding the description of the first brain surgery performed by the first woman neurosurgeon with the continuous activity integrated with the field of neurosurgery. Both specialized articles, biographical books, and television interviews were used as references. Results. The operation performed in the fifth year of faculty was the first step of a journey of 47 years of neurosurgical career, practised with high morality and devotion. The sacrifice of the pioneer of the first woman neurosurgeon was recognized in the press in the country and abroad, as well as by the recognition of different titles and distinctions

Dielectric silicone elastomers with mixed ceramic nanoparticles

A ceramic material consisting in a zirconium dioxide-lead zirconate mixture has been obtained by precipitation method, its composition being proved by wide angle X-ray powder diffraction and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. The average diameter of the ceramic particles ranged between 50 and 100 nm, as revealed by transmission electron microscopy images. These were surface treated and used as filler for a high molecular mass polydimethylsiloxane-α,ω-diol (Mn = 450,000) prepared in laboratory, the resulted composites being further processed as films and crosslinked. A condensation procedure, unusual for polydimethylsiloxane having such high molecular mass, with a trifunctional silane was approached for the crosslinking. The effect of filler content on electrical and mechanical properties of the resulted materials was studied and it was found that the dielectric permittivity of nanocomposites increased in line with the concentration of ceramic nanoparticles

UPB @ DANKMEMES: Italian Memes Analysis - Employing Visual Models and Graph Convolutional Networks for Meme Identification and Hate Speech Detection

Certain events or political situations determine users from the online environment to express themselves by using different modalities. One of them is represented by Internet memes, which combine text with a representative image to entail a wide range of emotions, from humor to sarcasm and even hate. In this paper, we describe our approach for the DANKMEMES competition from EVALITA 2020 consisting of a multimodal multi-task learning architecture based on two main components. The first one is a Graph Convolutional Network combined with an Italian BERT for text encoding, while the second is varied between different image-based architectures (i.e., ResNet50, ResNet152, and VGG-16) for image representation. Our solution achieves good performance on the first two tasks of the current competition, ranking 3rd for both Task 1 (.8437 macro-F1 score) and Task 2 (.8169 macro-F1 score), while exceeding by high margins the official baselines

Selective Symbolic Execution

Symbolic execution is a powerful technique for analyzing program behavior, finding bugs, and generating tests, but suffers from severely limited scalability: the largest programs that can be symbolically executed today are on the order of thousands of lines of code. To ensure feasibility of symbolic execution, even small programs must curtail their interactions with libraries, the operating system, and hardware devices. This paper introduces selective symbolic execution, a technique for creating the illusion of full-system symbolic execution, while symbolically running only the code that is of interest to the developer. We describe a prototype that can symbolically execute arbitrary portions of a full system, including applications, libraries, operating system, and device drivers. It seamlessly transitions back and forth between symbolic and concrete execution, while transparently converting system state from symbolic to concrete and back. Our technique makes symbolic execution practical for large software that runs in real environments, without requiring explicit modeling of these environments

Parallel symbolic execution for automated real-world software testing

This paper introduces Cloud9, a platform for automated testing of real-world software. Our main contribution is the scalable parallelization of symbolic execution on clusters of commodity hardware, to help cope with path explosion. Cloud9 provides a systematic interface for writing "symbolic tests" that concisely specify entire families of inputs and behaviors to be tested, thus improving testing productivity. Cloud9 can handle not only single-threaded programs but also multi-threaded and distributed systems. It includes a new symbolic environment model that is the first to support all major aspects of the POSIX interface, such as processes, threads, synchronization, networking, IPC, and file I/O. We show that Cloud9 can automatically test real systems, like memcached, Apache httpd, lighttpd, the Python interpreter, rsync, and curl. We show how Cloud9 can use existing test suites to generate new test cases that capture untested corner cases (e.g., network stream fragmentation). Cloud9 can also diagnose incomplete bug fixes by analyzing the difference between buggy paths before and after a patch